Chapter Text
The Oval Office reeked of a foul mixture of blood and cordite.
The sound of artillery fire was filtered through the thick walls into a muffled pulse. Every tremor made the half-shattered crystal chandelier sway gently, its severed wires dangling in the dust-choked air. The American flag hung crooked on the wall, its blue corner burned through with several charred holes, through which the cracked plaster wall behind was visible. In the corner, the floor-length mirror had shattered into a spiderweb, each shard reflecting a twisted, distorted Oval Office.
Homelander knelt on the carpet. His face—the face that had once graced every billboard in the world—was now a mess of purple bruises and dried, dark-red scabs. His nose bent at an unnatural angle, a pale shard of bone-white cartilage jutting through the skin, glistening wetly in the dim yellow light. With every sob, a mixture of tears, blood-streaked mucus dripped from his shattered nasal cavity, soaking into the unrecognizable remnants of his star-spangled suit in spreading blooms of dark red. The golden eagle on his epaulet had one wing drowned in gore.
He knelt there, his fingers clawing at the carpet fibers, his fingernails packed with dirt and congealed blood, like a drowning man clutching at his last strand of seaweed.
"Please, William... please stop, I'll do anything,I'll fucking suck your dick,You want me to eat shit? I'll eat your fucking shit,I'll eat your fucking shit on live TV, please…"
The man standing before him was a silent black shadow. Butcher stared down at him, his face showing neither pleasure nor rage—only the cold patience of a job nearing completion. The calluses on his palm ground against the grip of a rusted crowbar, its curved tip gleaming dully in the gloom, still bearing the dried blood of its last victim.
The crowbar did not swing down.
Instead, it slid along the upper ridge of Homelander's right eye socket and pushed in—slowly, inexorably. The grinding screech of metal against bone rang clearly through the Oval Office, a sound no one who heard it would ever forget—like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard, like a dog gnawing on a bone. Blood and some transparent fluid—vitreous humor or cerebrospinal fluid, no one could tell—gushed out in an instant, splashing across the overturned Resolute Desk, soaking into scattered presidential documents. Homelander's mouth gaped open, but no sound came from deep in his throat. The pain had long since exceeded the limits of his vocal cords. He could only work his lips silently, like a gutted fish.
Butcher gripped the crowbar with both hands and wrenched it upward. A wet, tearing sound—like prying open a fresh oyster pulled from the sea, like ripping meat from the bone. Homelander's frontal bone, along with half his golden hair, was peeled clean off. Inside the skull, the gray-pink meninges still pulsed weakly, rhythmically—the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, the last inertia of life. On the surface of the brain, exposed to the air, tiny blood vessels still twitched.
The shot pushed in, plunging into that fading blue eye. The dilated pupil reflected Butcher's cold face, reflected the ruined presidential seal on the ceiling. The blue of the iris receded like an ebbing tide, retreating from the edges, collapsing inward, until it sank into absolute darkness. Blood seeped from the rim of the eye socket, trailing down the cheek like a single blue tear.
In the deepest depths of that darkness, the hollow pupil suddenly contracted. Defiance ignited like wildfire from ashes. It caught, built—and then fury surged up behind it, a blistering, all-consuming rage. In an instant, it was forged into the purest, coldest, most bone-chilling ruthlessness the world had ever known. The final choice of a cornered beast facing death: not begging, not acceptance. Revenge.
"What the fuck?!"
A sharp, bewildered shriek tore through the image. The shot snapped back to reality.
The same Oval Office. The same American flag. Only the light was brighter now—midday sun streamed through the bulletproof windows, casting neat rectangles of light onto the carpet. This place had not yet been ravaged by war. The air held no trace of cordite—only the scent of disinfectant, the sour tang of cheap whiskey, and a deeper, more primal odor of fear. The kind of fear that comes from the adrenaline of extreme terror, sharp and cloying.
A fat man in a filthy white tank top was sprawled in a deeply undignified position beside Homelander. The armpits of his tank top were yellowed, a slick of grimy sweat clung to his neck, and his enormous gut bulged over his belt. His eyes—glowing with an eerie blue light—were now stretched wide with terror, the sockets so distended they seemed about to split. His obese cheeks quivered faintly.
Homelander's fingers were buried deep inside his disgusting, cavernous asshole.
The fat man was called the Prophet. His ability was seeing the future—through contact between his rectum and another person's body, he could show them a possible future. An ability so absurd it was almost laughable.
What Homelander had just seen was that possible future.
The tears in his eyes evaporated in an instant—like water drops hitting a red-hot iron plate, gone with a hiss. What remained was the inhuman, bone-chilling coldness of someone who had just glimpsed hell and returned. His eyes were still wet, but there was no longer any trace of human warmth in them.
And the filthy fat man, still prostrate on the ground, was still lost in the horror of what he had just witnessed—yet the eerie silence made him suddenly aware of a creeping unease. Perhaps it was a subtle spasm from his anal sphincter that alerted him to something. He slowly turned his head and found Homelander's gaze like an Antarctic abyss, as if it would suck him into a frozen void in the next second. He opened his mouth—to explain, to beg, to say it was just an accident, that his powers had spiraled out of control, that this was a mistake anyone could have made...
But only a single second passed before his expression twisted into a knot. Spiderwebbed veins erupted across his eyes, his eyeballs bulged as if about to pop from their sockets. Then a shriek—so sharp it nearly pierced the eardrums—before it dissolved mid-cry into a gurgling, liquid sound. A torrent of black blood erupted from the fat man's mouth, laced with fragments of internal organs. And behind him, Homelander simply watched, coldly, the corner of his mouth twitching with something almost like curiosity. Then he yanked—hard.
The fat man's intestines came out in a bloody, steaming tangle. The pink walls of the bowel steamed in the open air, accompanied by a putrid stench and the thick odor of blood, coiling in loops onto the carpet. The fat man's body convulsed in violent spasms, then went still. Those blue-glowing eyes remained open, staring blankly at the crystal chandelier above. A dark-red, viscous fluid still oozed from his anus, soaking into the carpet beneath him.
Homelander withdrew his hand from the still-twitching corpse, his face utterly expressionless. His fingers were coated in sticky blood, half-digested food residue, and intestinal secretions. He tore off a strip of the American flag and wiped his fingers clean, slowly and methodically, getting every knuckle spotless. The blue field of stars stained dark red. The white stripes smeared to ochre.
He rose to his feet, standing at the very center of the Oval Office. Behind him, the midday sun blazed through the windows, throwing his long shadow across the carpet—past the body still seeping blood, past the overturned Resolute Desk, stretching all the way to the far end of the room.
His eyes were hollow. But that hollowness was not emptiness. It was an abyss. A killing intent vast enough to tear the whole world apart, to chew it up, to swallow it and spit it back out.
He spoke coldly. His voice was low, as if talking to himself, or as if pronouncing a death sentence upon everything this room represented—democracy, order, a civilization that thought itself millennia old but could be crushed by a single hand at any moment.
"Let the fucking games begin."