Chapter Text
Hughie’s palms felt clammy, almost like they should be dripping sweat. Although, he had gotten a bit better at masking nervousness thanks to the absolute shit that he’d been through recently.
Still this fucking fancy tent with the super perfect decorations and the stupidly rich idiots mingling politely while dantily sipping cocktails gave him more of the heeby jeebies than when he’d been doing almost anything else.
On top of the terrifying thought of actually having to blackmail someone, it brought to mind the uncomfortable times he’d been to almost any type of thing with his Dad. Whether a stiltedly upbeat work event for his Dad, or the couple of school functions Hughie had been part of, well, awkward was an understatement. His Dad really didn’t do well in social situations, and Hughie, for better or worse, had picked that behavior up even if he wished he hadn’t.
Hughie had never counted as a loner or anything, but he hadn’t really had a set friend group. Then he’d met Robin at Mark’s birthday, and she’d somehow found his awkward goofiness attractive. Robin definitely ranked way out of his league, but she loved him so he could only count his blessings and work to be worthy of her, even if he failed. Failed like he did the day she died.
He couldn’t fail Robin today. Which meant he’d have to not be suspicious, and actually fucking blackmail someone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He could do this.
“Hughie.” He managed not to jump, turning in the direction of the perfectly pleasant voice that called his name. “Right?” Homelander, fucking Homelander, smiled at him. The tiny part of him that still believed in heroes, that Annie had bolstered and reminded him of, couldn’t help but feel a small amount of joy at seeing THE Homelander up close and personal. The rest of him, the part that burst to pieces with Robin and got fucking vaporized by Translucent’s death, wanted to panic at the man knowing his name. Even if he smiled at him crookedly, not quite perfect in a way that made Hughie remember that Homelander had been one of his first crushes, and that he’d been on both his and Robin’s lists. “You’re Starlight’s friend? She got you in here?”
The man handed him an orange juice in a champagne flute, which, really? And Hughie took the glass on instinct. “Yeah.”
Homelander chuckled in a way that Hughie couldn’t help but feel a little threatened by. “There you go.” He held out his gloved hand. “Good to meet you, pall.”
Hughie shook his hand, trying not to drop the orange juice. “Good to meet you.”
“How do you know Starlight?” Homelander asked him, standing in what Hughie could only think of as a parade rest with a perfectly placid smile on his face.
“You know, we met like a few weeks ago, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Homelander looked at him, well not quite disbelievingly, but almost.
“And she got you tickets for this?”
Not that Hughie could blame him. He still felt pretty shocked about the whole thing. He tried to chuckle a little, but couldn’t manage to more than huff. “Yeah, I guess she did.”
Homelander smiled brightly again. “Oh, this is a pricey ticket, Hughie.” He nodded, yeah it really was. “You must be a special guy.”
Which just.. “I.. No. Just no, haha, I’m really, really not.” He smiled, in more familiar territory. “I just feel lucky to be here. Really.”
Ezekiel, saving Hughie from continuing to make an idiot of himself, gathered the attention of the room, leading them back through a curtain after pointing out Homelander.
The two supes stood on a wooden platform surrounding a fucking pool, and Hughie actually realized that this was going to be… Yup… A baptism.
Which meant that Homelander carefully peeled his gloves off before floating down into the water to the adoring oohs and ahhs of the small crowd.
That explained part of the price for the ticket, Hughie thought cynically.
Baptisms, like many Christian based religious ceremonies, were meant to symbolize the joining of souls with God and Jesus and everything Hughie had gotten crammed into his head as a child in Sunday school before his Mom left and his Dad had stopped going to church. It really meant that you couldn’t wear gloves or anything covering your hands.
Afterall, soulmates found each other through skin to skin contact, and most religions tried to sell something like God being everyone’s soulmate, yadda yadda yadda, so anything that would block touch somehow symbolically blocked God’s heavenly connection the way it would block the connection he had chosen for you on Earth.
Homelander, like most heroes, rather famously, always, always, wore his gloves. Because of that, religious events like this would be one of the few opportunities for anyone to really try and see if they were Homelanders' soulmate. Hughie wondered how many people bought tickets because they were actually gung ho about this religious stuff vs the ones that were desperately obsessed with Homelander and delusionally thought themselves his soulmate.
Hughie stayed towards the back of the pack, watching the process carefully. It had been years since he’d last seen a baptism, and he didn’t want to accidentally do something stupid that would give him away.
Eventually his turn came though, and Hughie carefully, and more than a little nervously, entered the baptism pool.
Oh God, the supe would see right through him.
Homelander made some type of light, joking question as he smiled, holding his hand out invitingly. Hughie thought he somehow managed to answer with a joke about being nervous, but it might have been in his head.
It felt almost… Magnetic… The pull to Homelander’s bare fingers.
Looking back, that should’ve been a cue to run. For better or worse, Hughie ignored it.
Instead he focused on carefully stepping forward so as not to mess things up any more. He reached for Homelander on instinct, following the moves he had practiced in his mind a thousand times as he watched the people that went before him. A spark popped as their fingers came within millimeters of each other, and Homelander’s eyes widened the moment before they touched as he felt it too.
Then lightning jolted from his fingertips straight to his heart, his brain, and every other part of him.
The hand around his tightened, and Hughie felt an almost shifting sensation as he drowned in the bluest pair of eyes that he had ever seen, the glow of a match bursting from where they touched, nearly blinding him as it washed out away everything but the man in front of him.
At least until the pain hit.
His hand pretty much exploded into agony and he could feel bones crunching. Hughie’s eyes rolled up into his head as everything went fuzzy and sparkly. He felt himself begin to slide, only to be caught by a steel band around his ribs and pulled crushingly tight against a solid wall of a body. The pressure around his now excruciating hand released, and another arm circled him, holding him almost gently.
Hughie gulped in air, and he barely heard a keening sound that he realized came from his own throat before the tent suddenly erupted in noise. Mixes of shouts and cheers washed over him. An exclamation next to him that had to be Ezekiel. It all buzzed together into the background as his head sank onto the wall of muscle wrapped in spandex and Homelander’s quickening heartbeat drowned out everything else, singing him into unconsciousness.
XxXxX
Homelander clutched at the impossible young man in his arms, trying to adjust to the fact that his whole world had just done a 180.
For once, even though chaos surrounded him, the only thing he heard was the sound of Hughie’s heartbeat, the only thing he could smell was Hughie’s scent underneath cheap body wash and his eyes couldn’t leave his adorable curls. He felt… peaceful.
Then Hughie keened in pain , and Homelander froze. Hughie settled heavily into him, his whole body collapsing into the dead weight of unconsciousness.
Homelander absolutely did not panic.
“-and!”
Homelander glared up at the person that dared to touch him, and Ezekiel threw his hands up in a placating gesture whispering harshly at him even as he kept smiling at the crowd going nuts outside the baptism pool. “It’s okay! I’m not going to take him! His hand's hurt!”
Homelander looked down at where Hughie’s limp hand floated in the pool. He could see where he'd put too much pressure, where Hughie's flesh swelled, bruising already forming… His x-ray vision kicked in automatically and he saw where he had broken four of the phalanges and three of the metacarpals.
“Fuck,” he hissed. How could he have hurt his…
Soulmate.
He had a soulmate.
Vought was wrong.
Homelander had a soulmate!
And he was injured.
“The public!” Ezekiel bit out from his plastic smile as he waved at the crowd that security had moved in to hold back. Homelander smiled on instinct at them, even as his mind raced. He shifted so that Hughie leaned securely against him, carefully lifting his arm so his injured hand became cradled in between them. Even unconscious Hughie whimpered in pain.
“What a miracle we have witnessed!” Ezekiel cried. “That Homelander, graced by God to protect his followers, has found his soulmate! Thank you, Lord, for blessing your faithful!”
The crowd erupted. Homelander, for the first time in a long time, had to fight a flinch at the commotion. He’d long since been trained out of the instinctively reaction to loud sounds by Vought, but after having the peace of Hughie’s heartbeat the noise felt jarring.
He clutched at Hughie even tighter only to release his grip as Hughie made a pained sound.
Ezekiel shifted to stand between Homelander and the crowd, going against the public speaking training any supe associated with Vought went through and putting his back to the audience. Homelander felt more charitable than usual towards the man for giving him an ounce of privacy.
“We have a medical tent,” Ezekiel whispered. “We can say you’re going to a bon-”
“I’m taking him to Vought,” Homelander stated.
Ezekiel nodded quickly, “I’ll tell Ashley and control things.” Homelander swung Hughie up into his arms, only to flinch as he whimpered in pain again. Ezekiel scrambled to the edge of the baptism pool, quickly ripping some of the bunting into a strip. “Here, let me stabilize his arm for the flight!” He wanted to yank Hughie back, laser Ezekiel’s head in, but he knew it made sense so he shifted, opening up enough of a space for the other supe to stretch and flatten his fingers, ever so carefully wrapping his soulmate’s hand in the makeshift bandage, even as his other hand stretched over through the crowd and tent walls to the refreshment table, grabbing a fistful of ice and bringing it back to wrap into the cloth. “It should be good!”
Homelander flew.
He carefully kept his flight well below his max speed and height. Hughie was too fragile and Homelander didn’t want to hurt him again.
It meant that rather than making it from the Believe Expo to New York in less than five minutes, it took him almost twenty to touch down on the landing pad of Vought Tower. The normal scurrying of underlings to throw the doors open for him occurred, only for the idiots to freeze up as they saw the unconscious young man in his arms. He pretty much never carried anyone when he flew back to the tower except one of the other members of the Seven, and even then only rarely. Some random civilian was absolutely unheard of. Not that Hughie counted as a random civilian. In fact it felt a little upsetting they didn’t know that.
Madelyn remained so distracted by that annoying brat of hers that her work continued to suffer. It had been more than enough time for Madelyn to have gotten a sitrep on Hughie and have things prepared here.
Instead he saw only blank, shocked faces rather than a medical team waiting with a stretcher. He strode quickly through the hallway towards the elevator, carefully maneuvering Hughie’s slim form closer to him so no one else could touch him. Homelander would need to have them move medical to 98 or 99. Or maybe a suite on both?
Hughie was, apparently, powerless.
A heartbreakingly fragile, normal human.
Suddenly all of his strength, his power, had purpose. Meaning. Someone to protect that would always love him, adore him. Who would worship him and that he could cherish back.
Someone forever placing him first.
There would be no babies, no ex-lovers, no futile power struggles.
Just him and Hughie.
He gave a tight smile to the closest peon to the elevator. “Down, please.” The mousey man nodded quickly, hitting the button. The door luckily opened pretty quickly, and Homelander directed the peon in. “Fifth floor.”
The man cowered in the corner of the elevator as they rode it down, and, being careful not to brush Hughie, darted out of the elevator towards medical, shouting for a doctor. Huh, a peon with half a brain.
Even though the medical facilities at the tower itself were more R & D focused, they did have a fully stocked and staffed trauma unit for the heroes in their employ and unexpected research results, as well as a long term care unit for… special cases. The doctors and nurses available ranked among the best in the world, and they were efficient and professional as they rushed out through the large sliding glass doors that lead to the trauma unit with a stretcher. Homelander gently set his soulmate down, and kept pace with it as the Doctors moved it to the trauma unit. He’d only been here twice before, once when Black Noir got impaled by a helicopter blade they’d needed to cut out so he could heal, which you know, fair for someone not invulnerable to the level he and Maeve were, especially since even impaled he’d killed the two mass shooters that had gotten a few missile launchers he’d been after.
The other time was when they’d done a ‘team-up’ with a few other heroes, and some idiot screwed up a cue on the explosives leading to Mister Marathon and four of the visiting sups needing treatment.
That level of injury had been the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Homelander’s opinion, same with Madelyn. Mister Marathon had been retired shortly after, not running any additional missions with the Seven. He’d gotten too slow as he got older, and it had really just been nostalgia keeping him on the team, but that had its limits.
A-Train slotted in easily enough as the team’s speedster and as a diversity hire, which worked well to satisfy the pundits. He listened to orders well enough and knew when to keep his mouth shut, which mattered almost more than his continued ranking as the fastest speedster.
It felt worse than anything he’d known before, that his soulmate could be injured easier than failures like that.
Homelander held up a wall in the corner as he watched the doctors work on Hughie. He felt incredibly useless, because even if he could x-ray his hand, he couldn’t explain it to the doctors precisely enough for them to put his arm in a cast (in a cast! His soulmate was weak enough to need a cast…) and didn’t know if Hughie had any allergies to medications. He doubted even Starlight would know, given that the two had only met a few weeks ago.
Instead he could only watch as Hughie received a careful dose of mild painkillers to ‘take the edge off’ before he got taken to radiology for an x-ray for his hand then CAT and MRI scans to make sure he was okay after passing out. The nurse that had been gently asking him about Hughie went to make some calls to try and find his medical information, which Homelander kept one ear on. Luckily his wallet had a starting point since his phone was dead and on its way to IT in the hands of the semi-useful peon to see if they could recover anything from the water-logged device. His driver’s license yielded a full name and address here in New York, but no insurance cards or anything but a debit card, $61 dollars in cash, and an actual photo of Hughie and a young woman with curly hair, wrapped around each other and smiling at the camera.
Dammit, he should already know who the woman was, since she obviously wasn’t related to his soulmate.
If Madelyn hadn’t been distracted by that… thing of hers, she’d have already had the analytics team provide medical everything they needed to know about his soulmate, and Homelander everything about the bitch that had dared to sink her claws into Hughie that he’d need to deal with.
Fuck.
Homelander would need to do something about that.
Madelyn was supposed to help him. Take care of him. Be focused on HIM so they could both succeed.
She was the only one of these stupid fucks that bothered to listen half the time, but she had failed him over and over again since that fucking spawn of hers shot out of her vagina.
The blob of flesh and bones hadn’t even shown any powers yet!
If her kid could at least do something her split attention would make a pathetic amount of sense, but instead she put herself and the crying bastard above him.
The doctors had just finished up the last scan on Hughie, shifting him back to the gurney to bring him back to Homelander when Madelyn finally rushed into the room.
It had been 32 minutes since they landed. 56 total since Homelander found Hughie.
Unacceptable.
“John!” She said, a smile more plastic than his own on her face. Her heart raced so quickly he doubted anyone but him or speedsters would be able to tell the beats apart. “Congratulations!”
Homelander grinned his press smile, “thank you.” He could see, could hear the flush of her blood in her cheeks, the slight shift of her teeth, the twitch of the muscles in her cheeks. Give Madelyn her credit, she did know his ticks, not that she’d been paying attention lately with the squishy little lump attached to her hip.
“We have a team going to pick up his father,” she informed him, obviously trying to redirect. “He’s the only immediate relative, and we want to get to him before the press. We weren’t able to stop news of him getting out, but Ashley and Ezekiel managed to spin things at the Expo and control the crowd reaction to something celebratory and media is following suit.”
“Why wouldn’t they celebrate?” Homelander asked as he watched two nurses maneuver Hughie’s gurney down the hall.
Madelyn’s grin tightened. “Same sex soulmates make up less than 8% of pairings, and while most religions acknowledge them, you know the sentiment isn’t always positive.”
Homelander conceded her point, “still, it’s me? Why wouldn’t they celebrate me finding my soulmate?”
“You know you’re the most famous person on the planet right?” She gave a little laugh. “You should expect a little jealousy around him, especially when people compare him to your previous partners.” Hughie’s gurney came through the doors, and Madelyn waved a hand at him. “He’s… Normal. Not like anyone you’ve dated before. For example, you and Meave were like gods together, perfect, strong, untouchable.” True, and he’d always wondered what their kids would be like… Maybe if Hughie wanted kids Maeve could be their surrogate? “PR thinks we can sell the wish fulfillment fantasy of it all, the fairy tale story of him finding you after a tragic life type of thing.”
Homelander froze. “Tragic life?”
Madelyn raised an eyebrow at him. “Ah, sorry, you’re always listening in and keeping an eye on things, so I thought you would recognize him.”
Homelander widened his press grin. “How about you stop with the bullshit and just tell me what I need to know.”
She tilted her head in that way that used to make him want to bury his face in her neck. “His name is Hugh Campbell Jr., we already had a file on him since he had given us some trouble before.”
“Hughie?” He asked, tilting his head at the too skinny, infinitely fragile form across the room from him.
“He’s the boyfriend of the woman that A-Train ran through three months ago. He refused to sign an NDA until A-Train apologized to him in person.”
Oh.
He’d forgotten about that since Translucent had gone missing right after. He’d even debated killing Hughie, not that he’d known his name back then, just so he wouldn’t have to hear A-Train whine about the questions from legal and PR any more. He’d even ordered the speedster to show up for the apology Hughie had requested for Madelyn since she’d been so frustrated her people hadn’t been able to get the stubborn man to sign his NDA without one.
If he’d given into that impulse, he would have killed his own soulmate and never known it.
Homelander didn’t know if he should thank A-Train for removing a bump in the road to his path forward with Hughie without even knowing it, or kill the man for hurting his soulmate.
The nurse that had been on the phone trying to find his medical records cursed under her breath as another hospital had nothing, and the doctor treating Hughie finally decided to risk a higher dose of pain meds so they could splint his hand.
Maybe both.