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In all honesty, Flambae had thought he’d be tougher than this.
Throughout the sum of his hero and villain days, he’d made himself well acquainted with pretty much every way a person could get hurt. He had his fair share of scars, ranging from slashes to punctures to rippled skin grown over the stumps of two fingers, and he’d been hit over the head with just about any object one might find lying around. He’d been flung around like a ragdoll and crushed by debris, and every time he’d shaken it off—laughed it off, even—and gone right back to fighting. Adrenaline was his best friend, and unless he was physically immobilised, there was no injury that could stop him from kicking the ass of whoever had dealt it to him.
So he was pissed, to say the least, when something smaller than a fucking tooth had him seeing stars. The shock came first, and plenty of it: he heard the gunshot before he felt it, and it did not knock him backward the way he’d seen in the movies. One second, he was standing upright, and the next second he was still standing upright, only now the sheer wall of sensation crashed into him, forcing him off balance without any recoil needed. Flambae sagged against the nearest wall, one hand braced against it, the other finding the spot where he’d been hit, and he watched, paralysed by shock more so than pain, as the bitch who’d shot him used that brief window of time to hoof it, clutching the jewellery she’d stolen.
He tried to do what he always did, tried to force his legs to obey him, but the mere thought of moving sent a sting of pain through him, sharp enough to make his head spin. Such a tiny wound, and yet it felt larger than anything ever had, larger even than the time a fucking building had collapsed on him, leaving him to channel every fibre of every muscle into keeping concrete slabs lifted over his head so they wouldn’t crush him to a pulp. He’d felt every inch of his body, then, braced to capacity for minutes on end, and it’d hurt.
And somehow, this hurt twenty times more. Applying pressure only amplified it, but he had enough presence of mind left to know that he probably should, so he squeezed his palm against the hole in his abdomen, feeling his mind narrow down to that tiny channel that’d been torn through him. He felt the pulse of blood against his hand, hot gushes in time with his heartbeat where it pounded in his ears, overtaking even the ringing left behind by the shot.
This was bad, he realised. Worse than anything before it had been, because most things hadn’t ripped through him quite this severely, cutting into any of the important stuff. But when Flambae briefly lifted his hand to check, he found it absolutely drenched in blood, light red and so warm that even he could feel it.
“Fuck,” he breathed, and a moment later, Waterboy was with him.
“Oh, boy.”
Flambae hadn’t realised he was still there. The whole reason he’d considered himself fucked was because he’d thought Waterboy had run off to do his fucking job. “Get her,” Flambae told him, too focused on the obvious to push him away, but hoping his tone got the point across.
Very clearly, it did not. His breath was thin and getting thinner, and Waterboy was unfazed. “You’re hurt,” he pointed out, and Flambae glared at him.
“You think, Waterbitch?” He pressed his hand back down, groaning against everything in his body that told him not to, every basal part that would’ve taken a slightly smaller amount of agony over the even greater, even worse sensation of touching a gunshot wound. “You come here to tell me that, huh? Fucking idiot. You let her get away.”
“You’re hurt,” Waterboy said again, with surprising firmness. He wound an arm around Flambae, bringing Flambae’s arm over his shoulders in turn, and Flambae did not have the strength to resist as he brought him down to the ground, propping him against the wall of the store they’d just exited. “I-I’m not—I wasn’t going to leave you here.”
“Good idea,” Flambae said, huffing. Surprisingly enough, talking helped. Some sense of normalcy, something to keep his mind off the place where it felt like his organs were leaking out of him in liquid form. “Now she’s off to sell her stolen shit, and I’m still gonna bleed out. Real hero work.”
“No,” said Waterboy, appalled. He’d followed Flambae down, kneeling at his side. “You won’t—you’re not gonna b-bleed out. I—” He shook out his hands, not unlike Flambae’s niece sometimes did, a physical anchor when the mind was elsewhere. “I-I’ve got this.”
It was then that Flambae remembered. In his delirium, he’d briefly considered cauterising the wound, but seeing as he was immune to his own fire, that would’ve gone nowhere—and besides, they would’ve had to cut him back open to get the bullet out. Waterboy, however—that might have been a different story. It had never been necessary before, so Flambae had forgotten about this little perk of his, but as he watched Waterboy try to hype himself up, he recalled Prism telling him about some minor injuries that’d healed over seamlessly through Waterboy’s help.
He didn’t want to feel relieved, but he did. His numbers were gonna suffer, but if Waterboy had gone after the thief, Flambae might very well have stayed here for as long as it took for Robert to switch to their channel and ask how things were going, and then he’d have stayed there until the ambulance arrived. In short: he would’ve fucking died, and he couldn’t even get himself to be pissed that it was Waterboy saving him, because getting shot at work without landing a single hit on the person doing it was a mortifying way to go.
“I don’t see you,” came Robert’s voice in his earpiece, as if on cue. “You guys okay? What happened?”
Flambae was about to lift his hand to his ear to speak, but Waterboy held a finger out to shush him. “S-She got away,” he told Robert, and Flambae sat there, wondering why the fuck he’d let himself be silenced by him of all people. “Flambae’s hurt, but we—it’s okay. I’ve got him.”
Flambae also wondered why that was such a comforting thing to hear, which corner of his brain this version of Waterboy was rubbing up against to make him feel like he was in good hands. If not for the bullet in him, he might have laughed.
“How bad is it?” asked Robert, and Waterboy chewed on his lip.
“P-Pretty bad,” he said. “She shot him. Probably still call a doc—an ambulance. But I can take—help him until then."
“Shit,” said Robert. “Okay, Waterboy, you do that. I’m sending someone. Hang tight, alright?”
“You got it, b-boss.”
He took his finger off the earpiece, taking a deep breath. “Look at you handling shit,” Flambae said. It came out kinder than he’d wanted it to, lacking the usual edge now that it was quite literally leaking out of him, but whatever. He was making sure that whatever happened in this alleyway was staying there.
“F-Fair warning,” Waterboy said, tugging at the tips of his gloves, one finger at a time. “I, uh—”
“Save it,” Flambae said. “I’d prefer not to die, so I don’t have a choice. Get it over with.”
“O-Okay.”
He adjusted as best he could without feeling like he was tearing himself open anew, trying to turn sideways to expose the wound better. That is, until Waterboy laid a gloveless hand onto his sternum, a touch that should not have been so firm considering who it came from, and Flambae stopped in his tracks.
He looked up at Waterboy, and those wet, blue eyes were the last thing he saw before Waterboy was diving in.
Flambae didn’t know what he’d expected. A touch, maybe, or for him to spit water all over him, letting it seep into the wound and work its magic from there. Instead, Waterboy had leaned down to level with Flambae’s stomach, and had put his mouth on him as one would with—fuck, as one would with any other part of someone that wasn’t a fucking gunshot wound. Flambae managed to tilt his head down, and he watched as Waterboy worked his tongue inside, gauging how deep this new hole of his was. He wondered—inanely, hysterically—if Waterboy was going to dig the bullet out with his tongue.
This sure was one way he’d never been touched before. Waterboy’s eyes were closed, one hand still braced against Flambae’s chest while the other pulled the skin of his stomach taut, spreading the flesh to give him more space, keeping his torn costume out of the way. Flambae had had men suck their own spend from him and give him the darkest, filthiest looks right after, but somehow it was this that made him breathless, a tongue breaching where nobody else had, because no one had ever had the chance, and why the fuck would they want to? He felt Waterboy’s lips around the edges of his wound, that clean entry where something foreign had entered, and it didn’t feel all that foreign anymore. It no longer hurt, and Flambae’s brain might have booted back up to normal, had it not been immediately assaulted with the feeling of a mouth inside him, a tongue lapping at bare, ripped-apart muscles, at what had to be the edges of organs, the severed lines of arteries.
And yet, against all reason, it felt like he was going to be alright.
When Waterboy drew back for a moment, Flambae thought he was done, but another, sharper sensation joined the first, and he realised what this had been about. Once coated in his saliva, every nerve ending dulled nearly to nothing, Waterboy made a noise not unlike a gag before squirting water from his mouth right into the wound. With the pain numbed, Flambae felt only the pressure of it, a single, focused stream against flesh that had never felt touch before, and after a few moments, something within him lodged free.
Waterboy rose from where he’d hunched, and he spat the bullet out with little regard for where it would land. Flambae could not help but stare at him, dainty features covered in his blood from nose to chin, ever-damp hair mussed in ways it normally wasn’t, eyes avoiding Flambae’s like he hadn’t just had his tongue in his guts.
“Do you, uh—” he said, beginning to put his gloves back on. “The bleeding stopped, so you—does it feel better?”
It was difficult to see through the blood that had already soaked into his clothes, but sure enough, his stomach was no longer spurting red. The wound had not healed as neatly as it would’ve if it’d been left to heal on its own, but Flambae was alive. He hated owing people, but he was alive because of Waterboy, and Flambae felt several parts of his mind stir together, a dozen tributaries meeting in a larger stream.
This whole head down, back hunched thing was starting to piss him off now that Waterboy had saved his fucking life.
“Yeah,” Flambae told him, because he supposed it wouldn’t help to tell him that he was also gonna find the earliest excuse to jack off in the hospital bathroom. “Yeah, man, you did good.”
Waterboy looked like it was the first time he’d ever heard those words, which Flambae knew wasn’t true because Robert continued to baby the kid. It was about time Waterboy started believing him, because this was getting ridiculous.
“Keep that,” Flambae added, cocking his chin at the bullet a few feet away. “They’ll wanna know what kinda gun it was.”
“Oh!” Waterboy shuffled on his knees to pick it up, staining his white gloves with the blood that remained. No point in taking them off in the first place, then, but he didn’t seem to mind, something in his hectic, neurotic manner softening as he closed his hand around the bullet. “I’m just—I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Okay,” said Flambae, because there was only so much one could ask of him. “That’s enough cheesy shit. Was licking my organs not enough bonding for you?”
For a moment, he looked like he wasn’t sure how to interpret those words, how much edge Flambae meant to put in them when he was still a little too winded to manage his tone as he usually would.
And then, he laughed. His back was straight now that he was kneeling, and his eyes closed all the way, shifting his goggles some. “It is a little weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, man,” said Flambae. “Sure fucking is.” He would’ve liked to push down the smile that rose in him, to refuse to let Waterbitch grow on him like he did on everyone else, but it was getting increasingly difficult. Some leftover adrenaline, surely, and the thrill of having narrowly cheated death. Something about the blood loss eroding his defences. Happened to everyone.
Waterboy stirred a moment before he did, perking up at the sound of sirens. “T-Think you can st—get up?” he asked, and Flambae assessed the spot that’d been a gaping hole only a few minutes prior. The numbness was wearing off, leaving a strange feeling just to the left of pain, and when he twisted his torso to test its range, the sensation shot far deeper than the wound itself had been. Still, it was far preferable to the alternative.
“I’m not letting them carry me on a stretcher,” he said, “so yeah.”
He would’ve started pushing himself to his feet, somehow manoeuvering around that ache that wasn’t quite an ache, but Waterboy was standing before he knew it, holding out his hand to him. Flambae eyed him, this walking beanpole, this grown man who couldn’t string together two sentences, this hero with zero actual heroic qualities—until now.
Well, maybe even before now, only Flambae hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t been around to, or had ignored it every time it’d come up.
He clapped his hand into Waterboy’s and let himself be pulled up. The costume needed fixing, which was gonna be a pain because it was delicate material, but his mind kept circling around to the greater, more urgent truth: that he was alive. He’d evaded death before, but never so closely. Never when it had already had its claws in him. And it’d certainly never been someone else pulling him back from the brink when he’d been too gone to help himself.
He wanted to roll his eyes just for thinking it, but maybe this was what Robert meant. Had Flambae gone alone, relying solely on his own skill and prowess, he wouldn’t have lived to see tomorrow. It was objectively not a big deal, Waterboy probably did this all the time, but it had never been him, and no matter which way he turned it over in his head, Flambae was forced to reconsider a great deal of things about him.
Less of an annoyance and more of an asset. Someone who had his back during battle, or after, when he had to pick between victory and reason. Someone who had grown into his role as a hero when Flambae hadn’t been looking, and yeah, Waterboy still had a long way to go, but Flambae had to respect the hustle. Clearly there was more to him than swim goggles and a snail trail wherever he went.
He wasn’t gonna tell Waterboy that, of course, but as Flambae watched him wave the ambulance over and explain to the EMT what’d happened, something in him dreaded their next mission together just a little less.
And if Waterboy still carried himself like he had no right to be there, Flambae was going to kill him himself.