Even though he was only experiencing a fraction of The Deep's true emotions, it was enough to guarantee nightmares for the next few nights.
As he sank into the memories, he could feel the exact moment something in Kevin snapped.
On the third day of the oil spill, surrounded by the silent, screaming death of the ocean, he couldn't take it anymore.
He didn't wait for a boat. In a fit of madness, he just dove overboard, breaking through the thick, oily film and swimming for hundreds of miles underwater, never surfacing, his lungs burning for air.
After that, he refused any assignment that took him to a similar disaster zone. The easy, carefree life he'd known was over.
He funneled 70% of his income to every charity and organization he could find that was fighting ocean pollution.
The rest of the money, egged on by Lamplighter and A-Train, he blew on partying. But it wasn't fun anymore. It was a desperate attempt to forget.
The memories faded over the years, but even seven years later, he'd still jolt awake in a cold sweat, the phantom screams of sea creatures echoing in his ears, calling him a coward and a traitor.
It didn't help that his "friends" in The Seven couldn't have cared less. Maeve was too obsessed with Homelander, and Translucent was only interested in watching his bank account grow.
Lamplighter and A-Train just wanted to snort another line of coke and screw another star-struck fan.
Black Noir... well, Noir was in his own silent world.
And Homelander?
He was the worst of them all. He'd seen the young, promising Deep as a threat from day one, and his animosity was immediate.
He'd looked for any weakness to exploit, and a naive, trusting Kevin had confided in his hero about his embarrassing gills.
The next day, the story—complete with hand-drawn sketches—was all over the internet.
When a shocked Kevin confronted him, Homelander just gave him that chilling, plastic smile and said, "A true hero has no secrets from the people."
Vought hadn't appreciated the leak, but a month later, when the oil spill happened, they saw an opportunity.
They spun The Deep's connection to the ocean as a heroic crusade. It was all a calculated move that shattered the young man's self-esteem.
Terrified of showing weakness by going to a therapist and constantly worn down by Homelander's taunts, all that poison coalesced into one awful moment.
He decided to assert his power over someone weaker, just to feel important again. He cornered Starlight.
He may not have realized it, but he was slowly turning into a pathetic, second-rate Homelander.
Surfacing from the foul memories, the new Kevin felt a desperate need for a drink. He opened the fridge and found nothing but a couple of cans of some local soda called Fresca.
"Better than tap water, I guess," he shrugged, cracking one open. The fizz was a small, normal sound in a very abnormal new reality.
…
These inherited memories didn't just give him The Deep's fears of people and Homelander; they twisted them.
They didn't merge with his personality; they ignited a cold, hard rage that was slowly solidifying into pure hatred.
With every new fragment of the past that bubbled up, a desire grew stronger: to make Homelander feel every ounce of that pain, doubled.
Finishing the Fresca, Kevin felt a little calmer. He went back to the laptop, not to stare at a blank page, but to investigate.
He decided to look up some of the weirder, more insane supes from the comics. This world seemed a little less bleak than the source material, but some comic characters had been mentioned in the first season.
One in particular had caught his attention: Tek Knight. He was name-dropped at a support group for supe victims, a detail that had made him choke on his beer when he'd first watched the show.
Tek Knight's existence changed everything. He was a bizarre mash-up of Batman and Iron Man.
A rich guy with a mansion, a butler, and a high-tech cave full of gadgets.
He also had a super-suit that put him on par with most supes. In the comics, his entire character arc was driven by an all-consuming, pathological need to fuck anything with a hole in it.
Cyborgs, the exhaust pipe of his Tek-mobile, his butler's ear, a giant meteor... he'd even saved the world by fucking that last one.
The fact that he also had a young, spandex-clad boy living in his mansion who joined him on his nightly "activities" was another disturbing parallel to the Dark Knight, but Kevin decided to shelve that thought for now.
What mattered was whether this "superhero" was real in this universe.
He typed 'Tek Knight' into the search engine and was immediately hit with an official website and dozens of videos of him and his sidekick, Wing-Man, in action.
This raised a thousand questions. If technology existed that could make a regular person as powerful as a mid-tier supe, why the hell wasn't the military using it?
How had a guy like Butcher, who hated supes with a religious fervor, not gotten his hands on a suit like that? In the comics, The Boys took a low-grade version of Compound V to level the playing field.
Here, they were just regular guys, walking a razor's edge with every supe they faced, their chances of a messy death astronomically high.
The existence of Tek Knight didn't just feel like a plot hole; it felt like a game-changer. And he needed to know more.
This new information made Kevin pause. He was clearly missing something.
Either these high-tech suits were going to become a major plot point later on, or he was operating without a crucial piece of the puzzle.
He decided to shelve the Tek Knight issue for now, but made a mental note to come back to it. He needed to check on another... particularly infamous team.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Kevin swore, his search results confirming the existence of yet another group from the comics.
The search bar just had one word and a letter: G-Men.