Chapter Text
WARNING: This scene contains references to sexual assault and trauma. Reader discretion advised.
The bathroom tiles were a blinding, antiseptic white—the kind of white that belonged in a high-end morgue or a Vought-sponsored hospice. Becca Butcher sat on the edge of the tub, her hands white-knuckling the porcelain until the skin split at the cuticles.
One hundred and seventy-three grout lines. She'd memorized the geography of this small, tiled cage because looking anywhere else meant looking at the mirror. And the mirror was a goddamn traitor.
The executive bathroom on the thirty-seventh floor of Vought Tower was a shrine to the idea that power had good taste. The marble was Italian. The hand soap was cold-pressed argan oil from a Moroccan cooperative that Vought's PR team had bankrolled as a tax write-off. The towels were Egyptian cotton, monogrammed with the Seven's composite crest—that familiar interlocking V-for-victory sigil that appeared on everything from lunchboxes to the nose cone of a Lockheed Martin fighter Vought had gifted to the Pentagon. It was everywhere: the brand, the beautiful, omnipresent logo of a company that had sold the world a fairy tale about men who could fly.
Becca had spent four years working in Communications, shaping that fairy tale. She'd written the press releases after the Albuquerque incident—the one where A-Train had clipped a pedestrian bridge at Mach 0.9 and they'd blamed "an unaffiliated drone operator" and settled out of court for seven million dollars and a standard NDA. She'd drafted the op-ed under Homelander's byline about the importance of "responsible heroism" in the modern age. She knew the machinery. She'd oiled it herself.
Now she was sitting in a monogrammed towel, counting grout lines, because the machinery had swallowed her whole.
The steam from the shower rose in thick, humid plumes, clinging to her skin like a second layer of filth. It couldn't drown out the ghost of that smell. Sandalwood, expensive leather, and a hint of ozone—the scent of a "hero" who had just used her like a disposable prop.
Her stomach did a violent, sickening somersault. She leaned over the bowl, retching until her throat felt like it had been scraped with steel wool. There was nothing left to give. Just the bitter, metallic tang of the prenatal vitamin she'd swallowed that morning, back when the world still had a floor.
Thirteen weeks. A lemon. A little William—or a little Becca—growing inside her. A piece of Billy. The only pure thing she had left.
The meeting had been routine on the calendar. She could still see the Outlook invite: Quarterly Brand Alignment — Conference Room 37-D — Attendees: B. Butcher (Communications), J. Stillwell (Strategic Development). Nothing unusual. Ashley had pinged her twice beforehand with talking points about Q4 merchandise launches—an A-Train sneaker collab with Adidas, a Queen Maeve limited-edition action figure with "articulated combat stance," a Homelander children's pop-up book called Daddy's Home! with a foreword by the Vice President.
Madeline Stillwell had left after twenty minutes. Something about a Board call regarding the Paycom deal. She'd touched Becca's arm on the way out, smiled that wide, lipstick-perfect smile, and said, "He just wants a few minutes of your time. He finds you calming."
Becca had thought that was a strange thing to say.
She understood it now.
She looked at her reflection in the steamed-up mirror and saw a ghost wearing her skin. Her Vought-branded polo was wrinkled, the fabric snagged and distorted where he had gripped her with the casual strength of a tectonic plate.
"You look a little tense, Rebecca," he'd whispered. That voice—that manufactured, mid-western warmth that sounded like a suicide note wrapped in a flag. "Maybe you should try one of those mindfulness apps. They're great. Very therapeutic. Keeps the hysteria at bay."
Pushing him had been like trying to shove a mountain. He'd just smiled that million-watt, All-American smile—the one that sold lunchboxes, saved puppies, and hid the hollow, rotting void where a soul should be—while he pinned her wrists against the marble counter of the executive suite. His skin had been warm. Too warm. Like the surface temperature of something that ran a different operating system than human biology.
She'd read the classified Vought medical files once, back when she'd had Level 4 access and the naivety to think the clearance meant trust. The files described the Seven's biology in the bloodless prose of industrial engineering: Epidermal surface temperature: 102.4°F baseline. Grip strength: classified, 50,000+ lbs/sq inch. Skeletal density: 800% above human norm. Invulnerable to all conventional— She'd stopped reading at conventional. She hadn't understood, then, what it meant to be in a room with something that the word conventional didn't apply to.
She understood it now.
"Don't be like that," Homelander had crooned, his voice dripping with a sickening, performative sincerity. "We're teammates, aren't we? One big, happy Vought family. And Daddy's home to make sure everyone plays their part."
He'd said it like a man reciting a script he'd been rehearsing since childhood. Which, she realized distantly, was precisely what it was. Vought had raised him from a petri dish in a lab in Langley, Nebraska. Dr. Jonah Vogelbaum's life's work, funded by three decades of DoD contracts and investor capital. They'd made him in a tube, handed him a flag, and then wondered why he had the emotional architecture of a child who'd been left alone with a loaded weapon and told it was a toy.
Then the lights in his eyes had flickered—not with the heat of his lasers, but with that terrifying, blank blue. The look of a man who viewed people as ants and himself as the kid who just realized he could pull their legs off one by one just to see if they'd still try to crawl. There was a name for it in the internal Vought behavioral files. She'd seen it: Homelander Dissociative Episode, Category Three. Estimated duration: 2–8 minutes. Recommended protocol: do not engage, do not make direct eye contact, do not—
She'd made direct eye contact.
She pressed her palm flat against her stomach now, feeling the low, tidal warmth there. Still okay. Still there.
The vibration of her phone on the counter sounded like a jackhammer.
BILLY [9:42 PM]: Leaving now. Be there in fifteen. Don't you dare eat my leftover curry, you thieving gorgeous berk.
Becca felt a cold spike of ice drive through her chest. Fifteen minutes.
Billy. Her Billy. The man who wore a scowl like a ballistic vest but kissed her like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to a planet he otherwise wanted to burn down. If he saw her like this—if he saw the fingerprint-shaped bruises blossoming on her hips or the way her hands wouldn't stop doing this rhythmic, frantic twitching—he wouldn't just be angry. He'd be a memory.
She could see the future in the steam. Billy charging into Vought Tower with a crowbar and a death wish. And Homelander? Homelander would laugh. He'd let Billy get close enough to feel the heat of his skin, let him think he had a chance, before reducing him to vapor and whistling a patriotic tune while he stepped over the mess. The laser eyes operated at roughly 30,000°C. She knew because she'd written the myth-busting sidebar for the Vought quarterly newsletter: Could Homelander's vision really melt steel? We asked the scientists! With a little cartoon of him winking over a melted car.
She'd used the word remarkable seventeen times in that sidebar.
"Your husband," Homelander had said afterward, casually adjusting his cape in the mirror as if he'd just finished a light cardio session. "The little CIA grunt. Butcher. Charming name. Very... visceral. Very blue-collar."
He'd turned, his boots clicking on the tile with a sound like a firing pin hitting an empty chamber. "He's got a bit of a temper, doesn't he? A real 'fuck the world' attitude. It's adorable. Really. Like a chihuahua barking at a hurricane." Homelander tilted his head, his eyes glowing a faint, menacing crimson—just enough to let her see the fire behind the curtain. "I'd hate to have to paint the walls of your lovely little suburban kitchen with his brains. It'd be such a waste of a perfectly good Saturday. And think of the baby. It needs a father, right? Even if he is just a... temporary fixture."
He'd winked. An actual, fucking wink.
"See you at the Christmas party, Becca. Bring the potato salad. I love the way you do the little paprika sprinkle on top. It shows you care about the details."
He knew about the potato salad. She'd brought it to the Q3 all-staff barbecue at Vought's Jersey City campus. He'd been across a football field of catered tables, being photographed with the CFO and two senators. He'd been aware of her the entire time. She understood, now, that this was what he did. He catalogued people the way a spider catalogued flies. Not out of interest. Out of inventory management.
Becca scrambled to her feet, her legs feeling like overcooked noodles.
Scrub. You have to scrub until the skin comes off.
She reached for the shower curtain, her mind racing through the lies, weaving a tapestry of deceit to keep her husband alive. I tripped in the garage. A mugger took my purse. I'm just stressed about the baby. No, Billy would smell the bullshit. He was a human lie detector with a PhD in violence. He'd look into her eyes and see the hollowed-out wreckage Homelander had left behind.
She reached into the shower to test the water.
That's when it happened.
She didn't just feel the warmth of the water. She felt a kick.
But it wasn't a "thirteen-week-old lemon" flutter. It wasn't the soft, rhythmic nudge of Billy's son. It was a sharp, localized thrum of energy—a vibration that felt like a low-voltage circuit board was humming under her skin. Her abdomen tightened, not in a cramp, but in a strange, static-filled contraction. The kind she'd feel once, years ago, standing too close to a Vought energy demonstration at a trade show—the electromagnetic wash of a sustained plasma field. It had made her back molars buzz.
This was that feeling. But it was coming from inside her.
Becca stared down at her stomach. Her breath hitched. The air in the room suddenly felt twenty degrees colder, smelling of ozone and burnt hair. She knew that smell. It was in the Vought incident-response manual, the one she'd helped draft: In the event of an uncontrolled thermal event involving a Class-A Supe asset, affected personnel may note a sharp odor of ozone and ionized organic matter—
The "heartbeat" Homelander had mentioned. "I can hear the heartbeat. It's fast—probably a boy. Butcher genes."
He'd laughed when he said it. And now she knew why.
The baby was Billy's. She knew it was. They'd been trying for months; it was their miracle. But something had changed in that executive bathroom. Homelander hadn't just broken her; he had polluted the space around her. Whether it was the proximity to his irradiated, Compound-V-saturated blood or some twisted, god-like intent—the files said V-positive individuals shed trace amounts of the compound through perspiration and shed skin cells, an ongoing low-level environmental contamination they called V-bleed—the thing inside her was reacting.
The kick came again—harder, more insistent—and for a split second, she didn't feel a baby. She felt a threat. A hum of power that shouldn't exist in a human womb. The "Butcher genes" were in there, but they were being drowned out by a celestial static.
Outside, the familiar, low rumble of Billy's truck pulled into the driveway. The headlights swept across the bathroom window, casting long, distorted shadows against the white tile—shadows that looked like capes.
Becca looked at the door, then back at her stomach.
She wasn't just keeping a secret anymore. She was carrying a bomb that wore Billy's face, ticking to a rhythm set by a monster. And the timer had just hit zero.
The Void. The Gutter Between Panels.
Harry James Potter was officially over it.
Death was supposed to be the "next great adventure," according to a certain twinkly-eyed old manipulator with a penchant for lemon drops. Instead, it was more like being stuck in an infinite sensory-deprivation tank with a cosmic asshole whispering in your ear.
He'd done the hero bit. He'd died in the dirt, come back, won the war, and spent the next century-plus being the "Man Who Lived Too Long." He'd sired a dynasty, buried his friends, and finally—finally—croaked at 147. He'd been looking forward to a long, quiet pint with Sirius and Remus in the great pub in the sky. He'd earned it. The paperwork alone—the goblin reparations treaties, the Ministry pension fund restructuring, the seventeen years of serving on the Wizengamot before he'd finally told Hermione to find someone who actually wanted the job—had added what felt like a geological epoch to his age.
But the Hallows? The Hallows were a clingy, toxic set of ex-girlfriends.
"You don't get a gold watch and a pension, Harry," the darkness seemed to jeer. "You're the Master. And the Master doesn't punch out. He punches in."
Before he could tell the universe to go sodomize itself with the Elder Wand, the hook hit him. It wasn't a gentle tug. It was a jagged, rusty meat-hook through the sternum, dragging him through the psychic equivalent of a cheese grater. He wasn't being reborn. He was being drafted.
Then came the broadcast.
In this void, souls didn't have secrets. Everything was laid bare in a messy, technicolor spray of trauma and chemicals. The veil between lives was thin in the place between worlds, and through it, he received not a vision but a transmission. A full-spectrum data dump. History, context, the shape of a world.
He saw the logo first. That V. He'd spent enough time around Dark Marks to recognize a brand that functioned as a covenant. But this one was different. This one had stakeholders, quarterly earnings calls, and a market cap that had just broken four hundred billion. He skimmed the architecture of it—the lobbying arms, the DoD contracts, the pharmaceutical subsidiaries, the production studio that made the films, the streaming platform that carried them, the merchandise division that cleared eleven billion annually. He saw the trail of NDAs and quiet settlements. He saw the Human Resource Development protocols, the files Mallory would eventually get from the Zurich hacker, the ones that catalogued seventeen cases of in-utero exposure with the bland, bureaucratic numbering of a filing system designed to be deniable.
He saw Vogelbaum's original lab reports, the ones the man had spent forty years trying to quietly bury beneath peer-reviewed work on "voluntary enhancement." He saw the subject known as Compound V Batch 1, Test Article Alpha, Subject Designation: John. He saw what they'd done to that child. He saw what that child had become.
She was a firework in a room full of damp matches. Bright, sharp, and currently being ground under the heel of something truly, spectacularly foul. Harry saw the Vought logo—a stylized 'V' that looked like a corporate brand for the Antichrist—and then he saw him.
The Blonde God. The All-American Asshole.
Harry had dealt with megalomaniacs before. He'd spent seven years playing cat-and-mouse with a noseless freak in a bathrobe who'd genuinely believed his own mythology. But Voldemort, at least, had started from nothing and built his monstrosity himself. There was something almost admirable about the ambition, in the way you could admire a particularly committed parasite. This thing was different. This was a man who had been manufactured—literally grown in a tube—and then handed a world that reinforced his every delusion before he'd had the cognitive development to build a conscience. He was the product of three hundred million dollars of DoD funding and a board of directors who'd calculated that a god was worth more with a flag on his chest than a chain around his neck.
The rape wasn't just an assault; it was an exercise in property management.
Harry felt a surge of magic so violent it would have leveled Hogwarts. The Resurrection Stone pulsed like a dying star, and the Invisibility Cloak wrapped around his soul like a shroud.
"She's dying, Harry," the Stone whispered, sounding suspiciously like a bored executive. "The hero's juice—Compound V—is eating the natural kid alive. Like acid in a petri dish. In forty-eight hours, she's a mess on a bathroom floor and a tragedy in a press release."
Harry looked at the messy, flickering blueprint of the embryo. Two fathers. One biological, the man who loved her—Billy. One a monster who had forced his way in. He could see the V. It wasn't a substance, not exactly—not here in the between-space where biology translated into something more legible. It looked like blue lightning trapped in a lattice of iron filings. It was aggressive. It was hungry. It moved through the embryonic tissue like a solvent, rewriting the cellular instructions it found, superseding the natural blueprint with its own imperatives. He'd read about Dark artefacts that did similar things—the Horcrux in Nagini had eventually consumed her original serpent nature from the inside out, replacing it with fragments of a dying dark lord—and the principle was similar. The V didn't coexist. It superseded.
The human pregnancy was losing. Becca was losing.
"I can fix it," Harry thought, the old, reckless Gryffindor fire licking at his heels.
"It'll cost," the Wand hummed. "You won't just be a kid. You'll be a lightning rod. You'll have to take that V-crap, filter it through your own soul-fire, and fuse it to the Butcher boy's map. You'll be a hybrid. A freak. A wizard-born supe with a target on his back before you can even crawl. And the target won't just be Vought. Every arms dealer, every government, every ambitious bastard who looks at what you are and decides you're an opportunity—they'll all come for you. Eventually."
Harry didn't hesitate. He'd spent his first life being a sacrificial lamb. Why stop now?
"She's a good person," Harry snarled into the void. "And I've always had a thing for taking down bullies."
He assessed what he had to work with. The Elder Wand—raw power, the kind that bent the rules of magic at a cellular level, that could reinforce and rewrite. The Resurrection Stone—tethering, binding, a bridge between what was alive and what wanted to be. The Invisibility Cloak—concealment, a way to hide a signal, to make something invisible to even the most sophisticated scan.
Vought had scanners. The Supe-detection array in Vought Tower—he'd seen the technical specs in the broadcast, buried in a server-farm document stamped Proprietary — Class Five — Destroy After Reading—could detect V-signature at 200 meters. The moment this child was born, if the signal was live, they'd know. They'd triangulate. They'd send the team, and the team wouldn't be men with guns.
He'd need to mask the signal. The Cloak would do it—woven not as a garment but as an architecture, built into the child's very V-expression. A EM-damping field that operated at the frequency Vought's arrays were calibrated to detect. It wouldn't make the child powerless. It would make the child invisible to the machinery designed to find him.
He didn't just fall. He plummeted.
He breached the womb like a paratrooper dropping into a hot zone. He felt the V-serum—cold, blue, and chemical—try to reject him. He met it with the ancient, stubborn magic of the Peverells. He grabbed the dying spark of Billy Butcher's son and the toxic lightning of Homelander's essence, and he shoved them together with the sheer, bloody-minded will of a man who had once walked into a forest to die.
The agony was exquisite. His soul felt like it was being put through a blender with a handful of gravel.
Hang on, Becca, he thought, his consciousness fading as the biology took over. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, but I'm not letting that blonde prick win.
The darkness rushed back in, but this time, it was warm. It smelled like salt and iron.
He was in.
He was the lemon. And he was about to become the biggest sour note in Vought's history.
The Bathroom. Present.
The air in the bathroom didn't just turn cold; it curdled.
Becca didn't just feel a cramp; she felt like someone had shoved a live wire into her spine and flipped the switch to Overload. It was a jagged, screaming white light of a sensation that tore through her gut. She collapsed against the side of the tub, her breath hitching in a series of ragged, wet gasps.
It wasn't a miscarriage. It didn't feel like death. It felt like a fucking remodeling.
Inside her, something old and impossibly heavy was anchoring itself. It felt like gold and iron and cold, Highland rain. The violent, buzzing hum of Homelander's "contribution"—that oily, chemical wrongness—was suddenly being seized. She felt it being dragged, screaming, into a dark corner of her womb and forged into something new. Something tempered.
Then, the static vanished.
Becca stayed there, curled on the tiles, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She waited for the blood to soak through her jeans. She waited for the agonizing emptiness. But instead, a strange, defiant warmth spread through her midsection. It was a calm she didn't deserve, a humming power that felt... protective.
I'm losing my mind, she thought, her fingers digging into the denim over her stomach. The shock finally snapped the gears.
Then came the sound that made her blood turn to slush.
The front door didn't just open; it hit the wall with a bang that sounded like a gunshot. Heavy, frantic boots thudded against the floorboards downstairs.
"Becca? Becca, you in there, love?"
It was Billy. But it wasn't the "dinner's ready" Billy. It was the "I've got a lead on a target" Billy. His voice was a serrated edge of panic and raw, bleeding aggression.
He was up the stairs in three strides. The bathroom door handle rattled violently. "Becca! Open the door! I can hear the bloody shower!"
Becca scrambled up, her joints popping. She looked at the mirror. She looked like a car wreck in a Vought polo. She splashed freezing water on her face, scrubbing at the mascara tracks with a ferocity that broke the skin. She tried to swallow the sob lodged in her throat.
"Just a second, Billy! I'm—I'm just finishing up!"
"Open the door, Becca. Now. Or I'm kicking the sodding thing off the hinges."
She turned the lock. The door didn't just open; Billy practically fell into the room. He looked frantic. His coat was damp from the London-style drizzle outside, his hair a wild thicket, and his eyes... they were scanning her like he was looking for a sniper in a crowd.
"You alright? You didn't answer your phone. I thought—" He stopped dead.
He saw the red rims of her eyes. He saw the way she was shielding her stomach with one arm. He saw the Vought shirt crumpled in the corner like a discarded skin.
"Becca," he said, his voice dropping an octave into a low, dangerous rumble. "Talk to me. What's happened?"
"Nothing, Billy. Really. I just... I had a bit of a scare. The pregnancy, you know? Hormones. I got overwhelmed at the office and—"
"Don't," Billy spat, stepping into her space. He smelled of rain and cheap cigarettes and that familiar, comforting musk. He took her by the shoulders, his grip firm but trembling. "Don't you dare give me that corporate 'everything's sunshine and rainbows' bollocks. You look like you've gone ten rounds with a heavyweight. Who was it?"
"Nobody, Billy. Please—"
"Was it that bitch Stillwell? Or one of those cape-wearing ponces?" His eyes darkened, a flash of pure, unadulterated Butcher-brand hatred flickering behind his pupils. "Did one of 'em put their hands on you?"
Becca looked at him—at the man who would burn the world down just to keep her warm—and she felt the secret burning in her throat like lye. If she said the name, Billy was a dead man. Homelander wouldn't just kill him; he'd make a sport of it. He'd peel Billy apart while she watched. He'd smile the whole time. He'd probably have someone film it for the archive—she knew about the archive, the private server in the sub-basement of Vought Tower where Madeline Stillwell kept footage that never aired, leverage arranged in neat folders by person and incident.
"It's someone we can't touch, Billy," she whispered, her voice cracking. "Someone who... if you go after them, you aren't coming back. And I can't be a widow. Not now."
Billy's face went through a terrifying transformation. The worry vanished, replaced by a cold, crystalline stillness. The kind of stillness that usually preceded a massacre.
"A Supe," he breathed. It wasn't a question; it was a realization that tasted like copper. "One of those Vought 'heroes' did this to you."
He let go of her shoulders and backed away, his hands balling into fists so tight his knuckles made a dry, snapping sound. He looked at the Vought logo on her shirt in the corner and let out a laugh that was more of a snarl.
"Which one, Becca? Was it the deep-sea freak? The invisible cunt? Or was it the Big Boy himself?"
"Billy, stop it! Just stop!" She grabbed his arm, anchored herself to him. "It doesn't matter! We're going to get through it. The baby is... the baby is okay. I felt it. I'm okay."
"You're not okay!" he roared, the sound echoing off the sterile tiles. "You're fuckin' broken, love! And I'm gonna find out which one of those diabolical bastards did it, and I'm gonna carve 'em into pieces small enough to fit in a fuckin' matchbox!"
He dropped to his knees then, his forehead thumping against her stomach. He wrapped his arms around her waist, clinging to her like she was a life raft in a hurricane. Becca could feel the heat of his rage and the dampness of his tears soaking into her jeans.
"I'll kill 'em," he muttered into her skin, a vow that sounded like a curse. "I'll kill every last one of the cunts if I have to."
Becca held his head, her fingers lacing through his thick hair, feeling the impossible weight of the future.
Deep inside her, the soul of Harry Potter—the Boy Who Lived, the Man Who Conquered Death—settled into the marrow of the child. He felt the echo of Billy's fury and the shadow of Homelander's ego, and he began to weave. He took the Compound V, stripped away the madness, and bound the power to the Butcher grit.
He wasn't just a baby anymore. He was the Master of Death's final gambit.
The three Hallows—the Wand, the Stone, the Cloak—fused with the double-helix of his DNA. A wizard's spirit in a Supe's body, fueled by a father's vengeance and a mother's love.
The world of Vought didn't know it yet, but the playing field had just been leveled.
"It's alright, Billy," Becca whispered, looking at her reflection—at the ghost she had become. "We're safe now. I promise."
But as she looked down at her husband's shaking shoulders, she knew 'safe' was a lie. They weren't safe. They were just the first casualties in a war that was about to get very, very magical.
CIA Safehouse. Newark. Three weeks later.
Grace Mallory had seen a lot of diabolical shit in her thirty years with the Agency.
She'd seen the fallout of Compound V trials in the eighties—test subjects who'd liquefied from the inside out, or the poor bastard in Managua whose lungs had decided they wanted to grow on the outside of his ribcage. Those were the failures. The files she wasn't supposed to have—the ones she'd lifted from a CIA sub-archive during the Church Committee's follow-up sessions in '87—documented forty-one cases of "involuntary enhancement research" conducted between 1974 and 1983. Of those forty-one, six had produced what Vought's contracted researchers called "viable phenotypic expression." Three of those six were currently on Vought's official payroll. Two were in classified containment at a facility in Nevada she'd been told, twice, did not exist. The sixth she'd never been able to trace.
She'd authorized black ops that made the My Lai Massacre look like a Sunday school picnic, and she usually did it with a glass of neat scotch in her hand and a clear conscience.
But standing in this damp, piss-smelling safehouse, watching William Butcher pace like a rabid pitbull while his wife sat on the sofa looking ready to drop a toddler?
This was a whole new level of "fuck my life."
"Run it by me again, William," Mallory said, lighting her fourth cigarette. The 'No Smoking' sign on the wall was more of a suggestion at this point—one she was happily shitting on. "And speak slowly. I want to make sure I'm not just having a stroke."
Butcher stopped. He looked like he'd been pulled through a knothole backwards. His eyes were bloodshot, his beard was a tangled mess of salt-and-pepper wire, and his knuckles were shredded—likely from a very one-sided conversation with a brick wall.
"Someone at Vought got to her," Butcher spat, the word Vought sounding like a death threat. "A cape. One of the Seven, most likely. Becca won't say which one of those costumed cunts it was, but three weeks ago, we were thirteen weeks along. Normal. Now? Look at the bloody state of her."
Mallory looked.
Becca Butcher was perched on the edge of a sagging recliner, her hands resting on a belly that was definitely, unmistakably there. This wasn't a "too many tacos" bump. This was a "start buying diapers" belly. At sixteen weeks, she looked like she was hitting the third trimester.
"The growth rate is... anomalous," Becca said, her voice trembling but her eyes hard. She looked exhausted, but there was a weird, stubborn fire in her. "The OB thought I'd miscalculated. She started talking about 'unusual gestational acceleration.' Wanted to run a battery of tests at Vought General."
"Which is where I stepped in," Butcher growled. "Vought General is basically a fuckin' processing plant for Supes. They'd have flagged her, bagged her, and she'd be a lab rat in a basement before the lab results even came back. Whoever did this... they'd have come for her. For the kid."
Mallory took a long, dragging pull of her cigarette. Vought General. She'd had two analysts burned there, back in '94, when she'd tried to get a mole into their Research and Development wing. The hospital was a cathedral to plausible deniability—impeccable facilities, award-winning staff, a pediatric ward that had been featured in three consecutive years of US News & World Report's hospital rankings. And underneath it, six sub-basement levels that weren't on any architectural schematic she'd ever obtained, serviced by an elevator that required a biometric pass that not even the hospital's board members possessed.
"So, you're suggesting the assault triggered some kind of... mutagenic fast-forward?"
"I'm not 'suggesting' anything, Grace. Use your sodding eyes." Butcher snorted, gesturing wildly at Becca. "She was fine. Then some supe-freak treats her like a goddamn souvenir, and suddenly the kid is growing like it's on a fuckin' time-lapse. It's the V. It's that blue shite in the baby's blood."
Mallory leaned back, eyes narrowing. She'd seen the stolen ultrasound. The skeletal structure of the fetus was... dense. Too dense. The cranial measurements were off the standard growth chart by a factor of two. She'd sent the scans to a contact at Johns Hopkins under a cover story about a surrogate arrangement gone sideways, and the radiologist's response had been a single sentence: This is not a viable human pregnancy.
"Have you considered, William," Mallory said, her voice dropping into that cold, professional register that usually preceded a funeral, "that this might not be your kid anymore? That you're protecting a cuckoo in the nest?"
The air in the room didn't just get cold; it turned to liquid nitrogen.
Butcher turned to face her, and for the first time in years, Mallory felt her hand twitch toward her holster. Butcher didn't look like a husband anymore. He looked like a man who had looked into the abyss and told it to go fuck itself.
"It's my kid," Butcher whispered, a sound like gravel grinding on glass. "Mine and Becca's. I don't give a toss if some cape-wearing wanker tried to rewrite the code. That's a Butcher in there. And I'll slit the throat of anyone who says otherwise."
"Billy—" Mallory started.
"It's his," Becca interrupted. She stood up, her hand pressing firmly against the swell of her stomach. "I know how it sounds. I know what the science says. But when it happened... there was this... surge. Like a bolt of lightning. But it didn't destroy what was already there. It wrapped around it. It's like Billy's son is wearing a suit of armor made of light."
She looked at Mallory, her gaze hauntingly certain.
"The baby we made is still there. He's just... more. He's better. And he's ours."
Mallory looked at the two of them—the broken man and the miracle-carrying woman—and felt a profound sense of dread. If Vought found out about a natural-born hybrid with accelerated growth, they wouldn't just send a lawyer. They'd send The Seven. Or worse: they'd send the people who sent The Seven.
She'd read the internal Vought comms about the "next generation" Supe initiative. The marketing language was Legacy Program—a term that sounded like a scholarship fund and functioned like a eugenics project. The board had approved a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar research budget to investigate "natural-propagation pathways" for V-positive phenotypes. The science was appalling. The rationale was elegant: a natural-born Supe, one gestated rather than injected, theoretically produced a more stable phenotype, a tighter V-integration, fewer of the catastrophic rejection events that had quietly ended the careers of a dozen B-list Supes over the last decade.
What Becca was carrying was the answer to a research question Vought had been spending nine figures to solve.
"God help us," Mallory muttered.
Before she could finish the cigarette, the front door's deadbolt clicked open with a sharp, mechanical thud.
Butcher was across the room in a heartbeat, a crowbar appearing in his hand as if summoned by sheer malice.
"Stay behind me, Becca," he hissed.