Chapter Text
The HR representative’s pen had been tapping a steady, bored rhythm against the clipboard—tap, tap, tap—for approximately the first thirty seconds of the interview. It stopped somewhere around “giant robot.”
By the time Flambae reached “reciting Divine Comedy,” the pen had rolled off the desk and hit the carpet with a muffled thud. The representative, a middle-aged woman with efficient glasses and the kind of smile that had processed approximately four thousand Phoenix Program applications, was now staring at him with her mouth slightly open.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say—dancing in the rain. On a rooftop. While cops are shooting at him.”
“Yes.” Flambae shifted in the chair. It was too small for him. All the chairs in SDN were too small for him, like they expected reformed villains to have the exact same pelvic dimensions as reformed accountants. “And the dolls. The dolls are important. They’re those porcelain ones? With the painted faces? He hotwired a claw machine at a closed arcade to get them. Spent like forty-five minutes on it. Very committed to the aesthetic.”
“And the Divine Comedy.”
“Dante Alighieri. Italian. Fourteenth century. He was reciting from memory—Inferno, Canto Thirty-Four. The part about Satan being trapped in ice. I think he felt it was thematic.” Flambae paused. “He was also barefoot.”
The HR representative—her nameplate read M. KOWALSKI, SUPERVISOR, REFORM INITIATIVES—removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. This was not, Flambae suspected, her first unexpected supervillain revelation of the week. But it might be her most unexpected.
“Let me,” she said slowly, “make sure I am understanding the situation correctly.”
“Please do.”
“You are applying for the Phoenix Program’s rehabilitation track. Standard intake. Psychological evaluation, skills assessment, supervised hero duty rotation, the whole process.”
“Yes.”
“And you are stating, as your primary motivation for seeking rehabilitation, that you need to—” she consulted her notes, though she clearly didn’t need to, because the words seemed to be burned into her brain now—“convince your husband, who is apparently currently active as an unaffiliated supervillain engaged in what you have described as ‘cinema-level dramatic’ criminal activity, to also join the redemption program.”
“Yes.”
“By joining first.”
“He’s stubborn.” Flambae shrugged. It made the fire patterns on his suit catch the fluorescent light. “If I tell him to do something, he does the opposite. That’s just how he is. So I have to make him want it. And the only way he’s going to want redemption is if he sees me get it first and realizes he’s being an asshole by not having it already.”
Kowalski stared at him.
“Also,” Flambae added, “if I’m already in the system, I can be his caseworker. Or at least on his support team. They let you do that, right? Support teams? Family liaison?”
“That’s—not typically how we—”
“Because I need to be there when he comes in. He won’t talk to strangers. He won’t talk to anyone he doesn’t trust, and he doesn’t trust anyone, period. Except me. And maybe his dog.” He paused. “But the dog can’t fill out intake forms. No opposable thumbs.”
Kowalski’s pen had not been retrieved from the floor. Her hands were now folded very carefully on the desk in front of her, like she was preventing them from doing something impulsive. Like reaching for a stress ball. Or maybe the panic button.
“Mr. Flambae,” she said. “I need you to understand something. The Phoenix Program has rehabilitated villains who leveled city blocks. We’ve worked with telepaths who could rewrite memories. We’ve had inmates from maximum-security metahuman detention facilities. We have protocols for almost everything.”
“Okay.”
“We do not,” she said, “have protocols for this.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“I didn’t say that.” She picked up her pen. Set it down. Picked it up again. “I need you to confirm something for me. Off the record. Just between us.”
“Okay.”
“Your husband. The one on the rooftop. Reciting Dante. Barefoot. In the rain. While committing multiple felony-level financial crimes against one of the largest banking institutions on the West Coast.”
“Yes.”
“That’s Robert Robertson, isn’t it?”
Flambae was very still for a moment. The fire patterns on his suit seemed to dim slightly, the orange glow fading to something closer to ember than flame. When he spoke, his voice was quieter.
“How did you know?”
“Because I’ve been doing this job for twelve years,” Kowalski said. “And I’ve never seen anyone burn a reputation to the ground with that much personal attention to detail. The Mecha Man legacy was squeaky clean for three generations. Spotless. Untouchable. And then, six months ago, someone starts—” she gestured vaguely—“doing whatever this is. Robbing Vanderstenk while dressed like a Victorian ghost. Hacking live television broadcasts to recite existentialist poetry. Leaving origami cranes at crime scenes.”
“The origami was a phase,” Flambae muttered. “He got really into it for like two weeks. I told him it wasn’t sustainable.”
“Six months ago,” Kowalski continued, “was also when Robert Robertson checked himself out of metahuman recovery services against medical advice, declined all follow-up care, and apparently—according to his file—‘retired from superhero activities to pursue private interests.’”
There was a pause.
“He’s also,” Kowalski said carefully, “completely powerless. Isn’t he?”
Flambae’s mouth tightened.
“The Pulse was destroyed,” he said. “His life force. His energy core. Whatever you want to call it. It’s gone. He almost died. And now he’s just—” He stopped. Made a frustrated sound. “He’s just a guy. No powers. No suit. No backup. He’s been committing these crimes with zero superhuman abilities. He hotwires claw machines with paperclips and YouTube tutorials. He learned to pick locks from a BuzzFeed video. He hacks financial institutions with a laptop from 2019 and the Wi-Fi password from the coffee shop downstairs.”
Kowalski’s pen had stopped moving entirely.
“He’s been robbing Vanderstenk,” she said slowly, “one of the most secure banks in the country, while completely powerless. Using a salvage-grade mech suit that barely functions. Reciting fourteenth-century poetry from memory. Barefoot. In the rain.”
“Yes.”
“And the police haven’t caught him.”
“They keep trying,” Flambae said. “But he’s really good at hiding on rooftops. And also the suit is very loud and distracting. It makes this sound like—you know that noise a dying smoke alarm makes when the battery is low? That’s what it sounds like when he flies. Everyone covers their ears and he just sort of. Scoots away.”
“‘Scoots away.’”
“It’s very undignified. I’ve told him this. He says dignity is for people who can afford new batteries.”
Kowalski was quiet for a very long time.
“Mr. Flambae,” she finally said. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to answer it honestly.”
“Okay.”
“How did you meet Robert Robertson?”
Flambae shifted in his chair. The fire patterns on his suit flickered uncertainly.
“That’s,” he said. “That’s kind of a complicated question.”
“We have time.”
“No, I mean—it’s complicated. Not in a dramatic way. In a stupid way. A really, really stupid way.”
Kowalski waited.
Flambae sighed. The sound came from somewhere deep in his chest, the resigned exhale of a man who had accepted that he was about to say something profoundly embarrassing.
“It was a meet-cute,” he said. “At three in the morning. In the frozen foods aisle of a twenty-four-hour grocery store.”
Kowalski’s pen actually fell out of her hand this time.
“I’m sorry?”
“I was buying ice cream,” Flambae said flatly. “I had just committed a crime—a small crime, I was in my villain era, it was fine—and I was stressed and emotionally compromised and I wanted ice cream. And I went to the store and I was standing in front of the freezer, trying to decide between chocolate and strawberry, and this guy just—appeared next to me.”
He paused.
“He was wearing sweatpants. And a hoodie with a cartoon dog on it. And he was also staring at the ice cream with this intense, agonized expression, like he was trying to solve a math problem instead of make a flavor decision. And I said—I don’t know why I said this, it was three in the morning and I was tired—I said, ‘Just get the chocolate, the strawberry has chunks.’”
Kowalski blinked.
“And he looked at me,” Flambae continued, “with these huge, exhausted eyes, and he said, ‘But what if I want chunks? What if chunks are the point?’ And I said, ‘Then get the strawberry and stop making it everyone else’s problem.’ And he said, ‘I can’t have strawberry, I’m lactose intolerant.’”
“But you just said—”
“I know. I know. He was standing in front of the ice cream, agonizing over flavors he couldn’t even eat.” Flambae’s voice was carefully, deliberately flat. “So I asked him why he was in the frozen foods aisle at three in the morning if he couldn’t have dairy. And he looked at me and said, very seriously, ‘My dog is sad. I read online that dogs like ice cream. I didn’t think about the lactose.’”
Another pause.
“His dog,” Kowalski said, “was sad.”
“His dog gets sad when Robert has nightmares. Which is all the time. Because Robert doesn’t sleep. He just lies awake and spirals about his dead father and his destroyed career and his existential purposelessness. And then his dog gets sad. So Robert goes to the grocery store at three in the morning to buy ice cream for a lactose-intolerant dog who can’t eat it anyway, because he doesn’t know how else to fix things.”
Flambae’s voice had gone rough.
“And I thought,” he said. “I thought, this is the stupidest man I have ever met. He is completely powerless. He has no superhuman abilities. He can’t even remember that dogs can’t have dairy. He is standing in a grocery store in cartoon-dog pajamas, trying to solve his problems with ice cream he can’t eat, and he is so, so tired, and he is still trying.”
He looked down at his hands.
“And I said, ‘My apartment is three blocks away. I have lactose-free ice cream in my freezer. It’s chocolate. No chunks. You can have some if you want.’”
Kowalski was very quiet.
“He came,” Flambae said. “He brought his dog. The dog ate the ice cream and fell asleep on my couch. Robert sat on my floor and didn’t say anything for an hour. And then he said, ‘Thank you,’ like I had done something extraordinary instead of just—letting him exist in my space without demanding anything from him.”
He looked up.
“And that was it. That was how we met. Not a fight. Not a dramatic rooftop confrontation. The frozen foods aisle of a twenty-four-hour Ralphs. He was wearing sweatpants with a hole in the knee. I was wearing my villain costume because I’d been too lazy to change. We bonded over lactose intolerance and a mutual inability to make decisions at three in the morning.”
He paused.
“I didn’t know he was Mecha Man. Not then. I just thought he was some sad guy with a dog and really bad coping mechanisms. I thought he was hot in this really sad way, like fucking kicked pippy kind of way. I didn’t find out until later.”
“How much later?” Kowalski asked.
Flambae’s expression shifted. Something complicated moved behind his eyes.
“About six months,” he said. “And a lot of grocery store meetings. And a lot of three-in-the-morning couch sessions. And one extremely awkward conversation when I recognized his hands in a news photo of the Vanderstenk doll incident.”
He paused.
“His hands are very distinctive. He has these little scars on his knuckles from when he was a kid and his dad made him train in the mech suit without proper padding. He never got them treated. He said it was character-building.”
Kowalski was looking at him with an expression that Flambae couldn’t quite read.
“So you knew he was the one who maimed you,” she said. “And you stayed anyway.”
“I knew he was Robert,” Flambae said, staring at his eight remaining things. “The maiming thing was just—circumstantial. He’s not good at it, you know. Being a villain. He doesn’t have the temperament. He keeps apologizing to people he’s robbing. He left a fifty-dollar bill under a broken window once because he felt bad about the glass.” He paused, "Plus, we fucked it out afterwards."
“That’s not—that’s not typical supervillain behavior.”
“No,” Flambae agreed. “It’s typical Robert behavior. He wants to be seen and he wants to matter and he doesn’t know how to do that without performing. So he performs. And he’s terrible at it. And he hates himself for it. And I just—” He stopped. Made a frustrated sound. “I just want him to stop. I want him to realize he doesn’t need to be Mecha Man or the Mecha Man Destroyer or whatever identity he’s currently trying on. He can just be Robert. The guy who buys lactose-free ice cream for his dog at three in the morning. The guy who learned origami from a library book and got really into it for two weeks. The guy who recites Dante in the rain because he doesn’t know how else to express his feelings.”
His voice cracked, just slightly.
“That’s enough. That’s always been enough. He just doesn’t believe me.”