Work Text:
No, you ain't got no Mrs.
Oh, but you got a sports car
Zahir wanted to explode.
This, he thought, was a perfectly reasonable reaction. He thought that Alice laughing at him for throwing his cup before picking it back up was rather rude. So he didn’t like to litter anymore, so fucking what? He was a reforming and changed man. Therapy taught a lot about picking up after your messes—which also included burnt coffee cups.
“How the fuck are we meant to get out of here?” he asked Alice—and no, his voice did not end in a whine. “We haven’t even gotten to hang out yet!”
Alice shrugged and hit her vape. “Call Roberto. He’d probably know.”
“Just call SDN at that fucking point, bitch.”
“Yeah, but it’s Robert.” she said as she looked at his car. The front had started emitting smoke and caused him to immediately pull over. Fire powers mixing with a smoking car full of flammable gasoline did not go hand in hand together. “It’s basically the same thing, right?”
Zahir couldn’t find anything in him that would be able to argue with that language.
“And what, exactly, is the issue?”
Alice shrugged. “The car started smoking and Bae pulled over. Cuz he’s a little bitch.”
“Fire and smoke do not mix well in a combustible car!” he said to them both as he bent over the car’s insides. The hood was open, leaving the car to be exposed to the naked eye. “I would’ve tried to fix it if I had my toolkit, but I had to take it out to clean it off.”
Robert as he looked over Zahir’s shoulder. “I forgot what normal vehicles look like.”
“The fuck does that mean?” Zahir asked him.
Robert shrugged. “Blue’s been my transportation for a long time now.”
Alice laughed before looking over at his car. “Is that why I’ve never seen this before?”
“I bought it a week or so ago, I think? Chase said that my suit wasn’t reliable and gave me a bunch of his old CDs to convince me about it.” Robert shrugged before grabbing his toolkit and coming back. “The insides were all wonky—I had to fix ‘em.”
Zahir looked at him. “Wonky how?”
“Like this.” Robert gestured to the insides of his car. Completely fine insides, Zahir would like to add. Other than the smoking issue there was absolutely nothing wrong with the car. Everything was in the place that it should be. “Also, who the fuck worked on this last?”
Zahir shrugged. “The mechanic I usually go to had a trainee working.”
“Woah. You let ‘em do that, Bar?”
“I figured that I would try to be charitable.” Zahir smiled, fist bumping Alice.
Robert snorted before waving a cloth at the insides. “Well the issue is just that this shit didn’t get cleaned up. Everything ended up smoking before it burnt,” he said. “You want this the same?”
Zahir’s eyebrows furrowed. “What the fuck are you talking about bitch?”
“You know, the stuff in here. Do you want it to be left alone?”
“Uh, yeah? Duh.” Zahir rolled his eyes.
He was already leaning forward and rubbing the insides of Zahir’s car clean when Zahir felt more embers flying off of him. Robert had, at some point, bought a white tank top to wear. Which he was. Very scandalously. It was tucked into a pair of jeans with his hoodie tied around his waist—tools for his car poking outside of his pockets. It was also rather see-through. He was definitely not blushing at the sight of Robert’s scars through his tank top, and Alice was definitely not trying to laugh at him for it.
“What did you mean about changing everything, Roberto?” Alice asked.
Robert shrugged before tossing them his keys. “Take a look, I guess.”
Zahir and Alice looked down at the keys before looking at each other with rather wide smiles. Being trusted with something like this was probably similar to being trusted with the mech, right? That seemed like a reasonable thing to compare this car to. Zahir’s finger pressed on the unlock button as they both lifted the hood of the car.
And saw absolute fucking mayhem.
It was hell inside. Hell, that was a fucking compliment! Hell wasn’t nearly as chaotic as whatever the fuck this was. It was like some fucking eldritch horror had looked at it, claimed it, and then went the fuck to bed, and what was left was just the shell that said horror took shape in. There were cogs that looked rusted but were still running—even though the car wasn’t on—copper coils in places that made no sense, magnifying glasses of different sizes in the most absurd of places, even fucking light bulbs that were attached to things with different colored filaments. For some reason, there was a fucking clock. A keyboard near the right edge with both regular letters and symbols that they had never even seen before. And also an area with different liquids that looked to be in a filtering system out of a mad scientist’s dream. Half of the shit inside of the car neither of them could even begin to explain without being called crazy.
“Bitch, what the fuck is this?”
Robert looked over at it. “My car?”
“What the hell are the magnifying glasses for?” Alice looked over at him.
Robert’s eyes furrowed over at the inside before humming. “There’s a Pulse inside of there that needs to be focused on more specific parts. Also what the liquids are for.”
Zahir blinked. “You’re using an Astral Pulse to power your fucking car?”
“First thing: gas is expensive, and SDN could cut my paycheck again at any minute. Secondly–” he said as he lifted the now dirty white rag from Zahir’s car and made his way over. The insides were now squeaky clean, and Robert’s hands only pressed a few buttons on the keyboard before grabbing a small red and spiralling cylinder. “It’s not the Astral Pulse, hardly enough power for the arms alone. It’s only a regular star. More like a weaker younger brother.”
Alice’s mouth was opening and closing as she looked between Robert and the Pulse inside his hand, obviously much more red than it was blue. “The fuck you mean a star?”
“You know, a star.” Robert said casually. “Like how the sun is a star?”
“How the fuck did you get a fucking star inside of your car.” Zahir asked him. His hands moved to grab the thing inside of his hand—his eyes landing on the way that the energy inside spiralled around itself and moved tighter and looser every minute or so. The heat that this thing emitted was enough to make the oxygen around him deplete, and fast. “Dude, this is like– this is the textbook definition of a fire starter. How the fuck did you find this?”
Robert shrugged and took it back from Zahir’s hand and back into the car. “Stephan gave it to me. Repurposed some old metal for this car too.”
“Why the fuck is that metal so cold, dude?” Alice asked. Zahir had originally thought that his temperature had just been a bit wonky when he touched the car’s roof—but Alice’s fingers had a bit of ice on them after she touched the car’s side.
What the fuck did Robert do to this car?”
“Apparently there’s metal on Neptune near its core. It gets really cold, which counters the heat of this Pulse.” he said as he closed the lid of the car back. There was a small click that sounded way more like a sound that his suit would make than a fucking car roof should. “Your car should be fine, but I can tow it if you guys want me to?”
Zahir put his hands up. “Absolutely not–”
“Absolutely yes?” Alice interrupted. “Don’t be fucking boring, Bae!”
“I don’t want to fucking die in this– this death contraption! Bitch, you drive a death contraption!”
Robert shrugged and went to grab a cable. “So is the mech.”
Which, unfortunately, he couldn’t really argue with.
The inside of this car was just as fucking messed up as the outside of the car was.
Apparently, the car could transform into something that was similar to a mini-mech if Robert was ever in an emergency situation. Which meant, of course, that this thing had to be fucking built like the inside of the goddamn Mecha Man suit too.
There were three seats in the back and two in the front. This was normal of most cars. This should not be an abnormal thing to point out. It was, however, extremely abnormal—as Robert had moved the driver seat to the front and only added a side seat near his left elbow with a cage feature for Beef to have safer transportation. That was it.
Inside of this stupid fucking death contraption was two keyboards, two camera screens in between the windows and the windshield, buttons and sensors literally anywhere that you looked, and—on top of all the aforementioned things—both an automated voice that only talked in two languages and models showing the power and stability levels of literally everywhere in the car. Zahir could reach out and touch it to figure out the condition of a singular fucking wire. Maybe even the casing’s current level of strength.
Robert was absolutely insane.
“You said that this thing talks two languages?” Alice asked. “Does Blue?”
Robert hummed as he leaned back in his seat. His hands were casually resting on the bottom of the steering wheel—which should not have been as hot to Zahir as it was. Scratch that, none of this should have been as hot as it was. This was the worst car that Zahir had fucking ever seen.
And yet, it ran the smoothest. It was both the hottest and coolest fucking thing that Zahir had ever fucking seen. Sue him for having a competency kink, you could quote him on that. Robert Robertson was competent and Zahir was going to combust into flames over it.
“Blue speaks three or four I think.” he said to them. “I know that I taught it three, but Stephan might’ve taught him one too.”
“Right,” Alice drawled out. “And whose Stephan? Some secret ex-lover?”
Robert snorted at that. “No, he’s from another planet. I called in a favor and he helped me source some of the stuff that made the new suit and this.”
“People owe you favors?” Zahir asked him.
Robert was only smiling at that. “You’d be surprised.”