Chapter Text
The café was warm in everything but temperature, booths and wooden tables and potted plants hanging from the ceiling, and all of it wrapped up in a pleasant amount of air conditioning so quiet that Flambae couldn’t even hear it over the gentle music coming from the speakers. He’d caught a look at himself in the reflection of the glass door upon entering, that absurd sum of dredged-up parts, and had nearly spun around on his heel to turn back.
He looked like nothing had ever happened. Like he was still in sandy Herat, little Khadija at his side, telling him about her day at school—not yet a woman, nothing about her that their father could hold against her. Like he still had all his fingers and didn’t know what fire felt like when it singed his skin, didn’t have to worry about losing his clothes to an outburst. Like his eyes were still dark and he didn’t yet have to shave to avoid looking like every other asshole in the family.
Just over a decade of putting his life at risk for a living, and yet he’d never felt quite as exposed as he did now.
Flambae had shoved open the door with a little too much force, pushing through as he did with all things unpleasant.
He didn’t see him at first, because there was no blue-and-yellow wetsuit to stand out like—well, like a wetsuit in a café. Flambae scanned the corners first, because if Waterboy had arrived before him he’d definitely be in the corner, but just as Flambae was about to turn back and wait outside instead, a thin, cotton-clad arm waved at him from a seat by the window.
“Flambae!”
Waterboy looked like he was about to stand up to greet him, but only succeeded in getting his long legs stuck and slamming his knee into the bottom of the table. Only barely managing to catch his drink before it toppled and spilled, he gave a pained smile in Flambae’s general direction.
The goggles were gone, as were the pads around his knees and elbows. Waterboy was wearing a button-down that matched the first streaks of ochre lining the trees outside, even as the heat remained. The collar, already slightly damp to begin with, darkened just a bit more as Flambae scooted into the seat across from him.
The stupid little tug in Flambae’s chest meant nothing. Sympathy, most likely, seeing as Waterboy was skin and bone with nothing to cushion his collision with the table. Flambae had looked like that, once—he knew how it felt.
“You good?”
“Yeah,” said Waterboy, a forced-out squeak from behind his teeth. “S-Sorry.”
“Not my drink that almost got knocked over,” Flambae told him, and he turned up the heat of his legs just a little. Not enough to burn, but enough to warm the air beneath the table and maybe ease the ache a little. “How long have you been here?”
“Not much—long.” Waterboy gave his leg another rub before directing the same movement across the back of his neck. “I didn’t wanna be late, so I took another—I took a bus early. Earlier. Than I-I had to."
Indeed, his drink was a third of the way gone, some frothy, chocolatey concoction that Flambae was not at all surprised to see. Waterboy seemed like the type to have a sweet tooth. “You came here by bus? In fucking LA?”
Waterboy shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, in a tone as if he was admitting to something embarrassing. “I, uh, I don’t really have time to get a license now that I’m—now that I work with SDN, and there’s a stop right by my grandma’s place, so. It’s alright, really, I actually—I kinda like it. Gives me some time to rel—d-decompress.”
Flambae resisted the urge to shake his head at him—best not to make the kid feel weird about the things he said right away. Still, the thought of having to rely on transit just to get where he needed to be was not a pleasant one. The roads weren’t much better—not everyone had the luxury of flying to work—but at least Flambae would be alone on those rare occasions that he did drive, unbothered by whatever crackheads were on the bus.
“Maybe you’re tougher than you look,” Flambae said, aiming for a compliment, some vague sentiment of respect—you know, the shit that nice people did, or at least shit that people did on a date. Waterboy looked uncertain, and Flambae made an effort to exhale his irritation instead of letting it fester, a hot stream of air through his nostrils, not quite casting steam.
This shit was hard.
“You want anything else?” Flambae asked, chewing through the uncomfortable feeling of tension—not the kind he enjoyed, that he could ramp up over the course of an evening until he’d find himself slammed against the nearest vertical surface, but this other, more complicated kind. A challenge unlike any he’d ever faced before. Talking.
Waterboy looked up at him like he’d just asked him the circumference of the sun, and Flambae cocked his chin at the counter across the room, cakes and pastries on glass displays. “You gotta go up to them and tell them what you want. I think. How’d you get your drink?”
“Oh,” said Waterboy, understanding washing over his face. “Yeah, I—they don’t come and take your order.”
“Come on.” Flambae shuffled out of the booth. “I’m paying.”
“Y-You don’t have—”
“I wasn’t asking.”
It took some further glaring, but eventually Flambae managed to figuratively drag him out of his seat and over to the counter, where a stout, dark-haired woman flashed a smile of charmingly crooked teeth as she went about loading beans into the coffee machine. Under the curved glass dome of the counter, an array of sweet treats was sorted by flavour and kind: entire cakes at the very bottom, ranging from chocolate to lemon to carrot; a small number of cookies with various toppings; singular slices of more elaborate cakes; and, at the very top of the display, little glass jars of what looked like yoghurt topped with seeds and dried fruit.
“You want?” asked the woman behind the counter, her face framed by two of those jars. “Is homemade. My son make every morning.”
Flambae had figured. Prism knew him better than to recommend him some shitty mass-produced place that copied half its recipes from Starbucks; he was not above the occasional burger and fries, but baked goods were different. That shit was sacred.
“We’re still deciding,” he told the woman, who nodded enthusiastically and went back to her work.
Beside him, Waterboy was eyeing his options, wringing his damp hands. “Do you, uh—is there a budget? I don’t wanna—”
“You calling me cheap?” Flambae asked. And then, because that’d come out awfully sharp: “Pick whatever you want, dude. It’s fine.”
And so, after watching him chew on his lip some more in an attempt to decide, Flambae received two plates from the woman behind the counter, both of them with swirling, painted rims. Waterboy grabbed two forks from a large mug on the counter, and together they made their way back to their table, where a prickly, many-petalled imitation of a protea had been placed in a small pot between them in their absence.
Only when Flambae sat back down and looked closer did he find that it wasn’t synthetic at all. He suppressed a smile as Waterboy reached out to touch it, tentatively peeling back the first layer of petals, still shy of blooming. When he withdrew his hand, the flower did not bounce back as plastic would have, but stayed in place for a few moments, a small dent in the vibrant pink.
And then Flambae realised there was no use in holding back his smile, seeing as this was the whole point of being here, but he just couldn’t help the feeling of being out of place: not at the café, nor even with Waterboy, but rather the combination of the two, this quieter, slower context, the line where two categories overlapped. He hadn’t thought he’d end up like this, scheduling a cheat day to have cake with a coworker he used to hate, dressed like a man he no longer knew, for once quiet enough to notice the warmth of a ray of sunlight where it came in from the window and brushed his arm.
Really, when he’d taken Waterboy by the front of his costume and pressed him up against the wall of some apartment complex, he hadn’t thought at all. It had just happened, as so many things did when Flambae let the fire take over, only this time it had not been rage at the wheel. And now here they were, and Flambae saw Waterboy turn his plate to arrange his cake in the right direction, a heap of strawberries and cream with a dusting of ground cloves, and he felt him try to arrange his legs in the small space beneath the table in a fashion that wouldn’t get in Flambae’s way, and Flambae felt, for the first time in a long time, like he was flying blind.
“Thanks again,” said Waterboy, smiling at him through long lashes, and Flambae wanted to kick him out of principle, just because he didn’t know what else to do with the feeling that flared up in his chest. “You, uh, really didn’t have to.”
“Eh,” Flambae said, a vague sound that he hoped encompassed don’t mention it and no big deal and no, but I really did all at once. “Least I could do.”
He hadn't meant for it to come out bearing so much weight, but he felt the way the words settled, this elephant nestled into the booth with them. The thing they hadn’t talked about, even when Flambae had asked him out. The thing Flambae had skirted around even with Prism, describing only the outermost layers of it, though there shouldn’t have been layers to begin with.
It’d been a quick, impulsive decision, the sort Flambae made as often as he changed his clothes, as easily as he summoned fire to dance along his fingertips. Prism had made him realise that not everyone lived this way, and so he’d taken Waterboy out, a cheap courtesy so he wouldn’t make things horrifically awkward and give Robert a reason to baby the kid even more.
And that should’ve been it. Over and done, a stupid mistake and the measures to fix it, and nothing more to it than that. So Flambae really didn’t know why his sternum gave a little flutter as he finally addressed it, as the option of pretending it’d never happened was ground into nothing like the butt of a cigarette.
“I—Sorry,” Waterboy said, apologising in advance for what he was about to say. “Can I, uh—this is probably weird, but I gotta ask—is this, like, a-a date?”
Flambae gave a shrug, a motion as familiar as walking, only this time it felt more like reflex, nothing he wholeheartedly meant. “Do you want it to be?” he asked, because for someone who had never expressed a want outright without checking in with the other person first, Waterboy had not exactly been subtle in his attempts. Flambae had hardly even thought about it until recently, but in hindsight, it should have struck him as odd that Waterboy would try time and time again to make conversation, or praise him for a job well done, or compliment the look of his lunch, of all things. If not for this recent incident, Flambae might have assumed he was simply warming up to the team, trying to be a little less weird.
But when he met Waterboy’s eye, he thought he saw the same scene replaying in his head, too.
He considered being honest, seeing as that was what everyone swore by, but he could imagine the way Waterboy’s face would fall if he told him that he was only here because Prism had made him, that sweet shock turning into something like shame.
“I thought it’d be right to take you out after throwing you into that whole thing last week,” he said instead. It wasn’t untrue, at least. After Prism had set his head straight, Flambae had found that he did feel a little bad for just springing that on the kid. That alone was foreign—that bite of guilt, of being painfully aware that he hadn’t acted the wisest, nor the fairest. Prism was a terrible influence.
“Oh,” said Waterboy, seeming to snap back to reality, remembering that he’d been asked a question. “Yeah, I—I can’t lie, I was—that, uh, surprised me, I guess. Came out of nowhere—like, what?”
That bounce in his step, giddy from his well-earned victory. That hot twist in Flambae’s chest, and a brief, terrifying moment between that and the decision to move. The sound Waterboy had made against his mouth, and the way he’d melted in his hands.
“Me too,” Flambae confessed, preemptively pinching the flames from his ears before they formed. It felt like a confession, like he was handing Waterboy a world’s worth of meaning without really knowing what it was he was saying.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I mean…” He watched the way his fork reflected his own face, upside-down and hydra-headed. “Fuck, I don’t know. Guess that’s what we’re here for, no? Figuring that out.”
For a moment, Waterboy looked wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the spot where Flambae was tapping his fork against the table, flushed bright across his cheekbones. It wasn’t how he’d reacted that day; that day, Flambae had pulled away from him to find him low-lidded and loose, his hands steady around Flambae’s shoulders. How funny that they had both been left changed by it: Waterboy right away, and Flambae in the aftermath, each of them treading new ground.
Flambae pressed the side of his fork down on the corner of his cake, scooping the greenish-brown mass of matcha and poppy onto it. “To figuring shit out,” he said, and he raised his fork to Waterboy, who eased out of his shock a little. He, too, sliced off the tip of his triangular piece, and they tapped their forks together as one would with wine glasses, toasting to—well, whatever this was.
“Yeah,” said Waterboy. His eyes followed Flambae’s fork, and he looked like he was about to apologise for smearing cream all over it, but it was gone before he could say anything. Flambae hummed, savoring it. He was used to sweet things with a bitter undertone, but this one carried something else, too, more earthy than biting, and crumbled nicely on his tongue. “H-How is it?”
Flambae couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at him. Waterboy’s fork still hovered in the air untouched, as if he couldn’t bring himself to try his own portion before he was sure that Flambae was satisfied. Flambae would have found some way to wrap this up in words, gently teasing without cutting, but then a flicker of movement caught his eye. His gaze dropped, and he saw the skin of Waterboy’s neck shift, like a cat’s third lid flicking briefly over its eyes.
“The fuck is that?” he asked, barely having finished chewing. Looking closer, he could make out three lines where the skin seemed to meet in folds. Waterboy followed his eyes down to his own shoulder first, then looked back at him.
“Oh, this?” He ran a finger down the side of his neck, and the slight stretch of his touch opened those three lines right up, showing pink, bristled flesh beneath. “I have—they’re my gills.”
Flambae blinked, dumbfounded. His gaze flicked between Waterboy’s face and his neck, where, sure enough, the skin parted in slits like a fish’s. Flambae swallowed, then glared some more, before finally saying: “You have gills.”
Which was rich coming from the guy who could propel himself into the air using fire, but still. This was news. With Waterboy’s costume covering him from chin to ankle, Flambae hadn’t considered that there was more to him than just his water powers. More than that, it was the first time he’d seen powers that went this far to change the body while still being human. Sonar was a case for himself—they’d probably fucked around with literal bat DNA to create him, so that didn’t count—and Malevola was one of the few people Flambae knew who’d actually been born with their powers, rather than growing into them later on. It was uncommon for powers to be that obvious when not in use, at least those that occurred naturally.
“Yeah,” Waterboy said, setting his hand back down. The slits in his neck closed up once more, but now that Flambae had seen them, they were impossible to miss. “I don’t—I’m not the best swimmer, so it’s not super useful, but, uh, if I need to, I can breathe. Underwater, I mean.”
“So—” Flambae said, gesturing. “So what, you just started breathing water at some point?”
“It’s—kind of a long story,” said Waterboy. “I don’t wanna—you might get bored.”
“Shit, you’re right.” Flambae made a show of checking the wristwatch he didn’t have. “Hate talking on a date. Let’s just eat our cake in silence and then leave, I’ve got places to be.”
Waterboy looked at him like he wasn’t sure if he was joking, and Flambae lightly nudged his shin with his foot, noticing at the last second how the word date had rolled off the tongue, no hesitation at all.
“You can’t just show me shit like this and then not elaborate, man. Come on, was your father a fish? What is it?”
The corner of Waterboy’s mouth quirked up, though it fell again as he gathered his words. “I, uh… Me and my family—my parents, we were visiting my grandma at her house near the mountains, and my dad wanted to bring—take me kayaking on the Inn. He said I was old enough to come along now. My mom didn’t like the idea. I guess I was never the best at—I couldn’t really control my body very well, so she was afraid I’d fall into the water.”
His eyes dropped down, setting his fork onto the plate. A drop of water ran down the curve of his brow, dipping into his eye before rolling out the corner of it. He wiped it away as one would do with tears. “So she came along to make sure I was s-safe. I think at first, she was more afraid than I was. She held the paddle with me in the back, and she kept looking back to check on me. The, uh, the Inn gets really fast, even in good weather, and you can get turned around really quick. And…” He paused, seeming to steady himself. Flambae stretched out his legs to lay them in alternation with Waterboy’s, a light touch.
“And the weather was not good,” Waterboy went on. “My dad checked the forecast, but Innsbruck is a large place, so I guess it was more like an average. My mom said we should turn back, but it would’ve been harder to get out of the water and make our way back on foot than to just follow the current and take a bus from there.” He wiped his hands on his pants before reaching for his mug, further stirring that already homogenous blend and nearly stabbing himself in the eye with the spoon as he went to drink. Flambae, for once, felt little urge to make fun of him.
“We were soaked by then, both from the rain and the river. There were all these little drops as we went downstream, and usually it’s not a big deal if you get turned around, ‘cause usually you’ll just fall out of the boat and can climb back in with some help, but there must have been a larger drop, or maybe the currents were too strong to even know which way was up when we fell out. I don’t even remember what happened, I just—I only remember the sensation.” He laughed, something dry and sharp-edged and mirthless as he ran his finger along his gills once more. “They shouldn’t even work,” he said. “‘Cause in fish, they’re connected to the mouth so water can pass through. But I felt them open up while I was underwater, and—I mean, I guess I was fine. Lost two parents and gained—this.”
Flambae, his cake mostly untouched, his fork still in his hand, was hit with the unsettling feeling of being given more than he could handle. Emergencies, he could deal with, pounding through the beats until the threat abated. Drunken confessions, too, when inhibitions were broken down and nothing was too personal, no secret too sacred to lay on the table for a cheap joke.
This, though. Flambae had enough sense of tact to know that this required a more delicate hand, but not enough to know what to do with it. His hands, after all, had never been built for tenderness.
He thought of Khadija, who had remained kind despite everything, to whom words came as easy as breath. He thought of the way she approached little Moska, a child as wild and fierce as she herself had never been—and he thought of Waterboy, around the same age, nothing but a boy in the woods, confused and afraid and in pain and alone.
He lightly squeezed Waterboy’s leg between his own and hoped it was enough.
“I don’t remember dragging myself out,” Waterboy said. There’d been a few times when Flambae had seen him when he was left to speak uninterrupted; it all seemed to burst out of him like a torrent, his mind taking his stutter with it as his mouth sprinted ahead of his thoughts. “I just—I was walking through the woods trying to find my way home, and I think there was a woman out with her dog who brought me back to my grandma. Or maybe she brought me to the hospital first. But I was there, and they did a whole checkup. You know, to make sure I wasn’t gonna drown later on, I guess. One of the nurses asked me about superheroes. Who my favourite was, what I knew about them. And then my grandma took me to get ice cream.”
He took a breath. There were stains on his shirt, dampened by water, sticking in some places. Flambae imagined it must have been uncomfortable.
“I lived with my grandma in Innsbruck for a while. I knew—spoke the language a little bit, ‘cause my mom taught me, but it never really felt like home, so… So eventually we moved. At the time I didn’t know how much she was leaving behind for me just so I could go back to my old life.”
“Woman sounds like a hero,” Flambae said, and Waterboy blinked up at him, as though he’d forgotten he was there.
“Y-Yeah,” he said, and Flambae watched the steady rise of colour to his face, the hasty rebuilding of his walls. “I—Sorry. Oh, god, I didn’t wanna—this was a—downer. Sorry.”
“I’ve had worse moods,” Flambae told him, both as a reflex and because it was true. This was something to tackle, at least, an immediate feeling within his reach that he could unravel. “One time a guy picked me up from work to hook up and then had a panic attack in the drive-thru of a Wendy’s because the guy at the register looked like his ex. Now that was awkward.” Waterboy lightened somewhat, managing a smile. It was a nice smile, Flambae noticed, apropos of nothing. “This is way better.”
“Thanks,” Waterboy said, looking down at what remained of his drink.
“What even is that?” Flambae asked, cocking his chin at the mug. Copying what Prism always did: taking in the heavy stuff, and then moving on. Flambae liked that about her, that things never seemed like as big of a deal as they felt when he dropped them on her. She would listen, and the ceiling would not drop on either of their heads, leaving Flambae feeling comfortably small, powerless to lay ruin to the world at large.
Waterboy unhooked his finger from the handle of the mug. “You can—if you—wanna try?”
Flambae took a moment to realise what he was being offered. “Sure,” he said, slightly startled, receiving the mug from Waterboy. It shouldn’t have felt like anything at all, considering he already knew what Waterboy’s tongue tasted like, but the gesture still felt overly familiar. Or maybe it was the readiness with which Waterboy had offered it, the way he hadn’t even had to think about it—not only sharing a drink with Flambae, letting him lay his mouth where his own had been, but also just sharing in general, when there was so little of it left. Maybe it rubbed against a younger part of his brain, back when food had been scarce while on the run with his sister, when he’d gone hungry often so that she could eat. She made up for it by inviting him over for dinner as often as she could, cooking all those dishes they both loved in quantities that left nobody lacking, but it felt different, now, to take from the dregs, to be the one getting the last of something.
Flambae drank slowly, imagining—if only to take the weight off of it—that it was probably saliva and little else. Then he realised that that didn’t help much, either, and focused instead on the actual flavour.
Sure enough, it was sweet, likely more cream than substance, but without any of the artificial shit he might’ve found at a Starbucks. Sweet the way honey or maple was, and spiced just a little. His face must have done some complicated series of motions as he cycled through the different layers of flavour, because Waterboy was looking at him with something that might have been guilt, as if he would personally be to blame in case Flambae was displeased.
“You don’t like it?” he asked. “It’s very sugar—very sweet. Sorry.”
“It is,” Flambae said, searching for words. “I don’t not like it. Reminds me of this thing my mom used to make.”
It was meant as a simple comment made in passing, but Waterboy perked up ever so slightly at that, giving Flambae a look, open and doe-eyed and eager. Listening. Asking for him to elaborate without needing any words to do so. Flambae hadn’t thought that far ahead, hadn’t expected to be asked questions, or non-verbally prodded at.
“It’s this ice cream,” he said, rifling through his mind for things to say, things that he might tell someone who knew nothing about him. “Where I come from, at least. They make it with saffron and—” He paused, willing the tip of his tongue to yield the right word. “Fucking—those green little nuts.”
“Pistachios?”
“Yeah, that. They call it Sheer Yakh. My mom always added a little cocoa, so this tastes a bit like that.” He ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth, searching it for lingering flavour. “Used to have it all the time as a kid.”
The air conditioning blew a light breeze across Flambae’s back, and he was once again reminded of the state he was in: open-haired, dressed as modestly as he was capable of, bearing all the nerves of someone who had not yet had over three decades of life to know better.
He wasn’t really used to talking about himself this way, building from the ground up. Prism and Khadija already knew pretty much everything there was to know about him, down to every embarrassing detail, and everyone else just didn’t care enough to ask.
But Waterboy was sitting bright-eyed and captivated in front of him, nodding along and seeming to forget how to be afraid of eye contact for a moment, and Flambae found himself smiling in spite of himself.
It was nice to just—talk.
Then again, even he could understand that Waterboy may not be up for that much more talking today. Prism would probably skin him if he told her that, upon having Waterboy drop his entire lore on the table, Flambae had proceeded to talk about food of all things.
“Try your cake, man,” he told him, and Waterboy looked down at his plate, seeming to remember that he had not yet eaten.
“Right,” he said.
And so that was that. The cake was, in fact, better than most things he’d bought from elsewhere, pleasantly firm along the edges, the bottom unsoftened by the filling. Waterboy offered a strawberry from his own plate, and Flambae traded a forkful of poppy for it. His legs had not moved from where he’d slid them in with Waterboy’s, and for a while, that was all there was: a sweet treat shared in companionable silence, knees bumping into each other every once in a while.
Flambae was sure he was doing him a favour when he made moves to get up, putting an end to a nice afternoon before it overstayed its welcome. He’d had a good time with someone before only to end up getting annoyed when there’d been too much of a good thing, and strangely enough, he found himself wanting to avoid that sort of fate with Waterboy.
Outside, birdsong trilled around them, and the heat seemed milder now than it had when Flambae’d arrived. Waterboy had thrown on a loose jacket that looked like it’d been knitted by hand, and it crinkled gently as he moved, as if the inside was waterproof. It was probably how he’d avoided getting his seat wet at the café.
“So,” said Flambae, because Waterboy definitely wasn’t gonna take the first step. “You want a ride home? Or you wanna decompress?”
Waterboy looked up, peering between the two buildings that framed the sun to gauge how much daylight he had left. He looked up at Flambae, sheepish. “If it’s not too much of a—I mean, I don’t wanna—”
“Hey,” Flambae interrupted, aiming for a tone that passed for kind. “No offence, man, but you’re not the kinda person who can pressure people into things. I offered. Tell me yes or no and stop worrying, okay?”
And Waterboy, after a moment of processing, actually looked relieved. Flambae had thought it might’ve been too harsh, but Waterboy patted down his pockets to check for his wallet and keys and gave a smile that was both grateful and comforted, in a way.
“Okay,” he said, nodding to himself. “Okay, I—yeah. Thanks.”
If it seemed strange to him that Flambae had driven here when he could just as easily have flown, he did not point it out. Flambae wasn’t sure what he would’ve said, either; he flew when he was not particularly worried about getting a ticket for unauthorised air travel, and he drove when he had better things to do than run—or, well, fly—from the police. Just easier to avoid the hassle when he had somewhere to be, is all.
And so, after a brief walk to where he’d left his car at the side of the road, they were on their way. Flambae didn’t even need to type the address into his phone: their destination was exactly the sort of place heroes would be sent to when some grandma wandered off in her slippers again, waiting for the bus at an out-of-order station. Peaceful, though, besides that. Flambae could picture Waterboy there, away from the noise and the crime of downtown LA.
“Nice,” said Flambae as cement and concrete gave way to more colourful buildings with even more colourful gardens. It was a meagre consolation, he supposed, to be born into enough wealth to afford it when he’d also had to lose his parents to get here, but it was all Flambae could think to say.
“Yeah,” said Waterboy, with enough levity for Flambae to see that it’d landed well enough. “These people take—are proud of their gardens. I help out sometimes, with the—when my grandma can’t kneel. It’s nice.”
“A gardener.” Flambae smiled, tapping his fingers on the wheel. “Suits you.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Waterboy turn his head, as if to measure his own work against the ones passing by the window. “It’s not a—much,” he said. “Just the flowers. She still d-does most of it herself.”
Flambae was not an expert, his only knowledge of plants from Prism’s brief time working at a flower shop, but he was pretty sure that flowers were the hard part. Prism had told him all sorts of shit about which types of plants needed which soil, which ones would wither and die if you so much as looked at them the wrong way. Trees and vegetables didn’t give a shit if Mercury was in retrograde or something, but a flower might get colics for no reason other than vibes being off.
He was about to say as much, something vaguely comforting, hopefully, when Waterboy all but stumbled into his next sentence with the freneticism of someone who’d been sitting on their words for ages.
“Look,” he said, “I—I’m sorry for, you know, dumping all that stuff on you. I really wanted—I was looking forward to knowing—getting to know you.”
Flambae looked over at him for several moments before realising he’d taken his eyes off the road. The fact that Waterboy had done most of the talking had hardly even registered—beside the obvious thought of oh shit, that’s a lot, I got enough brain cells not to add to that.
With anyone else, it would’ve pissed him off—no point giving a guy the time of day when he didn’t care to get to know him at all, but this hadn’t felt like that. Flambae rifled through the past couple of hours, and he found that Waterboy hadn’t seemed self-absorbed, talking just for the sake of hearing himself speak. He mentally examined the things Waterboy had told him, his childhood and his heritage and the little details of his life, and thought he could feel the weight of them in his hand, the cost of having brought them forth. And, in the wake of it all, Waterboy had not been shattered by what he’d told Flambae, nor too ashamed to keep talking to him.
But Waterboy didn’t seem to see it that way. He looked genuinely guilty, blue eyes looking at Flambae as if bracing for impact, and Flambae was speaking before his head had time to add its two cents. “Well,” he said, “maybe I’ll share my tragic backstory next time. Then we can call it even.”
Which was an insane thing to say to a guy he’d made out with exactly once, even if that guy happened to also be his coworker. Especially if that guy was his coworker, seeing as he’d be forced to be near him no matter what became of this. Whatever this was. Flambae had sworn off dating people from work long ago, but he couldn’t exactly backtrack now, and he only had himself and his impulsivity to thank for it.
Not that he wanted to. It had been a nice day.
Maybe this was how Waterboy had managed to worm his way into the hearts of the rest of the team, growing on them like weeds. He seemed to have a way about him. Flambae had thought it to be pity at first, a tolerance for ineptitude beyond all reason, but then, by the time it’d turned out that Waterboy was not incompetent at all, he’d already won over most of SDN. And now Flambae was driving him home after a date of cake and conversation, and was making promises of a next one.
What the fuck.
“I-I’d like that,” Waterboy said. Flambae made a point to keep his eyes straight ahead this time, but he thought he could hear the edges of a smile in his voice.
Counting down the numbers as they passed rows of houses, Flambae spotted the one that had to be Waterboy’s. He took a brief glance at the rearview mirror, then stopped right there by the sidewalk, seeing as most of the residents in this area likely didn’t have the means to drive anyway, and therefore no need for a driveway in their house.
“Text me when you get home,” he said. No time at all passed between that and the resulting laugh, but by the time Waterboy turned to him, he was already flushed with it, hiding the worst of it in his hand.
“Sorry,” he said, and only then did Flambae realise that a little water had spilled out with it. Waterboy undid his seatbelt one-handed, using the other to wipe at his mouth. “Sorry.”
Which was definitely gross, Flambae thought, but also, in some weird way, sickeningly endearing.
“All good,” he told Waterboy, because there was nothing else to say that wasn’t either super weird or completely incoherent. He watched as Waterboy got out of the car and wiped down the fabric of the seat for good measure, just in case he’d left any wetness behind. “I mean it, dude, stop fussing.”
Waterboy looked up at that, stopped mid-sweep in his tracks. He nearly hit his head on the roof of the car as he straightened up from his hunch, and Flambae wondered—with some amount of awe, for the first time—how this was the same person who chased after villains like a man possessed, using that same power he was now mortified by to trip them up or knock them out.
Though Flambae supposed he had no right to talk in that regard.
“Thank you,” Waterboy said, picking at his hands in that open car door. “F-For everything.” And then, after staring at the space between Flambae’s eyes some more, he added: “I-I like what you’ve done with the—you. With your hair and everything.”
He slammed the door of the car before Flambae had a chance to respond, powerwalking to the front door, nestled between clusters of edelweiss and lavender bushes. Once he’d unlocked it, he turned back a final time to wave before hurrying inside, leaving Flambae to sit there and wonder how he would possibly sum all this up to Prism when he inevitably reported back to her.