Chapter Text
It started off with the heat.
Robert wasn’t the kind of person to run hot; he never had been. He was on the leaner side, the kind of build that suggested he once had more weight on him but had never quite gotten it back after the coma. Even with all the full-hearted attempts to rebuild his strength at SDN’s gym, the muscle just hadn’t returned the way he hoped.
And honestly, his diet didn’t help. Most days he substituted an actual lunch for whatever he could snag from the vending machine—chips, crackers, something sweet if the machine hadn’t eaten all his change. He always joked that his dog had a more balanced meal plan than he did, but that wasn’t far from the truth. His dog got the good stuff; Robert got the leftovers of his own exhaustion.
So no, there was no reason he should’ve been warm—certainly not that warm. The heat didn’t make logical sense, and that was the part that bothered him most. It wasn’t the kind that made your skin prickle or made you sweat; it was subtler than that, like stepping into a pocket of air that didn’t match the rest of the world.
It followed him too closely to ignore, lingering against his back on the walk into SDN every morning, crowding at his heels during the late-night trek home after a dispatching shift. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was always there—an insistent, creeping warmth, as if the universe had designated a personal climate zone around him and no one else.
At first, Robert chalked it up to stress. Stress did things. Stress turned your brain into a microwave. Stress made you feel warm, shaky, unsettled—nothing new there. He’d lived in fight-or-flight so long that his body sometimes forgot to turn the switch off.
But this warmth wasn’t the jittery, skin-tight heat of panic.
It was… external. Ambient. Intentional.
By the time he swiped into SDN for his shift, the warmth had collected along his shoulders like someone standing just a little too close behind him. And because Robert was Robert, he did what any rational, fully functioning adult who’d already survived a homicidal entity would do:
He ignored it.
“Morning, Robert,” someone called from the hallway.
He lifted a hand in a lazy half-wave, the other gripping his coffee as if the cup alone tethered him to the mortal world. “morning,” he deadpanned. His voice came out dry enough to need its own humidifier.
He passed Z-Team’s usual room—door open, chatter inside—and the warmth flickered, rising just enough to make the back of his neck feel like someone had breathed on it. Not normal. Not logical. Not anything he had the bandwidth for.
Robert didn’t stop walking, but his jaw tightened.
If he turned around and someone was actually there…
Well. He’d deal with it.
If he turned around and no one was there…
He’d… also deal with it, just with more therapy.
He reached his station, letting his headset click into place, letting the familiar hum of the dispatch room fill in the cracks of his nerves. Work was grounding. Work made sense. Work didn’t—
A spark of warmth danced across the space in front of him, brief and bright before fading away. Not enough to scorch, just enough to warn.
Robert’s eyelid twitched.
“…Really?” he muttered under his breath. “Already?”
Because of course it wasn’t in his head.
Of course it wasn’t stress.
Of course, if something weird and vaguely flame-adjacent was happening around him…
There was only one person in SDN who treated temperature like a mood.
And Flambae never believed in subtle entrances.
Robert didn’t even get through logging into his terminal before another flicker of warmth brushed past his arm—light, quick, like a match being struck too close to skin.
He exhaled sharply. “Okay. No. We’re not doing this.”
He pivoted in his chair.
And of course, leaning against the doorframe like he owned the entire structural integrity of SDN, was Flambae.
Flambae, who looked exactly as he always did: unimpressed, smug, and somehow hotter than any OSHA regulation would allow—figuratively and, knowing him, probably literally.
“Well, well, well,” Flambae drawled, voice smooth and irritatingly entertained. “If it isn’t my favorite dispatcher who pretends he doesn’t see me.”
Robert stared at him flatly. “I was trying very hard not to.”
A slow grin spread across Flambae’s face, sharp and lazy all at once. “Aw, don’t be like that. I’ve barely done anything.”
“Exactly,” Robert said. “That’s what concerns me.”
Flambae pushed off the doorframe, each step sending a subtle wave of heat rolling ahead of him. Not enough to burn—just enough that Robert could feel the temperature rise despite the ice-cold AC vent directly above his desk.
He swallowed.
Flambae noticed. Smirked wider.
“Shouldn’t you be… I don’t know,” Robert gestured vaguely toward the hallway, “setting something on fire? Causing minor structural damage? Ruining the fire marshal’s week?”
Flambae tsked. “You give me so little credit.”
“You’ve earned it,” Robert shot back.
That only seemed to please him more. Flambae leaned down, bracing one hand on the back of Robert’s chair, close enough that Robert could smell heat—actual heat; the metallic, ozone-tinged scent of something that shouldn’t exist indoors.
Robert’s breath caught, just a little. In annoyance. Definitely annoyance.
Flambae lowered his voice.
“Maybe I’m here for you.”
Robert blinked. “…Why?”
Flambae shrugged one shoulder in a way that was absolutely not casual. “Maybe I’m bored. Maybe you’re fun to bother. Maybe I wanted to make sure you didn’t fucking pass out from malnutrition again—”
“That happened once.”
“Still counts, bitch.”
Robert scowled up at him, dry as desert sand. “Are you done?”
“Mm. Not even close.”
And then—because he couldn’t simply stand like a normal adult—Flambae let a tiny spark slip from his fingers, hovering briefly in the air before dying out without a trace. A show-off move. A warning. A hello.
Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. “I swear, if you set off the building’s alarms aga—”
“I won’t.”
A beat.
“…Today.”
Warmth rippled again, softer this time. Close. Too close. Robert tried to ignore the way his nerves reacted—not fear, not exactly—but something wired and restless in between.
Flambae’s voice dropped, amusement curling around each syllable.
“Relax, Robbo. If I wanted to burn this place down, you’d be the first to know.”
Robert looked up. “That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Their eyes held for a moment—Robert’s narrowed and tense, Flambae’s bright with a knowing glint he refused to explain.
And then, without warning, the warmth pulled back. Fully. Cleanly. Like someone stepping out of his personal atmosphere.
Flambae straightened. “See you around, Robbo.”
He turned and walked out without another word, the air cooling behind him.
— — —
Robert shouldn’t have been in Flambae’s personal files.
He knew that. He absolutely knew that.
There was a distinct difference in the files he was allowed to review as his dispatcher, and files SDN kept secured away. There were rules about this kind of thing—protocols, clearance levels, an entire ethics training video he’d half-slept through—but none of those rules accounted for whatever the hell was happening to him lately.
So he justified it the same way he justified most terrible decisions in his life:
It was fine if he was quick about it.
The SDN archive room hummed softly, server fans a constant white noise that helped distract from the fact that he was elbow-deep in the digital footprint of someone who could incinerate him for fun. Not kill him. Just inconvenience him with fire. Emotionally. Physically. Both.
He scrolled through the most recent entries in Flambae’s activity logs—public sightings, incident reports, operational overlaps with SDN. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that explained the feeling that Flambae had been orbiting him like a heatwave with boundary issues.
Robert clicked into another tab.
Patterns. He needed patterns.
He pulled up timestamps:
• Morning commute routes
• SDN entry logs
• Dispatch shift end-times
• Last known locations of various Z-Team members
All perfectly normal… until he noticed a cluster of entries that didn’t belong.
Flambae had been recorded—unofficially, informally, barely—within the vicinity of Robert’s usual paths. Repeatedly. The system marked some of them as “environmental anomalies” instead of sightings… which made Robert’s stomach drop.
He leaned back in his chair, fighting the urge to rub at his face. “No. No, no, no. He would not.”
But the heat this morning.
And yesterday.
And last week.
And the week before that, if he bothered to think about it.
Robert frowned at the glowing screen.
He wasn’t stupid.
He wasn’t paranoid.
(He was absolutely paranoid, but for valid reasons.)
Still… this was too consistent. Too patterned. Too close.
“Okay,” he whispered to himself. “So either he’s stalking me, or I have unlocked some kind of rare, cursed superpower that involves spontaneous localized climate change.”
Between the two, unfortunately, the first seemed more plausible.
He clicked into one more file—Flambae’s interrogation notes, the bare-bones summary of every time SDN had bothered to question him. Most of it was useless: sarcastic answers, redacted pages, one section that was literally just the phrase ‘go ask someone hotter’ scribbled into the digital transcript.
But one line made Robert sit up straighter.
SUBJECT BEHAVIORAL NOTE:
Flambae displays heightened vigilance around SDN personnel he perceives as vulnerable.
Robert blinked.
“…No.”
He reread the sentence.
And reread it again.
He perceives as vulnerable.
Flambae? Watching him? Because—no. No, he was not vulnerable. He was fine. Perfectly fine. Mostly fine. Fine-adjacent.
It didn’t make sense.
He exhaled, long and slow, tapping the edge of the desk with restless fingers. He didn’t want this answer. He didn’t want any answer that involved Flambae paying that much attention to him for reasons unknown.
Because if it was true…
What did Flambae want?
The two had never really talked about it, per se, but the past was the past. He’d busted Flambae, and now they worked together. Really, they should be nothing but begrudging coworkers, tentative frenemies at best, but what was this?
Before Robert could spiral deeper into that thought, a faint warmth brushed the back of his neck—soft, drifting, unmistakable.
He froze.
This time, he hadn’t imagined it.
And it hadn’t come from the servers.
Someone was standing in the doorway.
Someone whose presence was always preceded by a rise in temperature.
Someone who should not, under any circumstances, see him reading these files.
Robert moved fast.
Not graceful-fast. Not confident-fast. More like “I’ve done something deeply questionable and God Himself cannot help me now”-fast.
He slammed a random window over Flambae’s files—something boring and defensible, like SDN’s weekly training spreadsheet—and jabbed the keyboard so hard the tab minimized with a sound he was one hundred percent sure was not supposed to be audible.
By the time the warmth fully settled behind him, Robert had assumed the most casual posture a man on the brink of a moral breakdown could manage: hand on mouse, posture neutral, eyes forward, expression deadpan.
Nothing suspicious. Just a hardworking dispatcher. Doing hardworking dispatcher things.
He swallowed.
A soft exhale—too warm, too close—ghosted across the back of his neck.
“Working hard, Robbo?”
Robert didn’t flinch. Mostly because his muscles had locked into place like concrete.
“Always,” he said, tone flat as asphalt. “It’s what they pay me the big bucks for.”
“They don’t pay you big bucks.”
“Exactly.”
There was a pause. A long one. Robert kept his eyes trained on the spreadsheet like he’d been born with a passion for data entry, feigning disinterest in Flambae’s presence.
Behind him, Flambae shifted, the air pulsing with gentle heat each time he breathed. Robert could practically feel him leaning in, like he was trying to read over his shoulder.
Robert casually—painfully—scrolled down the spreadsheet.
Units. Hours logged. Employee IDs.
The most boring, least incriminating information on the planet.
He even clicked a random cell and typed a number just to sell the performance.
He immediately regretted it, because now someone from admin might later ask why he entered “72” into a blank field labeled Notes (Optional).
Flambae hummed. “You seem jumpy.”
Robert’s fingers tightened around the mouse. “I’m always jumpy.”
“That’s true,” Flambae said, chipper about it in a way only someone with no empathy or far too much enjoyed. “But this is new. You’re jumpy with purpose.”
Robert deadpanned, “Wow. What a poetic way to say ‘I look stressed.’ Thank you.”
“Mhm.” Flambae leaned a little closer—close enough that Robert felt the heat touch the edge of his collar. “Tell me… what exactly are you working on?”
Robert clicked a completely random tab. “Forms.”
“What kind of forms?”
“The kind that make me question my life choices.”
Not technically a lie.
Another beat passed.
Then Flambae laughed under his breath—low, amused, like a spark catching flame. “Relax. If you were doing anything bad, you’d be sweating.”
“I am sweating.”
“Mm. Good point.”
The warmth eased. A sign Flambae had stepped back, or at least decided not to hover like a sentient space heater.
Robert allowed himself a microscopic exhale.
He’d pulled it off. Barely. But still: pulled. It. Off. Whatever this was that was going on, he at least needed more time to investigate before he took action.
“Anyway,” Flambae said, tone lilting with that irritating self-satisfied lilt, “don’t work too hard. You might collapse again.”
“That was one time!” Robert snapped before he could stop himself.
Flambae grinned like he’d won something. “Once is enough to keep an eye on you.”
Robert blinked.
“…What?”
Flambae didn’t repeat himself.
He never did—not when it mattered.
He only turned toward the door, heat trailing with him like a loyal shadow.
“See you around,” he called over his shoulder.
Then he was gone, leaving Robert staring at the doorway, pulse thrumming and skin still warm.
He slowly turned back to the monitor—back to the minimized tab he absolutely should not reopen but absolutely would—because now he wasn’t dealing with theories.
He was dealing with confirmation. For some unknown reason, Flambae was stalking him.