His phone rang at 12:18 AM and the name on the screen was M.
Not Queen Maeve. Not a number saved as anything operational. M, the name she'd signed her first message with, which he'd saved because it was what she'd given him and because Acquisition Sense had already logged her contact details before he could decide how to save them and so M was what fit.
Travis answered.
"Hey," Maeve said.
There was something behind the word that wasn't the after-bar tone or the checking-in tone. It had the quality of a voice that had been sitting somewhere too long and had decided that sitting there any longer was not something it could do.
"Are you okay," he said.
"No." A pause. "Can I come over?"
He looked at his apartment — which had the lamp on and a coffee cup and his laptop in the state of someone who had been reviewing Stillwell's Samaritan's Embrace routing for the fourth hour in a row and who had the Hollow's observations about Madelyn Stillwell's texts to Homelander running in the background as a kind of atmospheric pressure.
"Yeah," he said.
She arrived in forty-five minutes, which meant she'd been somewhere in Manhattan, closer than Queens, which meant she'd called from Vought or near it. She had a bottle of Jameson and the posture of someone carrying a weight that had been added to rather than distributed, the specific posture of accumulation.
Travis got two glasses from the kitchen cabinet.
He didn't ask what happened. He'd learned, across the months of accumulated conversation and the specific attentiveness he brought to her, that asking Maeve directly what was wrong when she'd chosen not to say produced the answer she could say rather than the one she meant. The one she meant arrived when the space was adequate.
He poured. She sat on the floor against the kitchen counter, the same floor as the takeout dinners, the same position, and took the glass.
She drank and he drank and the apartment held the ambient sounds of 1 AM Queens.
"Something happened," she said.
"Okay."
"I can't—" She stopped. Turned her glass once. "I can't say what. But. Something happened at work and it's—" She looked at the middle distance. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life. Whatever this is. Just — watching terrible things happen to people and being too—" She stopped again, differently.
Travis said nothing.
The Hollow was present in the room's background, which was its default state now — the attentive quiet of something cataloguing and categorizing and waiting. He'd developed a working awareness of when it was actively engaged versus when it was processing. This was active engagement.
Maeve leaned her head back against the cabinet. "Tell me something real. Not work stuff. Not logistics. Something real about you. Something that happened before."
The whiskey had the specific quality of something that reduced the distance between what Travis thought and what Travis said. Not enough to compromise the operational layer — he'd calibrated for that. But enough to feel the narrowing.
He'd been in this world for seventy-nine days. He had told no one anything true.
The man who'd pushed a kid out of traffic was in the room.
"I saved a kid once," Travis said. "Pushed them out of the way of a car." He looked at his glass. "Got hit instead."
Maeve looked at him.
He didn't look back at her. The floor had the particular quality of a surface you looked at when you were saying something real because looking at the person while you said it changed the thing into performance.
"They were fine," he said. "Kid was fine. I—" He stopped, because the next part of the sentence was I died, which was true in a way that he couldn't say without explaining eighty things he'd never explain, and so the sentence ended where it could end. "I was in the hospital for a while. And I kept thinking — that's the only thing I've ever done that was just. Just the thing. No calculation. No—" He stopped again.
No calculation. The Hollow had been cataloguing his thoughts for seventy-nine days and it had never found that sentence until now.
Maeve moved her hand across the floor and put it over his.
"That's enough," she said.
The sentence meant: that's sufficient, you don't need to be more, the thing you did was real and it's enough. Maeve's emotional intelligence had been higher than his operational model every time he'd run it against actual data, and this was the latest update. She'd heard the truest thing he'd said since transmigration and she'd said: that's enough.
The Hollow was quiet.
Not gone — never gone, never less than present and cataloguing. But for the duration of the silence that followed Maeve's hand on his, the Hollow was quiet in a way that Travis didn't yet have a category for.
[EMOTIONAL VULNERABILITY DATA — ACQUIRED. HOST DISCLOSED TRANSMIGRATION TRIGGER EVENT. FRAMING: PARTIAL. SUBJECTS PRESENT: QUEEN MAEVE. EXPLOITATION POTENTIAL: DESIGNATED SIGNIFICANT. CATALOGUING.]
Travis looked at Maeve's hand.
The lamp made a specific warm quality of light in the kitchen. The Jameson bottle was two-thirds full. Outside: Queens at 2 AM, the particular silence that wasn't silence.
Maeve leaned against his shoulder at some point — he wasn't precise about when, because the Miser's Constitution hours had a different texture when someone was asleep against you, and what he tracked instead was her breathing, which was slower and deeper than the breathing she'd arrived with.
He didn't sleep.
He thought about three crates of Compound V in Connecticut and Stillwell's "H." texts going unanswered and the Hollow's count of every byte of truth he'd just given away. He thought about the kid. The curb. The specific non-calculation of a decision that arrived at the level below where calculation lived.
She's worth thousands.
The Hollow broke its silence with three words, quiet and precise, and Travis sat with them in the dark until the city's ambient register shifted from night toward early morning and he heard, somewhere in the building, a door open and close as the first of the very-early people started their day.
Homelander was coming back to the Tower tomorrow.
Madelyn Stillwell had twelve hours.
Reviews and Power Stones keep the heat on!
Want to see what happens before the "heroes" do?
Secure your spot in the inner circle on Patreon. Skip the weekly wait and read ahead:
💵 Hustler [$7]: 15 Chapters ahead.
⚖️ Enforcer [$11]: 20 Chapters ahead.
👑 Kingpin [$16]: 25 Chapters ahead.
Periodic drops. Check on Patreon for the full release list.
👉 Join the Syndicate: patreon.com/Anti_hero_fanfic