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blindmagdalena · 3 months ago

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Center Stage in a Gilded Cage (chapter five)

18+ 4.3k. homelander x f!reader. pre-s1. stalking, kidnapping, imprisonment, forced relationship, slow burn, eventual smut. gif credit | fic directory | AO3

Within the isolation Homelander has imposed on you, your entire world is rapidly narrowing to just the two of you. With that, your understanding of the man who has ensnared you grows alongside his infatuation with you.

It’s much too early when you hear the alerting beep of the front door unlocking, metal sliding against metal as the mechanism engages.

Your eyes snap to the clock.

It’s barely after 2:00pm.

You scrub at your tear streaked face, ill-prepared to be confronted by your captor so soon. Your misery evaporates in a rush of panic, leaving only what’s necessary to survive.

Sucking in a deep breath, you drop your hands just in time to see Homelander appear in the archway.

The two of you stare at each other for a long, quiet moment.

His expression is difficult to discern. Pinched. Anxious. Staring at him now, you suddenly have no doubt that the boy in the photo is him. You can see every ounce of that nervous boy in his face.

But why is he looking at you like that?

Before you can ask, he closes the distance between you in a handful of long strides. The determination he moves with makes your stomach lurch.

Just as you move to get to your feet, he takes hold of you with that same chilling, unrelenting strength—arms coiling around you like serpents—and hauls you up until your body is flush to his.

He nuzzles into the crook of your neck, inhaling the scent of you so deeply your skin erupts into goosebumps.

“I’m really happy you’re here,” he says, his breath hot on your neck. His hand slides all the way up your spine, cupping the back of your head. His other arm remains looped around your waist, gloved fingers biting into your skin through your clothes.

You feel his lips shape the words against your skin as he murmurs, quieter yet, “I missed you.”

You almost say it back, survival instincts compelling you to appease him, but you stop yourself. You were scolded the last time you said something you didn’t mean in an attempt to appeal to him.

Even if despite yourself, a small part of you is glad he’s back. Being stranded alone in your prison had somehow been worse than the unease you feel with him present.

While logically you know humanity still exists beyond these walls, the deafening quiet of the penthouse makes it feel like the rest of the world has simply vanished, leaving you well and truly alone in it.

For all the good the people outside these walls can do you, it may as well have.

There’s tension thrumming through him from his head to his toes that you can feel in every inch of his body pressed tightly against yours. He’s clutching you like he thought—despite the fortress he left you in—you’d also have vanished in his absence.

You lift your hands, knuckles brushing the underside of the heavy cape hanging from his shoulders, and tentatively begin to stroke soothing patterns up and down his back.

The effect is instantaneous. His grip on you relaxes from stifling to a more tender hold, his fingertips no longer sinking into you like claws. He rests his chin on your shoulder, sighing out a long breath that tickles the back of your neck.

Silence fills the narrow spaces between you. He’s overwhelmingly warm, his heat seeping through even the dense layers of his suit and into you.

Despite the way he’s leaning into you, you’re barely standing on your own feet. You could go limp right now and not move an inch in his hold.

“Are you okay?” You ask, speaking in the same pacifying tone you would use with a spooked animal.

He draws back to meet your eyes, his own bereft of their earlier anxiety, though he does look a little surprised that you asked. He recovers quickly, his expression softening around a sly glint in his stare.

“You actually sound like you care,” he says, and though the words themselves are callous, you get the sense he’s paying you a compliment. Praising you for playing your role so convincingly.

“Unlike some people I know,” he says with sudden venom, hands migrating to your arms.

“You would not believe how fucking ungrateful they are out there. Day after day, I’m out there”—he nods to the window behind you—”working the crowds, selling the pitches. I’m the face of this entire fucking company.”

His grip occasionally flexes on your arms as he speaks, not quite enough to hurt, but enough to make you nervous, and though his anger isn’t directed at you, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

“But do any of them care? Those–the fucking–the CEO’s, those weak-necked pencil pushers? Do they respect any goddamn thing I think?”

“No?” you offer the word as half an answer and half a question. You’re not sure how rhetorical his spiel is, but you’re keen to commiserate with him and not find yourself in the path of misdirected ire.

“No!” He echoes louder, scoffing. Your response only riles him up further, his tension seeping into his hold on you. "And what are they doing? Hm? What are they doing that's so fucking important?"

Your lips part. You hesitate, but now he's looking at you with such exasperated expectation, you know you should answer. You start and stop a few times, but he makes no move to interrupt you or fill in the blanks.

Instead, he’s watching you with a rapt kind of intensity, suddenly eager to hear what you’ll say next.

"Making your work look like theirs," you say, finding your bearings. It’s not as though you haven’t experienced the same.

Any time you’ve ever had a boss, their only objective has been using you to make themselves look good. Standing on you like you’re just another rung on the ladder.

“Taking the credit and the money for themselves.”

"Yes!" he hisses, bouncing his fist lightly off of your shoulder. The way he moves is sharp, jagged like broken glass.

"Even you get it. I mean, I'm the fucking Homelander, and they treat me like a goddamn show pony. They trot me out and then expect me to prance right back into my fucking stall.”

You can feel the heat of his anger in his breath, in the way his fingers sink into the meat of your arm. It isn’t a loud or boisterous thing, it’s more sinister; the hiss and rattle of a venomous snake.

Everything about him—from the bearing of his teeth to the inescapable strength of his grip—is a screaming warning that you should run far, far away from him.

However, trapped as you are, your only recourse is to appeal to your predator.

“You’re more than that,” you say, his words from the night prior suddenly coming to you in a rush. “You’re underappreciated, and capable of so much more than they give you credit for.”

His tense expression slackens, his anger replaced by a flash of shockingly earnest vulnerability.

This Homelander is by far the least unnerving of the variety you’ve seen.

Last night he was manic, frightening in his unhinged flavor of excitement. This morning he’d been tender one moment and terse the next, eerie in his sudden lack of warmth. The way he smiled at you during breakfast felt straight off of a movie poster.

Performative.

Fake.

Nothing like the way he looks now.

“Yeah,” he breathes, relief heavy in his tone.

If he recognizes his own words on your tongue, it doesn’t show. He’s looking at you with a sort of wonder, as if they’re completely new to him.

It’s clear now more than ever that he said them to you because he desperately needed to hear them.

“Yes, exactly.”

He cups either side of your face, pulling yours closer to his.

“I knew you would understand,” he says, close enough that you feel the breath of each word on your lips. “I knew that if I could see you, you’d see me. Because you’re different. Because you’re not like those empty fucking suits with Cornell degrees.”

The tension between you makes the air thick and hard to breathe. You lick your lips subconsciously and his eyes drop predator-quick to follow the movement.

He hasn’t lost that look of expectation yet.

When his eyes meet yours again, they’re blown black, the vibrant blue of them constricted to a fine ring around his pupils.

You swallow dryly, your heart a pounding drum in your ears.

“Do you want me to kill them?” You blurt out, the words all impulse and zero thought.

He blinks, face jerking slightly back from yours in obvious surprise. Whatever he expected you to say, that certainly wasn't it.

Truth be told, you’re as surprised about what came out of your mouth as he is. It’s the kind of joke you would make to an exasperated friend. Not your kidnapper.

The silence between you stretches on. Homelander's face can't seem to settle, lips twitching between a near-smile and that same part of surprise.

“You’re gonna kill Stan Edgar?” The way he places emphasis makes it sound like he’s considered it before, but came to the conclusion that the task is an impossible one.

You shrug. “How tough can he be?”

At that, he starts to laugh.

His gloved hands slip from your face and go to his own, rubbing at his eyes as he laughs and laughs, the sound of it reverberating from deep in his chest. It’s the kind of laugh that speaks of deep catharsis. Your own lips curve in empathy, tension seeping from you.

"Christ," he says under his breath. His hands slide down his face until they fall away, landing on his hips. He gives his head a small shake before looking back at you, his smile broad and boyish.

Another rare instance of an expression from him without palpable pretense or agenda.

“You kill a lot of CEOs?” He asks, stepping right back into your personal bubble.

You hold your ground.

“Does imagining it in vivid detail count? Because I used to do that pretty often. Especially on unpaid lunch breaks in the closet.”

His brows furrow. “You ate lunch in a closet?”

"Not always. Sometimes I just went inside to scream. Thick walls," you say, only half-joking.

That had been at your previous job, where you routinely hid during meal breaks.

“My supervisor was always riding my ass. I couldn’t even eat in peace.”

“You’re kind of a weirdo,” he muses, his tone quiet and warm. Affectionate, even.

It’s your turn to bark an incredulous laugh, your nerves fading.

The gall of him to call you weird. In a bizarre way, it almost makes things feel… normal.

“I’ve been called worse.”

You don’t realize you’re smiling until his thumb brushes your cheek, his touch trailing down your jaw. He curls a lock of your hair around his index finger and brings it to his lips, closing his eyes on a slow inhale.

Oddly captivated by the display, you watch him with bated breath.

When he opens his eyes, the blue has returned to them. There’s a tired kind of relief to his expression. It’s as though he’s let go of something very heavy that he’d been carrying just a moment ago.

He releases your hair in favor of reaching for your hand, though he stops just shy of grabbing it, fingers outstretched.

“Will you watch a movie with me?” He asks. It’s the exact same tone he used when he’d asked for a kiss: there’s an underlying anxiousness that you’re starting to understand.

Despite the imbalance of power between you, he’s still anticipating rejection. He might even fear it.

Once again you find yourself thinking of the boy in the photo. How quietly and heartbreakingly miserable he had looked.

“Yeah. I’ll watch a movie with you.”

You slip your hand into his. His eyes light up and he squeezes, pulling you down onto the couch next to him. You watch him pick up the remote and begin flipping through the menus.

It’s surreal: the version of yourself that desperately typed in address after address until you were sobbing feels like someone else entirely. A part of yourself that you’ve compartmentalized away.

“How about Taxi Driver?”

You blink. The 70s flick with De Niro?

What an oddly specific pull.

“Sure.”

His smile broadens. He leans in, and though you brace yourself to be kissed, he only kisses your cheek.

Precisely the way you kissed his this morning.

“You’re the best.”

The tone of his voice gives a deceptively oppressive weight to such a simple compliment.

Turning back to the menu, he rests your interlaced hands on his thigh, thumb stroking your knuckles.

You stare at your hand enclosed in his for a long while before you glance up at him.

He has a classic kind of profile; a strong nose that slopes to a point, a firmly outlined jaw, subtle but defined lips, brows that neatly frame his striking ocean blue eyes.

Despite obvious bleaching, his hair looks soft and touchable. The dark undercut is even moreso.

More than just the sum of his parts, he’s perhaps objectively the most attractive man you’ve ever made contact with.

Certainly the wealthiest.

He’s strange in his mannerisms, but aside from the whole kidnapping ordeal, he’s been… mostly decent to you.

It’s not that you want to think of him as attractive. He just is.

It makes it all the more confusing as to why such a man would need to kidnap anyone at all. There must be more: just what the hell is so wrong with him that he’s so incapable of forming an organic relationship?

Suppose I’ll find out one way or another.

Realizing you’re staring again, you snap your attention to the screen.

While Homelander occasionally squeezes your hand, you spend the duration of the film pretending not to notice the long moments he spends staring at you.

You can’t help but be tense, anticipating that he’ll make a move at any moment, but his hand never moves from yours. He stays eerily still over the course of the next two hours, rarely shifting other than to spare you a lingering look.

It’s all so bizarrely chaste.

The movie, on the other hand, is anything but.

While Travis Bickle is the main character, he’s not what anyone would consider a hero. Even at his best he can't sleep, drinks heavily, pops pills, and spends his mornings in porn theaters. He’s irrational, unstable, and entirely too caught up in his own version of reality.

A terrible dread crawls up your spine when his attentions land on Betsy. He’s enamored with her too immediately, speaking to a stranger as if she hung the stars in the sky just for him. You want to scream at her to run, but she reciprocates instead.

When their second date rolls around, that dread in your gut doubles.

Don’t, you find yourself wishing, brows furrowing. Don’t do it. For fuck’s sake, don’t take her to the theatre!

No matter how hard you wish for it, the movie plays out as it always has, as it always will, and the whole thing blows up in Travis’ face. Disgusted with him, Betsy rejects him. It takes everything in you not to writhe off of the couch in sheer discomfort when he snatches her wrist, pleading with her.

"Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."

Homelander’s hand sits heavily atop yours.

Travis’ descent into madness is a gradual one from that point on. He grows violent and obsessive, hyper aware that the world he inhabits was not made for him, but unable to adapt.

Even among his peers he is isolated and unable to connect. He loses whatever self-awareness he once had, and deludes himself into progressively more dangerous ideals.

By the time the credits roll, Travis is the hero of his own warped story, and your neck is stiff from holding the same position with such tension.

“Now that is how you get control of your life,” Homelander says suddenly, bringing your attention to him. “You take it. Guns blazing, and you walk out of it a hero,” he says with a grin, turning to catch your eye.

Yes, you think, stomach churning. You have certainly learned to take.

“What was your favorite part?” he asks, surprising you a little with the earnestness of his question.

He’s an odd mixture of endearing and unnerving in his ability to move so fluidly from an intimidating unnatural force to someone sincere and boyish.

It doesn’t make his take-away from the movie any less disturbing.

“Oh, uhm…” You rub at your sore neck absently. It wasn’t exactly the type of movie with laughs or feel good moments to choose from, despite the handful of times Homelander laughed or cheered himself.

“Probably the part where–”

“What’s wrong with your neck?” he interrupts suddenly, gaze dropping to your hand.

You let your hand fall back into your lap. “It’s fine, I get stiff sitting. I just need to stre–”

Before you can finish, Homelander slips his hand from yours and grasps your shoulder, turning you away from him.

“I can fix it.” His tone is unerringly certain, leaving you no space to protest. He manhandles you until your back is faced to him, your legs drawn up onto the couch. “Believe me, I’m used to women with tech neck.”

“Who?” You ask impulsively. It’s eating you up inside wondering if there have been others before you, and what might have happened to them to land you here in their stead.

“You jealous?” He asks. You don’t have to see his face to know he’s smiling. You can hear it.

“No,” you say after a beat, ever careful with your words. “Just curious.”

He slides his hands up slowly over your shoulders and hooks his thumbs over your collar, adjusting it out of the way.

“No one you need to worry about.”

A non-answer that does nothing to quell your anxiety.

He brings his thumbs to either side of your neck and presses them in at the base of your skull, slowly moving them all the way down and out towards your shoulders, your muscles popping beneath the pressure.

The precision with which he finds the ache in your neck shocks a little gasp out of you.

Fuck, maybe he can fix it.

“You know, muscles actually look different when they’re all knotted up like this,” he says, sounding pleased with himself.

“Y’got all these little nodules, and all I need to do”—he drags his thumb down your neck, following to the side of your spine—”is pop ‘em.”

The sound of tense tissue crackling and loosening under his touch sounds like a zipper being undone. You can’t deny that he knows what he’s doing. He works slowly, gradually increasing pressure. The strength in his hands doesn’t falter once, the leather of his glove soft on your skin.

It’s only when you make a noise–a sigh caught somewhere between pain and pleasure–that he hesitates.

“Are you really saying you can see the knots in my muscles? Through my skin?” You ask when he stops, tilting your neck to one side.

It already feels better.

“One of the many perks of dating me,” he says, his voice lower and nearer to your ear than it had been a beat ago. Goosebumps erupt down your spine and arms.

Dating.

Life would be easier if you could believe that to be true even half as much as he does.

He resumes the massage, focusing mainly on your neck, his thumbs pushing up into your hairline and then slowly back down. The level of control he has over his strength is staggering, the pressure just enough to stay shy of hurting you.

Your eyes fall shut while he works the tension from your muscles. Your mind drifts back to the movie. To Travis and Betsy. To the dozens of times he called her, and the dozen more flowers he sent to her door. To the delusional power fantasies he fell into in the wake of that denial.

The agony of rejection during their phone call had been so visceral that not even the camera could seem to bear it, panning away to an empty hall while he held a painfully one-sided conversation.

Homelander doesn’t have to fantasize about power. He has more of it than any one man rightfully should, yet still he has found himself in deficit.

Is he so terrified of rejection that he would deny even someone as powerless as you the chance of it?

Perhaps he isn’t quite so powerful after all.

“That feels amazing. You’re really good at this,” you tell him, correctly anticipating the way your words give him pause.

This time, you hear him swallow.

The couch dips and you lean back with it, his thigh pressing in behind you as he shifts closer. The massage becomes less focused, his grip loosening and moving wider. His hands come to rest on your shoulders.

Your breath hitches at the feel of warm, bare skin along your exposed neck. His lips ghost your skin in a faint not-quite kiss.

“That’s not all I’m good at,” he murmurs, staying close enough that you feel the shape of each word against your flesh.

You don’t move, your eyes remain closed.

He takes your silence as permission, hands sliding down your arms, falling off from your elbows to your hips. He holds you in place while he peppers tentative kisses on the tender flesh of your neck, following down the line of your spine as low as the collar of your shirt allows him to.

Your stomach flips, but your heart isn’t the only thing fluttering. There’s a faint throb between your legs that feels like it should belong to someone else entirely.

Can he hear that, too? Can he see it?

Shame, fear and arousal swim hot in your gut, the heat of it crawling slowly up your chest, your face. You screw your eyes shut tighter.

Dating.

That single word spins around and around you like the rattle of a broken record. He exists in a sweeter reality than you do.

It would be nice–no, not nice, safer–to visit it, if only for a moment.

Wouldn’t it?

His lips are soft along your hairline to the shell of your ear, his breath warm and tickling. His hands begin to work up your sides, cupping your ribs.

There’s a tentativeness to his movements that implies a question, and there’s no doubt in your mind that if you stayed still, stayed quiet, he would find the answers he wants all on his own.

Instead you take hold of his wrists, stopping him in his tracks. Part of you is surprised that he’s so easy to halt. You turn around slowly, moving his hands away as you do, releasing one of them in order to face him properly.

The look of him catches you off guard; cheeks stung pink, lips parted and shiny wet from where he’s licked the taste of you from them. His eyes are wide and hungry, but there’s an inquisitive apprehension in his expression.

That same terrible anticipation of rejection.

Gently, as if you might somehow spook him, you place your hand on his chest and push. A victorious little rush moves through you with how easily he bends under your touch, moving until he’s forced to lay back, sweeping his cape out from under him to drape off the edge of the couch.

You slip off of the couch but leave your hand planted firmly on his chest, nudging his legs with yours until he gets the picture and brings them both up onto the couch, too.

All the while he watches you intently, curiosity edging out anxious uncertainty.

Holding his gaze, you lay yourself down next to him. The narrowness of the couch leaves you practically on top of him, but he clearly doesn’t mind. His lips spread slowly into a wondrous smile, his arm curling around your waist to bring you closer yet.

Where last night the weight of his arm had felt suffocating, now it feels more like putting on a seat belt to ride a rollercoaster.

He may be a supe, but he has shown you–intentionally or not–that he’s also just a man, and you have power over him, too. You only need to wield it as such. Your affection can be a shield. Your indulgence a precaution.

You drape your arm over his middle and rest your head upon his chest, letting out a long, calming breath.

“This is, uh... a nice surprise,” he says, resting his hand on your forearm. He strokes your back idly with the other.

“So was the massage.”

His chest rumbles faintly against your ear as he laughs.

“I would’ve done it sooner if I knew you’d like it so much.”

You stare at his hand. Resting as lightly as it is, his fingers still curl in just enough to press into your arm. Even when you choose to offer your affection freely, he can’t help but grip like you’ll suddenly take it away if he doesn’t.

It’s like he never learned how to hold something without leaving claw marks on it.

“We have a lot to learn about each other,” you say quietly, closing your eyes.

His hand pauses upon your back for a moment, and then without comment, he pulls you properly into his arms, enveloping you in that familiar warm thrum of power.

It’s like being embraced by a nuclear reactor.

You can’t survive in fight or flight forever. The relief he brought to your neck has made you realize how tense all over you really are, how heavy your fear has made your aching heart. If you’re going to get out of this, you have to learn to put it down when it’s safe.

So, for at least a little while, you decide to let yourself relax not only in Homelander’s embrace, but in his rose-tinted reality.

( chapter six )

#homelander x reader #homelander x you #x reader #homelander fanfiction #my writing #center stage in a gilded cage #yandere x reader

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