Chapter Text
The shift had gone badly enough that a dispatcher didn’t bother turning off a computer and just emotionlessly stared at it.
The monitor was the only thing glaring in the room: a cold blue ghost cutting through the dark. Robert sat in front of it without really looking at it. Since Shroud’s death had reshuffled the Red Ring gang’s command and put Courtney at the top, crime rates across the city had risen fast. Fast enough to surprise even the SDN veteran heroes. And the Z team had held their own. They always did. But holding their own and doing it well were two different things, and tonight had made that gap painfully clear.
Robert pulled off his headset and set it on the desk. In his head, he was already replaying the night: every call, every decision, every half-second where something could’ve gone differently. He’d wished that the Mecha suit was ready. With it he could’ve been out there instead of in here. But the suit was still in repairs, which had been dragging out week after week, and in the meantime he was the only person capable of keeping the Z team from imploding over comms. Even Royd had stepped into dispatch to help cover the load. The schedule they’d scraped together was holding. Well, barely. At least the Astral Pulse was secured. That was something.
“Hey brudda, it’s time.” Royd’s voice came from behind him.
“Oh, hey. Yeah, I’m coming.” Robert muttered it and followed him out.
***
The visors were not in the apartment.
Chad had checked everywhere. He’d gone through the pockets of every costume he owned, pulled apart the couch cushions, gotten down on his knees and looked under the bed like some kind of deranged housekeeper. The floor was a disaster: clothes, wristbands, a bottle of cologne rolled under the radiator; and somewhere in the middle of all of it stood Flambae, both hands on his hips, seriously considering burning the whole place down. They were his best pair. Colorful, magnified, the exact kind of thing that made a night out feel like a statement. He couldn’t go without them. He physically could not.
Then it clicked: he’d had them at work today. He’d worn them in and left them somewhere. Maybe it was the lounge or maybe even at the gym. No seconds to waste, Flambae took off, penetrating through the night air like a lit match, and landed at SDN a few minutes later.
The building was quiet at this hour: that particular kind of late-night quiet that felt like the place was holding its breath. He moved through the kitchen, the lounge, checked the gym and every bathroom stall, turning over everything he could think of. Nothing. He was crouching behind the kitchen cabinets, running his hand along the back of the lowest shelf, when he heard footsteps somewhere down the corridor.
He went still.
It was too late for anyone to be here. His first thought was a janitor; his second, more irritating one, was confirmed when he followed the sound and found Robert heading towards his desk.
“Oh, it’s just you,” Chad muttered, the disappointment fully audible.
“Well, surprised to see you too, I guess.” Robert looked him up and down. “What are you doing here?”
“None of your fucking business.” He poked Robert’s chest and crossed his arms.
“Sure.” He shrugged. “I don’t actually care about your plans… unless you’re stealing something, in which case it will be my business.”
“The fuck, Bobert? I’m not a fucking thief. I’m the real actual hero, unlike someone whose job is helping superheroes like me.” He smiled and dropped his “ugly” hand onto his boss’s shoulder. “But I guess even that easy job is too much for you, Bob-bob.”
“Hey, if you all listened and did what I’d told you to do, then maybe, just maybe, nothing bad would’ve happened tonight.” Robert aggressively shrugged off Flambae’s hand.
Chad felt the dismissal land somewhere unpleasant. He didn’t like where this was going. Although if he was being honest with himself, which he generally tried not to be, he hadn’t liked where this was going since the moment he saw Robert being alone in this dark room looking exhausted and unfairly attractive. The sweat on the back of his neck. The way the shadows made his jaw look sharper. The cockiness that hadn’t gone anywhere even on a bad night.
“Oh yeah? You’re always fucking blaming us when things go to shit. So maybe, just maybe, shut up for once, take a good hard look at your-fucking-self, and figure that out.”
“Fuck you!”
“Bitch, you wish.”
“Well, suck my dick then if that’s all you want. I have no energy or time to go through this with you.” Robert’s voice had dropped, the words coming out clipped and cold. “I’ve done a lot for this team… a lot for you, specifically. Without me, you’d have gone back to prison. You would’ve rotted there, and nobody would’ve ever known your name except as a criminal record. Actually… no, no one would’ve even cared about you.”
He turned away before Chad could respond. Maybe he was aware of what he’d just said or maybe he wasn’t. Either way, there was some truth buried in it. Robert clearly wasn’t ready to savor the thought and neither was Chad, not like this, not with the heat of a bad night still sitting between them.
Robert was heading for his desk, the monitor light spilling toward him like a guide. Behind him, Chad hadn’t moved. Anger had a habit of burning clean and fast in him. But this wasn’t the usual feeling of anger. This was something else. Something that didn’t have a name yet. He stood in the dark and felt it spreading through his chest.
The only way out of something like that was to disappear or to fight.
“Hey,” Flambae’s palms lit up, a low orange glow bleeding into the dark. “Bitch. We haven’t finished yet.” He walked toward Robert’s desk.
“Listen, little arsonist, if you want to fight, we can do it another day. Preferably outside the fucking building.”
Chad grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him back against the table.
“You don’t even know what I’ve been through, fucker.” The words were coming out fast, faster than he could control them. “You have no fucking right to assume anything about me. None! You think you’re better than me? Maybe once. Maybe. But now you just act like you can do whatever the fuck you want and still be the good guy. I see you every single fucking day and I-I-” he was speaking faster than he could breathe, the sentences crashing into each other, and he had to stop, had to force air in before he continued. “I hate how you act around other people. I hate the way you talk, the way you walk, the way you eat. I want to hate you with everything I’ve got after what you did to me… but I just can’t. Same as right now. I can’t fucking hurt you, even though I really want to.”
The grip on Robert’s shirt went slack.
Flambae’s forehead dropped forward and came to rest against Robert’s chest.
Mr. Robertson III had been in a lot of unexpected situations. This was a new one. He’d never heard Flambae say that many words directed at him, not like that, stripped of the usual armor. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. So he did the only thing that seemed right: he raised one hand and rested it against the back of Chad’s head, fingers finding dark wet hair, and held it there. Gentle. Quiet.
Chad wasn’t crying (not exactly). It was more that every emotion available to a person had arrived at once, and his body had nowhere to put all of it. The slow strokes helped, eventually. His breathing evened out. After a moment he wrapped both arms around Robert’s waist, not saying anything, and Robert didn’t say anything either.
Chad smelled like engine oil and burnt batteries, which should have been terrible. Somehow it wasn’t. Robert, for his part, smelled like expensive cologne: wood and musk, warm and deliberate. He felt uncharacteristically safe and warm. Neither of them moved. It was the first time they’d ever held each other, technically, even if the circumstances made calling it a hug generous. Robert found, to his own surprise, that he didn’t want it to end.
The phone buzzed.
“Fuck.” Chad pulled it out and answered without stepping back. “Yes? Shit - sorry, I won’t make it. I know, I know. Listen, I can’t find my visors. Yes, bitch, they’re important. Yeah. No. Sorry. Bye.” He hung up.
“Wait, you can’t find those?” Robert reached into his backpack.
He pulled out the sunglasses.
Chad stared at them. “You had them?”
“Waterboy found them in the gym. Brought them to me so you wouldn’t accuse him of stealing when you would notice they were gone.”
Chad took them, turned them over once in his hands, and put them on. He looked Robert up and down from behind the lenses. Then he looked away.
“Thanks. See you tomorrow, bitch.” A beat. “No one needs to know what happened here.”
“Nothing happened, though,” Robert said, and he was smiling.
“Yeah. Right.”
Flambae left.
Robert stood at his desk for a moment longer than necessary, one hand resting on his bag. Then he picked it up and walked out into a night that felt, somehow, a little easier than the one he’d come in from. He was still smiling when he got home.