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Robert strapped himself in, guided the suit’s flight out of the lab, and prepared for disaster.
Working on the ground with the team as Mecha Man had gone pretty well so far, especially in a pair with Courtney; turned out her powers really shone when there was a giant metal distraction keeping everybody’s eyes off her. But today was another hero’s turn.
“Better not slow me down, bitch,” came the voice over his earpiece as a streak of fire rose up into the blue sky to meet him.
“Sorry, what was that?” Robert said. “I can only hear people who are on the leaderboard above Dr. Princess, M.D.”
He got a growl back, and smiled. Maybe this would be fun.
Ever since they’d had that moment in the closet, Chad had been about two levels smugger than usual. Somehow, that translated into being really good at his job. There’d even been a time when there was a really shitty job to do, and Chad had breezed in with, ”I’ll do it, I don’t give a fuck.” Which had made Prism say, ”Damn, babe, what’s got you in such a good mood?” with a reply of ”Just high on life, you know?” Fortunately before anybody could ask any followup questions, Sonar had said mournfully, ”I tried that once. Worse than salvia.”
The mission went surprisingly well. The suit felt like having his arms and legs and eyes back. Finally, Robert wasn’t just reflexively flicking his gaze over to the blank space where the camera that looked behind him should be, or reaching out to tap phantom buttons. He had the calculations on the screen to confirm his instincts when his eyes measured whether the suit could fit through an opening, like a cat measuring a crack in a fence with its whiskers. Royd’s work was different from the mishmash of Robert’s own and his father’s that he was used to, but similar enough that it was like humming along to a cover of a favorite song. He owed Royd...something. How did you say “thank you” to somebody who gave you your body back?
There were a few smaller jobs that he and Chad handled with a token amount of Chad’s bitching, then a call came in that somebody’d spotted six magpie drones outside a jewelry store, and they had to hurry before Sorrow the bird-hybrid made off with all the gold. They spotted her black and white shadow coming down out of the sky and Chad kept her busy, singeing away the razor feathers she shot while Robert took care of disarming the nest bombs she’d planted on the rooftops.
When they fought together, to Robert’s surprise, it worked. Chad’s mobility meant he could be everywhere at once, harrying Sorrow with fireballs while Robert kept her from ever getting the chance to swat him, and with the suit’s resistance to fire, Chad didn’t have to hold back. When she screamed into the air and came down in a talons-first dive, Robert got in the way and tanked the hit, with the sound of the claws screeching against the metal dimmed through the cockpit’s speakers. This, he thought, was what the mech was for.
The sun was down, they were off the clock, Sorrow was hauled off in cuffs and wing restraints while she muttered about a secret never to be told, Beef was with Chase for the night (“If you never see me again, it’s because I took this dog with me to Tijuana to live like kings”), and they had a minute to fly up to the hills to let the adrenaline fade away and the solid tiredness of hero work sink in while they watched the faint LA stars come out. Chad was sitting on Robert’s shoulder, tapping his heels against the metal and whistling tunelessly in a way that came through the mics in bits and pieces. The coloration on the monitors dyed the sky a deeper black-blue.
“Oh hey, I forgot to tell you,” Robert said into the air of the cockpit, knowing it’d come through Chad’s earpiece. “That rice stuff the other day, it was really good.”
Foil boxes got shoved into his hands or dropped on his desk a lot these days, inevitably with Chad acting like he was doing it out of sheer irritation. Robert was almost getting used to it. There was something to be said for eating less like a sad raccoon.
“Of course it was,” said Chad’s voice. The monitor on the lower right showed his perched silhouette against the sky. “I don’t fuck around.”
“The leaf was kinda weird, though. Like, a leaf from a tree. Kind of papery.”
The silhouette straightened. “You ate the-- bitch, were you raised by a pack of feral engineers in the woods!?”
“Just the one,” Robert said easily, “and it wasn’t in the woods.”
“Fuckin’ robot Mowgli.”
“Yeah, but I’m mostly domesticated these days. You know, in the epic of Gilgamesh, the way the wild man gets civilized is by having sex for a week.”
“You know that, but you don’t know what a fuckin’ bay leaf is?”
“I had a mythology phase as a kid. Was really into all the classic supers. Moses, Atalanta, Cuchulain. The ancient Egyptian hybrids, Judah Loew making the first construct. Before it was all mech all the time.”
“Yeah? When was that?” Chad said, with the tone of somebody who knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.
Robert admitted, “When I was about fifteen.”
“Fucking hell. When I was that age I was smoking weed and setting tires and old cars and shit on fire with the kids in the junkyard.”
“So you’re why there was that hole in the ozone layer. Must’ve been popular.”
“Oh yeah. I was a gay Afghan immigrant who could set shit on fire in the early two thousands. Everybody fuckin’ loved me.”
Robert winced. “Right. Wait, who were you smoking weed with?”
“The kids who thought it was cool I could set shit on fire.” He was quiet for a while, as the sky turned slowly to black. “Hey. You know what you said to Visi? About there not being any such thing as villain powers? You really believe that, or were you just saying shit?”
“I believe it. Whatever tool you have, when it comes to how you use it, you always have a choice. Like fire. There’s burning shit down, and then there’s those pinecones that only open up in wildfires.”
“Fuck. That’s, like, poetic.”
“I have the soul of an artist in the body of a guy who gets dropped down the stairs a lot.”
The wind came through the speakers as a staticky sound.
Chad said, “You ever get a choice?”
“About what?”
The silhouette on the monitor waved its hand in a circle. “The robot hero shit.”
“Oh. Yeah, not really. I guess no one was gonna tie me up and throw me in the cockpit. There was just never any question. I knew I was the next Mecha Man a long time before I knew what that meant.”
His heart knew it a long time before his body had learned the scars it would get him, before his skin had been marked like the guy in the carnival Punch Up had worked at with the moving tattoos that told stories.
Chad said, “That’s fucked up.”
“I’m getting around to thinking that. But I can’t be mad at my dad about it. He was doing his best with what he had, and what he had was a giant robot. He didn’t have much choice either. And he grew up when if a kid was bad, you slapped them and took their cigarettes away.”
Robert had always known what his life was for. When after the hundredth time digging around the wreck site he’d accepted that the Astral Pulse was gone and the suit was dead for good, it was the first time in his life when he’d had to grope for the future in the dark like everybody else.
“Still. He didn’t have to make you a fuckin’ child soldier about it.”
“If I’d really wanted to, I suppose I could have gone rogue or something. Wrecked up the place.” He smiled slightly. “We could’ve been partners.”
“Hell no. You would have had plans. Shit more complicated than ‘burn everything.’”
“You were one of those guys who never did any work on the group project, huh.”
“Damn right.”
“Anyway, there was always Shroud to deal with. And now that’s done with. He’s in prison with all his people, and Toxic, who’s probably still weirdly easy to talk to.”
“There always are those guys. Total motherfuckers, but good for a chat if you can catch them alone. Like therapy with a worse couch.”
Chad didn’t talk much about his time in prison. At least not to Robert, for obvious reasons. Complicated guilt worked its way through Robert’s organs and settled in its usual place somewhere on top of his pancreas.
Chad said, “So, what, you gonna find a new archnemesis all your own now, now you’re done with the hand-me-down asshole?”
“Guess so. Kaiju are the usual thing, but that one we ran into seems pretty happy with Golem.” They all got a lot of pictures in the group chat. It had a little bandanna. It was adorable. “Maybe a giant spider? But yeah, it’s weird to be doing my own thing now. With my own suit, even.”
“Good thing. The old one was ugly.”
“Hey. Wanna christen it?”
“What, like break a champagne bottle on the bitch?”
“Let me rephrase that. Wanna fuck me in the robot?”
The silhouette on the monitor straightened, and the grin came through in his voice. “Since years ago.”
Opening up the cockpit was like taking off sunglasses. The faint stars were a different shade with the naked eye. Chad was a bright thing throwing orange light through the gray as he flew down and climbed in. The fire wreathing his feet extinguished before his boots touched the metal, and he looked around, fascination on his face. The temperature ticked warmer with him there.
“I never thought about what it looked like on the inside,” he said, running his hand along the angles of the low ceiling. He had to stoop, but it was roomier than it seemed, moreso than the old suit had been. Building this one meant it had to be able to hold one Royd, which equaled two or three other people. “It’s like seeing backstage. Fuckin’ weird. I’m not gonna bump into something and launch a missile with my ass, am I?”
“Nah, I’ve got those functions and the movement locked. Don’t wanna start fires like a bad gender reveal party.” Robert hit the button to close the cockpit, the door pushing Chad closer. “C’mere.”
Chad leaned down, put his hand on the back of his head, and kissed him. It was different with his hand on the mask instead of in his hair. Pulling Chad closer put him up against the breastplate, his warmth slowly soaking through the metal and the suit to Robert’s skin.
“So I’ve got this strategy,” Robert said, his voice a little low and rough.
Chad was pulling off the breastplate, following how Robert’s hands showed him how it split in half. It fell to the floor with a resonant clonk. “Yeah?”
“The way I see it,” Robert said, pulling Chad’s suit down off his shoulders and arms, “the first time was only so good because of the novelty factor. So if we have sex more, eventually we’ll get sick of each other. Then we do a firm handshake and go back to normal.”
“Yeah?” The suit’s zipper moved down, splitting the emblazoned M in half. “What if I get to know what you like and fuck you better each time?”
“Then back to the drawing board, I guess,” Robert said as he worked on getting Chad’s suit the rest of the way off, which involved Chad doing a cute little tilt with his hips. Robert’s eyes flicked up slyly. “If.”
“Conceited bitch.” Chad stepped out of his suit and kept working on Robert’s, which was thicker and not quite as tight. “I’ll make you take that back, even if you’ve got the homefield advantage. Which, this is actually nicer than your real place. Huh, even got a cupholder. Wait. Tell me you haven’t taken this thing through a drivethrough.”
“Only a couple times,” Robert lied. The people at In-N-Out were very understanding.
He stood so he could get the suit off, which pressed him right up against Chad’s firm chest. Usually when he was taking this off it was alone, exhausted, and being careful around all the new bruises and cuts he’d picked up. There was something to be said for having somebody watching your back.
When he reached up to the mask, Chad’s hand stopped him.
“Leave it on,” he said conspiratorially.
Robert’s mouth quirked up. “Kinky.”
Chad kissed him again before he could say anything else, which was a pretty smart move. The mask’s cloth warmed when their foreheads rested together.
With a mischievous glint in his eye, Chad said, “Can I sit in the chair?”
It had never occurred to Robert that anybody else could do that. “Hell. Sure.”
He put his arm around Chad’s waist for balance as they switched places in the cockpit’s confines. Chad settled back on the pilot’s seat, looking like a naked king on a throne.
“Huh.” He looked around consideringly. “This is actually pretty comfortable.”
“Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of nights there. Got kinda more used to sleeping sitting up than not.”
“Can we go five minutes without you saying the saddest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever heard?” Chad’s hands ran down his chest. It was an interesting sensation, with the patchwork of sensitive skin and numb scar tissue. “You’re filling out a little. Looking less...what was the word Coop said?”
It was kind of nice to eat a little less like a post-apocalyptic cockroach, and there was a charm to how Chad always tossed food at him like it was a grenade. “Dickensian?”
“Yeah, that.” His hands wandered to Robert’s hips, then took a firm hold of his ass, which made his breath hitch. Fuck, Chad’s hands were warm. And large. “Almost even got an ass now.”
“Working on it.” Robert settled himself down on Chad’s lap and kissed his neck. “How can you be so beautiful and still look like a can of Axe that got its wish to be a real boy?”
Chad’s hands worked their way up and down his back, fingers tracing over the three sections of the claw mark in turn until they traveled up to play with the hem of the mask. “Ha ha. You think I’m beautiful.”
“That’s just one of those science things that’s true even if it’s annoying, like global warming.” Robert kissed under Chad’s jaw, feeling the scratch of stubble under his lips. He flattened his whole palms over Chad’s chest, which was inarguably great, and spent a lot of time at his exact eye level. While he was at it, Robert could feel the thump of his heart going faster.
Chad’s eyes roamed the cockpit, and he said, “So do you have anything for…?”
“Oh, yeah.” Robert leaned down and opened a panel under the pilot’s chair. One thing about small spaces was they led to having a lot of clever storage. “Lemme see what’ll work…”
Chad craned his neck over. “It’d better not be fuckin’ motor oil.”
“Nah, I’ve got better than that.” Robert pulled out a small bottle. “This one should do it. Kind of an off-label use, but that’s called being resourceful.”
“You know ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ aren’t opposites, right?” Chad said with sudden urgency. “They mean the same fucking thing!”
“Know that from experience?” Robert righted himself and got back to kissing Chad’s chest, which had gone too long without attention. Most of it was usually hanging right out there, but his nipples were a novelty. Maybe he should suck on them. Definitely he should suck on them.
Chad sighed, his hand resting on the back of Robert’s masked head. “Yeah…”
It was cute how he jumped when Robert bit down.
Going by feel, Robert balanced himself on Chad’s solid thighs and kept licking as he poured oil on his fingers and worked himself open. He nuzzled his face against Chad’s chest, knocking the mask askew, and stole a half-blue-obscured glance upward to see Chad staring at him in fascination.
“You do that a lot?” Chad said, voice hoarse.
Robert smiled against his skin, breathing in the scent of smoke and sweat as he shifted his hips into his work, blatantly pleasuring himself. “More lately. Thinking about you. And Jason Momoa. Mostly you.”
“Yeah?” Chad’s hands got firm hold of his ass and helpfully spread him open. “Which Jason Momoa?”
“Khal Drogo.”
“I was gonna toss you out of the robot if you said Aquaman.”
“God, who even saw Aquaman?” Robert slid his fingers out and realized belatedly, “Oh, fuck. Why don’t I keep condoms in the robot?”
“Dumbass. If you’re not using this thing to get laid, what are you even doing?” Chad leaned over, making Robert have to cling to him to hang on, and pulled what turned out to be an impressively slim wallet out of his suit. “Lucky for you I’m smart.”
“I do love a man who’s prepared for anything.” Robert watched as Chad pulled a condom out of the wallet and put it on, then Robert decided to be helpful and slick him up with a lot more flourishes and wrist movement than was strictly necessary. He was rewarded with the sight of Chad’s head lolling back against the headrest.
“You ready?” Robert said as he got into position, just to be annoying.
“Hurry the fuck up,” Chad grunted, steadying him with his hands on his hips.
“You’re so romantic.” Just for that, Robert slid down slowly. His long, rough exhale reflected off the cockpit’s close walls.
“Fuck,” Chad breathed, and the look on his face could make a man smug for the rest of his life.
The thing about being settled in his lap was that heat came from every direction. Robert rolled his hips just to watch the jump of Chad’s throat as he swallowed.
Robert anchored himself with his hands on Chad’s shoulders and started to move, slow enough that his finely-tuned senses for getting on this man’s nerves knew he wouldn’t be able to take it for long. Just as he thought, soon Chad was thrusting up into him, rising up out of the seat and pulling gasps out of Robert’s throat as pleasure jolted through him.
“That’s right,” Chad murmured. “Let me give it to you good.”
“Oh wow, you think you’re in charge?” Robert said, not letting it bother him that it was a little undercut by how unsteady his voice was. “Homefield advantage, remember?”
Before Chad could say anything, Robert shoved him down into the pilot’s chair, grabbed the straps, and pulled them down over him to lock with a resolute click. Chad struggled against them for a second, then relaxed and leaned back with a smirk. A few long strands of black hair had escaped from his ponytail and stuck to the sweat on his face. It was new to imagine someone else feeling the straps on their shoulders and knowing they were where they belonged.
“Hell. If you wanna do all the work, go ahead.”
“I do,” Robert said, and took the opportunity to kiss him hard. “I want all the credit this time.”
One thing Robert knew about himself was that he could be really good at a thing if he gave it one hundred percent of his attention, and right now, he put all of that focus into riding Chad. He grabbed onto his shoulders for leverage and took him to the hilt and back again, using him shamelessly to make himself feel good. As Robert’s eyes slid half-shut, the world turned into a blur partly the blue of the tilted mask and partly the colors of Chad’s face.
Chad’s hands on his hips probably could have lifted him up and down without any effort, buff bastard, but he kept his word and they only guided. Fuck, Robert loved the orange of his eyes.
“Scrawny little beautiful bitch,” Chad panted.
“Decide- whether- you’re insulting me- or not,” Robert managed.
Chad gripped him tighter and said, “No.”
The heat of Chad’s body surrounded him and soaked into him until he couldn’t tell what was the metaphorical arousal kind and what was literal Fahrenheit. He could feel sweat sheening him, and the air giving him instants of coolness as he moved. His breath got louder and rougher, trapped in the small space with them, until every time he sank down it came with an urgent and ragged noise he didn’t bother to hold back. Nobody to hear but the coyotes.
Chad was breathing, “Fuck, fuck,” and his lips kept pulling back at the corners.
Robert couldn’t look away from him, which wasn’t easy when he was putting everything he had into taking a dick, and the feeling of Chad wrapping his hand around his cock and stroking didn’t make it any easier. Every bit of his skin Robert touched was hot in a way that had to be under firm control. Chad could burn him to ash in an instant if he wanted. He had his old enemy’s full attention and devotion at the same time as he was at his mercy.
The noise Robert made when he came was a strangled yell that reverberated off the metal. Open-mouthed, he watched the splash cover Chad’s hand and chest. But it would take more than that to make him stop moving. He had a mission.
Chad’s eyelids were fluttering and the muscles of his stomach were moving rapidly with his breath, and Robert realized with a roller-coaster dive feeling that he already recognized what Chad looked like when he was about to come.
Grinning wildly, Robert leaned in, nipped his ear, and murmured, “Wanna come in Mecha Man’s ass?”
The whimper Chad made was gorgeous.
Robert rode him through his climax and got to get a good look at his face this time, in better light. It went through a whole transformation you could draw diagrams about. Figure 1-1, his dramatic-ass eyebrows knitting together. Figure 1-2, them smoothing out as his mouth fell open. All the way to 15 or so, which would be something complicated about how he managed to look blissed out and smirky at the same time.
Robert sighed and settled down, trying to catch his breath. It was like a hundred degrees in Chad’s lap, so he unseated himself and slid down to the nice cool floor. The monitors were still looking out at the hills and down onto the city. He leaned against Chad’s calf, and was blinded for a second as Chad pulled the mask off and stroked his hand through his hair. Fortunately not the hand with come on it. Felt nice.
“Made you scream,” Chad said smugly.
“That was a yell.” Robert’s limbs felt loose and languid. “Totally different sound.”
“Sure, right. Made a mess of your mech, too.”
“That’s fine. It all wipes down. I get blood in here all the time.”
“What did I say about saying the saddest fuckin’ things?”
Robert just laughed and kissed the side of his knee.
It was strange to share this space with someone else. Usually he carried captured villains or rescued civilians in his hands. There’d only been a couple times when somebody was so injured or the environment was so dangerous he’d had to bring them into the cockpit, and usually then he was too worried about keeping them from bleeding out to get real philosophical. Strange to see Chad in the pilot’s seat, and think about him being the one whose senses expanded to fit the suit, the one who was complete.
His apartment was a drawer where he stashed his body sometimes. This was home.
Robert was half-dozing when Chad said, “Hey.”
“Hm?”
Chad was looking off into the distance, either at a screen or at nothing. “You ever watch so much of a sitcom it starts getting depressing?”
“Oh yeah. One night I couldn’t sleep, and I watched so much Three’s Company I started thinking Mr. Roper was a metaphor for the inevitability of evil, never letting anybody live in peace.”
“Yeah, like that.” He was quiet long enough that it seemed like that was the end of that thought. Then he said, “Like, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Watch too much in a row and it just gets fuckin’ sad. Like, these people are so fucked up that they can’t fuck up just their own lives. Anybody who gets anywhere near them, they get sucked into their bullshit and fucked up too.”
One thing that stayed in Robert’s mind was, he’d dealt with a fair number of arsonists over the years. The ones in it for the insurance money or that kind of thing tended to book it as quick as possible. The ones in it for the fun of it tended to get to a safe distance and watch.
Nobody stayed in the building.
“That show’s joke and tragedy are the same thing,” Robert said. “You don’t know what would happen if they tried to break out of the cycle, cause they never do. You’ve gotta be brave to take that risk and care about other people. Easier to stick to rum ham.”
Chad said, “Hm.”
He kept running his fingers through Robert’s hair, like he was deep in thought. Maybe he got philosophical when he got laid. Maybe Robert would be around enough to find out.
Chad said, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I drive the robot?”
“Can I drive your car?”
“Fuck no. I just got the Phenomadents out of it.”
“Then no.”
“Dick,” Chad said lazily.
They didn’t have anywhere they needed to get back to. They watched the lights of the city through the monitors and listened to the faint sound of coyotes howling.