Operation Babylon - Chapter 1 Preview (1/1)
All the pieces had yet to connect at the time, but the strongest memory that resurfaced would always be the second time Homelander had managed to properly set his eyes on the stranger who would become, in hindsight, very important to him. A little prized acquisition of his own. His own future sugar baby.
Their first time had been at a black-tie gala hosted by Vought, staged in Homelander’s honor after his latest string of heroic saves. He’d spent most of the evening “relationship building” as instructed, moving between clusters of carefully selected guests with the other invited Supes—though not everyone could make the list. Beyond The Seven, of course, was a curated selection of rising names Vought had deemed marketable, controllable, and photogenic enough to be seen in the same room as its crown jewel. Everyone else in the room had been chosen for a different kind of value.
Madelyn had debriefed him beforehand with the calm precision of someone arranging pieces on a board, reminding him—without ever needing to say it outright—that tonight, he was expected to play nice. The guests that mattered were pointed out to him like exhibits: the defense contractors in impeccably tailored tuxedos and the arms brokers who rotated champagne flutes like props, speaking in the measured tones of men accustomed to budgets measured in billions; nearby, local politicians practiced their humility in real time—smiling on instinct, their expressions rehearsed down to something almost reflexive whenever a camera drifted close enough; the pharmaceutical and biotech executives with quiet stakes in things that never made headlines. Generals and intelligence figures were tucked among them for optics, lending some legitimacy to the costumed heroes to signal endorsement, but standing distant enough to preserve plausible deniability; then there were the old money families and new money donors, the media personalities, studio heads, even a scattering of cultural tastemakers and luxury brand magnates—all with their own ulterior motives to attend the event tonight.
It wasn’t a party so much as a networking exercise rendered in silk and gold.
No one had arrived here by chance. Each invitation had been issued with intent, each guest selected not for who they were in isolation, but for what doors they could open for Vought International. The megacorporation didn’t host celebrations so much as carefully craft narratives—placing people in proximity to Homelander, Vought’s walking success story, with the precision of a staged photograph. He was the centerpiece, of course. The reason the room existed at all. Smiles were directed toward him like cameras seeking focus. Who was seen, who stood nearby, who could later claim they had shared a room with Vought’s best prototype—that was the reward beneath the champagne and chandeliers.
Homelander’s role in it had been simple on paper but tedious in practice: shake hands, hold eye contact, and make everyone of them feel seen. Be the product and the promise. Every conversation, every measured smile, every autograph signed or selfie granted was another thread in a web Madelyn intended to pull tight later—leveraging goodwill into negotiated contracts, access to restricted spheres of influence, and admiration into something far more profitable.
All these powerful connections could gilt Homelander’s status. Networking would pave the way for Madelyn to capitalize on the established goodwill, to reap not only some benefits for herself but to secure investments for Vought. A win-win for all parties.
Charged with helping Vought shape that narrative, his presence translated into endless compliments, staged laughter, and small talk that felt like chewing glass. Homelander performed the role expected of him with rehearsed ease—measured warmth, smiling for the cameras, tolerating mouthbreathing executives being touchy with him, signing autographs for “their kid who’s such a big fan,” applying only the tiniest amount of pressure to squeeze hands, and acknowledging each carefully selected person in turn with a reassuring grin that made them mistakenly believe they were the special guest of honor.
He was mid-performance—mid-smile, mid-handshake, mid-existence—when he saw him.
Not the Supe. The Supe was forgettable. B-list costume, B-list reputation, the kind of hero whose publicist probably worked harder than she did.
Instead, his attention was drawn toward the 6’1” eye-candy accompanying her.
Juxtaposed against the vibrancy of his companion’s flashy costume, the tall, dark-haired man stood out. The stranger was somebody who dripped sex appeal out the wazoo, looking like he’d stepped off the cover of GQ magazine. Even from a distance, there was a physical assurance to him—well-dressed, clean lines, a straight-backed posture that hinted at etiquette or ex-military, and a wicked scar skittered along the right side of his forehead that didn’t so much disfigure as it did deepen the mystery of whatever story lay behind it. Unlike most fresh faces whose eyes darted in unrepressed awe, the scarred stranger carried himself with the confidence of a man already familiar with spaces like this; a faint dismissiveness to his attitude, suggesting a semblance of familiarity navigating these heavyweight circles. When he wasn’t smirking at something his companion said, that confidence hardened into something else—into an unimpressed stoniness that made several people shift around him without ever quite realizing why.
Which was what made the visual so jarring—someone like that, paired with a crime-fighter with barely any arrests to her name and no recent headline victories, like a prize poorly matched to its display. Moreover, for someone Homelander didn’t need to remember. He had seen plenty of beautiful people everyday. They blurred quickly in his world—faces into surfaces, bodies into background, impressions that never held long enough to matter.
Yet the man interacted with his companion through a perfected series of intrigued, deferential glances, smiling at her attentively as she spoke, quietly showcasing a non-combative establishment of power and intimacy, listening actively rather than passively. His hand rested at the small of her back like an old-fashioned gentleman, the two of them tucked away into their own pocket of space as the crowd ebbed around them, maintaining that same charm even when other Supes drifted over out of curiosity. As a Plus One, he was courteous and hyper-attentive, his eyes widening at all the right moments, paired with a keen awareness of his female companion that only another man would recognize—and could respect.
A fine specimen like that, attached to someone so forgettable, created the kind of discordant mismatch that the eyes kept circling—a glaring error in the composition that lingered a second longer than it should have. Homelander watched them through the crowd just a fraction longer than necessary, not out of curiosity wondering how the hell that pairing came to be, but with a quiet, instinctive irritation. It was finding that discrepancy—unresolved, faintly intrusive—like running fingers over a quit and finding a stitch slightly ajar in an otherwise logical and seamless pattern. A striking man wasting himself on a wallflower. It didn’t fit. Didn’t conform to any version of reality Homelander knew.
For that alone, the man stood out.
Then someone spoke to Homelander again, and his focus snapped cleanly back into place.
Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome dissolved back into the larger texture of the gala—the chandeliers, the rehearsed speeches, the camera flashes, the sparkling lights, the laughter, and the endless choreography of status pretending to be intimacy. Another face. Another body. Another detail filed away without ceremony. By the time the night moved on, the scarred man had already blurred into the background, indistinguishable from the rest of the spectacle—swallowed into the anonymous drift of the evening like a fleck of debris too small to matter, gone the moment one stopped looking.
Or so Homelander had believed.
The second time he’d stumbled across him, Homelander had been cutting through the night sky on his return patrol over SoHo, the neighborhood’s cast-iron façades and designer storefronts laid out beneath him in a grid of sodium-orange streetlights, yellow taxis, steam rising from subway grates, and glass reflections from high-rise loft windows, when something below broke the rhythm of the streets. It was a jagged spike in the city’s noise that didn’t belong in the usual New York churn of sirens, distant subway rumbles, and overlapping voices.
The thing about criminals was—their patterns could be so predictable.
Wind shear pressed against him in clean, invisible sheets as he hovered above the avenues, the air thin enough at that altitude to muffle the city below into a distant, indistinct churn—honking taxis cutting through intersections, shouted arguments in thick New York accents spilling up from sidewalks, the constant layered hum of Manhattan in motion. Homelander had considered investigating the disturbance for only a split second. Nothing eventful had marked his patrol so far, and he felt—briefly, indulgently—in the giving mood. If his suspicion proved right, he might even catch a hapless civilian in need of saving. Then milk some publicity. And raise his points.
Overhead, his voice floated down with a soft, sibilant ease—almost fond, almost amused. “Boys.”
Most criminals scattered at the sight of him, instinct kicking in faster than thought, like prey bolting from a shadow they already understood meant death. These two didn’t run. Not fast enough. The soles of his red boots met the damp asphalt with a final, decisive weight, his cape settling behind him in a slow, deliberate fall. The faint rustle of fabric was the only announcement he needed.
Three pairs of eyes lifted.
A sharp intake of breath. Someone swore under it, voice cracking under the pressure. “Oh shit—it’s Homelander.”
The muggers reacted all at once—panic snapping through their bodies like livewire. The innocent civilian they’d been harassing was yanked forward, dragged hard into a tight chokehold. The gun came up not a second later, clumsy in its urgency, jamming the cold muzzle against his temple with enough force to bruise. Their hands shook, but the intention was clear: leverage, crisis negotiation, and survival through proximity to a human shield.
Then, slowly, a smile began to creep up the corners of Homelander’s lips.
Did Christmas come early? A routine mugging, now upgraded in real time into a hostage situation with stakes. Something now worth the trouble. Perfect.
Homelander swept both hands out beside him, his pristine gloved palms facing upward—like oxidized blood beneath the moonlight. From the formless darkness coiled around him, an eerie, sinister feeling condensed behind his grin as Homelander answered playfully, “The one and only.”
They retreated hastily with every step he took. Each measured footstep of his landed with deliberate heaviness, the sound carrying farther than it should through the narrow alley—striking brick and concrete, then returning in tight, overlapping echoes that seemed to shrink the space around them inwardly. Tap. Tap. Tap. The rhythm of it settled into something inescapable, each muffled impact closing the distance whether they moved or not. The cape drifted behind him in a slow, weightless pull, the stars-and-stripes rippling like something alive beneath the pale light—breathing, waiting, keeping pace.
A shout. “Stay back! Or I’ll—!”
Homelander didn’t even pay the threat any mind. It’d failed to reach him in any meaningful way, dissolving into irrelevancy even before the sentence could be fully finished. His attention had already ricocheted past them—past their shaking hands, the gun, the chokehold pulled too tight to be controlled, reducing their existence down to something as incidental as air. For these unimportant mooks, his expression held no disappointment nor righteous fury; he was just an empty shell devoid of pity, regarding them no differently from how a person would stare at a slab of meat on a chopping board.
Soon, beneath the darkened mouth of the alley, his focus landed on the civilian he would be rescuing. In the dim spill of moonlight and fractured neon, the man resolved piece by piece, as though the world had been waiting for him to notice. He was scruffy, a dark beard shadowing a strong jaw, black hair unruly and wind-tossed from the recent struggle. A leather biker jacket framed his shoulders in sharp, deliberate lines, but the black button-down beneath had been yanked open by the chokehold, fabric twisted where the arm cinched tight at his throat. The longer Homelander looked, the more the scene resisted him—like stumbling upon an extra who’d been horribly miscast with the wrong script. The civilian being held hostage was a towering behemoth, forearms packed with burly muscle and legs that stretched a mile long in dark denim that could probably sledgehammer someone’s skull in with a couple precise kicks. An intimidating man like that shouldn’t have looked so easily contained. There was no panic, no pleading—only a slight tightening at the brow, subtle enough to feel almost misplaced. The gun stayed at his head, and still he looked as though it failed to reach him.
Everything was in place, yet still the fear and alarm Homelander expected to see did not appear.
The man simply stood there, held at gunpoint, and looked…inconvenienced.
The feeling of déjà vu was beginning to creep in. There was something about the deep-set contours of the civilian’s facial features and that forehead scar which cut a white stroke through his eyebrow, both sparking some familiarity—but Homelander couldn’t quite conjure up any memory of where he must have seen him before. (At least, he couldn’t remember him from this exact time. It would only be later, after enough time had passed, that Homelander would kick himself for not having recognized his precious baby sooner.)
Everything after that, honestly, went as he’d expected. The bullets bounced off his upper body uselessly, scattering around his crimson boots like golden hail.
Human fear had a distinct scent. It was an acrid tang, sour and pungent. This time it bled into the scent of wet garbage, in the tepid water and heated brass, a combination of copper and zinc.
Dispatching a gunman presented little problem to him. All Homelander had to do was narrow the distance—and the rest was history.
Just as he’d neutralized the first threat, Homelander heard the man remark quietly in a thick accent, “Oi, you forgot to turn the safety off.”
It came too fast to properly register in real time—just a blink of sound—but the balance of the scene had already shifted before the words had even settled.
The civilian moved first, with no tell or hesitation, his elbow snapping backward like a piston slammed into the gunman’s abdomen. The gunman buckled with a strangled gasp, air punched clean out of him, and before the motion could finish resolving, a hand had already locked on—unyielding—driving him into a pivot that raked the sole of a boot hard across the pavement in a sharp scrape.
And, god, that throw. It was the smoothest motherfucking shoulder throw Homelander ever witnessed.
In one continuous motion, the gunman was lifted clean off his base, rotated through the air like his weight had been reassigned, and then driven straight into the ground hard enough to crack the night like a gunshot. The motion was competent and fluid—the kind of technique born from repetition, drilled and refined over years of getting it wrong until it stopped being wrong. Nothing a panicked amateur could pull off.
Dust plumed upward from the impact, hanging in the air like a delayed afterimage. Before the gunman could even process what had just happened, his arm had already been seized in a vise-like grip. It was forced back—further, further—wrenched at an angle the human body was never meant to take, until something in the joint gave with a wet, splintering snap.
The scream that followed ripped into the silence, raw and animalistic, the kind that made even hardened ears flinch.
What followed the dislocation was almost an afterthought—a single, brutal strike that drove the gunman’s forehead into the pavement. The body went limp on impact, breath still there, but the fight already gone from him.
Everything had happened in a matter of seconds.
Only then did Homelander realize he’d been staring.
The stranger was coming down from his adrenaline rush, his chest rising and falling with every jagged inhale as he caught his breath. Bending down, he gave the unconscious mugger a few heavy condescending pats, as if to say, you picked the wrong fight, son. He wiped his hands off his jeans as though he’d touched something unclean. Looking around, he found his wallet which had fallen to the ground during the scuffle. Retrieving the stolen wallet, he clicked his tongue when he noticed a pair of aviator sunglasses—now spidered with a fine hairline crack from the fall—before casually tucking the wallet back into the inner breast pocket of his leather coat, looking mighty pleased with himself.
The pavement still carried the ghost of the morning’s drizzle, darkened just enough to fracture the city into pieces and turn the ground dark—neon signs smeared into color, streetlights breaking into jagged reflections that trembled with every slight shift of movement. Above, the moon hung. Somewhere beyond the mouth of the alley, a taxi horn cut through—sharp, impatient, oblivious—only to vanish instantly, swallowed by the layered churn of Manhattan pressing in on all sides.
Abruptly, a slow muffled clapping resounded. Clap. Clap. Clap. A mild, but awed whistle. “Impressive.”
When the civilian glanced over, awash under the full moon, he looked almost unreal. Confident, present, and unnervingly quiet in a way that didn’t belong to the aftermath of violence around him. Whatever else Homelander had been planning to say died in his throat when their gazes clashed, and his half-hearted clapping paused mid-motion. The sight of the man’s silhouette under the moonlight was so bewitching, one might even describe it as frightening. His disheveled inky black hair, and the rakish way his shirt had come undone at the throat, buttons ripped in abandoned disarray beneath the collar, revealing the dip of his collarbone and the fine whorls of dark hair dusting that sculpted chest, only added to the mystery and allure of him.
For a fleeting second, Homelander felt his curiosity resembled a magnet being tugged forward by the man’s gravitational pull. The air felt drawn inward, like a slackened cord pulled tight without a visible hand.
So Homelander stepped closer. Of course he would; he had a role to see through to the bitter end. His expression smoothed on instinct, polished and camera-ready, the role settling over him as though it had been waiting beneath the surface all along. His gloved hands moved to fold neatly behind his caped back, and he donned the ready smile of a savior expecting gratitude.
“Just doing my patriotic duty, no need to thank me,” Homelander said lightly, already angling the usual speech in his head toward the man’s accent. Not posh and sophisticated. Instead, Cockney. A dialect that was mostly spoken in London. Likely of British origin—which meant Tall, Dark, and Dangerous was either a foreign national or an immigrant. First impressions could be deceiving, but the man appeared older than he was—which could indicate manners might be regarded with some significance. He waited a beat, then added with practiced charm, “So sorry you went through that. America’s really not all that bad, I swear.”
Homelander was taken off guard when the man laughed.
It was a low, effortless sound that’d zipped up the spine and could make a woman’s ears pregnant. Mouth curving into a maddening smirk—half sardonic, half secretive, as if the entire exchange hinged on a joke only he intended to understand—the stranger spoke in a smoky timbre, velvet laced with the roughness of his accent, “Bit conceited, are we?”
Homelander’s smile thinned. It was the first time in a long while that a mudperson disrespected him to his face this openly. So ungrateful. Feeling a bit disgruntled, he said, “Hey, buddy….”
A hand lifted before the sentence could finish, making him halt mid-threat despite himself.
“I know who you are. The great bloody Homelander. Cultural zeitgeist. The superhero who reigns at the summit of this country. The World’s Greatest Superhero. Greatest thing since sliced Wonder Bread.” The man’s voice clipped slightly. “I’m not a tourist, I ain’t. So no need to waste your breath showing off to me how great you are, yeah?” He saw Homelander’s brows rose faintly, and the man’s smirk widened just enough to be annoying. “It’s freedom of speech, innit. What’s more American than that? Can call me a bleedin’ Yankee Doodle Dandy if y’like.”
The unconscious body hit the ground with a dull, careless thud.
Homelander’s gaze followed it down as the European man crouched beside the fallen man without ceremony.
“So here’s the yarn you’re gonna spin, hero,” the civilian said, eyes flicking between the body and the man he was instructing. “Y’stopped two armed twats. This prick went for your throat, chokehold attempt. Y’held back, yeah? Controlled force—elbow at the joint, clean break.” He jerked the mugger’s arm up for a quick demonstration, rough but precise, like he was correcting a detail in a story already written. “That’s what you tell the cameras. Same for the old bill. Necessary force, nonlethal intent, competent, clean arrest. Keep it simple. Keep it consistent.” The arm dropped. His tone cooled a fraction. “Don’t start improvisin’, don’t start embellishin’, and don’t give anyone a second reason to look twice. No one’s sniffin’ around this twice if you don’t hand ‘em the excuse.”
A tacit understanding dawned on Homelander in a flash. He was being instructed. Him—decades into the job. The irritation that had started to rise stalled out, thinning into a sharper incredulity, bordering bemusement. A civilian was walking him through his own talking points, deciding what was appropriate, what wasn’t, as if he were new to the gig. And the stranger didn’t even seem to want anything from it. He’d handed the credit all over without hesitation, as if subduing an armed assailant barehanded were incidental—a feat not worth claiming, let alone keeping.
As if to inspect Homelander had been paying close attention, the man lifted his gaze. Up close, his eyes were striking—a light hazel, a frosty green dappled into a mosaic of gray with faint brown around the pupils, steady in a way that made it hard to look away from them for long. In his leather jacket and black button-down, missing its top three buttons from the scuffle, half-dressed in the aftermath, he acted as if nothing about the violence prior had managed to rattle him. Compared to the mildly wry tone from before, his voice now flowed into something peculiarly sweet, mellower and much more pleasant on the ears: “Lest you forget, you done this all by yourself, yeah? Proper hero. You can take all the credit. And pretend I weren’t even ‘ere.”
Oh? A gentle and excessive smile bloomed over Homelander’s face. It was the kind of smile which made men want to be him and women cream their underwear, to make people want to stand closer, to believe they were part of something larger than themselves.
This also wasn’t part of the script.
He naturally adjusted his posture.
Having done this for many years, he had come to develop certain expectations from his audience. Behavioral patterns which usually conformed to what he knew. By and large, civilians would try to reach for him and ingratiate themselves with their savior. They’d ask to shake his hand or beg for a selfie, to commemorate this momentous occasion of being saved by America’s No. 1 Superhero. All to chase clout and indulge in a little vanity, showing off to friends and family and to various strangers online—just like how meeting a celebrity was the highlight of a person’s mundane life.
This time was different.
The man acted like he’d rather not be seen with him at all. Which should not have been possible.
What normal civilian wouldn’t want to be seen with him? Was he playing hard to get?
As the stranger straightened as if to leave, Homelander moved first. A hand closed on his shoulder, firm enough to halt him, but considerate enough to refrain from shattering human bone.
“Hold up,” Homelander said.
In his experience, the people who acted like that either didn’t like him or they had something to hide.
Maybe his intention was too obvious. The man paused, then glanced back over his shoulder at the hero’s cobalt eyes turned up to his, alight with something both dangerous and daring, shifting moods faster than the average person could process. “Alright,” he replied evenly. “Is there anything else you’d want from me?” His tone was reserved. Almost polite in wording—but with a dry, clipped edge Homelander had already begun to identify as idiosyncratic to the British.
Dark brows shot up when Homelander pressed closer.
The stink of the nearby dumpster and the alley cut through Homelander’s superhuman olfactory sense, but something cleaner kept pushing through it anyway. It was bright citrus softened by the dry bitterness of black tea leaves, and a faint smoky trace of worn leather and cedarwood clinging to the man’s clothes. It registered as an appealing, masculine scent, too consistent to ignore, settling into the space between them as the man’s breath broke in brief white clouds against the cold New York night. Even that felt like something more than air—like his life force made visible for a second before it disappeared. But beneath that….
A smile bloomed on Homelander’s face. “Is there a reason why you’re in a rush to leave?”
To the man’s credit, his heart had spiked up from the sudden proximity, but he did not break eye contact. He kept looking at Homelander as if sizing him up, not reacting to him. He was a little taller—just enough that Homelander had to tilt his gaze upward while assessing him in return—and in that angle scrutinizing his microexpressions, the focus shifted without permission. Homelander found himself tracking the man’s mouth as he spoke.
It was an appealing mouth, he had to admit, especially for a guy. The shape of it carried a kind of erotic symmetry: lips full and generous enough to soften the sternness of his face, sitting beneath a short, neatly kept dark beard that didn’t conceal it so much as draw attention back to it.
The stranger also happened to be irritatingly easy on the eyes. Maybe not Hallmark-movie handsome, the kind of photogenic All-American classic timelessness Homelander knew well enough to recognize in himself: blue eyes, blond hair, and a broad reassuring grin built for cameras. But something aggressively sexy, like the sort of stranger danger American mothers would warn their naïve daughters about before a holiday abroad, the kind who would be laughed off as charming until someone ended up rethinking their choices in a foreign train station. There was a natural charisma to him, the kind of European appeal that never quite made sense on paper—an ease of speech that leaned into understatement, a dry confidence that made arrogance sound like wit, and an accent that, for reasons people rarely admitted outright, tended to make even careless remarks feel oddly persuasive.
The man stepped in closer before Homelander could fully settle on that thought. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, the East End in it unmistakable. “Listen, as awestruck as I am meetin’ you, and as grateful as I am for you doin’ your civic duty an’ all that, I’ve just come off a long flight from Heathrow. I’m absolutely knackered—especially after bein’ held at gunpoint by those two cunts.”
He punctuated it with a casual slap to Homelander’s bicep, like they were already on familiar ground.
Homelander blinked once, slow, the reaction slipping just slightly behind comprehension. He gazed up at him with an almost child-like bewilderment, like a boy discovering the toy they’d been playing with had hidden features, though there was nothing innocent about an adult looking at another grown man like that. Not many people touched him like that without permission. Fewer still did it like it meant nothing.
The stranger’s mouth tilted faintly, amused by what he saw in that delay. His tone stayed conversational, softened just enough to pass as charm if one didn’t pay attention, but steel sat underneath it all the same. “Whilst I’d love to give you the right lip service in front of the cameras for all of America to see,” he announced, “I’d rather chew glass than be fillin’ out a police report this late into the bloody evenin’.”
Another pat. His hand lingered a moment longer on Homelander’s arm, and even through the padded blue bodysuit, Homelander registered a kind of warmth that shouldn’t have reached him at all—before the contact dropped away. “So let’s keep it simple, yeah? Y’get your hero moment, I get to disappear, and nobody has to think too hard about what just happened.”
The man’s white-toothed smile widened into something forebodingly provocative. “Try not to miss me too much.”
XXXXXXXXXX
It was difficult to forget a memorable civilian rescue like that, especially when that same attractive foreigner—whom Homelander had personally gone out of his way to save from becoming another anonymous statistic of crime that night—had turned the entire incident into something that felt less like real life and more like a stunt lifted straight from a Hollywood action blockbuster.
And it was not that Homelander would ever admit to it, but in the days following that chance encounter, he might or might not have found himself paying a little more attention than usual to the SoHo region in the weeks since. Apparently William, in what could only be described as either admirable caution or an extreme overcorrection, had sensibly taken it upon himself to stop going out at night—only it was altogether, as if a single incident in a narrow New York alley had been enough to make him paranoid and put him off the habit entirely. Because of that, Homelander could not find one lick of him thereafter no matter how many times he’d gone over that evening in his head, replaying it again and again, insisting it had happened exactly as he remembered it, or trying to reverse-engineer reality via the exact flight path down to the precise angle and timing, as if repeating it accurately enough might convince the city to return the same outcome, just once more under the same conditions.
