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Chad fucking hates when he has to track down Mecha Bitch for his punch, instead of him just waiting at his desk.
Something about it made him feel white-hot, when he had to work for it. It was already something the bitch owed him, why couldn't he make it easy all the time? Help them both get it over with?
At least this time, he doesn't find him somewhere fucking weird like in a janitor's closet. It's pretty fast, actually—he just follows the smell of bitch Robert's Twinkies down to the lab.
. . .
Not literally, he's being fucking, metaphorical or whatever. The bitch doesn't stink of Twinkies except in the ten minutes after he's eaten one. He actually smells like depression most days.
Don't read into him knowing that, Chad doesn't give a rat's ass about him, thank you.
It's just fucking obvious to whoever has eyes or a nose.
Worse lately, too. Usually he just smells oily, like unwashed hair. But lately, there's been a gritty edge to it, of burnt metal and overheated skin and pissed-off stink. It's fucking acrid as hell, and Chad thanks every one of those twinkling stars above that least Robert hasn't fucking called him in for a meeting since the change occurred, or he might've done something about it.
Anyways. Giving this asshole his monthly punch is going exactly to plan up until he walks into the loud-ass lab he's in (it seriously sounds like someone's running a vacuum cleaner, even before the doors open, and it's fucking obvious which one he's in because all the others are quiet) and gets punched in the face by that depression stink of hot metal and rancid oil.
His face scrunches up, and he pauses.
Robert's sat at a table in the back, wearing these goggles that make him look stupid, hunched over what looks like a limb made out of metal. He's got this like, air-gun-jet thing, and it looks like he's slowly running it over the inside of a joint. Debris is flying like crazy with every swipe, a cleaning clearly long overdue.
Ah. Right.
Chad kind of fucking forgot the Mecha-Bitch was a robot in places other than his brain or his heart. The first hint has been the thunking noise his kicks had made during a bar fight the team had dragged him out to.
Chad had just figured he had a metal shin or something, at the time.
And then one time he'd been looming over him at the desk, and Chad's leg had brushed his left, and it'd been cold. He'd chalked it up to bad blood pressure, just more shit for poor little Bob-Bob to deal with.
And then at one point, because Robert apparently fucking loathed taking care of himself or his shit, it'd seized up while he was walking to the coffee machine. By the next morning it was all over the building that Robert Robertson the III was hauling around a ten pound metal leg and not even that could keep the overworking bastard upright.
Coming across him cleaning it is. . .
Chad feels the strange urge to look away.
It's not like, fucking disgust! Even though the process is absolutely fucking disgusting, and Robert is definitely fucking coated in gross-ass shit and getting it everywhere or whatever. He's not like, got anything against amputees. That'd be stupid and hypocritical, considering he is one.
It's just. Intimate. Like putting scar cream over his stumps, intimate. Like walking in on someone in the bath, intimate.
. . .
It's fucking. Stupid. That Bob-Bob's got that kind of bullshit going on. That the normie kept going with the Mecha Man shit even after he lost a limb at some point like a damn idiot and then just ignored that if he just stopped, he could've lived a pretty good life.
Makes him wonder if there's other bits that are missing. Maybe his fucking dick, too, ha, then he could call him Mecha-Dick and have it hit even harder—
Chad's stopped looking at him and started looking at the wall at some point and he only realizes he's done it when the sounds of blasting air stops. Fuck. He didn't realize he'd been standing here for so long.
The air-gun-thing gets set down with a click, and Robert flips his leg with a grunt of effort.
Chad bets he could handle that thing no problem. Robert was like picking up a bag of grapes for all the effort it took to move him. Skinny-ass bitch's weight would actually be outright improved, measurably, by eating a bag. The leg would be fine, not even clunky, he's sure.
He creeps closer, the loud blasting of air covering his footsteps, but apparently he forgot fucking something that gives him away, because Robert's shoulders tense before he gets anywhere as near as he'd like, and the blowing stops.
"What do you want, Flambae."
Chad scuffs his boot against the floor, weighing whether to ask about why he's cleaning the leg here or not, and then makes his decision.
"Well, I'd fucking love to have my two fingers back, but I'll have to settle for my monthly punch."
Robert sighs, long and loud. Like he wants to collapse against the table, but knows he can't.
"I am busy."
Chad cracks his eight knuckles pointedly, so that Robert can count each and every one and notice where the sound comes short.
"Don't give a fuck. This'll be quick. But I can wait a minute. You're not going anywhere, Mecha-Bitch."
He posts up against the wall like he's back in school waiting for his turn on the playground, and Robert eyes him warily before going back to his work.
It's tempting to cross his arms instead of letting them hang loose at his sides.
But that shows nervousness. Weakness.
They stay where they are, and every time Robert looks at him out of the corner of his eyes, he juts out his chin a little just so he doesn't forget Chad doesn't give a fuck about what he thinks.
Robert gets back into the rhythm and ignores him eventually, and this close up the noise is definitely hurting both their ears, but Robert acts like he doesn't even notice.
Maybe all the head trauma left him half-deaf. And that was why he was such a bad fuckin', listener when the team told him he was doing complete shit.
Chad drums the fingers of his left hand against his thigh while he waits.
Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.
Fist.
Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.
Tighter fist, the tendons creaking. His heart is beating hard enough to hurt, anger and something skittish making it speed up.
Taptaptap—
Robert pushes away from the table.
"Okay, I'm done. Just hit me."
Don't mind if I do.
Chad cocks back the incomplete fist, this time, he's feeling weird enough to need that. He's been picking Robert's face, every single time. Left side.
Robert's gone all scrunched, neck braced for the impact.
This time, he goes for the left forearm, hard enough to bruise a normie and hopefully knock him over.
Clunk.
What meets him does not feel like a normal arm. It's solid, and inflexible, despite looking like normal skin. Chad pulls back a little, head cocked, and Robert opens an eye to glance at him warily as he hits his knuckles against it again, twice.
Knock, knock.
Yeah, that's muffled metal. Huh. Was it just the arm? How the hell was it being hidden? Because he thinks he'd notice if half of Robert was made of the shit, unless the injuries happened at different times and he'd managed to afford a more high-tech prosthetic. But this has him questioning that.
"Had enough for today?"
He sounds bored, and like he'd rather be anywhere but here. But underneath that, there's the barest hint of anxiety. Insecurity.
Chad will gladly dig like a dog for any hint of something that fucks with Mecha Man. His hand closes around the arm and squeezes, bruising level again.
"Naaah. You don't feel this shit at all, do you? You hiding more hardware underneath this fuckass skin glove or camouflage or whatever it is?"
"Is it really your business whether or not I am, Flambae?"
He sounds tired. He hasn't put his leg back on yet.
On any logical level concerned with privacy and interpersonal distance, maybe it's true.
But that's not how Chad works.
By his own metric? Oh hell yeah, it's his business. Anything to do with Robert or his secrets is Chad's business. Robert made it his business with the finger-chopping shit, and then the lying like a bitch. Someone had to keep his ass in check.
Chad squeezes a bit harder, and watches Robert's face tighten.
So there's some sensation, or at the very least, something that tells him when there's pressure.
"The Mecha-Bitch title is more literal than you let on, huh?" He tests.
Robert's expression darkens immediately, and his other hand settles onto Chad's wrist. He'd never have a hope of moving him in his own, of course, but it's a warning.
As Chad weighs whether to heed it or not, he hears Robert's teeth start to grind.
He lets go.
"Jeez, Bob-Bob, I'm just curious." He steps back, hands raised casually in surrender. Robert doesn't relax, though. His body stays coiled tight, watching Chad for any sudden moves.
"Yeah, well, you can stick your 'curiosity' up your ass." He barks, and the left arm that comes up and forms a fist has just the barest microseconds of lag to it. Like it took a moment to react to what he told it to do. "You got your one punch. Now, please, fuck off?"
He's holding onto civility by the tips of his nails. The exact ratio of how much of him is man to machine is clearly a sore spot.
Chad gleefully marks it down in his mental list of Robert's myriad traits and traumas he's revealed since he became their dispatcher. He hadn't started seriously keeping track until after the Sardine, but it was still getting to be quite detailed.
Hands still raised after poking at his favorite rattlesnake, Chad backs out of the lab. Seeing Robert cleaning his arm has reminded him—the Firebird needs an oil change anyway.
He's still mulling over the reveal later, when he's on his back in his driveway underneath his Firebird in a mechanic's jumpsuit with a pan to catch the used engine oil flowing from the unscrewed cap.
The smell of the stuff coming out is almost the exact same that came off of Robert. Rancid, and gunky. He wrinkles his nose.
He wonders how often Mecha-Dick cleans that fake arm. He still smells a little bit like rancid mineral oil and anger-sweat, but the burnt metal is gone. Probably came from the prosthetic leg, before Robert took that air-blasting gun to it. If how he treats that bit of essential hardware is any indication, the arm has gotta be fucking nasty underneath whatever flesh-colored shell is covering it.
Probably tons of skin gunk mixed with sweat clogging up whatever wires or joints are in there, at the very least. It's definitely sweat-proof, but that doesn't help as much as you'd think, especially when it's not being maintained as often as it should.
Chad watches the thickened oil drain into the pan, imagining the same stuff hiding underneath Robert's surface. He'd peel back the skin, and a thick, stinking slurry, black as sin and grainy from debris, would come dripping out. Mecha-Bitch's whole arm would be coated, like some sick metaphor about how awful the man himself could be underneath his perfectly imperfect heroic veneer.
Sometimes, it felt like Chad was the only one who saw to that dark core, where nothing was out of the question if he accomplished his goal.
He remembers when Robert had left Shroud on the rooftop, the fading calculation behind his eyes as he looked down at them all fighting even while supporting Invisigal with his arm, and he's pretty sure the only reason the villain lived is because Robert had concluded that he'd already done everything he could do to the guy before incurring negative returns for the effort.
Chad puts the cap back on after the oil runs dry, and climbs out from under the car, carefully dragging out the oil pan.
Maybe underneath the surface, it's all wires bundled together into a vague shape. Or maybe it looks solid, and you have to open it up in sections for maintenance. Some fuckin', science fiction nightmare with blood pumping through metal tubes inside, swimming in machine oil like a brain floats in the skull. Things could be tangled in there, and Robert wouldn't even feel it until it fucked up at a critical moment.
Chad leans over under the hood to pour the new oil into the open maw of the engine, and in his mind, the internal chamber of Robert's forearm shines in the same beaten-up chrome silver as the Firebird's hot and mechanical heart.
He kind of wants to see how his metacarpals are arranged. They've got to be so, so finicky.
He imagines the pistons, all gummed up and lurching whenever they became unstuck like a faltering engine, impeding Robert's job as their dispatcher to the point where he can't even hack reliably, and having to pull his dumb ass aside like a malfunctioning toaster and take his arm apart to clear out and replace the lubricant. How they'd twitch when touched, and Robert would be spitting mad, but eventually have to give in to him taking control because he hadn't been taking care of himself properly. And when he wasn't taking care of himself properly, it fucked up the team.
If only Chad could treat him like his car. An object, predictable in function and where it breaks down. Something to be fixed, like if he just reached into that petrol-slicked cavity behind his eyes, he could turn a dial and Robert's thought process would resemble more of a man than a machine. If he could puzzle out the instinctual groove Robert fell into for hero work (like Chad did) and what interrupted it, narrow down what made him decide who to spare and who to cut, and how he could subtly prop the guy up and keep him going for as long as the team needed him instead of just waiting for him to break and inevitably fuck them all over—
Chad blinks. The jug of oil has emptied while he wasn't paying attention, mouth hovering over the open engine cap and still dripping.
Well. Actually, what's stopping him?
Well.
Is he really about to. . . Try to become this rabid raccoon's fuckin', watcher? To do maintenance on him, like he'd do for a car as a mechanic?
All for the sake of the team?
(And maybe himself, a little.)
(Because smelling Robert's fucking depression-anger-oil funk all the time is just, it makes Chad want to take him apart and scrub him one layer at a time from the bones out until he was shiny and new on every layer. And then just look at him laid out in his entirety like that when he couldn't hide anything about himself for shit. And clearly Royd wasn't fucking helping him with it, if he even knows about the arm.)
He puts the cap back on, wipes his hands on a spare rag in his pocket, and shuts the hood. Honestly, he's poured so much into this old hag she might as well be a whole new car. The front alone was a motherfucker to replace after she got sat on.
. . .
The next thought enters Chad's relaxed mind with all the subtlety and abruptness of a gunshot.
What if he could do that to Robert, too?
Replace all his malfunctioning parts, and no matter how vulnerable or. . . intimate it got, Robert would let him?
And eventually, Chad wouldn't have to fuckin' worry about him or track his trauma and habits anymore? Stop treating him like a tiger that could size him up as a meal, and instead, like he'd been. . . Trained?
The idea of a leashed Mecha Man smashes into his poor, hasn't-gotten-any-dick-for-a-week sexual constitution like a wrecking ball and Chad automatically incinerates the cloth in his clenched fist to nothing, throttling a startled noise before an unmanly squeak can escape, even though there's no one to see it.
A flush of heat rises to his face, the color of his cheeks no-doubt an incandescent shade of red.
He hates the guy. He can't stop thinking about him, even when he's working on his fucking car. He wants to support him so that bad shit doesn't happen to his coworkers, because even if he's not friends with them all, they're still people who deserve to stay out of prison for as long as possible. These concepts can and do co-exist in his mind.
Naturally, the thought of humiliating Robert a little plays a factor in his decision making, as it always does.
Okay. Chad wipes off the ashes on the front of his jumpsuit, already thoroughly stained from previous incidents. What does Chad know about Robert?
He likes light things to eat. It's unclear if that's because of stomach problems, flightiness and fear of being slowed down, or habit from being Mecha Man and probably trying not to hurl in the suit when he ate too much (Chad has a similar problem. Now that he's got his flying license, heavy foods are decidedly reserved for dinner. Nobody likes feeling like they're going to throw up when they come in for a landing), or all three.
He won't spend money on himself if he can avoid it.
Caffeine may be the one thing that keeps him going other than pettiness.
He views his time as a resource to be spent on other people, and not himself, like the money thing, unless he has to do it in order to keep helping other people.
If he sees a way to use a joke to lighten an atmosphere or distract someone from himself, he'll do it.
He won't do it at his own expense if he doesn't like you, and is more likely to sacrifice you on the altar.
He loves to mock people, and he's got a deep rage in his heart for bullies (Chad winces), but not when they bully him. Only other people.
Kind of like a bully for bullies.
He's got a metal leg and arm. The leg is a lot less high tech and inexpensive, and probably only appeared after he crashed, as far as Chad's been able to figure, but he hasn't been able to look back through what information and videos of Mecha Man Blue exist in order to track down exactly when the arm happened. The prosthetics for each are too different for them to have happened at the same time. Maybe when Robert had more money?
All of this barely forms a workable pattern, which he hates. This is how Chad functions, how he stays safe—he forms patterns and masks, and he looks at other people's and analyzes them and decides how he needs to act in order to be left alone. He doesn't understand what goes on in people's heads sometimes, but he can see cause and effect just fine.
Alice is one of the few people he can interact with in a pattern he actually enjoys, that isn't designed to drive anybody who interacts with it insane. He has a reputation, after all.
Mecha Man was one of the few who received a theoretical pattern tailor-made to him to avoid another finger-chopping incident after Chad tried to press a boundary and test him out of his fuckin' armor at Crypto Night. Which, honestly, is pissing Chad off, because he came up with a pattern for Mecha Man, just in case he ever saw him again, and then Robert got a separate pattern for himself by cheating and hiding his identity, because he's in a position of power over the team and Chad's response to people with power over him has always been to test their boundaries and find buttons to press for when they try to exert it.
(That hadn't ended well with Mecha Man, either time. He'd planned on not doing it whenever he saw the hero in costume again and just being an agreeable little bitch as to not draw his wrath. What a fucking joke.)
And then Robert became Mecha Man, and their patterns of behavior (already so similar, and overlapping in places, and he'd fucking suspected it but didn't want to admit it) became a snarled mess. He couldn't tell if Robert was seeing him as a person (unlikely, his brain had hissed at him the following morning, after he called out to figure out what the fuck he was going to do, or he wouldn't have fucking lied), a villain to be bullied, or as an asset to to the team to be managed like Chad himself had been cautiously filing Robert under (he was going to be fucking nice. Maybe even a bit of a suck-up. He'd smiled at the bitch after the Sardine while they ate, even though he'd thrown food at him a few days prior and fucked up his whole day, teased him by getting him the wrong order as a call back, and then it all fucking blew up), and just hiding it. So Chad had gone back to the button pressing stage, with an extra layer of compliance whenever Robert was in the suit.
He didn't give a fuck about Shroud, personally, at least he didn't until the bombs started going off.
But he knew Mecha Man did. And Mecha Man was the person their entire team was anchored to, at that point. It was participate or get fucking. . . excluded, or whatever. Participate in the vote even if it's to say no, participate in the fight or get fucking fired, participate in the celebration right next to Robert/Mecha Man/that fucking dead-eyed robot bitch looking at them all like he was calculating exactly how they did for their next performance reviews and drop his ass, knocking that mental arithmetic right out of his head and letting the man actually enjoy the moment for about forty minutes.
Now, he's pretty sure Robert sees him as something like a flame. Something he has to stoke or restrain depending on the mission, and keep at arm's length, except when he must allow it to burn him to continue using it. But also wild, and tending to do its own shit, including be nice for no discernible reason to his hang-dog, depressed ass.
Which is how Chad likes it. People observing him back freaks him the fuck out, sometimes.
(Maybe that's why he hates Robert so much for looking at them like he's judging them all, sometimes. Less, these days. And mostly at Flambae, like he's trying to figure him out. But it's still a lot.)
He'll lean into the 'nice for no discernible reason' bullshit, he thinks, cracking his knuckles. Let him assume it's more shit to throw him off, until he's so used to Chad bringing him shit and poking him to avoid collapse he won't protest when he starts tuning up his arm like his car.
(Is some of this an excuse to get his hands on Robert's advanced prosthetic? Maybe. Chad designed his own suit back when he was a villain running insurance scams and the occasional mental break down. He gets to be a tiny bit intrigued by weird tech shit, even if his whole thing is more secretly nerding out over materials science, or mechanicals, or thermodynamics.)
(He can be smart. He couldn't make it, he's not that smart, he had to get it commissioned and do a shit ton of research, but he did design it.)
Operation: Mecha Maintenance is a go.
He starts with light shit. High protein, fiber, light snacks like granola bars, egg salads, classic white people food to help Robert feel more safe. Painfully spiceless. Hell, it's like fucking Waterboy is leaving Robert shit instead of him, which is hilarious, because Robert is so busy tracking the guy and convinced it's him that he's missing the actual windows to spot Chad by a mile.
Chad tracks his opportunities with care. Left at the desk during a coffee break. Before Robert sat down in the morning. After he came back from the infirmary to check on a team member. Pretty much any time Robert is away from his chair, Chad is stealing into his cubicle and leaving things Robert could eat in a few bites, max. Frequent snacks to keep his strength up is the goal.
It feels like a heist. A tiny bit of thrill, dodging Robert's increasingly unsettled, paranoid eyes around the office. It's like uber-difficult stealth boot camp, and he can't wait until he does his next mobility assessment, because he can already tell he's gonna go up another couple of points.
Chad doesn't even stick around to watch him eat what he leaves, for fear of being caught. Instead, he recruits Invisigal.
Well. More, she was kind of there when he was dropping things off and then followed him out of sight and accused him of trying to poison Robert.
Chad was actually a little offended. Hasn't he proved that if he wanted Robert dead, he'd do it directly?
Up until this point, he's been judging how much Robert's been eating by checking his trash can. After the first day, it'd all been thrown out, and Chad had to hold back the urge to shake him.
"Look, okay. Mecha-Bitch is fucking—" Chad performs a strangling motion as he explains, "But if he dies, or gets fucked up, or starves himself to death, the team's gonna suffer. I don't actually give a fuck about him beyond that. You guys are mine. Even you."
It's said like he's half convincing himself, because Chad does give a fuck about the prosthetics. He feels weird about them, now that he know they're there. He just can't stop noticing the tells now that he can differentiate them from Robert's normal my-spine-is-fucked or my-joints-are-ass movement.
Chad didn't elect to get his own because he didn't think there was a metal that could put up with him going full fuego. He wonders if Robert notices his tells, too, when they bicker. The phantom pain, the decreased grip strength, the adjusted grips.
He hopes he feels guilty, but knows that's unlikely.
Eventually, after about a week of Chad cooking a bunch of shit at home and keeping it in a cooler in his car, Robert's appetite starts to increase. He eats more at lunch, actually brings in breakfast for himself, now, and Chad can't exactly judge his dinner shit, he isn't eating whenever the team breaks into his apartment, but hopefully he's having one.
The man himself seems both reluctant, and baffled at the development. The behavior was already on the way out now that the team had embraced him, but Chad mentally fist-pumps every time he's indulgent instead of defensively snappish or mean.
The anger-sweat smell is genuinely less, and the more Chad thinks about it, maybe in this way Robert is like him, a little. When he doesn't like something, or he isn't doing well, it stresses him out and pisses him off to the point where he can't help but do something about it.
Chad doesn't really sweat much as a matter of course - except when he's doing hero work and shit gets dicey. Maybe that's why how Robert smells keeps jumping out to his senses when he passes by his desk. It lingers.
Robert doesn't relax or stop being busy. He never does that, at least not fully. But he eases, like a cog in a machine being given fresh lubricant and run at less energy than will stress the metal. His leg moves like it takes effort, but doesn't lock up.
Chad lowers the amount of snacks in response.
He still smells like old oil. His left hand still fucks up sometimes, moving too fast or too slow, like the internal mechanisms are fighting through clinging molasses.
Chad looks at that arm, in the break room, in meetings, when they're all filing out for the day, and thinks, I can fix that.
One day, it fails. Badly, by Robert's cursing over the comms mid-hacking job.
"Why the fuck isn't it working—!"
"Ey, Bobbo, you all good?" Sonar, of all people, is the one to check in, and Robert shuts up abruptly. After a moment, he clears his throat, and stiffly replies, "All good over here, team, just a bit of a computer malfunction."
That night, Chad dresses in his mechanic's jumpsuit, grabs his degreaser and a few cloths, and decides to go through with it. He tells himself it's because it's started impeding Robert's, and therefore his, job, but that's not why.
He just. Wants to see it. Needs to see how Robert's fucked himself up, to uh, mock him for it, of course.
The flight over is careful and restrained, white-hot roaring jets of flame enveloping his shoes, the only part of his fire-proof costume he's still wearing.
He floats outside the balcony, trying to decide whether to enter, and just decides to case the inside for a minute. There's a glow of dim light coming from the otherwise dark apartment. In the center of the concrete floor, Robert is sitting criss-cross in his boxers and a tank top, the light of Alice's posable lamp centered on his arm, faint shadows of tools and containers and a roll of paper towels scattered around in reach.
Robert's arm doesn't look normal. It still has vague texture, an idea of what a human's skin should look like, but now it's rendered in silver from the elbow down. Metallic.
A seam has opened, at the hinge of the inner elbow held in his lap. It gleams wetly in iridescent black, drawing Chad's eye even from across the room and through glass, like the same wavering effect of those images of black holes, sucking in light so hard that it can't escape.
Before Chad knows it, he's landed on the balcony and opened the unlocked (Bob-Bob can't be this fucking stupid, he wanted someone to come in) glass door to enter the room. It bangs with the force, announcing his presence loudly.
Robert startles, head jerking up.
"What the fuck? Flambae?"
Chad can't say anything. He steps towards him, the things in his grip falling from clumsy and prickling hands, vision devouring the open seam.
He wants to get his fingers in there. Split Robert open around them, dig deep.
"Get out!" Robert shouts, breaking Chad from his reverie, arm pulled defensively to his chest and starting to change back to being flesh-colored.
Chad shakes his head and distracts him with a scolding, anxiety and eagerness blending into one as he points furiously at Robert's left arm. "No. You need to clean that prosthetic, and you haven't done it in a while. I fucking know you haven't." He shakes his head harder, with disapproval. "Can't be that much worse than an oil change on my car. Why the fuck would you leave your prosthetics so long, they seized at work? Both times? Even if you hate yourself, that's a work of fucking art, right there. It doesn't deserve that."
Robert pauses to stare at the wall of his shitty apartment, considering it, and Chad drifts closer, lured by the dulling gleam of silvery metal and oil. The carefully restrained fire inside flares.
When Robert tunes back in, he's only a few feet away, and he startles. "Flambae—?"
"Yeah?" Chad's response comes out too high. Too breathy. Too excited in a way he didn't even know he needed to hide until it was too late. Robert's arm relaxes, the inner side exposed again.
He can't look away from that split-open seam in the metal.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
Chad swallows spit, takes another step forward, without breaking eye contact with it, and carefully collapses to his knees beside Robert. He doesn't disturb a single tool, or brush the prosthetic, but Robert's body still flinches.
"Like what?" He finally tears his eyes off of it all, the oil-slicked arteries and silver bones exposed to the air, a profane and mechanical and bloodless gore. The closest comparison he can think to make being a gutted machine's open wound all gummed up by clotted black. Finally meets Robert's pinprick-thin pupils.
"Like you want to take me apart." Robert's voice is quiet, and he's staring into his eyes. They're probably wide enough to swallow the whole world, not just Robert. "And not in a killing me way."
Was it that obvious? Fuck. Of course it was that obvious. Chad just fucking went to his knees next to him in the middle of his apartment without so much as a 'hello, how are you, what's up'.
"Because I do." Chad admits without hesitation, fingers twitching towards the scattered tools and cloths and paper towels and containers of lubricant, unsure where to begin. "Can I?"
Robert's pupils blow into pools of inky petrol. But somehow, he's still hesitant. Still guarded, even as Chad drinks in the vulnerability wafting off his body language like he's sucking on his water bottle after working out to failure.
"Is that, uh. . . Wise? Sure you're not gonna set my apartment on fire like that one dispatcher's Kia Soul? I mean, some of this shit is flammable." He gestures one-handedly, and Chad watches a bared, insulated tendon in his prosthetic arm judder reflexively like a strummed guitar string.
Chad shakes his head. He knows he's acting like he's entranced, barely holding back, but he really wouldn't. He can have self control when he's invested in something being unharmed, or else he wouldn't be able to work on the Firebird.
Instead, wordlessly, he tears off a paper towel from the roll and rubs it across a thick patch of oil and debris, clinging to the metal skin. The seam splits all the way to the wrist.
Robert makes a sound. It could be passed off as discomfort, the intake of breath through his nose, the air raspy and rumbled in his throat, but it's not immediately clear.
Chad doesn't think it is, though.
It's not a bad one, as far as Chad can tell, so he keeps cleaning, drawing the arm to his instead of Robert's lap and leaning over it. As he goes on, he finds a degreaser among Robert's scattered supplies, and that makes it even easier. There's a plastic grocery bag to discard the used-up towels in, and watching it fill as he lifts away grit and layers of stinking, rancid oil is practically meditative.
It's like a ritual. A pattern. Something Chad can file away, under the mental umbrella that contains everything Robert.
Swipe across the surface, leaving shining silver, and listen to Robert's breathing get heavier and hitching. His criss-crossed legs shift a little wider. Just tug the metal mesh of fake skin farther open, revealing more of that techno-viscera so he can get at it, and he can watch the wires inside wriggle and twist like snakes when they're exposed to air.
It's slow. Before he even tries to approach cleaning any of the components directly, he has to remove what seems like over a year of accumulated general build up from the cavity, thick and gathered on the walls like layers of sandstone rendered in ink. There's room to do it, but not much, so Chad has to be very, very careful.
He uses his damaged hand to fit into the most cramped areas, on the opposite side of the opening behind the fake musculature, lifting the entire bundle of shifting wires and metal with the other, and Robert gasps outright, startled and strangled.
The entirety of his forearm and hand is open to Chad's devouring eyes now, the snck of metal sliding against metal loud in the silence.
He's shaking. A minute tremble. One hand is gripping his knee, so tightly the skin around his fingernails has gone pale.
Chad follows the line of his leg down, to the boxers Robert had chosen to do this in when he had anticipated the privacy of his apartment not being disturbed, half-naked and smeared with oil and machine grease.
There's a shape in the fabric. Chad keeps his eye on it from where he's angled his body to hover over Robert's arm, lifts a wire, strokes it with his fingertips, and watches the outline of Robert's cock jerk in those boxers like it's the best thing he's seen all week. And it is. It's a reward, seeing Robert's stoic nature falter, the robotic mannerisms fall away as Chad touches him with more and more intensity.
Which is why it's such a shame when his legs shut abruptly, obscuring the view, and Robert coughs awkwardly.
He shifts like he's going to pull away. Fortunately, Chad reminds him he's still literally under his skin by stroking his wires again pointedly, and he stops.
Chad looks Robert in the face, sees his expression, and smiles smugly.
Robert is flushed, all the way to the damaged tip of his ear, the red of embarrassment and shame creeping down his neck, chin tucked to keep Chad in his view. He's breathing like he's just run a marathon, heaving and stuttered, tank top sticking to his skin wetly with more than oil. His face is shiny and eyes fever-bright, the red settling thickest at the height of his cheeks.
He doesn't smell like stress-sweat. It's something else.
Hotter. More explicit. Slick.
Like sex.
Chad breaks eye contact, sucked back into the reality of the wet and writhing machinery he's still touching. It's squirming, breaking up clotted bits of debris for Chad to remove.
"Yeah. You needed this."
Chad teases his prosthetic's wires with a forced grin covering his wild desire, slides the towel through the center of the tangle to remove more black oil, and Robert squirms outright, hips shifting forward, lips pressed shut like something is trying to escape, and it's too genuine for Robert to allow it.
"Are these actually hooked into your nervous system?" He asks faux casually, rolling a wire that's nearly microscopic between two pinched fingers. "Should've figured you'd be a sensitive bitch past the metal."
"Mm-hm." Robert moans, self-recrimination heavy in in every syllable. It's not clear which part he means. Maybe it just feels fucking good.
"Fuck, that must've been expensive." Chad sighs. For a whole arm? That's close to a hundred thousand dollars, probably. "And you let it rot like this?"
"The point was—" Robert cuts himself off with a groan at a particularly thorough and bold stripping movement, towel wrapped entirely around half of the cables with his fist like Chad's giving him a handjob, "It's designed to be low maintenance, asshole. It was still working anyways. I didn't like to think about it."
Like Chad didn't like to think about his missing fingers.
Fuck. God damn it. Robert isn't the one being fucking affected by this.
Chad doesn't try to obscure it. That'd just bring attention. Instead, he keeps cleaning, stroking, heaping indulgent attention on now-shining metal internals like they're actually having sex, and his goal in mind is to make Robert's to cum rather than pay attention to what Chad got out of it.
And it's working. Robert's squirming, little huffs breaking free of his lungs, thighs rubbing together. His whole body is turned away like he's ashamed of the reaction, the only part of him still making contact his prosthetic leg and arm.
Chad wonders why he didn't take it off, but then again, that's Robert to a T. Doesn't even take off his fake leg while he's cleaning his fake arm, in case he needs to run, even though he's in the middle of his own apartment. He'd probably try to throw a punch and splatter oil absolutely everywhere, and his only hope would be the assailants slipping in it and knocking themselves out. Stupid.
The thought is horribly conflicted, and terrifyingly fond. He keeps forgetting this is fucking Mecha Man, and simultaneously, he can't forget that he's coming close to running his fingers through wires and cables like he would to a lover's hair as they laid in bed.
He keeps rubbing, even though Robert's definitely clean now, from gleaming tendons in the front of his wrist where veins should be, to the taut bundle of cables and rubber-encased nerves.
Right as Robert's tenseness and trembling seems to approach a peak, he stops, pulls the towel free, and sits back.
The shivering, rattling sound of wires and metal vibrating calms.
"I'm done. Need to replace it with new lubricant now." Chad announces, and a raw, choking sound seeps out of Robert before he turns back to face him. His legs fall open again, and the sinful natural perfume of his body floats across the space between them to roost in Chad's nose as he inhales greedily. No oil, anymore. Just skin, and sweat, and a bitter, heady smell Chad knows from a hundred rounds of foreplay and grinding his cock against someone's else groin, in dozens of different places over the years. His coffee-brown eyes have been devoured by their pupils, resembling black holes and sucking in light, just like the shine of the dark, dirty oil from his arm earlier.
Chad wonders, with burning intensity, if he pressed his face to the crotch of Robert's boxers and took a deep breath in through his nose, his brain would memorize the smell of Robert's precum and file it right next to everything else he'd ever committed to memory about Mecha Man.
"Okay." Robert forces out, like a tree suddenly cracking in half, giving in to the heated atmosphere Chad has carefully cultivated in the room before he can convince himself to back out. There is no robotic distance, no alien calculations running behind those eyes before they close again.
Just human nature, base and animal. The caveman, shifting closer to the warmth of the fire, squinting against the burn of the smoke.
The effect might as well take a crowbar to Chad's faltering composure. His breathing stutters, and his back tenses as to not give away more than that when what he wants is to pin Robert to the fucking floor and ravish both him and his stupidly complex prosthetic. It's a struggle and a half to keep his flames from coming out from under his skin, but if he lights up even a spark right now with all this combustible shit around, Robert might actually die.
With barely contained energy, Chad waits for him to point out which oil he wants.
. . .
Like a bitch, Robert doesn't speak or move, so Chad has to open his mouth and be the one to prod him into action.
"Should I use mine, or yours?"
It feels like he's in the middle of a hookup and asking about lube.
Technically, the horny side of his brain pipes up, depending on the type, you could also use it like that—
He swats it away. Later. If ever. There's no guarantee that happens. Or that Robert lets him do this regularly. Even if he hopes he does.
Robert grunts impatiently, reaches out randomly with his right hand, and selects a jug of mineral oil with a short, plastic scraping against concrete. He clearly doesn't want to admit how much he wants this, even as he holds it out in Chad's direction, eyes closed. He's sweating. Skin burning red. "Use this." He allows, struggling to stay reserved.
Chad plucks it from his grip and considers getting a new towel to apply it with.
And then he has an idea so seductively evil, he briefly feels like a cackling supervillain stroking a long-furred cat.
He pours clear oil over his damaged hand, and slides two slicked fingers and a thumb into the mass of shifting wires directly. No barrier. Just skin, thrusting into and massaging the machinery like he's scissoring someone open, Robert's prosthetic resting palm-up on his knee.
Robert sits bolt upright, eyes popping open. The wires flex around him, squeezing and releasing. "Chad, what are you—" He chokes out, disbelieving, and then the rest of the sentence is lost and replaced by a shaky, properly moaned exhale. His hips thrust forward into nothing, and his free hand flies down between his legs, pressing his no-doubt weeping cock against one thigh, in denial of what's happening.
Chad doesn't think any part of that is a real protest. In fact, he swallows, misbehaving dick throbbing against the crotch of his jumpsuit, he thinks Robert is somehow enjoying this even more than he is. That impression only grows as he withdraws, drips more oil into his palm, and starts sliding his fist up and down the bundle like a cock, and Robert's next moan is loud enough to echo off the shitty, thin apartment walls.
They're in it, now.
No denying this is anything other than pure perversion, for either of them. Not that Chad was really trying to pretend otherwise. A paper towel was barely a barrier with the way he'd been cleaning Robert's internals, with almost the same movements as teasing someone he'd just finished getting fucked by in the shower.
Chad flicks his wrist, squeezes particularly harshly, and watches in awe as Robert comes apart like a collapsing building just from having the wires in his arm played with. What should be howls of release are hissed through clenched teeth, back arching as his cock spills into his boxers in waves, the peak lasting for what seems like hours and simultaneously seconds.
And then Robert collapses in on himself for real, panting, sitting in his own cum and horribly embarrassed.
Chad removes his fingers, dripping with lubricant, and habitually wipes them on his jumpsuit, staring at Robert's complexion going as ripe as a tomato all the way down to his collarbones. He feels fucking desperate to pull his own cock out, but that would be revealing his own state of yearning.
Speaking of desperation, the scent of cum is so thick in the air, Chad really, really wants to burn that scrap of a Walmart product between his hands and tongue it off Robert's cock for a direct taste.
Is that too mushy?
It'd only be correct, he reasons feverishly. He was cleaning Robert right now, after all.
He puts a hand on his knee, head inclining towards Robert's face, and Robert jerks away from approaching lips, a stricken look on his face. The arm has sealed itself back up and raised to plant a restraining palm at the hollow of Chad's throat, as if to push him away.
"Get out."
Unlike the first time he said it, indignant and reflexive, this is soft, pleading. Doe-eyed. Begging him to listen.
Chad's inner world buckles in on itself slightly. He pulls back, a cold flash of dread going through his body like a bucket of ice water has been tossed over his head, that internal flame nearly guttering out. The denial seems so sudden, so cruel, his tear ducts actually well up a bit before he catches them.
"Wait."
He stops, realizes what Robert's up to, and resists the urge to roll his eyes, lest a tear escape. The freezing sensation mostly passes, now that he's pretty sure Robert was fucking with him like he usually does, but it still lingers. Mentally, he commands Robert to make up his fucking mind.
"I just," Robert swallows, and leans back towards him, "I wanted to see if you'd actually. . ."
"If I'd leave if you told me to, now that the work was done?" Chad sighs, bending like a reed to wrap his arms around him and rest his head on top of Bob-Bob's. It's a sickening mimicry of real intimacy he knows Robert would never allow if he thought it wasn't artifice. "You're a sick, paranoid bastard, Bob-Bob. I swear to God, you'd stab a bitch just to see if they fell over."
"I mean, it'd have been kind of funny if I made you fly home this hard, I can't lie."
A firm, unforgiving palm presses against Chad's dick, and after so long without contact, just that touch is enough to fry Chad's brain into going blank with need. His hips roll automatically, and tingling pleasure immediately and urgently radiates out from the root of his cock in a buzzing wave.
"This is for making me cum in my fucking boxers, by the way." Robert whispers into his neck. "You knew exactly what you were doing, you bastard."
Guilty as charged, Chad rubs his dick into the pressure of his prosthetic hand, whining low in his throat and nose buried completely in Robert's hair. He must've washed it recently, because it doesn't fucking smell like depression.
That composure he mentioned earlier, about it being taken apart by a crowbar? Yeah, the crowbar just hit it like a bat and sent it flying out the window, and now it's rapidly vanishing over the horizon as Robert continues to let him get off against his palm.
The friction is simultaneously terrific and horrible, the rough inner layer of fabric chafing the skin on his dick, but that doesn't slow him at all.
Chad is so wound up from playing with Robert's wires, it only takes about eight thrusts into it before Chad is shuddering through a tsunami of a release of his own, making choked and needy noises as Robert strokes him through it with an approving growl.
After all the energy in his body drains right out of his cock and into his underwear, Chad falls back against the floor, lightheaded.
Concern flashes across Robert's face, and the hand moves to cradle the back of his skull on the way down, to prevent it from cracking against the concrete. Thoughtful of him.
And then he reclines and joins Chad on the ground where he's panting and trying to regain his breath in a moment of solidarity that feels truly unfair. Like, bro. Don't give him hope.
They don't speak.
Chad doesn't prod at his buttons. Robert doesn't take him apart like a computer algorithm.
It is, perhaps, the closest thing they will get in their lives to an actual truce.
Chad can only hope it will last long enough for him to stick his dick somewhere inside Robert. Or vice versa.
(He's still holding out for the presence of a real, actual mecha-dick between Robert's legs, because he hasn't even touched the damn thing. Yet.)
(You never know, his balls were intact at the very least, surely there's a high end model you can cum through.)
Best not to be picky.