Can we be lonely Together?
A Homelander x Stalker!Reader fan fiction
This is my first fic for this fandom (and in a decade lol) this is a bit of a slow burner and will have about 8 to 9 chapters.
This is a Gender Neutral reader (but honestly is just me shipping Homelander with Joe Goldberg... so feel free to see it as a crossover, just not going to make it clear at all in the fic.)
Summary: We were two mouses pretending to be cats, weren't we?
We didn't expect to find ourselves in this situation, but John... Homelander... you were perfect... none of this was a lie, these feelings I got are genuine! So I don't know why you're using such words like: Stalker, Psychotic bitch, Insane, liar! To describe me... after all I've done? To help you!?
You were wrong.
I just yearned to get closer to you. So what if I did my homework? After all it was you who played along.
I knew you knew... you were so loud.
R18+ (there will be smut, drug abuse and gore in later chapters) gore, stalking, killing.
Chapter One
Apologies
It pains me to say this… I'm genuinely ashamed, embarrassed more like it! To admit that I genuinely wasn’t impressed by you.
Your face had been painted on every surface to death... It has grown boring.
Nothing but an overbearing presence to the common man, but the average citizen didn’t loathe you, fear you, hate you or even found you pastiche! They simply adored you.
Your face was plastered on everything one could imagine and then some– I’m not just talking mugs by the Target checkout area or birthday cards, and keychains, but sausage packages in the supermarket! Your face wasn’t all that special to me… I used to think of you as nothing more than an aged jock from a John Hughes movie, the tights didn’t fool me, you wore the varsity jacket underneath the foam-- I had bets that you were going to be the worst the world could’ve manufactured if I ever met you.
Now… Now I see… I was wrong… contrite is the word that describes this social faux-paux of mine.
Now I see… just how… unique you were-- the whole world didn’t have the faintest idea of just the sheer amount of bullcrap you had to endure everyday. Gosh I couldn’t even fathom being in your shoes, the fantasy alone proved heavy, and you had to do it all while looking more well adjusted and prim than Princess Diana during her divorce.
I’m sure you’ll be so divine in that revenge dress too.
I mean… you sort of knew you looked good in women's clothes, Is okay I like adventurous men… I’ll admit I might've dressed you a couple times in my head… but don’t worry! It was all flattering.
Which in terms of flattering things… it's a shame that this is how you catch me, how we end this farce, this game of pretends... today you could be the cat… I wish at least I had the time to wrap up the plastic sheets, or wash all this off me.
I feel the weight hit my foot directly, I barely wince, but I’m not taking my eyes off of you, feeling wet bubbles and gurgles tickling my bare toes– all I want is to give you decades worth of misplaced attention to those red eyes of yours… I seen your face in a million different ways, but never had I seen it in such vivid technicolor-- There’s no red that can quite match your eyes… as they watch me from this eighteen story window, inside an apartment smaller than your closet (that’s New York city for you kids). I can admit to having fantasized being on the receiving end, it would be fitting for me, us.
This building is so loud, it overwhelms us both, but unlike you right now I don’t have to listen to the upstairs neighbors petty grievances, the next door lady wondering where her kid is at these ungodly hours, the stoner in the elevator, or the homeless man wondering if his dollar store hooch was tainted with something because right now there was the freaking Homelander hovering above him! So I listen to her… right at my feet… gargling… hacking… I didn’t cut deep enough, and we both can hear it… knife still in my hand, her mind is nothing but the flashing lights of a faraway train, it’s ever so silent as the train drives off, all she can think off is a trip to europe when she was a child, and the snow devoured the sun and the music, it was just her, the train, the snow and us now.
“‘Is not what it looks like?’ Is that what you want to say?”
yeah. I mean… Can I? I licked the knife clean as if it was residuals from an apple, trying not to roll my eyes at you.
“Evening… John… Homelander.” My hand is on the window latch letting the cold breeze in, your eyes suffocating me just like the bitch behind us… I almost whimpered as they lost their candor giving me back blue moons– What brings you here?”
You points behind me, unable to believe I just said that, I give way for you.
Always staring at me– I want to hear your thoughts… for the first time in all my years of life I am yearning to listen, feeling every particle of my being falling apart as they're begging me to listen to your thoughts once more… but I can’t… Right now I’m in Finland, is winter, is cold-- everything you aren’t… because I am sorry… I pry so much.
The way you watch me isn’t undressing me further, I am mostly bare, just underwear and sweat and my soul too tainted for you to want to seek, I can’t make sense of that smirk on your lips that has only now begun to reach your eyes… this somehow has amused The Homelander, your laugh scares me far more than your ray-guns– are you mocking me!? No you…you wouldn't be, you’re gentleman after all, if you wanted to mock me… you would treat me like Miss Barrett, or Kevin.
I mean… I don’t want you to hate me. We are perfect for each other. We would be perfect… so just… let me… explain.
“Where do you like me to start?”
Your foot crushed the skull leaving it nothing but a gummy, clumpy pancake under your booth, sick of hearing it mope and cry for any longer it seems, you immediately threw your cracked phone at my feet.
“The beginning.” The Homelander growled.
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Hamlet’s Age
Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesn’t even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamlet’s age is both in-text and as meta-text.
To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamlet’s age:
Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Master’s degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a master’s degree at 23.
Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a “youth” by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use “youth” to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless ‘men’ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)
King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)
Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard
In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamlet’s birth, and that he’s be “sixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.” However, it’s unclear if “sixteene” means “sixteen” or “sexton” (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)
Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says “dozen years” instead of “three and twenty.” This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huh…)
Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravedigger’s expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood
One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamlet’s death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)
Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that I’m fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.
However, it doesn’t really matter what the “right” answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:
Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of “youth”
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience
The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and that’s the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isn’t otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny
Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, that’s so interesting and cool.
*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Polonius’ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and been very well reviewed. Hamlet’s joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).
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i was thinking more about characters Performing Gender, but not necessarily Transgressing Gender. I wound up focusing on Ned and Sansa bc I feel like I understand them the most but-
Sansa as a hostage is imo the most obvious (bc it’s so well done) moment of someone clearly Performing Gender but not being transgressive in that performance. Which isn’t to say it’s not a complicated performance; it’s a fine line Sansa walks between weaponizing her gender to protect herself without seeming too fake. She’s trying to placate the Lannisters by playing the perfect, dedicated, air headed betrothed because it’s the only defense she has - if she outwardly rebels, she will be punished in a likely violent and/or sexual way (which isn’t even conjecture - when she says “or maybe he’ll give me yours” Joffrey has her struck with an armored hand). She’s not quite successful in being convincing but that’s because it’s a rather extreme situation; despite no one believing her, she does make herself seem meek and stupid enough that no one suspects she’s plotting to escape with Dontos until she’s well away from KL. The fact that she even has Dontos to confide in is because of Sansa’s relationship with gender! When she saves him, she covers her rebellious slip by playing up Joffrey’s intelligence & his role as King; she reaches for “tools” of her gender AND of ~proper manhood~ to save a life and herself from another beating. Her retreats into the godswood and silence are very much Sansa attempting to recharge from these draining interactions, the same way a knight would need to stop and eat and rest after a fight. She is fighting, constantly, by forcing herself to stay within the narrow confines of a specific type of gender performance as a way of shielding herself from harm.
Ned yelling at Cat is another big one, and I’ve seen the scene referred to as Ned using his patriarchal power to scare Cat, which is a great description. It feels like a Performance because Ned is putting on this terrifying Lord Stark mask in an attempt to get Catelyn to stop asking about Jon (and Lyanna). This is not how he usually acts with those he loves! When Ned is with His People, he is welcoming of questions, curiosity, emotion, even transgressive thought (to a point! the idea that Ned is a feminist because he lets Arya learn to fight is Not accurate but you can’t deny he allows significantly more flexibility wrt gender expression than most of the fathers we meet in this series. the bar is in hell tho). Yet when Cat asks him about Jon’s mother, Ned scares her so well she stops asking & still remembers the moment bitterly over a decade later. And if that snippet we see through Bran’s eyes of Ned praying that Cat will forgive him does come after she asks (like it’s suspected), it’s clear not only that this is a performance he’s putting on & weaponizing against Cat, it’s one he does not like using as a weapon against someone he is close to. After using the power his gender gives him to cause harm, he retreats to the godswood and silence to pray and rest, much like Sansa. A spiritual cleanse, the way a soldier may pray after battle, to reset and reconnect Being A Proper Man to Being A Kind Man.
I think there’s something interesting in that two of the characters most widely defined by how well they adhere to Westerosi gender norms both dislike feeling like they had to weaponize their gender. They are exhausted by the performance, because it’s a performance. This isn’t Sansa getting excited over tourneys, or Ned teaching his sons to fight; it’s toxic masculinity, it’s structural misogyny. It’s something they’re good at, excel at, and connected to something they enjoy but when it’s paired with violence, whether done by Ned or done to Sansa, it crosses over in their minds from an innate part of themselves (The Gender) to a performance necessary due to survival (The Gender Role). And that after these performances, both retreat to nature & god as a way of resting and cleansing from the experience.
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Every CoP2 chapter is like
Trystan: I'm incredibly horny
MC: good
The fucking queen yet again, appearing out of nowhere: Trystan I am now forcing you to leave for the better half of this chapter
MC + all of us: this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me
Some rando: hello, I'm Thorne sibling #417318461876 and here's the most insane thing you've heard in your entire life so far
MC: getting real murder vibes from these people
Trystan: I'm back and still horny but in a tired way now
MC: Trystan your siblings are insane I think they all murdered people
Trystan: yeah that tracks
Thorne sibling #417318461876: i will now act like a serial killer for the entire duration of this interrogation. btw, here's a cliffhanger
Marguerite: *making something ugly for us to wear*
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So I mentioned in the tags of this post about Sampo's character design the other day that looking at his splash art made me realize something sneaky about the bg and oh my god I thought I already couldn't possibly love him any more than I already do but this might just prove me wrong JAKSLFJKDLASJFK
So this is maybe? old news by now but I remember when Sampo was first leaked to be in Penacony, some fans were excited saying that it must be Penacony shown in his splash art, and not Belobog. And tbh I was trying to avoid story leaks, so I just kinda ignored it and didn't think about it any further...until I was looking at it to look at his chains.
But I think it IS Belobog shown here because if you look closely, you can see what looks to be a pile of snow in the bg, and even some on the rooftop! And snow isn't present on Penacony.
There's also the huge moon shown behind Sampo. And we never get to see the Belobogian night sky, but even in the hours that are locked in permanent nighttime, Penacony noticably lacks a moon. The buildings all look like they match Belobog architecture, too.
This one is a bit more questionable tbh, but. There's also this long horizontal structure in the bg-
-which I'm not 100% sure what it even is, but it doesn't look like any specific part of Penacony. But it DOES look like the official art of Belobog (everyone say thank you to @/the-astral-express-archive for these pics; dude you're a lifesaver orz)
And if you will notice. The only place up high enough to look down on those structures,
the only thing taller than all the rest of the buildings in Belobog,
is the one establishment set dead center; Qlipoth Fort.
Which means this little asshole is shamelessly, gleefully breaking into the most important government building on the whole planet right in his splash art KFJLJSADKLFJKLDSJ
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