Work Text:
“Robert, I’m requiring that you take PTO.”
There’s a pause and Mandy watches Robert Robertson’s head come up from where it’s bent over a small pile of after-action reports. He squints at her because, you know, it’s almost 8pm and most of the office lights have dimmed and he’s working by the light of his desk lamp. He looks exactly as tired as the day she pulled a bunch of Skittle colored muggers off him in the street, and it’s been nearly a month working at SDN.
Mandy would like to think that working for her is marginally healthier than being in a fucking coma for four months followed immediately by getting in a goddamn street fight. She kind of hoped Robert would start to look less like he just woke up from said coma the longer he worked here but…
“You’re what?” he says, wrinkling his nose at her.
Okay. That’s… that’s a little cute.
She clears her throat. “PTO. Paid Time Off. I’m telling you to take some.”
“I just started working here,” he says slowly, still squinting at her.
“You’re doing great, Robert. I admire your work ethic. I do, but Z-Team has literally never been better—”
“Flambae lit the last dispatcher’s car on fire,” Robert says.
“Right, but that doesn’t—”
Robert pulls his desk drawer open, rifles around inside, and pulls out what looks like a massive sparkly dragon dick dildo and slams it on the top of his desktop where it suctions with upsetting force to top. It wobbles there fully erect. Mandy forgets what she was going to say and becomes temporarily rendered speechless.
“Invisigal put that on my computer today,” Robert says with the resigned grit and forbearance of a day one World War Two soldier, a man who has seen horrors unending. “Sonar’s taken it as a challenge, Blazer. A challenge. I’ve been in a prolonged hacking battle with him for his Amazon account to stop him ordering something illegal in the state of California.”
“Oh my god,” Mandy says, horrified.
Robert reaches for something else in his desk.
“No!” She throws up two hands. “No, don’t show me anything else!”
Robert closes drawer and folds his arms on the desk, maintaining a deadpan expression from the depths of the bags beneath his eyes. “You see why I can’t let my guard down and, like, take time off? I’ll lose momentum with the fuckhead brigade and, also, they will booby-trap my desk again.”
“Again?”
Robert looks haunted. “Don’t make me talk about it.”
“Jesus,” Blazer says rubbing a hand over her face. “Robert, this is exactly why you need to take some PTO.”
“You’re in on it,” he says immediately, leaning forward on his elbows, glaring up at her. “What did they pay you, Mandy? What did my dignity and access to my desk cost you?”
She starts to sputter, but Robert’s neutral mask cracks at a dimple just in the right-hand side of his mouth and she realizes with relief and annoyance that he’s fucking with her. Mandy glares until he fully cracks, leans back in his swivel chair, and hooks his hands behind his head.
“They’re rubbing off on you,” she accuses.
“Nah, I was built like this and I’m going to defeat these dipshits at their own game.”
She points at the dildo. “Did you report that to HR?”
“I’m documenting,” Robert says, non-committal.
They admire the dildo for a moment together.
“Honestly,” Robert says, experimentally, “I don’t know if I can get that off the computer a second time. The suction is insane—”
“I’m not touching the fucking dragon dildo, Robertson.”
Robert stands up and removes the thing without much issue but more effort and a louder pop of release than bears thinking about. Mandy squints around his desk while he does this and notices a fat notepad labeled HR VIOLATIONS and a second full notepad labeled INVISIGAL’S CRIMES. He’s about a quarter of the way though both notepads.
“Robert, I’m serious.” She moves to lean against the outside of his cubicle. “You need to take a day off. Just… a three day weekend. Anything.”
He sighs and knees the desk drawer shut with the dildo safely contained.
“Okay, is this an order?”
“Kind of? Call it a strong recommendation that would make me feel a lot better as a boss.”
He sighs again louder. “Fine. Like… what do I do? Just not show up?”
“Jesus, do you not know how PTO works?”
“I’ve never had a job that had PTO,” he says dryly.
She tilts her head. “What jobs have you had?”
“Private security.” He shrugs. “And freelance penetration testing.”
Mandy blinks. She opens her mouth.
“Penetration testing is a computer security thing,” he says immediately.
“That’s not what I was going to ask.”
“I was just clarifying,” he says, not-quite a smirking. When she narrows her eyes him, he drags at hand over his face. “Yeah, yeah,” he groans. “I need to take time away from these guys. I’m hearing it. You know, when I listen to myself, right now talking to you—”
“Your boss.”
“Yup.”
She shakes her head. “Okay. Your employee account portal? Please say you know what that is, Robert. This is important to me.”
“Yes. I do.” He grins and lowers his voice. “Smart-ass.”
“There’s a section called PTO. Just click on it, pick a date, pick a time, submit to your manager—that’s still me by the way—and I’ll approve it.” She waits. “Well?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Christ. Fine.” He takes a seat at his workstation and starts clicking around. The glow of the screen casts his tired face into a sharp relief, eyes lidded as he navigates the screen. “Kay. How’s next Friday sound?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Done.” He huffs, shutting down his workstation. “Thanks for the time off, Miss Blazer.”
“Ugh, don’t.”
“Hey, if Prism gives you a pre-fix, I think that’s a good sign.” Robert picks up his backpack and clicks his tongue at Beef who perks up, rolls off his doggy bed, then waddles toward his owner. Robert looks at Mandy and sighs with open jealousy, “She would still flashbang me at a crosswalk for sport. Affectionately, I think, but still.”
Mandy starts to say, ‘Don’t flash or bang your coworkers, Robert. Wildly inappropriate,’ but stops herself because she’s a goddamn professional. Christ, she needs to stop letting Vizi-humor eat her brain. It’s literally going to get her reported to HR at some point.
She points at Robert as she starts toward the door. “Friday. Three-day weekend. No take backs.”
“Whatever you say.” He raises his voice slightly as she gets further from him. “Like I said, I don’t know how PTO works.”
“Bleak,” she calls back, then hops into the air and floats out the door.
The next Friday, Mandy (truly Mandy, the amulet of power is on the end table) sits curled on her couch, reading a book, freshly showered and cozy, and listening to music. Her apartment smells pleasantly of pancakes, bacon, and fresh cut flowers. When her phone chimes, she paws blindly for the device, then frowns when she sees the message from Robert’s work phone reading, Can you ask Galen to text me? He’s not answering his phone.
She contemplates ignoring this, then texts back, I’m not at the office. What do you need tho?
Nothing. a VPN software code. Not time sensitive. Thx
She nods and starts to go back to her book… then picks her phone back up and texts, suspiciously, Why do you need a VPN code?
To mask my IP and location?
Are you working from home?
She watches the active texting bubbles appear, stop, then appear again, I’m just wrapping a few things up.
She calls him.
It takes about four rings before he picks up, and she can perfectly imagine Robert staring at the phone in despair before finally answering.
He says, “I’m not working-working,” instantly on the defensive.
“You are allowed to do whatever you want with your PTO,” she says immediately. “I’m on PTO right now so this isn’t a boss-call, Robert.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Yeah, okay, I’m working a lead and its work… adjacent.”
She sighs. “You can do whatever you want but I am judging you a little.”
“I live my life in judgement. That’s fine. How are you?”
“Reading a new book. It’s garbage.”
Robert chuffs a laugh. (She’s always a little taken aback how low his voice is; something of an engine growl under the deadpan delivery.) She hears something shift on the other side of the line, like he’s tucking the phone under his ear. Tinnily, there’s the sound of dog food hitting the bottom of a bowl and the jangle of dog tags.
“You read garbage books?”
“They can’t all be winners, Rob.”
“Right but you could just stop reading it.”
“I’m not a damn quitter,” she says. She checks her smartwatch. “What are you doing besides be a workaholic?”
“Functional workaholism is my entire personality, unfortunately.” Robert grunts in a way that suggests he’s picking things up and moving them around in his apartment. “Last week there was a brute force hack against SDN’s, uh, security system, to keep it plain but I recognized the style and I think it’s a black hat hacker I’ve run into a few times before.”
“As Mecha Man?”
“Uh-huh.” There’s the sound of the microwave humming from his end of the phone. “They never rated high enough that it made sense for me go after them specifically, but I’ve got the down time and I want them gone.”
“Oooh,” Mandy says slowly. “Got it. This is just a spite thing.”
“Yes. I am a petty son-of-a-bitch, and they’ve bothered the fuck out of me for ages.” He huffs then rushes to add, annoyed, “The V-Rush Cartel bust? You remember that? A year back? Took me two weeks longer because this fucker set up a bunch of counter-security measures for them. They’ve literally made a living out of offering to ‘Mecha Man-proof’ their cyber security.”
“So, this hacker they’re… what? A rival?”
“I mean, I rival in the sense they keep slide-tackling me while I’m doing fifty other things. Sure.”
“Wow. You kinda hate this person, huh?”
“I always get past their shit, Mandy.” The disdain in his voice comes through like a physical force through the phone. “It just takes me longer and I hate that. I hate having my shit fucked with.”
Mandy snorts. She can perfectly picture her dour-faced coworker declaring his hatred to a microwave burrito. Royd told her in passing that Robert’s apartment looks like the man is squatting there, not living there, and while she doesn’t know Robert quiiiite well enough yet to ask what the fuck is up with that, she gets an upsetting vision of Mecha Man’s once-pilot sitting in an empty apartment with a laptop.
“Hey,” she says, slowly, an idea forming, “you have a car right?”
“Yes. It’s held together with duct tape, sheer force of will, and the fact I can rebuild a car from the ground up with spare-parts, but I have one in my possession.”
“I have a proposal.”
“I’m not going to spit alcohol at you again. That was a onetime trick.”
“Hahaha. No. Leave your cave and come to the boardwalk with me. Let’s do an adventure. For science.”
“For science?”
“I want to see if you’re physically capable of relaxing, Robertson.”
“And to be clear, this is not a date.”
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Hey, you tried to recruit me with whiskey at a job interview that I didn’t know was a job interview, and I spat one-hundred proof vodka in your mouth. We’ve all made mistakes that HR would strangle us for.”
“See, you’re starting to be less mortified by that story, and I think that’s a sign of your mental illness.”
“Oh, you have not yet begun to see my mental illnesses, Blazer.”
“Hey,” she says, shifting to lie back flat on her soft, “if you want to sit at home and hunt your hacker rival instead, that’s fine. I have a garbage novel to get back to. I’m just proposing options and, perhaps, reminding you that grass exists and you could touch it.”
There’s a pause. Then, “Touching grass might, conceivably, be a good idea.”
“Great. It’s not a date.”
Robert Robertson holding and ice cream cone like he doesn’t know what to do with it should be less funny. Maybe this is a sign that Vizi has broken Mandy’s baseline sense of humor. But the face he’s making as he examines the three-scoop tower of chocolate chip mint ice cream is somewhere between afraid and offended. Mandy finds herself ugly snort-laughing and unable to stop.
“What?” he says, deadpan.
She gasps for breath.
“Hey, if you brought me out here just to bully me, I’m gonna go back to my laptop.”
“No, just, your face.”
Deadpan, he says, “This is the only face I have, Mandy.”
“You seem distressed by the ice cream.”
“This scoop is the size of my head.” He gestures with his other hand to the admittedly impressive ice cream construction. His dead emotionless expression never cracks as he says, intensely, “It’s eighty-five degrees out here. What the fuck am I gonna do with my body weight in ice cream?”
“Eat fast?”
“Does your—” he gestures to his throat to indicate her amulet, currently inactive, on its chain beneath her crop-top hoodie— “Does it speed up your metabolism when you wear it? What’s the deal?”
“Yes.” Mandy starts to walk. Above, the blazing blue sky is cloudless and clear; the ocean breeze is exactly cool enough to take the heat off the skin. The smell of fresh waffle cone batter hits her nose sweet and mouth-watering on the wind. She elaborates, “The power I wield while wearing it comes from another place but actually channeling it does use up a lot of my energy so—” she takes huge bite of her own ice cream scoop— “I’ll eat yours if you can’t finish it.”
“So, I paid twelve dollars for your second serving of ice cream.”
“If you’re a slow eater, yes.”
She takes another huge bite.
Robert’s mouth twitches on a grin and he follows her, cautiously licking his ice cream far, far too fucking slowly in her opinion. They stroll down the boardwalk while other sun-seeking civilians walk, bike, and roller-skate past them. Comfortable human chaos in motion. They take a seat on a section of low concrete wall studded with decorative seashells and glass.
“How’s it feel?” Robert asks, gazing forward at the ocean, failing to stop his ice cream from melting. “Not wearing the gem, I mean. How’s it feel?”
“High definition,” she says, biting into her waffle cone.
“Jesus, are you done already?”
Mandy shoves the rest of the cone into her cheek and crunches affirmatively.
He hands her his ice cream. “Does being Blazer—? You said it takes a lot to feel anything. I assumed you meant the alcohol but—”
“It’s kind of everything,” she affirms. She kicks her heels against the stone wall, running her palm over the concrete beside her, feeling the sand-paper texture across the skin and rubbing her fingers together. “The gem takes everything down. I can… kind of tune into things if I focus, but as a default everything is just… blunted. You know? Great when you’re getting hit by lasers and punched by kaiju, but—”
“Less great when eating ice cream?” Robert offers.
She nods and licks her stolen ice cream.
She does not think too hard about the fact this is the second time she’s getting Robert’s saliva in her mouth through a transitive property. This is platonic. Platonic second-hand spit. Robert, for his part, seems more enamored with the ocean than ice cream (or her) anyway. He’s leant forward, elbows on his knees, staring forward at the gold shimmer off the sea, the breeze ruffling his hair a bit and for a moment Mandy would swear some of tension leaves his shoulders.
“You got people you talk to about this?” Robert asks after a while.
“Hmm? Oh! Yes. Jesus. Yes, I have friends, Rob. No offense.”
He smiles reflexively. “Just checking.”
She pauses. “I will admit… most supers know me pretty exclusively as Blazer. Just for safety and the like but—“ she fidgets with her cone— “my family. My friends from my civilian life? They know. I can tell them what’s going on.”
“Phenomaman?”
“He knows. He’s sweet, you know, but he struggles with the alias thing. He just… he is what he is and it’s all there on his sleeve.” She feels a pang of regret then and nostalgia as she eats her ice cream. “I didn’t break up with him because I don’t love him you know? It’s just… not that kind of love.”
Robert’s giving her a peculiar look.
“What? Too much?”
“Nah. Just… I see what you mean.” Robert looks back at the ocean. “He’s a good guy just…”
“Alien?”
“Alien. Just… big feelings. We’re working on it.”
There’s a companionable silence, watching the ocean.
“What about you?” Mandy pauses halfway through Robert’s ice cream to look at him. “When you were, you know—” she lowers her voice— “Mecha Man, did you have a lot of people who knew? Besides Chase?”
Robert shakes his head. “I mean… not on purpose. Some people found out incidentally, but no one used it against me. A few supes… healers mostly. A few technos and teleporters. Local-level for the most part.” He looks at his hands, knitted loosely between his knees. Up close, Mandy can see his knuckles are heavily calloused, criss-crossed with various fades of scarring. “Sometimes, you can’t go to a hospital.”
Mandy kicks his ankle dangling next to hers.
“Mecha Man pretty famously has a standing invite to walk in to almost any clinic in LA.” She watches him roll his eyes at this teasing, embarrassed by it. “You did a lot for your community, Robert. Infamous or not, everyone knew how dangerous it was for every Mecha Man pilot to do the work you did.”
Robert shrugs. “Yeah. A lot of bad guys hit really hard.”
“They do.” Mandy studies him in profile, feels that he feels her looking and doesn’t meet her gaze. “I said it before,” she ventures slowly, “but doing what you did for as long as you did, starting as young as you did…”
Robert clears his throat and shifts a bit, uncomfortable.
“Sorry.” Mandy thumbs what’s left of her waffle cone slightly. “We don’t have to talk shop.”
“Shop is… pretty much all I am.” Robert huffs. He lifts his gaze from his hands to the sea again. “Occupational hazard of doing one thing for half your fucking life is you don’t have much else going on.” He shrugs. “Makes you great at the job but… yeah.” He closes his eyes and the breeze ruffles his shirt collar a little. He murmurs, “I’m bad at relaxing.”
Mandy takes a bite of ice cream.
She looks at the water. “Is this relaxing? Am I helping?”
He nods. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Great.” She finishes the last of her cone. “What do you want to do next? Dealer’s choice.”
He opens his eyes slowly, like a cat that’s gotten comfortable in a spot of sun.
Almost sleepily he says, “Is it weird that I want to go, like, float in the ocean?”
Mandy blinks, then laughs, startled. “Really?”
He nods, drawling a little, “Yeah. I dunno. I never willingly get in the ocean. Sounds kinda fun.”
“Jesus, you were not kidding about not getting out much. Yeah, Robertson, we can go float in the ocean. Are you… should we go one of the swim shops on the pier? Do you even own a bathing suit?”
Robert starts to stand up. “I can just fling myself in there. Just watch my shoes.”
“No,” she says, appalled. “There are so many vendors. You’ll be soaking wet for the rest of the day.”
“Waste of money.” He stretches lazily. “I’ll dry off in the sun.”
“I will literally buy you a beach towel and trunks, you goddamn weirdo.”
In the end, Robert does relent and allows her to buy a towel, trunks, a tote bag with a cartoon sun wearing shades. There’s a changing cabana on the beach. Mandy stands guard and tries again not to think about this being the second time Robert is undressing in immediate proximity at her insistence. (She sucks at this. She sucks at being a co-worker. She’s not even doing it on purpose. God.)
Robert emerges from the cabana in the trunks and the plain white button down he wore out here. He looks extremely resigned.
“This is a lot of fuss,” he accuses.
“Well, now you own beach attire,” Mandy says, rolling her eyes. “Insane that you didn’t own any before, Robert. Like… upsetting implications.”
He shrugs and they wander toward the water’s edge, Mandy shoving her own socks and shoes into the tote bag with Robert’s clothes. The breeze really is genuinely the platonic ideal of a day at the beach and tossing the tote into the sand, she joins her fellow veteran superhero coworker in standing calf-deep in the ocean. She lets the waves lap at her knees, just below the hem of her bike shorts.
Robert’s got his eyes closed again, hands in the pockets of his new swim trunks, enjoying the sun and the breeze so much he seems kind of lost in it.
Watching him, Mandy gets the uneasy feeling he’s literally never done this before. Just… stand on a beach and do nothing but be there. Sun looks good on him, she thinks. Like it’s literally doing him a health service while he’s standing there, and she can almost ignore the wreckage of keloid scarring and discoloration still visible beneath his unbuttoned dress shirt.
After a while, she says, “It’s a really nice day, huh?”
He half opens his eyes. “Yup.”
Then without any pre-amble Robert walks forward, turns and simply lies down in the water. Surprisingly buoyant despite being almost nothing but muscle and bone, he simply star-fish floats there in the shallow green waters. He didn’t take his shirt off, so the white cotton billows and balloons around him a little. Small waves break over and wet his short coppery hair. He exhales audibly and closes his eyes again.
Oh, she thinks.
Mandy rolls her shorts up a little higher and wades out to stand over him, arms akimbo, looking down at this tired person who is actually Mecha Man who is actually (she is realizing) a feral motherfuck who might not own things like silverware or plates or, like, more than five pairs of socks. She desperately, suddenly, wants him to have more socks.
“Is it what you imagined?” she says and does not ask him about the state of his sock drawer.
“I get,” he murmurs, “why Flambae got in that sensory deprivation tank.”
“He what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Mandy leaves Robert to float for a full thirty minutes. She gets herself a hot dog, a soft pretzel, and Dippin’ Dots from the roving vendors along the boardwalk and sits on Rob’s new beach towel and watches SDN’s weirdest dispatcher float in the water like a freckly corpse. She checks her phone messages and texts her sister a photo of the ocean, shimmering blue and gold, Robert’s body only faintly visible in the waves.
Beautiful, her little sister sends back with a little heart emoji appended to the photo. Then, seconds later, with a little more time to examine the photo, a second message comes through; Is there a dead guy in the water?
Mandy texts back, He’s only dead inside. We’re working on it.
Bleak.
Mandy hearts the response and eats her snacks and waits.