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He’s so sorry he ended up looking like this, sorry he ended up alone on his knees, hoping someone would sink as low and wrap their arms around him. He doesn’t know how to stifle the overwhelming need to cry out somebody else’s name, how to choke out the eagerness to let his body go pliant and silent under careful or cruel hands.
Homelander grips his own thighs harder, his breath shattering, slow and burning tears he tries to forget running away from his eyes, away from his face, as he knows traitors always should.
He wonders how deeply he could get hurt, whether there could be someone able to trespass on his flesh, invade his lies and poison his eyes, until perhaps what would remain would be something undeniable, something impossibly true. He could then proudly wear what would be left, profane scars remodeling his skin, his last attempt to expose what he's so sure cannot be seen. He could cherish the bruises—always with him, never demanding—and would turn that love into worship, just like he always has, just like he always does. And he could lick them, the burning salt of wounds defiling his tongue so there would be no mistaking the nature of his heart, distrusting why their taste would drip golden from his lips.
Still, he knows he would have to drink the horrors swarming his blood on his own, would end up losing himself in the fever of it, as there would never be someone foolish enough to desire so poisonous a sin and come along with him. No one willing to gnaw at the alienating venom and rid Homelander of it, feed him a brighter shade of it, no one willing to stay and witness deformed bones shaping the broken truth of him.
Yet when he's alone he covets the prospect of someone using him, someone who would have come close enough and would have seen, and still would be found wanting. Someone who wouldn’t ask and force themselves upon him, someone who would rob him of what he cannot afford to let go. Devouring, as though they would finally have found something worth having. And he knows he would gladly let himself be consumed by it—the burn comforting because it would hold him, would entirely own him—knows he would be theirs, at last surrendering, eager to split himself open: his body an offering to the unrelenting heat swallowing him.
Homelander also knows how he has started to long for his nightmares to consume him whole—the hunger for cruelty becoming far easier to bear than the craving of feeling small. And he wishes for hands that would go right through him, for teeth to eat the shadows out of his skin: a stirring reminder that something could still be worth finding.
Quickening pangs captive inside of him, lost, a frightened little monster—everlasting.