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The light in the room is dim, chasing away only the faintest hint of darkness lurking in vacant corners. Crickets and the feeble whir of evening traffic hums beyond the windows, the slant of the moon rising to its zenith high above the city that subtly quiets by the hour, trailing to blissful sleep.
Chad sits on the edge of the bed wrapped in a towel and waits, rubbing the last increments of lotion into his skin. He hears the sink in the adjoining bathroom turn off. Footsteps nearing his way. His head lifts where it was inclined toward his own hands, a strand of hair falling into his face where it was tucked behind his ear.
Robert leisurely leans against the doorway clad in only a towel tied low on his hips, arms crossed in a vague display of indifference. Chad in no way shields his blatant gaze as it spans Robert’s scarred body, lingering and yearning. Robert does not find it within him to be self-conscious about it as he once was, many months ago.
Aiming for something playful, Robert asks, “Got a staring problem?” His mouth catches in a smile.
The corners of Chad’s lips upturn, eyes crinkling, mirroring his demeanor. “I don’t know. Do you have a stand at the door and ask stupid questions problem?”
Robert shrugs, his smile so wide the edges of it clip into his cheeks. “Maybe I do,” he responds airily.
Chad teeters forward on the balls of his feet. “Maybe I should fix it." He bends forward and rises onto his feet to stand tall, leaving the towel to drop to the floor. A foot draws its way forward and onto the ground in front of him, taking a step. Another. He stalks toward Robert in a lazy, casual manner, shoulders back, head held high, eyes gauging as they rove over the expanse of his face, down his chest, his legs. He decreases the distance between them with each slow step forward, as if sizing him up and readying himself for their physical encounter, his gait best described as calculating.
He ambles closer until he stands in front of Robert, who has to crane his neck to peer up at him, the height difference made obvious with the lack of proximity. Chad observes him through bronze eyes molten with emotion.
Robert blinks up at him with his own heavily-lidded ones. “I think I have a bigger problem,” he confesses softly, voice dropping deep as he can make it. Embarrassment is something that evades him as of this moment.
An incline of his head, smiling, brows arched. “You need some help?” Chad asks, a palm lifting and meeting Robert’s skin, curving along the ridge of his jaw. He soothes slow circles with his thumb into his cheek, a warm press of flesh against flesh, a meeting of two people who have fought on opposite sides and have at long last met in the middle, the past left behind to make way for the beauty of the present.
To think they had once fought cruel and violent, planned each touch to be followed with stings of pain, sought the other to fall in a ruthless, merciless way that rendered them defeated and unable to rise to continue. Such contrast, when all that they seek now is the pleasure of one another in the same home, with the shared resolution of a love with no penalties. There is no guilty verdict to be drawn regarding the state of their companionship as they bear witness to one another's presence, anew, like the first coming of spring in a land barren of warmth.
Robert’s breathing transitions into something heavier, carrying the weight of feeling that he feels right down to the press of his length against the towel. “Yeah,” he husks, voice a whisper.
Chad takes the thumb that was rubbing his skin and taps it against Robert’s parted mouth. He dutifully opens, and Chad slides his thumb along the plush velvet of his tongue, saliva smoothed into the grooves of the pad of his finger.
“Then I’ll help,” he whispers back, bowing forward, his other hand coming up to cup Robert’s jaw, warm fingers sliding into his hair.
Chad slips his thumb out and presses their lips together. His own push firm and soft against Robert’s, a chaste contact, until his tongue prods forward. Wider entrance is concaved, granting him access, and their tongues soothe along one another, a slide of wet heat that Robert feels right down to his very core.
He can feel the sensation of sparks dragging deep in his chest and down to his stomach at the press and prod of eager mouths, the scrape of Chad's stubble against his own, heart loud in his ears. Gooseflesh ripples down the lengths of his arms when Chad’s hand finds his hip and prods along the knot holding the towel closed. His fingers pull, and it falls at his feet like the sudden draw of a curtain, his attraction culminating toward the cock that bobs heavy between his legs.
“Is this your problem?” Chad rasps into his ear, licking up his helix and tracing the crescent divot absent of cartilage with his tongue, moving back down to sink teeth into his lobe, causing the hairs on the nape of Robert's neck to prickle. A hand grips around Robert’s cock, a force insistent and all-encompassing, a warmth that consumes his thoughts and centers him where he stands despite precarious balance on trembling legs. The control Chad has over him is something he welcomes with open arms, the need to cease his ability to think wholly fulfilled by him.
His head draws back and he sighs a groan as Chad begins to stroke his arousal into a heat that exhausts his faculty to think, to comprehend and speak, burning his resolve into a puddle that moves easily with the tide of Chad’s direction and desire alike. “Yes,” Robert says throatily, quiet, warm pants leaving him.
Chad draws their lips back together, the hand at his jaw moving further into his hair and pressing Robert’s head forward where it splays against the back of his head. They breathe as one as they connect, part, connect again, plaiting a line of pleasure deep in Robert’s groin that lessens when Chad’s hand departs from his cock. The sacrifice of his control contributes to the swelling warmth he feels as he relents himself, his mind, his body to the man in front of him as if participating in a sacred practice deeming him a supplicant of his will. Chad at last draws back, a line of spit hanging like a thread strung fragile between them. Robert’s next exhale breaks it.
Folding over, Chad draws his hands underneath Robert’s thighs—a shift in gravity and he finds himself in his arms. Their mouths meet again easily, fitting together as if pieces separated, and Chad walks them toward the bed and lays him down before settling beside him. Robert adjusts himself toward the center of the mattress, wrinkling the dark sheets, balancing himself on his elbows as he sends a heated gaze up to where Chad towers on his knees high above him.
His eyes draw to Chad’s own length hanging neglected between his legs. His hand raises as he mumbles, a sense of obligation causing the movement to be urgent, “Let me—”
Chad bats his hand away, expression stern. “Just let me take over this time. You promised me I could ask about your …” he trails, rather reluctant in finishing the thought aloud.
“Scars,” Robert finishes, the word surprisingly not awkward, nor stilted. He had believed it would catch on the pricks of his painful memories as it left his mouth. “And yes, I did.”
His scars, reminders of the stories he has lived. Memories, etched into his skin.
He has bore witness to the death of so many he wonders how it hasn’t yet found him.
He is reminded of his own inadequacy to save those who needed help time and time again; in past years, when he had scrubbed the crescents underneath his nails coarsely enough the water ran red with the amount of sin purged from his skin, an omen that he has wronged in not fulfilling the role his father burdened his shoulders with.
There are nights, eyes closed, when all he can see is his father’s turned back and metal that shields him from the carnage he was convicted to find with every day he stepped out to offer his own bloodied, shaking hand to those who pleaded for it.
Nothing will ever reverse his mistakes—the digging of dirt plots, the engravings on tombstones, the flowers picked, trimmed, folded into bouquets to be bought by those who lost a part of their heart the day a death was determined by otherworldly decision. Losses that he, despite a body of powerless, human blood, could have forestalled.
"Robert."
He glances up.
Chad scrutinizes him with a concerned expression, having caught the way his eyes glazed over with thoughts. He bends onto his forearms and kisses him to compliant attention again before he trails a line of heated kisses down his jaw and neck, nipping mercilessly with teeth. A patch of skin is drawn out and bitten lightly, sucked hard. Robert doesn’t repress the quiet moan he hears himself make.
“Not too high,” Robert mumbles, back arching slightly when Chad begins to suck another mark. “Shirt collar’s gotta—hide it,” he says, blinking blearily up at the ceiling.
The vibrations of Chad’s chuckle meets his wet, cooling skin where he releases an expanse on its way to bruising a delightful, deep maroon, stark against the pale surrounding it. “You care what those fuckers think?” he questions, pecking his way down the length of his collarbone.
Robert maintains dull eye-contact with him as he shifts and descends the length of his chest gradually. “It’s called trying not to get unnecessary attention for violating company standards of propriet—” The tail end of the word chokes into a small gasp when Chad licks one of his nipples into his mouth and forms suction through a tight circle, watching his face with lidded eyes.
He removes himself and tweaks the nipple with an index finger and thumb, a saccharine smile played upon sculpted lips, his amusement emphasized in smile lines. “You’re thinking too much,” he speaks into scarred skin, then ascends his body again to be face-to-face with him. "Can you do that later?” Chad trails his thumb along Robert’s under eye, ending his curved path at the corner of his waterline. "Think only about me?"
Robert swallows and nods, focused on the experience of Chad close, over him, his presence like a hearth in a cold, cold home, warming and casting light over the lonely and dark nooks of his life which have been lived in, if at all, primarily in solitude.
“Good,” Chad whispers, lowering himself. Robert expects a pressure on his face but it lands instead on his right shoulder, lifts, moves down and settles again on his chest right along where a discoordinated pattern of reddened patches are situated in his skin. A scar rinded with jagged edges is present, wine-red and rough as a scab picked at and never allowed to fully heal. Dark lines bearing the memories of fresh cuts blooming crimson sit near it.
“These?” Chad asks, the edges of his words softened with feeling and care. He drifts a warm, mellow path with his lips, skirting the edges of each groove with something like reverence as if Robert’s marred, blemished body remains still a body to be worshipped.
Robert exhales slow, a hand raising to bury in Chad’s hair, his downy locks spilling like fine silk in the wedge between each finger. The scent of his shampoo is one that he welcomes as he strokes fingers through hair as if coaxing a reaction out of him as a result of his following words, “The cuts, I got—stabbed, by some villain a few years ago.” His breathing is labored and slow, though he is not entirely sure of the reasons each breath requires such effort. “The guy’s weapons managed to breach the suit. Tore a bit of my skin," he adds, referring to the crusted, red shape. The tip of his tongue holds between his teeth before he concludes, “Forgot his name.”
Chad looks highly displeased that he even considered the idea, mouth hooked into a disgusted frown. “Don’t mention any stupid villain’s name in here,” he mutters. “It’d be a real boner-killer, y’know?”
A chuckle small and short. He knows Chad can feel it where his head is laid over his chest. “Yeah, alright,” he murmurs, twirling a strand of his hair around a finger. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
A lingering kiss is pressed to every carved line, to the skin that once wept red, insinuations of the pain that once held him in its cruelty. Robert has to remind the voice in the back of his mind that he is allowed to be cared for like this.
Chad positions over the right side of his chest and presses a kiss to the scar spanning one of his ribs. Robert watches his own chest rise and fall as Chad holds there and releases, looks up at him through a few strands of hair where they’ve fallen in front of his face, curtaining his eyes as if frames of a portrait.
A blink. “Don’t really remember that one all too well. I think it was a, um." He swallows. "A burn.”
Chad’s brows draw and his face turns horribly serious, the shift immediate. “You think it was me?”
The smile Robert summons is slight, tight-lipped. “No. I would have remembered if it were you.”
Chad tuts, though relief bleeds into his expression, the worry diluted with emotion far kinder on his heart. “Should have fucking started with that.”
A higher lift of Robert's mouth. “And even if you did, Chad, then it’s in the past." Chad's movements stall, heeeding of Robert's words. "We’re here right now, aren’t we?” Robert beckons him closer with a pull at his shoulder, and Chad abides his request wordlessly, content to follow his footfalls through any and every path no matter how uncertain or untraveled.
“Right,” and they meet in a kiss that’s fueled by passion and something gentler, lips and tongues meeting, the sounds of it loud in the quiet.
They pull apart. Chad lands next on his waist, pecking the skin there.
Robert’s breath hitches as he sucks a bit of the skin. He reaches down and massages his hands into his shoulders, sighing, reviving the memory from deep within. “I was out on a mission,” he starts, eyes closing for a few moments. “I was in the suit, pursuing this one villain. She started flying, and I started going after her, and then suddenly I couldn’t see her anymore.” A laugh sounding self-deprecating escapes him softly enough it is hardly a laugh at all. “By the time I was able to realize where she was and turn around she sent me straight into the ground.” He gestures loosely, almost dismissively at himself. “Second-degree skin abrasions.”
Chad rests his chin on his abdomen and hums thoughtfully, stroking Robert’s arm. The callouses on his upper palm rub a soft, unhurried rhythm to fruition, the silence filled. “Sounds painful.”
A shrug is intended, although fails when Robert chooses to nod. “It was,” and his own honesty surprises himself.
A pattern is traced into his skin with the edge of a finger. Chad's gaze is headstrong, directed at him. “I would have burned that bitch, whoever she was, if I were there,” he mutters, brows drawn, tone dark. It is as much of a threat as it is a promise.
A snort. Robert ruffles his hair, and Chad shoves his hand away with a vexed expression. Through amusement he is informed kindly, “I think you would have been on her side and tried to, ah.” His smile grows wonderfully wide. “For a lack of a better phrase: burn me alive.”
Chad rises up and flicks him on the shoulder. “What was all that bullshit you said about the past not mattering just now?” He leans in close enough it feels as though they exchange breaths, exhales in sync. “You proud to be a hypocrite, hm?”
A broad grin. Robert's answer comes as a whisper, “So fucking proud.” He meets Chad for a brief kiss before Chad rises and gestures with a hand for him to flip over.
“You really gotta look at the ones on my back, too?” Robert inquires, still smiling.
Chad looks offended by the very fact that he asked. “Of course I fucking do. I’m not half-assing this.”
Finding his affronted expression incredibly endearing, Robert bites the pudge of his inner cheek to stifle his laugh. “Knock yourself out,” he concedes as he settles prostrate, head laid against his arms crossed in front of him.
“Only person who’s being knocked out is you from how fucking good I’ll make you feel,” Chad says with pure confidence and the edge of a smirk. They look at one another with blank expressions before they simultaneously laugh quietly.
“That was corny and you know it,” Robert chuckles.
“Fuuuck, shut up, shut up,” Chad tells him through an awkward smile. "Think about the embarrassing shit we say in bed after the post-nut clarity hits."
“Mm, alright,” Robert mumbles as Chad plasters his hands over his shoulder blades. Wonderful heat blooms from the flame-wielder's palms. “You’d make such a good masseur, you know that?” he mumbles as Chad begins to rub warm circles into his skin.
A huff, “Bet you're real fucking glad you have me all to yourself.”
The ruffle of sheets, signaling a change in position. Chad's hand precedes his lips on a circle of skin depressed and deformed. Robert hums and thinks. “Bullet wound, I'm pretty sure." He prods his tongue at his gums and tries to remember. "The guy got me with my back turned."
A scoff. "Fucking coward."
Robert's mouth quirks wryly.
Traces of warmth down, down, down. A large leathery and raised arc, a few shades darker than the skin surrounding it. Robert has to think for a few moments before he's able to answer the unspoken question floating in the space between them.
“There was this one guy who set fire to his office building. Some sort of—shitty revenge, I think it was, that he was trying to enact on his boss who fired him. Managed to get caught in the flames.”
He can see Chad's frown deepen in his periphery. Seeking confirmation regarding a concern is what motivates him to mumble, “Are … are any of the burns from …” He stops, unable to complete the sentence, choked with emotion.
Robert's throat briefly tightens. “No," he murmurs softly, the air laden by thoughts heavy. "No, not you." His hand reaches around, searching. Chad meets it with his own. Their fingers intertwine. "None of them are from you.”
The presence of lips briefly skitters over another mark. The placement is what makes Robert remember its source.
“That scar’s from the surgery I had to get when the suit, um, fell this one time.”
The caress of Chad's hands pause. “From how high?”
Robert blinks and exhales through his nose. Thinks. Says, “... About ten stories.”
Silence.
“… Shit, Robert.” His voice, undeniably, wavers slightly.
A clearing of the throat, his off-handed acknowledgement of the sensitive fact he shared. “I know.”
Chad leans down, plasters his chest over his back lightly, a cascade of warmth. “I’m sorry." The words are weighted. "You didn't deserve this." He kisses his ear. "Any of it," he tells him quietly.
Robert smiles sadly. “Don’t be." He finds Chad's right hand and brings the small stubs close. "I should be the one apologizing, in fact.” He kisses each healed divot with care.
Chad watches him, eyes soft. The soft murmur of Dari meets Robert's shoulder, the incantation familiar.
"What did you say?"
Chad whispers, "Eshgham." He leans forward. Robert's head turns and he's met with a kiss to the scatter of freckles on his cheek. "My love."
Robert's vision blurs. Silence sprouts before against Chad's hand he mumbles, “I wish we didn’t start off wrong." Another kiss to his hand. "I wish things had gone different.”
A hum of agreement. “I would take back all the shit I've done if I could."
Lifting himself, Chad's hand doesn't leave Robert's own as he descends once more. He lands against his calf.
Robert presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, the placement of the scar familiar, the origin not. “Don’t remember." He thinks for a few more moments. "Got it in one of my first years as Mecha Man," he concludes after a quick skim through his memories.
“You were how old?”
“About fifteen, I think," Robert finishes.
A butterfly kiss against the back of his knee, a sign of Chad's ascent upwards.
Chad lifts his body on an incline over him. Hesitantly, “Did you still want to, uh." A frown rather apologetic blooms. "Continue?”
Part of Robert seeks to reach out to smooth the line of Chad's lips into neutrality, his sadness painful. Desiring to mitigate the damage of his words, a smirk curves his face and he asks despite knowing the answer, “You’re really gonna let me go to sleep with my dick hard?”
Chad immediately sputters, “No I’m not, I was trying not to be an asshole by asking!” The smallest spike in body temperature, the threat of flames, his flustered state manifesting physically.
“I know, I know," Robert chuckles. He's promptly rolled around by a strong hand at his shoulder.
He meets the eyes of his partner, who glares down at him fondly. “You can be a real pain in the ass sometimes," is chided with little frustration.
Robert tilts his head, coy smile accompanied. “I think it's about to be the other way around." His eyes flick down and up suggestively.
Chad doesn't dignify the comment with a retort as he reaches over to the nightstand and grabs the bottle of lube on it. Robert's legs instinctively widen as Chad enfolds the bottle within his palms and warms it using his ability. A few moments pass before he flips open the cap and drizzles the liquid onto his fingers.
"Let me know if it's too much," he says. A finger glides down to Robert's rim, slicking over its perimeter. Robert's hands fist in the sheets as Chad's finger breaches him and sinks down to the second knuckle gradually. Eyes flit to his face and back down as he enters all the way to the third. He allows him to adjust a few moments before the finger begins to pump, in and out, a rhythm that Robert is quick to melt into. The sensual rock of the intrusion, tender and deep, makes him go relaxed and boneless. His breath leaves him in heady puffs as he allows his senses to be absorbed in their entirety by the pressure.
Chad's voice reaches him through a faint veil of haze, “Adding another.”
Robert gives him a small nod. The second finger is inserted, moving in tandem with the first. A groan punches out of his chest at the sudden crook of fingers, striking him where it's most pleasurable, his body tingling when sensitive nerves are abused again before the onslaught of pressure resumes steadily.
Noises leave his mouth, ragged and wholly affected by Chad's actions when a third finger joins the first two after some time. The ceiling is muggy through eyes narrowed with pleasure, body yielded to a throbbing force that envelops his being. The pleasure begins to build toward a cresting point following a short period, so he pleads through words staccato, “Please, Chad—I’m ready.”
The fingers withdraw carefully. “Impatient," Chad remarks, though Robert sees his hand curve around the shaft of his cock, lining himself up, knees wide on either side of his spread position.
The head catches on his rim, and he pushes, soothing himself forward. The stretch consumes Robert's thoughts, and the world centers completely on the place where he and Chad connect. He registers a certain fullness when Chad sinks completely, remaining still for a beat, inhales and exhales heavy through his nose.
"You can move," he heaves. At the words, Chad draws back, then forward, building a tempo slow and igniting sensations entirely pleasing. The pace grows to be consistent, the thrusts sharpened with intention. His hands curve around Robert's waist, gentle and warm, and the breaths that emerge from them both are loud and sporadic, shared within the same space.
Chad bows. He bows, and the firm line of his brow connects with Robert's own, a press of bone. Robert peers up, dazed, as if seeing him for the first time. Chad spans his fingers over his fringe, cups his cheek, and holds his eyes.
Whether it is due to the intimacy, the closeness, or something else entirely, Robert hears himself wheeze, “I’m sorry." The rising crest of tears pitch his voice high and vulnerable. "For the past.”
Chad shakes his head. “Fuck." His breath catches. "I am, too.”
Robert's sight diminishes. Warmth brims, spills, curves the length of his cheeks, delayed trails of grief left in the wake of his path through tender memories. Chad's thumb catches a droplet where it beads at the edge of his chin. “I’m sorry.”
"Shh, shh." His sight clears, revealing Chad's face, sunken with sorrow. Voice softened with affection, syllables gentle where they emerge through the fit of his lips, “It's okay."
Robert gulps an inhale, shudders.
Chad presses a kiss to the corner of his eye. “It’s okay," he repeats, though all Robert can think is he is not worthy of his forgiveness.
In nearly all his time, the touch of another has always hurt. The gentleness he is treated with now soothes so wonderfully it pains.
He has dressed in the weight of a metal skin that has reduced enemies to blood and bone, and yet he has hardly known what it feels like to be held.
To be the cherished of someone else is something he has never truly found until some time ago, the empty rooms of his past robbed of a people that saw him as one of their own and told him so.
All he had wanted, for a great time, was to belong. To know that if he fell, his palms wouldn't scrape bloody on the unforgiving ground, but rather be caught by the hands of those who would teach him, at long last, what it felt like to have someone care as they lifted him into an embrace.
He prays his gratitude to whoever decided that he finally deserved to be perceived of worth not solely as Mecha Man, but as Robert Robertson.
Never will he take for granted the feeling of being loved after being deprived of it for so, so long.
He and Chad move together, both as one and apart, meeting, separating, colliding and breaking apart. The fragments of things they wished to say in the past and never did are conveyed in the grazing of skin, the press of kisses, through whispers and consolations.
The wave grows stronger, stronger, a swirling whirlwind of pleasure that peaks into a flood waiting to wash over if granted the moment to do so.
"I'm—I'm close," Robert sighs in a breath fractured by both exertion and feeling.
The speed ramps imperceptibly. Chad reaches down, begins to stroke him with a hand slicked with perspiration.
The command is given, strained yet wholehearted where he delivers it by his ear, "Go ahead."
Robert lets go. The sensations churn, mesh together before they spill over him, dousing him in a gratifying ache that he throbs with, a liberation from the mounting euphoria that wracked his body for so long. It finds him in several places at once, sparking behind his eyelids, in the coil of his muscles, the pit of his stomach. His stomach glosses with his release, thick as it is wet.
"Where do you want me?" he hears.
Robert's mind is slow to register the meaning of the sentence. "Inside," he replies once he has gathered his bearings enough to reply.
Chad's hips connect only a few more times before Robert feels him spill not longer after, groaning low in his throat, tucking his head to his own chest.
A silence settles over them like the warmth of winter coats, broken only by labored breathing. They stay as they are, experiencing the aftermath in its entirety, content to simply feel one another in their most vulnerable, exposed state.
"I'm gonna pull out," precedes Chad's withdrawal from his body. Robert feels his release trickle down the crest of his ass, cringes, seems at last to be appalled by the secretions that he paid no mind to throughout their time together.
Chad pats his knee once. "Shower or bed?"
The answer arrives quickly, "Bed." The word is smothered in the brunt of the pillow his face is buried into, the faint smell of detergent and cotton greeting him.
The creak of springs, the dip in the mattress leaving, the sound of bare-footed footsteps. Robert can hear the turn of the sink faucet, the opening of a cabinet door, the pound of water. Chad returns with a damp cloth in a hand.
Robert glances up at him. When he makes no move to do something, instead looking incredibly embarrassed and awkward, he asks, "What?"
His question is answered with a voice that emerges strangely, "Is it wrong to say I think you look pretty when you cry?"
Robert laughs wetly, loud in the silence.
Chad looks completely taken aback. "What? What?" he presses when Robert continues to laugh. The faintest hint of steam rises from his shoulders, pink flushing down his face. "Did I—why the fuck are you laughing!?"
Shaking his head, Robert swipes at an eye with a finger and grins at him. "Nothing, it's just—your face." Another peal of laughter. "You really thought I was gonna get upset at you?"
"I don't fucking know—you were having a moment, and I didn't wanna, like." His hands gesture at nothing uselessly. "Ugh, you know exactly what I fucking mean you little shit!"
Robert laughs even harder at that, forearms grasping his stomach, curling in on himself. "No, no wait—" he begs while chuckling when Chad stomps over and grabs his wrists with a hand, pinning them over his head as he climbs back into bed. "Chad—"
"Don't make me use this," Chad threatens, the rag wielded in his other hand and held above his face.
Robert's grin spreads. "Ooh, scary," he shoots. "What are you gonna do, gag me?"
The hitch of eyebrows. "I will if you keep acting like a fucking brat. Maybe you need someone to teach you some discipline, hm?"
Robert's face, admittedly, goes hot. Chad notices, his mouth sharpening into a smile of teeth. "Next time," he says, mostly to himself.
Eyes wide and with the pungent flavor of his next tease sharp on his tongue, Robert inquires, "Next time? Oh, getting ahead of yourself I see—"
A finger held to his face. "Shaddup." Robert, to his credit, goes silent despite his pleased look aimed at him. Chad tries his best to glare before he sighs, releasing his wrists. "Stay still," he demands as he motions for Robert to open his legs.
He obeys, knees falling on either side of him. Chad makes quick work of him, dragging the cloth over his skin, unassuming and brief. Once he's done he retreats to the bathroom and cleans himself with a separate cloth before returning, grabbing the duvet from the closet and laying it over him before descending into bed beside him. He shuffles close and lays on the singular pillow, Robert shifting lower to lay his head over his chest, tucked close to the line of his body. Chad's arm curves over his back, his chin hooked over his head.
A hand strokes over Robert's head, soothing its way up, and down, up, down. They bask in both silence and presence, the world beyond the windows unreceiving of their attention, the warmth from the nightlamp dousing them in soft gold. The convection from Chad's body contributes to the drowsiness Robert feels paw at his consciousness.
Against his head Chad murmurs, “All your scars." His hand soothes up Robert's arm. "They don’t change anything about you." Down again. "Just means you’ve worked hard to be where you are today.”
Robert isn't sure of what to reply despite the way words usually come to him as easily as the lift of a finger, settling for a noncommittal hum.
Another momentary quiet fogs the space before Chad shatters it, “... Do you ever think about being Mecha Man again?”
He answers honestly, because that is what they agreed upon. “… I do.”
“Why?" A pause. A guess, "The feeling of being out on the field?”
Potential answers cloud his throat, constricting, making it hard to swallow. “No. It’s—” He exhales through his nose. He wonders whether he is allowed to burden Chad with an answer, and decides that he is. “It’s more like the opportunity of being able to prove my worth.”
“Prove your worth?" Chad questions. "I think dispatching the assholes giving you shit all day is already enough.” His tone isn't harsh nor accusing, simply opinionated.
A single raise of his shoulders. “It doesn’t feel like it, sometimes. And it’s not because you guys aren’t doing a good job. You are." A blink before he reveals, "It’s how I feel about myself.”
Chad waits for him to continue patiently, tangling his hand with Robert's. A single squeeze.
Robert inhales, and it’s uncertain, frail as a whisper that carries a secret too heavy to properly share with another. A bite too large to chew. A swallow of something too painful to accept.
The words arrive slow, “After being repeatedly reminded your efforts aren’t good enough, or that the results are disappointing for the longest time, it sticks with you.” His lids close hard, breath shuddering on the exhale, then open to reveal dewy eyes. “You think it doesn’t, but it does. It stays with you for the rest of your life, and it feels like you'll never experience a moment of rest that you believe you deserve.” A pause in his breathing, a reciprocating squeeze of Chad's hand. “You spend every waking moment trying to prove your worth no matter how much you tell yourself that what people say about you is wrong.”
A strong arm hugs him all the more closer. Chad's words meet the softness of his hair, “You don’t have to prove anything, not to any fucker out there doubting you." The frustration on his behalf, the reassurance and belief make Robert scrub a hand over his eyes and sniff. "Fuck all those bastards who talk about Mecha Man being a coward. They’re the real fucking cowards, sitting on their asses and talking shit when they couldn’t live through a goddamn day doing what you did. They'd lose their shit just looking at a villain.”
“I’ll be the one to remind you that what you already do is more than enough.” Robert's head is tilted up so that his gaze aligns with Chad's. With unbelievably warm eyes, Chad asks, "What the fuck was it you told me once? The past is the past …"
He shakes his head, his lips curving into something wobbly. "God, it's so cheesy."
A shake of his head right back, as if in retort. "Finish it. The past is the past …"
Begrudgingly, "… So we don't look back."
"Exactly." A kiss pressed to the crown of his head. He can feel Chad smile against his hair. “Dosted daram," he murmurs, eyes closing.
A smile in response, another squeeze of his hand. It is this sentiment that Robert has, with a heart brimmed with adoration, learned to receive and gift over, over, and over again. He knows, despite a body and a mind of scars, his mouth will never tire of the words, “Love you, too."