Chapter Text
I don't smoke except for when I'm missing you
To remember your mouth, how it tasted true
And I don't smoke except for after I've held you, baby
Being with you makes the flame burn good
Robert had scheduled time off for a week, had said he was sick and to leave a note for the team to behave. Blazer had believed him—and wasn’t that the worst part? That she took what he said as the truth and trusted him. He hadn’t done anything to earn that trust whatsoever.
He’d betrayed the people he felt that he could be himself with.
He had betrayed Chase—who came to pick up Beef and wasn’t allowed to ask any questions. He tried regardless, but Robert had shut him down. He betrayed the team and Blazer for lying about why he was taking the time off. He’d betrayed Flambae. Zahir.
Zahir, who had been completely honest with him. Who’d run with his punches and his shitty lifestyle and seemed to like him anyways. There was nothing so likeable about Robert that could’ve led Zahir to feel that way about him, and yet he seemed to think that there was. There was something in Robert, something deep down inside of him, that was leading Zahir on with that thought. With the idea that he was something other than, well, whatever husk he was.
Right now? He liked to imagine himself a hull. A hull so devoid of being human that he wasn’t even sure if he was one anymore. He was just a floating ball of darkness that had stolen a human’s skin and worn it to blend in, and somehow had dragged someone into his mess with it. That darkness was made of memories. Memories of the way that his father would talk to him or the ways that Chase would hug him when he was a child. Darker memories, like how Shroud acted right after his father’s death. Nicer memories that he had to go and ruin. Times where the team cared for him. Times where they had invited them along with their shenanigans. Times where Zahir had held him.
There were moments that he could remember when the two of them were physically close. How Zahir seemed to run hotter around him. The moment that he could taste the smoke from Zahir’s mouth to his was the moment that he knew he had to tell him. Had to make sure that Zahir wasn’t fooled any longer than Robert had fooled him already.
There was really only one way that Robert knew how to beg for forgiveness.
“You haven’t been back in a while.”
Robert huffed. Late at night, where the moon nor the street lamps could reach, there was a small bar that crawled with villains. Some of them were regular ones, ones who broke shit. Some where cocky guys who just rode off of their father’s evils. Some of them were the evil.
He hadn’t gone to this place in almost five months.
The first time that he had been here was when he first turned twenty two. He hadn’t done anything for his twenty-first birthday, but his twenty-second marked ten years of him being Mecha Man. He wanted to celebrate. The bartender, God bless her, had known him well by his fifth visit, known the fact that he wasn’t a true villain. But a lot of people who thought that they could harass the people at the bar would come in often—and someone needed to take out the trash at the end of the night. So he would come in about once a week and beat up anyone who the bartender pointed out had done wrong.
The last time that he had gone in before today was a week before he blew up.
“Bit of a life change,” Robert said to her. His voice was hoarse from the crying and vomiting that he had done. “Can I get a whiskey?”
She snorted before pouring him two. She never learned his name, and he never learned hers.
That was the way things should be with him. Nobody would get close enough to realize that he wasn’t exactly human. Just a mimicry of it, something imitating human life in order to get by. They wouldn’t get hurt that way, and Robert wouldn’t let himself cling to the idea of being loved. It was easier.
Robert didn’t remember much about that night at the bar. Only that a group of five men had walked in and were extremely creepy to the bartender, and that he had drunk his whiskey before slamming the glass over their heads and starting a fight. He remembered how his fist landed in someone’s nose and how he had kicked someone in foot before slamming their face against the bar. The familiarity of it all—the blood clinging to his skin and the adrenaline rushes in his veins. That was what he knew. What he came for.
“Such a mess,” the bartender snorted when she came back out with a broomstick and some bleach.
He pulled out a cigarette. “I’ll clean it up.”
She blinked at him. “Didn’t know that you smoked.”
Robert’s eyes looked down at the cigarette, almost completely finished in the time that it’d taken her to finish counting money and grab cleaning supplies. “I started recently.”
There was a moment when Robert realized he should start smoking.
Robert had never smoked in his life before he became a dispatcher for the Z-Team. He’d never picked up a cigarette, never looked at them when he bought beer and bandaids at the gas stations. But the moment that he could taste the smoke from Zahir’s mouth was the moment that he knew he was doomed—that day he had run to the store and bought the first pack that he saw. Camels, menthol crush. He would bite the filter and pretend that the taste of the nicotine inside of it was Zahir’s life force, that the paper was the way his lips would feel on his.
He never told Zahir that he was the reason Robert started smoking. Most people didn’t like it when you said things like that to them—and Zahir seemed rather against it whenever Visi smoked. But he had lit Robert’s first cigarette. And every one after, when Robert held a lighter up to the end of it, he imagined that it was Zahir’s fingers snapping the flames into place. He imagined that the man was beside him, that the flames running down his throat were something that he deserved.
The nicotine running down his throat helped him to forget, at least for a little bit, the way that Zahir had walked out. Robert had been prepared for something dramatic. For being burnt alive to a crisp and his will being automatically sent to Chase. He prepared for a fight and for his fists to turn red from the punches—he’d even been prepared to lose a couple of fingers back.
He wasn’t prepared for Zahir to walk out.
Everything else in his life that he lost was taken from him. Mainly by Shroud, mainly his father. Everything else he walked away from. Chase and the Brave Brigade, or the idea of having a normal childhood. Nothing in his life that he had cared for that much had walked out because of him, because of who he was or what he had been allowed to do. It was a consequence he thought that he would be okay with dealing with. That, in passing, he would get over it.
But there was something about the smoke from Zahir that he would never be able to get out of his head—no matter how many packs that he smoked out.