Chapter Text
Chad throws the painting into the fire with a scowl.
His therapist had the idea. A hobby, completely unrelated to his powers. A way to get the images in his head out, and onto canvas. Renditions of his prison cell, of his father, lovingly rendered and gazing out, his sister. His niece. All of them are hung, somewhere in his apartment. He's proud. He's always liked working with color - he designed his own suit, after all. But he hadn't extended that to painting until now.
Fire crackles and roars, the frame crumbling into ash, and the image of the Mecha Man suit staring at the viewer goes up in a fireball.
It's not enough. It's not vivid enough, well-crafted enough. Just - Chad keeps getting this prickle in the back of his head, every time he thinks he's done with drawing Mecha Man. It says to him, it's not perfect. The references aren't good enough, that wire is off, the chest plate is shaped awkwardly in the perspective, the gleaming, tamed plasma of Mecha Man’s blade doesn't throw the glow correctly on the canvas. And it's right. So he destroys them as he makes them, like he tried to do to the subject, in fire, and he starts over.
This is the fifth, and Chad was starting to think maybe he should do the next one on something less easy to burn.
Part of the issue must be not having previous work to compare. The sketches and form studies all get burned too, after all, usually seconds or minutes after they've been completed, after a brief flash of mental disquiet.
Each painting is like digging out splinters from under his skin, but with Mecha Man, he can't stop digging. Can't resist clawing at the wound and tearing it farther open, squeezing until it's swollen and leaking blood.
There's - and Chad knows those hero colors like the back of his hand - maybe that's the issue - because he can't capture it properly. Because hero colors colored by flames into something unrecognizable - twigs a long buried instinct in his brain any time he mixes it.
He doesn't know how to move past it. If he can move past it.
His hands itch, not with buried flames for once, but to paint. Again, again, and again. Until he’ll have sketched Mecha Man in a hundred different poses, looked at a thousand paint colors, and properly depicted the man, the myth, and their legend in all their terrible glory. It's just -
He needs a new canvas. A bigger canvas than he can buy at the store. So he can make something true to life. Surely, that'll be enough. If he makes it exactly the same as it was that night, and stands in front of it, it'll be out of his head. Surely.
He will learn to spray-paint if it kills him.
Chad soars across Torrance, just another meteor in the night sky. He has his supplies, spray cans and reference sketches from a tense night spent following Mecha Man around with bated breath, printed off photos from amateurish fan blogs and all. He had to go out and buy a huge duffle bag to keep it all in, and he's got a cheap air filtering facemask pulled on from the same store. All he needs is to get to the location.
Nobody would find it. It'd be just for him, since technically, this was illegal, and he was supposed to be doing better. But, as his therapist was so fond of sighing about, a big part of recovery is, famously, backsliding. So he gives himself a pass.
Wind whistles in his ears along with the roar of flames as he aims himself downwards at an old, dilapidated mall, and as he passes through the hole in the roof, a chunk of heat-damaged concrete falls and crunches on the ground.
Dust puffs into the air. Nobody’s touched this place in years, the concrete too unstable even for most thrill seekers, nevermind squatters. No issue for Chad, though. He floats through the mall, touching nothing, until he finds the spot again.
Twenty feet of intact concrete canvas, his for the taking.
Painting the background in layers is easy. The colors of flame are as familiar as the color of the sky, to him. And he has references for the concrete right here. He even does a couple quick light studies with his powers to see how it catches the color. They come out crisp, practically popping off the wall out of the darkness when Chad flicks a little flame across the start of the mural to dry it.
Chad tries. He really, really tries. He sketches poses, his throat working to keep the panic at bay, cross-references the blurry amateurish photos of Mecha Man fighting villains he'd printed off.
It's perfect, as it should be. Mecha Man facing the camera, a chunk of rock being tossed to one side, that blade of tamed plasma swiping across the foreground, leaving electric streaks that mingle with the color of the flames.
It was just a job, at the time. Insurance fraud. But he'd also been spiraling a little. Probably hadn't helped keep things contained.
Nausea churns in his stomach. The edges of his eyesight go dark.
Chad reaches out with his right hand. The stumps make contact, accompanied by the feeling of wet spray paint smearing underneath them, and he hisses as a jolt of phantom pain jerks up his arm.
Spit wells up in Chad’s mouth, wets the fabric, he can't breathe and his stomach convulses -
He tears off the facemask, leans over between Mecha Man’s knees, and vomits.
Fuck.
He heaves, and more bile comes up, drops splattering against the bottom of the mural and his shoes. He hadn't eaten in - a day. That probably isn't helping him at all. Fire burns hot and fast.
He's been too preoccupied. Too focused. Manic.
He claws at the concrete for something stabilizing. Something to hold onto. More paint smears into his hands in shades of muddied blue and green.
He'd painted the blade last.
This is worse than last time. How is it worse? He came back to where it happened, he recreated it perfectly when he was feeling no pain and minimal, uh, distress or whatever, but it's still flashing in his head -
Chad’s mind blanks into pure panic and anger for a moment before he wrestles control back.
Okay. Recreation doesn't work. What did he want when it happened?
Relief. Help. An extended hand. Fuckin’ embarrassing shit he would never sketch or paint normally but he's at a goddamn bottleneck and he will push past it. Mecha Man will not be what holds him back from improvement.
An extended hand.
Paint that.
Chad gathers his things and leaves, a new goal set firmly in his mind.
Reframe what happened.
He sets back up outside the mall. Paint smears the duffle’s straps. Cross-contamination.
This time, there is no blade to be seen.
Mecha Man reaches out, mechanical right hand braced against the ceiling. Behind it, open sky. Around it, the internals of the building, flame.
It extends a hand. And, this part was tricky, its cockpit is open.
There are no reference images of the inside of Mecha Man’s cockpit anywhere Chad’s looked. If there ever have been any online, they were swiftly taken down. It's tactical information, and Mecha Man is pretty infamously good at hacking, after all.
Chad hadn't been able to get close enough for a look either, so he leaves the cockpit completely dark and obscured by shadow.
A right hand extends from the blackness, an asymmetrical mirror to the mech's left. Its owner is invisible. All there is, is the hand. Gloved in a white gauntlet. Reaching out to help.
At the edges of the painting, Chad includes Flambae’s hands, healed-over, dismembered fingers and all, reaching back. Like the viewer is staring out of his eyes.
He stands back, looks at it, and feels light. There is a, a hard, sour core in his stomach, but it isn't worse. It isn't bad.
And then it's off to the races.
Chad spends the next couple of weeks dodging night shift heroes and painting Mecha Man on anything big enough to house him. Backs of billboards, ducking down, sifting through rubble. Tram underpasses, lifting them, keeping the trains running. Once, only once, Chad enters a gallery and submits a painting done directly on the outer wall, with thick, thick textured paint. Even with Chad helping it along, it takes almost a week to dry before the exhibition. Hands, holding a little girl. She's grinning, perfectly at home while she's being cupped in Mecha Man’s metal palm. She has his father’s smile. Something all of his children got. And his grandchildren.
He doesn't go to the exhibition, but he does watch from afar.
There's a mech parked outside. A man, in blue and white armor, looking at his painting.
At the rendition of Chad’s niece.
Chad watches him reach out with a white-gauntleted hand and trace her smile.
Too close. Chad leaves.
It’d stopped feeling sour and resentful and started feeling good, by that point.
His sister calls it an obsession when he tells her about it, and after he whispers to his niece about the encounter, too, she vibrates with all the rage she, a very temperamental little girl, can muster at him and asks why he didn't ask Mecha Man for an autograph for her.
Chad’s therapist, who he doesn't tell about the graffiti but does know about the sketches and the exhibition, calls it enough progress and potentially time for him to move on to another subject, but it's fine if he lingers if he feels like it.
And oh, how he lingers. He spreads his reach all over Torrance, half a dozen paintings popping up faster than people can keep up. Some weekends, he gets as many as three done in a single night, if he's willing to crash the next day.
It's a bad move. His punishment is swift and merciless.
More than one is abandoned before he can finish it. He's low on the priority list, but he's consistent. Takes time, enough to stumble across him in the middle of his work. Present in Torrance the way few repeat offenders are, barely even subtle. Practically shouting out all the paintings come from the same source. Some of the night-shifters call out for him to stop as he escapes with an actual nickname they came up with, for fucks sake.
Firebrand. For the way he dries his artwork. Speculation is that he uses a handheld flamethrower. Nobody's linked him to Flambae, he takes great pains to dress the complete opposite of how he does normally, the least of which is an off-navy hoodie with green and blue paint splatters on the cuffs. Every inch of skin is covered, and he never, ever takes off his facemask where anybody could see.
People start to notice. Not only the guys online who track graffiti, not the niche people, not the taggers Chad runs into sometimes in the same spots. It starts with the night-shift heroes chasing him, calling out to him, and spreading the word. A handful of sightings expand into the day shift when Chad runs long, and he comes in late to SDN. He starts hiding his pieces again, away from Torrance, coming back the next night to finish them. There's people tracking him, now, fans, he likes to think, a cat and mouse game across LA’s underbelly.
There's only so many fuckin’ places he can fit Mecha Man.
He checks on his original pair occasionally. It's where he does sketches for pieces. Memorials, sometimes, and after he's analyzed so many photos of Mecha Man helping people, sitting in front of his first Mecha Man graffiti doesn't make him want to throw up anymore.
Chad is sitting in front of it tracing out his dad's expression on a sketchbook when he hears the distant sound of jets. They sound like jet engines, anyway. He ignores them.
They get closer. More familiar.
He knows them. Those are Mecha Man’s jets.
In a moment of pure, embarassment-soaked reflex, Chad shoves his sketchbook into the duffle, scoops it up, and books it across the ruins to a dark corner. High. Chad’s feet light up briefly to carry him up, and he braces himself against a defunct security camera and the wall with all the stubbornness of table gum. He can't go through the ceiling, that's where Mecha Man's going to be coming from if this is actually his destination, but he can hide. Sneak away. One of the entrances must be relatively uncollapsed, right?
A shadow falls over the floor, and Chad presses himself deeper into the concealing darkness. Mecha Man slowly comes in for a landing, maneuvering through the rotting roof with care, and the thump of the mech suit making contact with the floor shakes the whole building. Concrete rains down for a moment, from a hundred sources that'd been just on the edge of coming loose for weeks before all being shaken at once. Chad’s bones rattle, the vibration reaching him from close contact with the walls.
The front pops open and the pilot comes spilling out. He frantically inspects the ground where Chad’s footsteps have disturbed the dust and scorched concrete, claws his hands at the air, spots the graffiti, and slows down. Approaches to give it a look-over, smeared paint and all. Embarrassment creeps up Chad’s spine. Mecha Man’s next words are loud and frustrated, spoken to himself in the deathly silent ruins of the mall they met in.
“Think this one's the oldest piece yet. And he was here recently. Nostalgic? And why here?”
Mecha Man inspects the long since dried pool of vomit at the base with a distinctly manic energy. Lodged up in the corner of the ceiling, hidden by twisted rebar and braced with his legs against the walls, Chad covers his mouth with a hand over his mask and watches him poke around. Panicked breaths puff against his palm.
You can't get DNA from vomit, right? It's been too long, surely. Months.
Mecha Man reaches into his toolbelt and retrieves a kit that from here, looks a hell of a lot like something for taking DNA samples. Chad screams softly into his hand.
Under his foot, a piece of unstable concrete slowly shifts in place. Chad scrambles, puts his boot higher on the wall to relieve the pressure on it, but it's too late.
It falls, and the sound of it crunching onto the ground and scattering in pieces echoes loudly.
Mecha Man’s back posture goes ramrod straight, and he turns, sweeping his eyes towards the source, shoulders tense. The kit is slowly placed back into its pocket. Mecha Man’s gaze passes over him without snagging on anything in particular, but Chad stays on alert.
He's pretty, from what Chad can make out under the cowl. Lean, and muscled, more in his legs than his arms, focused on endurance for foot chases rather than absorbing the shock of landings like Chad’s are. Or were. His ass got fat around when he started flying and then he kept it up after he figured out how to set himself down properly. The armor makes it hard to tell how hard he's breathing, or the exact proportions of his muscles. A disguise in a disguise.
Mecha Man picks his way across the mall towards Chad, tapping at something on his arm. After a moment of delay, the mech moves, circling to the other side. Cutting off possible escape routes. Or just making him think it is. Or laying a trap. Depends on if he thinks Chad can see him.
The competence - something Flambae almost never sees from his coworkers save Malevola and Golem, and neither of them are the sorts for him to be attracted to - gets him unexpectedly hot under the collar. A month ago, it would've scared him, probably. But he's researched too much of Mecha Man being competent in contexts that aren't hurting people, since then. Now it'd be almost reassuring, except, it's aimed at preventing him from escaping the scene.
Which is stalker thinking, and Chad needs to leave before Mecha Man manages to corner him in this, well, corner. He relaxes his brace slightly and slides down the wall, feeling the concrete scratching his back through his hoodie with the loud sound of fabric on rough rock, and bolts into the open between them both. No fire to boost him and give him away. He's just gonna have to. . . Sprint, he supposes.
“Hey! Firebrand! I just want to talk!” Mecha Man, the pilot, barks at him as he approaches, turning to intercept a little too late, and Chad absolutely does not reply verbally because Mecha Man has heard his voice before, when he chopped off his fingers, but he does flip him off with his left hand as he goes past and pivots towards the left, making to circle around and find an exit.
“Fuck.” Mecha Man hisses behind him, and to the right, he catches a glimpse of the mech darting across the rubble at a speed entirely unfitting of its bulk, fixed on an exact location. An exit? Or more possible tricks? Fuck, Chad does not have it in him to untangle Mecha Man’s thought process, so he's going to lose. Footsteps slam into the floor after him, Mecha Man choosing to pursue on foot.
He leads him on a merry chase, keeping his right hand fisted to disguise the lack of two fingers, and it in fact turns out there's only one exit. No mech in sight. Yet.
Chad jukes right, towards his pursuer, the first obvious ‘mistake’ he's made so far. Mecha Man buys it and eats shit on the ground after missing his tackle, and Chad snickers under his breath. His powers stir under his skin, heat rising with the adrenaline, and Chad tightens his control.
“I didn't want to have to do this!” Mecha Man yells, and Chad wants to check for an ambush, but - that requires slowing down. He looks back. Mecha Man is going for his control panel -
It happens too fast for him to do more than try to brace for it. One moment, he's about a foot away from freedom, the next, he's been hip-checked by fourteen feet of metal and flattened against a dilapidated storefront twenty feet away. The duffle goes flying to one side. Pain radiates out from the point of contact in a wave of warmth over his skin. After a moment, his body peels itself off it and falls with a thump. He wheezes on impact, curling up on instinct to protect his vital organs. Fuck, maybe it's more the shock of having his breath knocked out of him or anything, but that hurt. He prays no fire leaked out where Mecha Man could've seen.
Mid-struggle for him to get up, another body reflattens him to the floor, pinning his right hand under him, and grabs at the back of his hoodie, rucking it up slightly and revealing the black tank top he has underneath. Chad twists, regaining leverage with his free hand, and it falls back down as Mecha Man loses his grip. They wrestle on the ground, Mecha Man trying to tear his clothes off for access to identifying features and Chad fighting him off one-handed, until Mecha Man finally manages a half-decent pin and yanks his hood off his head, so Chad fully turns his face into the ground while he tries to kick him away blindly. “Stubborn fucking asshole,” Mecha Man hisses, burying a hand in his tied hair and pulling his head up, spine straightening out against his will, “At least let me see you, what'd you expect, me to ignore you painting me everywhere, you're barely even trying - “
Chad finally lashes out with his right hand, catches a half-second of Mecha Man’s eyes widening, and reverses the pin. His thighs crush his hips to the ground, toolbelt digging into his skin unpleasantly. Their stomachs chafe. Both hands lock Mecha Man’s over his head.
Strands of hair fall free, shadowing his face, and he can see the glow of his eyes on Mecha Man’s gorgeous face. There's a look of revelation on it, eyebrows high and expression open, and Chad closes his eyes for a moment and huffs loudly. Too late. Too fucking late.
“Leave me the fuck alone.” Chad growls through the mask, lets go of Mecha Man’s hands, and sits up.
“You're that shitty villain I busted up a couple years ago.” Mecha Man splutters, and yeah, Chad’s gone. Fuck this guy. He pictured him quicker on the uptake in his head, when he was drawing him. He tears the now-pointless facemask off and puts it in a pocket. “Not a villain anymore.” He grunts, goes to swing his leg to one side and get off him, but Mecha Man’s hands fly to his thighs to keep him in place. “I took two of your fingers,” He whispers incredulously, still processing and scanning Chad’s face with frantic eyes. “Why - “
“Therapy shit.” Chad interrupts to start prying the armored fingers off one at a time. Why is this twunk hot. Oh, yeah, it's the fucking kindness in his eyes, or whatever. “At least it started like that. Then I got fucking invested in doing it right. Doing you justice. Biggest mistake of my year. Should've fucking known - ”
Mecha Man surges up and crushes himself to Chad's chest, arms locked around his waist and nose tucked into his neck, and Chad grunts softly. His hands hover over Mecha Man’s armored shoulders, hesitant to touch, and finally settle on his lower back. Mecha Man’s hips jump in surprise at the reciprocation, briefly pressing their groins together, and Chad can feel a breath puff out of Mecha Man’s nose against his jugular. “Fuck’s all that tension about.” He tucks his chin in a little and presses his lips to the top of his head. He kinda wants to rip the cowl off and just - put his nose against his scalp and inhale.
“Oh, is it so out of the question for me to be attracted to the guy who's been stroking my ego by putting murals of me all over Torrance for anybody with eyes to see?” Mecha Man snarks, and when Chad rolls his hips down, testing the waters, he outright moans.
“Pent up?” Chad needles him, and Mecha Man’s hands ball into fists for a moment, gathering up hoodie fabric in his hands. “Maybe. You down?”
It's filthy. They're both covered in concrete dust from the scuffle. Sweat pours down Chad’s back. Disgusting. There is no lube to be found. But Chad is absolutely down to let Mecha Man give him a handjob right now, and then blow him. Or vice versa. He doesn't really give a shit so long as the object of his affection gets him off. And he's not taking this guy back to his apartment, or letting himself be taken to a third location.
“Yeah.” He rasps, and Mecha Man’s happy hum rumbles against his throat, sliding a hand down between them to cup Chad through his pants, followed by, “Got a name I can call you other than Firebrand?”
“Flambae's my hero name,” he reluctantly allows, rocking his hips into the pressure, and Mecha Man snorts, properly slipping his hand into his pants. “Not much better, 'bae. But, it'll do.”