Canon divergent around the beginning of season 2. Enemies to lovers, then back to enemies again. Slow burn. Eventual smut. Specific content warnings for each chapter will be applied in notes prior to the text to help avoid spoilers.
Summary:
Hand-picked by Stan Edgar, Morgan Daly's new role as the latest member of The Seven is anything but glamorous. Behind the scenes, she’s been tasked with a dangerous mission: keep the world’s most powerful superhero, Homelander, in line. Her telepathic abilities make her a valuable asset, but navigating the ruthless game within Vought’s elite team could cost her more than she bargained for.
As tensions rise and the line between ally and enemy blurs, Morgan must decide whether she’ll play by Vought’s rules—or risk everything to outmaneuver a man who could destroy her without a second thought.
AO3 Link | Fic Playlist | Ship Playlist
Tumblr Chapter Directory
Chapter 01- Tightrope
Chapter 02- Control
Chapter 03- Take a Bow
Chapter 04- Shot Me Down
Chapter 05- Smile
Chapter 06- Under Pressure
Chapter 07- Losing My Religion
Chapter 08- Not About Angels
Chapter 09- Everybody Knows
Chapter 10- I'm Not the One
Chapter 11- You're Somebody Else
Chapter 12- I Gave You All
Chapter 13- Samson
Chapter 14- Night of the Dancing Flame
Chapter 15- Falling
Chapter 16- Hollow Crown
Chapter 17- Landslide
Chapter 18- All the Good Girls Go to Hell
Chapter 19- They Weren't There
Chapter 20- The Dance
Chapter 21- Once Upon Another Time
Chapter 22- Give It Up
Chapter 23- Meant to be Yours
Chapter 24- I Found
Chapter 25- Where is Your God Now?
Chapter 26- Without the Lights
Chapter 27- Little Talks
Chapter 28- Falling Apart
Chapter 29- Holding Out for a Hero
Chapter 30- Turning Page
Epilogue- What a Wonderful World
He looked at her then, really looked at her, and for the first time, Morgan felt like he was seeing her as more than just another tool in Vought’s arsenal. They were two people trapped in the same machine, each fighting their own battles against the invisible strings that pulled them.
My lovely sister @s0alaina did this beautiful piece of Homelander and my OC Morgan (aka Psyren) from my fic The Dance. I couldn't be happier with it.
Notes: 18+ No warnings apply for this chapter. Each chapter will have individual content warnings as they apply to avoid spoilers. Find this work on AO3. Tumblr master post here.
The music at Vought events was always too loud.
It was too polished. Too carefully selected to feel spontaneous while still being approved by at least six executives and a marketing team desperate to convince America that superheroes were approachable. Morgan had learned that all too quickly.
Everything about these events was artificial. The smiles. The speeches. The strategically placed children waving little American flags near the barricades. Even the lighting had been adjusted to make Homelander look softer somehow, the golden glow catching against the white stripes of his cape like a halo.
It was exhausting.
Still, the evening had gone better than expected.
The announcement of their relationship a few weeks earlier had sent the media into a frenzy. Vought, naturally, had wasted no time capitalizing on it. Every public appearance now came with cameras packed shoulder to shoulder and headlines already drafted before either of them even arrived.
America’s Sweethearts.
She still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or throw up every time she heard it.
Across the outdoor pavilion, music pulsed through hidden speakers while guests mingled beneath strings of warm lights. The event itself was supposed to be some kind of charity fundraiser for children’s hospitals. Or military families. Maybe both. The details had blurred together somewhere between Ashley’s frantic itinerary briefing and the fifth photographer demanding they kiss for the camera.
Homelander stood beside her near the edge of the dance floor, posture immaculate as always.
Perfect smile. Perfect hair. Perfect angle.
Sipping lazily at her drink, she watched Stormfront charm a cluster of donors several yards away with practiced ease. She looked perfectly at home beneath the lights, all sharp smiles and effortless charisma. Maeve, meanwhile, appeared to be surviving the evening entirely through alcohol and spite.
That was something Morgan understood completely.
“You look like you’re considering homicide,” she murmured, her eyes sliding over toward Homelander.
Without breaking his smile, he answered under his breath. “I’m considering heat vision, yes.”
She snorted softly into her glass. It shouldn’t have been funny. It should have been horrifying given everything she had seen from him thus far. And yet she knew where his intentions lay tonight. Tonight, all seemed to be well.
His eyes flicked toward her briefly, the smallest crack in the performance. Barely there amusement softened the edges of his expression before the cameras could fully catch it. That still surprised her sometimes. Not the smile itself, but the fact that it could occasionally be real.
The music shifted suddenly, the opening beat instantly recognizable.
Whitney Houston burst through the pavilion speakers. A few guests laughed in surprise while others groaned playfully at the abrupt transition from smooth, jazzy background music to something considerably less dignified.
Morgan perked up immediately.
“Oh no,” Homelander said flatly.
Her grin widened. “Oh yes.”
“Really? This song?”
Nearby, several children had already abandoned their parents in favor of the open dance floor, their tiny dress shoes skidding across it beneath the lights. One little girl spun dramatically while another shouted the lyrics several beats too early with complete confidence.
Morgan laughed before she could stop herself. Without thinking too hard about it, she started swaying lightly with the music. Nothing dramatic, but just enough to feel it.
Homelander watched her carefully. Not because she was dancing. Because she wasn’t performing.
There was no calculation behind it. No awareness of cameras or carefully rehearsed body language. She wasn’t Psyren right now, polished and marketable beneath the pavilion lights.
She was just… Morgan.
One of the little girls noticed her almost immediately. Her eyes widened as a smile of sheer delight brightened her face. Then, after a brief whisper to the other girls beside her, she gathered enough courage to approach.
“Um…” The girl shifted nervously in glittering shoes. “Do you wanna dance with us?”
She blinked once. The girl couldn’t have been older than seven. She was utterly charming with her missing front tooth. Her tiny sequined jacket, her hair done up in curls, and her face radiating unabashed joy.
Morgan smiled instantly.
“I've done alright up 'till now,” she sang along, her voice just loud enough to be heard over the speakers. “It's the light of day that shows me how. And when the night falls, loneliness calls.”
The children erupted into delighted chaos.
Homelander watched her disappear into the small cluster beneath the lights, laughter bubbling out of her as one of the girls grabbed both her hands and spun in a sloppy circle. Several cameras shifted direction immediately. Somewhere nearby, Ashley was probably moments away from ascending bodily into heaven.
Morgan either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
And for a while, Homelander simply stood there watching.
"Oh, I wanna dance with somebody!" Morgan and her little gaggle of fans belted out the chorus unabashed and slightly off-key.
They all dissolved into laughter as one of the girls attempted a dramatic twirl and nearly took out two others in the process. Morgan caught her before disaster could strike, steadying the child with a grin while the music blared cheerfully overhead.
All around her, thoughts buzzed together in bright, scattered fragments. Excitement, sugar highs, hero worship, the absolute certainty that this was the greatest night of their young lives. It was almost overwhelming in its sincerity.
And beneath all of it, there was Homelander.
Morgan felt him long before she looked back toward him.
His mind was quieter than usual tonight. Not empty — never empty — but absent of the sharpness she had grown accustomed to navigating around him. No irritation. No simmering violence lurking beneath polished smiles.
Just… stillness.
Watching.
Suddenly, she saw him again. Not the hero that the public saw. Not the menace that a select few knew him to be.
The Boy.
The boy with the shaggy, golden hair and the drab hospital gown. The lonely child hidden beneath layers upon layers of manufactured perfection and carefully constructed mythology. The child raised beneath fluorescent lights and observation windows instead of birthday candles and backyard summers.
For one fragile moment, she could feel him standing outside the edges of this happiness like he didn’t know how to step into it. Like he wanted to. Like he didn’t believe he was allowed to.
The realization struck her with painful clarity. No one had ever simply invited him to join in before. Not genuinely.
Not without expectation attached to it.
Another burst of laughter erupted around her as two of the girls grabbed Morgan’s hands again, trying to pull her into a ring around their friend. She laughed with them, but her eyes drifted back toward him once more.
He was still standing at the edge of the dance floor. Still perfectly composed beneath the pavilion lights. Still watching her like she was something impossible. But something under the surface threatened to break.
One of the little girls followed Morgan’s gaze and gasped dramatically. “Oh my God,” she whispered loudly to the others. “Homelander’s watching us.”
Another girl’s eyes widened impossibly far. “Do you think he dances?”
The sheer wonder in the girl’s voice nearly made her laugh. Warm pavilion lights tangled gold through Morgan’s fiery hair as she held her hand out dramatically, palm upturned in open invitation.
“Homelander!” she called over the music. “Get over here!”
Every instinct in his body tightened instantly. She felt it ripple through him before he even moved. Attention. Exposure. The unbearable vulnerability of being perceived without the shield of performance to hide behind.
The children turned toward him all at once. One little boy waved enthusiastically. Another immediately looked starstruck enough to faint. Homelander remained rooted exactly where he stood.
“I don’t dance,” he called back, sounding almost offended by the suggestion.
Morgan grinned. “Of course you do! Everyone does.”
A few of the children giggled, some standing on tiptoes in anticipation. Homelander’s eyes flicked briefly toward the surrounding crowd, toward the cameras trained on him from every conceivable angle. Morgan could feel the conflict tightening beneath his carefully controlled expression now.
Wanting. Hesitating. Wanting again.
“I don’t,” he started, the words catching strangely in his throat. For a moment, she thought he might retreat behind the performance again. Flash a smile. Deflect. Turn the moment into a joke for the cameras.
Instead, his gaze found hers. And for once, there was no Homelander in it at all. Just the boy standing, peering outside the glass.
Quieter this time, just loud enough for her alone to hear, he admitted, “I don’t know how.”
Morgan’s breath caught softly in her chest.
Around them, the music still blared. Children still laughed. Cameras still flashed endlessly beneath the pavilion lights. But for one fragile second, the entire world seemed to narrow down to that single devastating confession.
Not, ‘I don’t want to.’
Not, ‘This is stupid.’
Not even, ‘People are watching.’
Just… ‘I don’t know how.’
And God… The sincerity of it nearly broke her heart.
Morgan’s expression softened instantly. “Oh,” she said quietly, not mocking, or surprised. There was only simple understanding.
The children looked between them expectantly, the music continuing to pulse around the pavilion while Whitney Houston practically demanded emotional vulnerability from the speakers. Morgan stepped away from the little group slowly, ignoring the cameras shifting after her in unison. The polished heels of her boots clicked softly against the dance floor as she crossed the space between them.
Homelander stayed perfectly still.
Close like this, she could feel the tension wound through every inch of him now. The instinct to flee beneath the instinct to stay. The unbearable discomfort of wanting something he had no frame of reference for.
She stopped directly in front of him.
"It's okay," she uttered, voice for him and him alone. “You don’t have to be good at it.”
His eyes dropped to her offered hand immediately. She felt the conflict in him surge sharply again. Cameras. Expectations. Failure. Humiliation. The endless pressure of perfection pressing against something far softer underneath.
Then another thought surfaced quietly beneath the panic.
Morgan. Just her.
Slowly, almost cautiously, Homelander slipped his hand into hers. For just a heartbeat, the world seemed to fall away. Just for an instant. All his trust was in her.
The second she took a breath, the children erupted like someone had just announced Christmas morning.
“Oh my God!”
“He’s gonna dance!”
Laughing softly, she tugged him toward the middle of the group before he could reconsider his life choices. He moved stiffly at first. Painfully so. Like someone taking their first steps.
In a way, they were, and by God they were finally outside of that sterile room.
Little by little, the tension in him began to loosen. Not completely. Never completely, but just enough.
Enough for his shoulders to relax by inches beneath his cape. Enough for the careful performance to crack around the edges. Enough for Morgan to catch flashes of genuine, unguarded happiness bleeding through the seams.
Morgan smiled softly as she stepped closer, their joined hands shifting naturally until one rested uncertainly at her waist.
“There,” she murmured gently. “See? You’re already dancing.”
Homelander looked deeply unconvinced. “This feels suspiciously like standing.”
She laughed quietly, warm and genuine, and the sound alone seemed to ease something else loose inside him. “That’s because slow dancing mostly is.”
Carefully, almost cautiously, Morgan began guiding him through the simplest possible rhythm. Nothing complicated. Just a slow sway beneath the pavilion lights while Whitney Houston crooned overhead about wanting somebody who loved her.
At first, Homelander moved with painful concentration. Every motion too precise. Too deliberate. Like he was trying to perform the act of being human correctly.
Morgan could feel it in every inch of tension still lingering beneath his skin. The instinctive terror of failure. Of humiliation. Of doing something wrong in front of all those watching eyes.
So she squeezed his hand gently, and led. “That’s it,” she said softly. “You’re doing fine.”
The children circled around them in loose, chaotic orbit, still singing along loudly and entirely off-key. One little girl spun herself dizzy nearby before collapsing into helpless giggles.
Somewhere near the bar, Maeve raised her drink toward Morgan in silent congratulations for somehow accomplishing the impossible.Morgan barely noticed. Because Homelander was smiling. Small at first, and almost hesitant, but real.
It was far from the polished public grin carefully crafted for cameras and crowds. Not the blinding all-American smile Vought had spent decades perfecting.
This one belonged only to him.
And maybe to her, as well.
For one impossible moment, the noise around them seemed to fade beneath the warmth of his hand in hers and the slow rhythm guiding them back and forth beneath the lights. No laboratories. No observation rooms. No performance.
Just a boy learning that he could be held gently and still be wanted.
And as Morgan looked up at him beneath the gold glow of the pavilion lights, she thought that perhaps this was the cruelest thing of all. Not that the world had made Homelander into a monster, but that somewhere beneath all of it…
There had once been someone who might have been good if only somebody had taught him how to dance sooner.
Song: I Wanna Dance With Somebody by: Whitney Houston
Author's notes: If you've read my fic, The Dance, this really should have been included. I had it all outlined and then I scrapped it last minute because I thought it interrupted flow. But then Season 5 happened and Frenchie said something that I took very personally.
I’m still mad about the finale and s5 in general but I gotta say there is something really tragic and poetic about the fact that Homelander spent his entire childhood being watched and experimented on in a lab, then spent the rest of his life constantly performing in front of cameras, and in the end even his weakest moment and death happened in front of cameras too.
He never truly got to exist as an actual person. From the moment he was born, Vought turned him into a weapon and a spectacle for people to watch. Vought really did win in the end.
Woke up feeling sick and then read a bunch of sad stuff about Homelander. I’m still kicking myself for cutting this chapter out of my fic, but goddammit, I’m gonna finish writing it out. Let me share a snippet with you, because when Frenchie said “I bet you never danced a day in your life,” I took that personally.
The music at Vought events was always too loud.
It was too polished. Too carefully selected to feel spontaneous while still being approved by at least six executives and a marketing team desperate to convince America that superheroes were approachable.
Morgan had learned that all too quickly.
Everything about these events was artificial. The smiles. The speeches. The strategically placed children waving little American flags near the barricades. Even the lighting had been adjusted to make Homelander look softer somehow, the golden glow catching against the white stripes of his cape like a halo.
It was exhausting.
Still, the evening had gone better than expected.
The announcement of their relationship a few weeks earlier had sent the media into a frenzy. Vought, naturally, had wasted no time capitalizing on it. Every public appearance now came with cameras packed shoulder to shoulder and headlines already drafted before either of them even arrived.
America’s Sweethearts.
She still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or throw up every time she heard it.
Across the outdoor pavilion, music pulsed through hidden speakers while guests mingled beneath strings of warm lights. The event itself was supposed to be some kind of charity fundraiser for children’s hospitals. Or military families. Maybe both. The details had blurred together somewhere between Ashley’s frantic itinerary briefing and the fifth photographer demanding they kiss for the camera.
Homelander stood beside her near the edge of the dance floor, posture immaculate as always.
Perfect smile. Perfect hair. Perfect angle.
Sipping lazily at her drink, she watched Stormfront charm a cluster of donors several yards away with practiced ease. She looked perfectly at home beneath the lights, all sharp smiles and effortless charisma. Maeve, meanwhile, appeared to be surviving the evening entirely through alcohol and spite.
That was something Morgan understood completely.
“You look like you’re considering homicide,” she murmured, her eyes sliding over toward Homelander.
Without breaking his smile, he answered under his breath. “I’m considering heat vision.”
She snorted softly into her glass. It shouldn’t have been funny. It should have been horrifying given everything she had seen from him thus far. And yet she knew where his intentions lay tonight. Tonight, all seemed to be well.
His eyes flicked toward her briefly, the smallest crack in the performance. Barely there amusement softened the edges of his expression before the cameras could fully catch it. That still surprised her sometimes. Not the smile itself, but the fact that it could occasionally be real.
The music shifted suddenly, the opening beat instantly recognizable.
Whitney Houston burst through the pavilion speakers. A few guests laughed in surprise while others groaned playfully at the abrupt transition from smooth, jazzy background music to something considerably less dignified.
Morgan perked up immediately.
Homelander noticed at once. “Oh no,” he said flatly.
Her grin widened. “Oh yes.”
“Really? This song?”
Nearby, several children had already abandoned their parents in favor of the open dance floor, their tiny dress shoes skidding across it beneath the lights. One little girl spun dramatically while another shouted the lyrics several beats too early with complete confidence.
Morgan laughed before she could stop herself. Without thinking too hard about it, she started swaying lightly with the music. Nothing dramatic, but just enough to feel it.
Homelander watched her carefully. Not because she was dancing. Because she wasn’t performing.
There was no calculation behind it. No awareness of cameras or carefully rehearsed body language. She wasn’t Psyren right now, polished and marketable beneath the pavilion lights.
She was just… Morgan.
One of the little girls noticed her almost immediately. Her eyes widened as a smile of sheer delight brightened her face. Then, after a brief whisper to the other girls beside her, she gathered enough courage to approach.
“Um…” The girl shifted nervously in glittering shoes. “Do you wanna dance with us?”
She blinked once.
The girl couldn’t have been older than seven. She was utterly charming with her missing front tooth. Her tiny sequined jacket, her hair done up in curls, and her face radiating unabashed joy.
Morgan smiled instantly.
“I've done alright up 'till now,” she sang along, her voice just loud enough to be heard over the speakers. “It's the light of day that shows me how. And when the night falls, loneliness calls.”
The children erupted into delighted chaos.
Homelander watched her disappear into the small cluster beneath the lights, laughter bubbling out of her as one of the girls grabbed both her hands and spun in a sloppy circle. Several cameras shifted direction immediately. Somewhere nearby, Ashley was probably moments away from ascending bodily into heaven.
Morgan either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
And for a while, Homelander simply stood there watching.
But the baby from the lab, born in spring ‘81, with blonde curls and love for a particular blue blanket who was named John because of Jane Doe maybe deserved a little bit of a chance, even if it was just a minute of being off screen and surrounded by nothing but peace.
I want him to dominate me and put me in my place as much as I also want to have him lay on my chest as I rub his back and tell him how good he is and how proud I am of him. ♡
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