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In fair NYC where we lay our scene, there is a café, a bar, a café (with added bar) with the flowery alliterative name of Buttermilk & bourbon. The difference in capitalization is a stylistic choice, not a typo, says one of the owners. The other disagrees. They don’t particularly agree on a lot of things, those owners, but they apparently agreed to a shared establishment.
They didn’t agree on the kind of establishment, though. Entering the café-bar feels like being split in half and transported to different universes. To the left, garish colors, leather seats, and a jukebox give the impression of a 1950s roadside café; to the right, wood panels and dark green bottles make the unassuming visitor think of a dive bar. To the left, people sit down and chat over their meticulously prepared milkshakes; to the right, they watch sports or – if they want to – engage in some themselves with some tasteful foosball or throwing darts.
It seems magical, that the sounds never intermingle too much, that the vintage jukebox and the ceiling speakers playing British punk rock live next to each other in perfect harmony, only ever serenading their respective people, never bothering anyone else.
The owners do not live next to each other in harmony.
Calling them ‘enemies’ seems dramatic. They aren’t.
Or rather, they’re not enemies now, though if you ask any visitor, there is some animosity going on there. Words are thrown like daggers across the room – as is, sometimes, cutlery.
But they have a family of their own, and they are very clearly married, the rings on their fingers always on display to deter any customers who won’t otherwise take ‘no’ for an answer. They are both jealous men and do not like seeing others flirt with what is clearly someone else’s property.
Every second weekend, their son helps wait the tables. His name is Ryan, and one day the café-bar might see a time when he gets an order right first try. But he’s charming, and awkward, and so, so friendly, and he gets a lot of tips when he apologizes and quickly runs off to bring a new order – the right one, he’s never fucked up twice. When he is there, the yelling quiets down, and the pair on opposite sides of the room are on their best behavior.
There’s a rumor that one of the owners used to be someone else. After the fall of Vought International, most of its heroes lead quiet existences away from the spotlight, so it isn’t uncommon to see them working the odd job. And sure, there are some who say the owner of this café looks a little like The Homelander, but honestly, there’s a lot of blond dudes around, and there’s plenty of men called John. And what was Homelander’s real name anyway?
The menu is a simple thing: two pages, one white (and red, and blue), the other white on black; one offering milk (47 variations of creamy off-white goodness), the other spirits; one expensive and exclusive in its selection (of milk), the other dirt-cheap, but it gets the job done.
It’s a concept that, by all accounts, should fail.
It doesn’t.
“Wrong half, mate.” The owner of the dive bar (a man in his late 40s with a Hawaiian shirt only known to the patrons as ‘Butcher,’ who looks exactly like he should be the owner of a dive bar) leans over to a clean-shaven gentleman with a sleek silver laptop who has just sat down to do some work or write a poetry collection by the looks of him.
“Wanted to try something different today,” the gentleman with the laptop replies and orders a Moscow Mule.
The owner shrugs and serves his new customer.
It’s a quiet day at the bar. Most of his patrons don’t come until the sun has already set. There’s a few teens gathered for an after-school game of foosball. He wouldn’t sell them alcohol. No, they bought their beverages at the café, but he does allow them to play over in his half. He’s watching them half-heartedly, one arm on the bar, chin in his hand, until he hears a noise from the counter on the opposite end of the room.
“Oh, darn it!”
Homelander John The cunt His very own Johnny comes stumbling out from the backroom, barely evading something that is on the floor. He is balancing an elaborate cake, and where in a different life, he would have evaded the obstacle by flying, he can’t do that now without revealing his identity and is forced to walk around it like a ‘mud person.’ Butcher finds it more entertaining than the kids playing around and turns his attention to his husband.
His staring doesn’t go unnoticed for more than a minute. John places the cake on the counter of his café, admires it for a second, and then looks up to meet Butcher’s eyes. He’s still wearing his flour-coated apron, clearly having just pulled the cake from the oven – without gloves, probably. There’s flour in his hair, too. He looks adorable and delectable in ways that make Butcher hungry.
“Are you stealing my customers, William?”
“Come over here and steal him back, Johnny.”
It’s a futile suggestion. They never cross over into each other’s territory.
“Don’t you want some of the cake I just made?”
“Oh, I want some cake alright.”
The kids have long since stopped playing their game. The verbal duels of the owners are legendary and more entertaining than anything. The wannabe-writer with his Moscow Mule is staring intently at the screen, wishing himself into another sphere where he doesn’t have to listen to their blatant erotic provocation.
“Actually,” one of the teens says, “I want some cake, too. Can I buy some?”
His friend rams his elbow into the kid’s ribs and shakes his head, but John is already nodding eagerly. “Sure, go ahead, take some! It’s on the house. But careful, it’s still warm!”
John is looking at William. It’s his favorite thing to do if he’s not baking or serving customers. Living like this is a strange concept because he despises it. He hates it. He hates every morning when he opens up the café, throwing out the last of William’s patrons who’ve damn near stayed the night drinking their weight in whiskey. But then he’s behind the counter in his civilian clothes, wearing a nametag with his name that has never felt like his name except when William moans it, and he suddenly feels like… someone. If he can’t be The Homelander any longer, he can at least be owner of a café, serving anything dairy to an audience of aficionados with the same taste as him, and he can be happily married while he does that, raising Ryan in a ‘mud people’ way.
In terms of how unbearable it is, it is somewhere between the later years in the lab when he was allowed to roam free at least some hours of the day and the first day in his penthouse when he’d realized he was finally never going back to B6. At least he’d chosen the café décor for himself, and he gets to test his recipes in the kitchen all day, always working on expanding the menu with novelty milks – all animal-based, none of that plant stuff or the ‘nut milk.’ Ryan and William had broken out into hysterics the first time he’d complained about that one in particular.
All in all, it is a boring life, but one that his younger self would have murdered half the planet to have. If he’s not doing it for his superhero identity, he can at least do it for the little boy who’d once dreamed of living in a quiet town and saving people out of the goodness of his heart, right? Right. So he bakes. And makes milkshakes. And serves customers.
And stares at William who has half his chest visible with how unbuttoned his button-down shirt is.
A woman with a baby walks in. John has met her before, on the other side of the bar. She looks like one of William’s regular patrons, and she’s dressed the part: leather jacket, ripped pants, boots. A biker. With a baby in a little sling, keeping it close to her.
“Now who’s stealing customers, hm?” William complains from behind the bar, and the woman turns around and gives him the finger. John balks at the crass behavior, but doesn’t let it color his customer-service face. He’s good at schooling his expression into what the people want to see.
The woman turns to him and orders a chocolate milk with extra cream. “I’d order a Black Cow, but none of that for me until she’s done biting my nipples every three hours on clockwork.”
John makes sure to pack some extra whipped cream in the order to give this hard-working mother some much-needed fats. Feeding a child is a noble purpose, and she’s sacrificing a lot for her daughter, so he wants to appreciate that. “Here you go, chocolate milk for you.” He leans in a little closer as she hands him the money, takes just the faintest whiff of her body, and- yep. That’s the sweet aroma of just the only kind of milk he is not legally allowed to sell here.
William shoots him a warning glance, but John ignores him. The woman shoots him a smile, then leans down and kisses her daughter on a chubby little cheek before walking over to William, stepping into an entirely different world, where now she belongs, and the pastel-clad newborn seems out of place. The baby blinks at him tiredly with its dark, bleary newborn eyes.
He blinks back.
William and the patron have a little chat, and John busies himself with cleaning his counter. He likes things to be clean. Orderly. His space needs to be flawless. Like marble. If he himself can’t be, then everything around him has to, even if it’s impossible. But the chaos of baking is charming, not disgusting, and spilling milk ‘on accident’ just makes him seem relatable, so he does it.
Frequently.
With the slow day not getting any quicker, the hours tick by in which they make eyes at each other, throwing back and forth the odd innuendo, complaining about each other’s approach to customer service, commiserating about the taxes they are paying for this place.
They’re waiting.
For that one glorious moment when there will be no customers or only ones who have already been served. For those few minutes they have to themselves, so they can discreetly move to the kitchen and beyond to storage and-
The bell above the door dings when the final customer leaves, and finally, finally, William gets up from his place behind the bar and – without so much as a last glance at him – walks out. John can barely get his apron off quick enough and follow him.
They meet in the middle of their storage room where a lot of still-boxed deliveries wait to be put on the shelves. The only thing immediately being put on any shelf is John’s ass when William lifts him up and sets him down on one, so they can make out, John’s calves easily wrapping around William’s sides. “Missed you,” he mumbles.
William grunts and unbuttons both their pants, first his, then John’s, before hastily pulling them down. He barely ever wastes time. He does open the medicine cabinet to his right where they keep lube handy for when they need it. Not like John ever needs wound disinfectant spray or anything else, so medicinal lube it is – and a slick finger in his waiting, willing hole.
He sighs in relief and lets his head fall against William’s neck when he feels his husband finally slide in. He’s been feeling empty for unbearably long – since the morning at least.
They fuck on the shelf, against the wall, against a box of spirits, keeping note of all the places to clean when they’re done because while they will disregard the no-sex-where-we-make-meals rule, they absolutely do not disregard the clean-after-sex-where-we-make-meals rule. This is an industry-standard establishment, after all, they get checked.
“You’ve been making eyes at me the entire day behind your little counter.”
“Should’ve… buttoned up… your shirt properly then,” John gasps as he continues to get fucked into the deliveries, the bottles in the boxes clinking and clanging in the rhythm of their lovemaking.
“Yeah? Well, this isn’t how you get me to do that.” William is rough with him, lifting him up with every thrust, and John has to put his all into staying still enough, has to clamp a hand over his mouth to keep in a desperate cry as he feels his orgasm shoot up his spine and out his cock, William just barely being quick enough to pull out and get on his knees, sliding his fingers into the wet mess he’s made of John’s hole, and sliding his mouth over his cockhead, greedily drinking up all of it.
“Only milk I need,” he says and wipes his mouth.
John just rolls his eyes.
William’s jerking himself off after, adding to the flour residue John has all over him when he cums across John’s chest.
Ding, the sound that announces their most recent customer.
“Who do you think’s gonna get that one? Me or you?” William asks as he hastily buttons his clothing back up.
“Hopefully not me, cleaning this off will take forever,” John laments as he tries to wipe himself clean with the wet wipes they keep in the medicine cabinet – for emergencies like this.
“I can man your little milk counter,” William suggests.
“And I can serve your washed-up rockers Black Cows,” John replies and playfully flashes his eyes for a moment. “I’ll kill you if so much as step one foot into my domain.”
“As if I’d wanna be trapped in that 50s bizarro world.” One last kiss, and they walk back out, John righting his apron, and William toweling off another glass.