Queen Maeve, in front of so many people, didn’t reveal anything; as usual, with a faint smile on her face, she gave Alex a brief hug.
“It seems you still haven’t made up your mind, Maeve.”
“A little disappointing.”
“So what?”
Maeve tilted her head slightly, looking at Alex.
“Is that line part of your act too?”
“No, no, no.
You seem to have some misunderstanding about me.
For the people I respect, I never deign to put on an act.”
“So how long are you planning to keep hugging me?”
“I wouldn’t want others to think our old flame had rekindled.”
Alex shrugged, let go, and then walked over to the last person.
Lamplighter.
As the star of today’s event, the guy was dressed in his superhero costume, yet he looked utterly haggard.
Even though the makeup artist had done their best to patch things up, it was still glaringly obvious.
“Looks like you’re not in great shape.”
“S-sorry, sir.
I’ll do my best to pull myself together.”
Lamplighter gave a light hug, then stepped back and hurriedly explained himself.
Even mired in inner torment, he was still filled with dread at Alex’s very presence.
Alex sized up the guy in front of him.
Negative, dejected, haggard…
Almost every expression of despair could be read on his face.
He had none of the high spirits of a superhero; instead, he looked like a destitute wretch on the verge of being driven into vagrancy by the brink of ruin.
This Lamplighter character hadn’t had much screen time in the original work, and had been written off quickly.
Come to think of it, this guy was quite the unlucky bastard.
His dirty secrets had been dug up by Mallory of the CIA, who threatened him into becoming an undercover mole.
To keep that from happening, after consulting Vought Corporation, with their tacit approval, he went to take revenge on Mallory.
But he ended up killing the wrong targets, slaying two of Mallory’s grandchildren.
From then on, Lamplighter never recovered, his heart brimming with guilt and remorse.
How to put it.
This guy wasn’t thoroughly evil, nor was he conspicuously good.
It wasn’t as if he’d never killed before, yet after killing the wrong people his psyche completely collapsed.
In the original, when he came to rescue people, he quit halfway, and when his emotions got the better of him he simply set himself ablaze, hoping to atone in that manner.
From start to finish, he never confessed out of guilt, nor did he ever fight back against Vought Corporation.
He dared to set himself on fire, yet didn’t dare to defy Vought Corporation.
Purely cowardly to the bone.
A person like this definitely couldn’t compare to Maeve, but he wasn’t entirely useless either.
Alex thought it over and figured he’d do well enough.
Right now was precisely when he was short on people.
Lamplighter still counted as a superhero, he still had power, and dealing with ordinary people would be no problem at all.
“It’s fine.”
“I imagine you wouldn’t mind having a drink afterward.”
A drink?
Lamplighter looked at the beaming face of Homelander before him, and his heart involuntarily clenched.
‘Is he going to kill me?’
In Lamplighter’s mind, his first reaction was that he no longer held any value, and that the company was about to get rid of him.
Otherwise, why would Homelander ever extend such an invitation?
But gazing at the Homelander before him, Lamplighter didn’t dare utter a single word of refusal.
His cowardly nature was carved into his bones; if he had dared to resist all of this, he would have done so long ago, instead of becoming what he was now.
“Y-yes, sir.”
Lamplighter said meekly, not daring to offer any objection.
Maeve stood off to the side with her arms crossed, watching their exchange with a slight frown, silently pondering Alex’s reasons for doing this.
But before she could figure it out, the retirement ceremony began.
The whole ceremony was actually quite simple: Lamplighter went up on stage to read his speech, and then the others, as his teammates, offered some blessings, and that was that.
The reason for staging this, put plainly, was to remove Lamplighter from the public eye while building hype for Starlight, who would be rising to take his place.
The retirement ceremony didn’t last very long.
It was over in an hour.
Lamplighter, once the focus of all eyes and possessor of tens of thousands of fans, thus faded from the stage.
Apart from a few reports arranged by Vought Corporation, it stirred not the slightest ripple.
If it weren’t for a handful of fans spontaneously reminiscing about him online, it was as if this person had never existed at all.
But these were no longer things Alex needed to concern himself with.
Right now.
There was only one thing he had to do.
“Sit.”
“What would you like to drink?”
Lamplighter sat stiffly on the sofa, glancing at Queen Maeve seated across from him, then at Homelander standing in front of the refrigerator, and felt the atmosphere grow stranger and stranger.
Queen Maeve’s past romance with Homelander was common knowledge.
But ever since their breakup, the relationship between the two had become extremely sour.
Although in public they would still maintain a forced harmony.
In private, however, they never communicated much at all.
Not to mention, for tonight’s little drink, Queen Maeve had actually shown up uninvited.
Lamplighter couldn’t figure out what these two were up to, but he knew one thing.
To deal with just him alone, there was no need for both of them to make a move together.
“I-I’m fine with anything.”
Alex rummaged through the refrigerator, grabbed some ice cubes, a bottle of whiskey, and three glasses, and walked over.
“Don’t be so nervous.
Even though you’ve now retired from The Seven, we were teammates once, weren’t we?”
Alex said in a gentle tone, dropping ice into the three glasses and pouring the drinks without the slightest hurry.
“It was my honor to work alongside you, sir.”
Alex gently pushed two of the glasses over, then lit a cigarette for himself.
“I called you here today because I actually wanted to have a chat with you.”
“Ever since that incident last time, you haven’t been in good shape.”
“Yes.”
Lamplighter hung his head low, not daring to speak.
Homelander had always cared about his own public image, and likewise about the image of The Seven; if Lamplighter were to tarnish The Seven’s image….
“You killed two children by mistake, your heart full of guilt yet not knowing how to atone—am I right?”
Lamplighter’s situation was no secret to The Seven.
“I can understand how you feel, and I can also see exactly what your negativity stems from.”
“It’s because of the cowardice, the numbness, the self-abandonment within you.”
“Sir, I…”
Lamplighter’s already haggard expression grew even uglier under Alex’s words, as the old scenes resurfaced in his mind once more.
The scene of accidentally killing those two children.
“Do you want to atone?”
“I can give you that chance.”
“Give you this—the one and only chance where you won’t have to worry about Vought Corporation purging you.”
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Homelander: