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“Has he ever been like this?” Parisa asked her sister.
Andisha only shook her head, hands resting on her stomach. “Definitely not.”
The this in question was the current state that Zahir was in. He had just been busted by Mecha Man and sent to prison for arson and property damages, his sentence being full of community service that was meant to clear the ‘debt’ his damage supposedly cost. Parisa and Andisha weren’t quite sure why the fines were so high—truly, had a hero ever had to do something like this? They didn’t think so.
But the high bill wasn’t what shocked them. What was shocking was that he was sobbing.
“Dude–” Parisa murmured quietly, nails tapping on the glass. “Since when did you ugly cry?”
“Shut the fuck up, man! I’m having a moment here.” he sniffled, head resting in his hands as he wiped his eyes dry. “This is a very very big moment I’m having. A realization. An epiphany–”
“And what, pray tell, is that moment?” Andisha asked him.
Zahir sighed before looking up at the both of them. “Mecha Man fought me!”
“We know.” Parisa said sarcastically. “You got your ass kicked.”
“Yes, exactly! He fights.” Zahir grumbled. “Like, fucking well.”
Parisa and Andisha blinked confusedly. “Come again?”
“Like– he fought really well! Fuck– and I know that he could do better, I mean, have you seen the state of that suit? It’s running on scraps and yet he still fought me that well.” he said, not taking a breath once in his ramble about how badly beaten the suit was and how well Mecha Man fought regardless. “Which, is like, really bad for me. Because now I’m stuck here in this prison cell and I’m not out there with him!”
“And this is important how exactly?” Parisa asked.
“Because it’s tradition to fight!” Zahir whined as he banged his head against the glass divider. “And now I’m just, like, so wired. I don’t know. I feel like my body is burning up.”
Andisha groaned. “Zahir, he took your fingers. He sliced them off–”
“Who really needs a pinky and a ring finger?” Zahir said before sighing dreamily. His sisters looked at each other before looking at him in utter confusion.
“Why would you have them if they weren’t needed?” Andisha asked confusedly.
Zahir shrugged. “Maybe it was just fate that I had them on me.”
“It’s just fate that you grew the five regular fingers, the ones that most people grow, just so two of them could get chopped by a guy playing Robots?” Parisa asked him. “Seriously, Zahir?”
“You should’ve seen the way that he handled the Mech!” he said instead of answering, fingers tapping on the table and legs bouncing up and down. “It was so graceful.”
It was Parisa’s turn to bang her head against the glass divider. “You are so fucking gay dude.”
“Fuck off!” he said as he shooed them away. “Let a guy have his meltdown in peace.”
The issue that Zahir was facing was the fact that his sisters thought him to be much more dramatic than he currently was. So he was crying over being in prison? So what? He wasn’t even sure if they understood why he was crying—not that he could quite explain it to them. Parisa hadn’t found a partner just yet, and his mother hadn’t taught Andisha all of their traditions before she married her husband.
The issue was just that. He was taught the traditions—he knew what they meant, their importance. And right now? He was at his wit’s end with the tradition being fulfilled.
On paper, his name was Zahir Yar, one he changed to Zahir Yar-Khan when his mother remarried. He was committed for arson, had no past history of anything criminal or medical, and seemed to be in otherwise perfect shape. What the papers didn’t say was just what he was. What his family was.
Surprisingly, for a world full of people with superpowers, there weren't a lot of reasons as to why many of them had those powers. Some people just figured out they could become a weird slime some day, maybe some of them just magically turned into a ball. But despite the fact that most families didn’t have a reason for generational powers—biological genes spreading down at best—that didn’t mean all of them didn’t have a reason. Zahir’s family had a reason.
It was a well kept secret, their family. They’d descended from the Azdehyazi bloodline. Former dragons with fire running through their veins and out of their scales—the warriors of many dragon clans. They went from protecting the royalty to being the royalty, they became the name that was whispered in fear when others ran away from something screaming. If anyone had been put in danger it was most likely them who caused it—and it was a fear that his family basked in with pride. While many other dragons learned to adapt to the ways of being human—learned to hide their scales and their horns so much that they faded away with time—the Azdehyazi bloodline didn’t. They kept their wits about them. They kept their scales, their horns, their claws and their traditions.
Which is what made this situation the worst situation that Zahir had ever been in.
The first thing, the most obvious thing, was that he didn’t look like a dragon right now. His scales weren’t out, his horns were hidden, and the bones of his wings were scraping against his spine. It was awful, painful, an extremely cruel punishment he was subjecting himself too. But he couldn’t let anyone know just what he was—not if he wanted to get out of here to get to Mecha Man.
Mecha man was the other issue.
There were many traditions that his family had. They had their powers, they had their altars and they had the qokharbi. But perhaps one of the most important rituals was the hunt. The fight, the chase, whatever it was that you wanted to call it.
Dragons were territorial creatures. Ones that needed to be satisfied. It was something they sought out in daily life—why, in his mother’s words, a lot of them can have kleptomanic tendencies. One of the ways that they needed to be satisfied was through a satisfying partner. Someone who could challenge them on a physical, emotional and intellectual level in a way that best suited them and their needs.
One of the traditions to prove this was to fight.
Zahir had been to many of these fights growing up—dragons who hadn’t given up their ways would often host fighting rings for prospective couples to get into and test their strength together. He’d seen the gory endings of them, had dreamed of when it would happen to him. He wasn’t sure what the fights were officially called, whether they had an official name was a question in itself. They were just called the fight. And the only rule of the fight was that you couldn’t truly win.
Not that winning wasn’t allowed, or that you lost on purpose. Losing on purpose was an insult to your opponent to say the least—you were meant to fight with all of your wits. But fights were handed as a win when there was a draw pulled out of the pair or after hours of fighting. The playing fields, for the most part, were meant to be even. Too much power imbalance was never good for a relationship, and the fights were a way to showcase it. But the rules were different with dragons than they were with humans—absolutely, under no circumstances, was a dragon expected to lose to a human. Zahir remembered the stories that his mother would whisper to him late at night after watching those fights. She had an uncle whose mate was a human. They had fought, somehow, and he had lost. It wasn’t just a bloody nose or broken skin—he’d been taken to the hospital chewed like a rabid animal. The details before were always fuzzy to her, but the ending never was. He had grown obsessed with his new partner. More obsessed than a dragon ever had been over any jewels or lair of riches.
Zahir hadn’t quite understood what she meant until this moment.
Because before the fight, he was a regular member of the Azdehyazi bloodline. He had his markings and he had his powers. He had everything until he fought Mecha Man—a human with no powers fighting in a suit so worn down he wasn’t sure that anything could fix it. And he lost. Zahir had lost to a human nowhere near his prime. His sisters say that he lost pitifully, but he disagreed. The fight was amazing—it was like gaining his fire for the first time all over again. He’d felt it coursing through his veins, felt the way that his back burned when faced with such a rival. Such an opponent.
Such a perfect match.
And now? Now, Zahir was stuck in a prison cell. Pushing down every dragon bit of his DNA and obsessing over a man who probably forgot who he was. It wasn’t something that he could handle for much longer, but it was something that he needed to. It was something that had to happen, something he had to deal with, if he truly wanted to escape.
If he wanted to see him again.
Robert wasn’t sure whether what he was looking at was real or not.
He usually liked to keep up to date with some of the villains that he encountered throughout his times as Mecha Man. Some of them would send him letters and apologize, some of which he could convince to apologize to the families that they might’ve hurt. Some of them were more violent than others. He was waiting for the day that those ones broke out of their prison cells and started to seek him out. Some of them were just interesting.
Robert had fought fire before. He’d fought it many times—fire powers, regular forest fires, burning buildings that he saved people from. He’d tried his best to fireproof the suit—and it’d worked for years. But a fight with a villain that he fought just a couple of weeks before that threw his entire track off loop.
He found out that the man’s name was Flambae. His villain name, at least, he hadn’t been told the man’s real name. There was something about Flambae’s fire that seemed to be so unique to him—so special that Robert couldn’t help but dream about it still. He still had the taste of the smoke on his mouth. The heat from the fire had damaged a large part of the suit that had taken him out of commission to fix for about a day or two, but after that? His mind couldn’t truly get off of the burning man. He kept tabs on him.
Which is what leads him back to where he was right now. In the Mech suit, responding to a burning fire.
He’d been patrolling the area in the sky, making sure that nothing awry was happening, when he saw it. A controlled fire near the beginning of a forest. He had water prepared in the jets of the Mech suit ever since he had gotten into the fight with Flambae, which made landing near the fire feel just a bit safer to do.
That was until somehow, in some way shape or form, Flambae had come out from the forest and reabsorbed the flames in the trees into his body. The trees were somehow fine. The grass was still green.
And Robert was utterly confused.
“We need to have a conversation, Mecha Man!” Flambae shouted at him.
Robert winced. “You really don’t need to yell that loud, you’ll get caught.” he said to Flambae. “And why are you out here anyway? Weren’t you sentenced to prison?”
“I was in prison. Then I broke out.” Flambae said, crossing his arms. “Now you have to listen to me.”
“Are we going to be fighting?” Robert asked, defenses raised. As much as Flambae had intrigued him, he knew the type that Flambae usually was like. They fought back when they got free. Became the biggest fans that Robert could ever have nightmares about. “Cause I have shit to do. I’d rather we hurry this up.”
Flambae scoffed. “This is a very important conversation about a very important matter.”
Robert snorted. “So important that you break out of prison over it?”
“Yes, dumbass, it is.” Flambae said. “We’re mates now.”
Robert blinked. Once, twice, then titled the suit’s head down to look at Flambae just a bit more. “What?”
“You heard me, we’re mates.” Flambae said, waving his hand around as if this was a conversation people had on an average Tuesday. “Well, sorta? The tradition around it is weird– basically, we fought good. Like, really good. And now I can’t stop thinking about you.”
Robert was silent.
Flambae nodded, as if the silence was a means to continue. Maybe it was, Robert didn’t know at this point. “Because we fought well, we are now considered mates. Through Azdehyazi culture, at least.”
“You want to fuck me because I gave you a good fight?” Robert asked confusedly.
Flambae looked to the side before shrugging. “Pretty much, I guess.”
“I cut your fingers off.” Robert said to him, though it was more like a question than a sentence. As if the man forgot about the fact that he had been mutilated. “Aren’t you, like, mad at that?”
Flambae shrugged. “Not particularly.”
“Does that have anything to do with your, uh–”
“Azdehyazi culture?” Flambae said to him before nodding. “Yes, yes it does.”
Robert nodded, looking over the man again. He had the same costume on. Low cut leotard with flambe patterns surrounding his legs and his arms. The only difference were the tattoos that went up his chest and neck—ones Robert was sure he would’ve noticed in the fight. “Did you get those–”
“They’re magical.” Flambae answered. “I have a few questions for you now.”
“Uh huh,” Robert drawled out.
“When do you get off?” Flambae asked, his hand waving around the suit. “This thing?”
Robert shrugged, realized that Flambae couldn’t see him, then cleared his throat. “Uh, I dunno. A couple hours, I guess? I’ve been patrolling for a bit now.”
“Do you like tacos?”
“Sure?” Robert said confusedly.
“Good.” Flambae nodded. “We’re going to get tacos.”
Robert looked at him in utter confusion, half tempted to open the cockpit doors and shake some sense into the man. But he couldn’t really do that, so he settled for verbal shakes instead. “Are you insane?”
“I have priorities, Mecha Man. There’s a taco place just down the street, meet me at six.” Flambae said.Robert watched as the man’s hands and lower legs lit up in flames, his body flying right in front of the cameras of the mech. Robert hadn’t noticed how much his eyes glowed until then. “You better not stand me up, Mecha Dick, or I will actually set this forest on fire.”
“Is Mecha Dick meant to be an insult or a compliment?” Robert asked. “Cause I have to say that my dick’s, like, pretty average–”
“Shut the fuck up.” Flambae said. He flew off before Robert could even get a word in. Which, Robert thought, was a bit rude. He hadn’t been given the chance to say no. Moreso blackmailed into saying yes, if he was playing with semantics.
But Flambae was a curiosity. And Robert was nothing if not curious.