Chapter Text
“Do you think your god will save you if you pray enough?” the guy says, and that’s how Flambae knows he’s worse than a villain, he’s an idiot. “Your god” said by what looks to be the whitest man on earth, like Allah isn’t another name for the same thing most of the world worships.
Flambae stops the dua and raises his eyebrows, disturbing the tacky blood on his face. “Wasn’t praying for myself.”
He can’t really be sure how white the guy is, though. Not with the emergency lights turning everything red and the heat shimmering the air.
He knows the guy’s eyes are orange, though. They have to be. Anyone other than a pyro would die here. They don’t feel heat the same way as other people, but Flambae can feel the danger of the air in his lungs. He can feel his sweat evaporate.
The other guy’s fist slams into his chest.
“Hotter.”
Flambae smiles when he finally catches his breath, feeling probable blood drip down his chin and vaporize there. “You’re a candy-ass, you know that, right? Can’t burn bright enough on your own?”
Just for that, he gets one in the face. Worth it.
The guy can cave his whole head in if he wants. If he gives in, the building they’re in won’t be here in ten minutes, and neither will a good swath of LA.
It may come as a surprise that Flambae doesn’t know much about bomb construction, but he’s not blastproof — hell, he’s barely even smokeproof. If you asked him about delayed incendiary devices? Now we’re talking. At first he only burned abandoned buildings, but the first time he lit a fire in an active, open public place — it hit different. You can’t cover a Ralph’s in gasoline. You have to use your head. A lit cigarette, burning down to three matches, tucked into a chip display or a pillow bin. If you’re lucky and nobody catches it fast, the whole store goes up within thirty minutes.
It was nerve-wrackingly difficult to do without getting caught, which was part of the appeal. It felt good to know he could do difficult things.
He’s that cigarette now. An oil refinery’s a hell of a lot of matches.
“—bae, can you hear me?”
Flambae thinks he just hit his head too hard at first, but the shitty electronic crackle that interrupts the low, steady voice in his ear gives it away — right, he managed to get his earpiece in before they dragged him out of the apartment. “Yeah,” he rasps softly.
Not softly enough. “What?”
“I said, I’ll fuck your dad,” Flambae says, and gets punched in the face so hard the back of his skull bounces off the water heater he’s been chained to. Maybe that one wasn’t worth it.
“Don’t respond if it’s not safe,” Robert says as Flambae tries to catch his breath through a nose full of blood. His arms are restrained at an odd angle that makes it hard for his chest to expand. “Help is on the way. Intel says there’s a heat-triggered bomb in the building; I’m in the systems trying to open a water main and flood the place.”
Flambae spots movement in his peripheral — Robert is wiggling a security camera back and forth, trying to get a better look at the refinery floor. Or perhaps just trying to reassure Flambae with his presence, in however small a way.
Fuck, when did Mecha Man’s presence become comforting?
No. Robert’s presence. He knows they’re the same, of course, but calling him Mecha Man feels dehumanizing, somehow.
“Prism and Waterboy are en route. I just need you to hang in there.”
Flambae swallows and nods. He can do this. He’s strong enough.
“Hotter.”
He’s punched in the gut. He gags from the pain, but manages to not vomit. Okay. Just have to endure… probably a lot more of these. “You know,” he grits out, “most people lead with dinner before begging for my hot body.”
“Flambae, stop provoking him,” Robert says, typing loudly in his ear. “We need you back alive.”
Candy-Ass over there turns his back to check on the bomb, and Flambae takes the opportunity to whisper, “Then tell me what the fuck I should do.”
“Make him monologue.”
He can work that.
“Hey, bitch! You didn’t answer my question — if we’re both pyros, why can’t you blow your shitty bomb yourself?”
Long, long pause.
“What do you think ‘pyrokinesis’ is?”
(The best thing that ever happened to me, the worst thing that ever happened to me, and if you took it out of me, the person you’d have left would be somebody else, he thinks.)
“Controlling the fire and the flame and my skin does not burn?” he says.
Candy-Ass grabs him by the face.
“You are trying,” says Candy-Ass, “to make me angry. I don’t like to be angry.”
“Might explain why you’re so shit at starting fires, huh?”
The man leans back.
“You do not understand fire. You do not understand yourself. Anger is the body’s manner of protection. Chemicals that set your blood aflame and propel you to fight for your life. The fire is the same. It protects us. Its love is constant.”
“I burned down a mall for no reason. You call that shit love?”
“It is constant, not kind. And when the world is your enemy — as it often is — all must burn.”
(All must burn. All does burn. He stands in the inferno and yet is perfectly safe from the fire. He stands in the inferno and is safe from everything. He stands in the inferno in the shitty costume he made for a firefighter calendar and is embraced by tongues of fire, by something that loves him and wants to see him protected. Completely. Unconditionally.)
“Well, I’m sorry you’re afraid of literally fucking everything, but that’s not my problem.”
“Who hurt you?”
“...What?” he says.
Maybe just to fuck with him, Candy-Ass cuts the bonds that hold him to the water heater and he pitches forward to the ground. His hands and feet are still secured with metahuman-grade cuffs, so he can’t do much other than blast ineffective fire at the other pyro and attempt to crawl away, which also doesn’t work. A boot presses into his injured shoulder, and he has to bite back the urge to cry out.
“Who hurt you?”
“Right now, you! Get the fuck off me!”
Candy-Ass does not get the fuck off him, his massive frame like a building about to fall on him. Flambae can picture it now — Robert sparing a glance from his hacking to check the security feed again, only to sigh when he sees that Flambae’s about to get his beautiful face stomped in by a guy who looks like if Willem Dafoe fucked an enormous ham.
“That’s how it starts. We all begin as fires that warm. Pain makes us into fires that burn.” He crinkles his ugly nose, leaning in so close that he has to put his hand on the floor. “What did it, hm? You get jumped for being pyro — foreign — gay? Or was it someone you knew? Your father? Brother?”
Flambae can feel his rancid breath as he chuckles, amused by his own idea.
“Your wife?”
Flambae slams his head into Candy-Ass’s nose with a crunch.
He can’t discern if it was the assailant’s nose breaking or his own skull and he doesn’t care, scrambling away as best he can with his hands and feet bound.
He only gets a few feet away before he’s dragged back by the ankles.
“I didn’t want to use this,” Candy-Ass says, utterly calm as Flambae twists and howls profanity in his grip, “but sometimes force is the necessary option.”
The snap. Flambae freezes and looks up.
Candy-Ass has opened a shock collar.
“No,” Flambae croaks, hating how weak he sounds.
Robert stops typing. “Flambae?”
“Come here.”
No. “No!”
He kicks at nothing. Fire spits hopelessly from his hands and feet and breaks on Candy-Ass’s fireproof skin. He is dragged and held down like a misbehaving child.
“ROBERT! HELP ME!”
“Fuck,” Robert whispers, and there’s the rapid clicks of him merging comms channels, and if Flambae could hear properly over the roar of his own heart, he’d hear his voice shake. “Not again, we’re not doing this again — Prism, Waterboy, ETA!”
A motor cuts in with Waterboy’s wobbly voice. “Th-thr—”
“Three minutes,” Prism says. “The fuck’s happening to our boy?!”
The collar comes closer, and even though he’s already pressed to the floor, he keeps trying to draw away from it like there’s a world where he can escape what’s coming.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” Candy-Ass says, “that you needed this lesson.”
The collar wraps around his throat and clicks shut, like a coffin.
Flambae is struck by fucking lightning.
Every muscle contracts, back arching off the concrete floor, head thrown back, every nerve, every fucking atom, this is not fire as he knows it, this is fire made by people who refuse to allow him the privilege of existence, and it’s a fire that they’ll keep stoking no matter how much he begs and begs and begs.
He is later informed that his shrieks were so loud in Robert’s headset that they were heard in neighboring cubicles.
Sweat breaks out across the whole of his skin before vaporizing immediately as his fingertips begin to glow orange. In his right ear, he hears ragged breathing and an accelerating engine’s scream.
“F-F-F— hey — we’re coming to get you!”
Shahab sobs and shakes long after the current stops — he’s back there, he’s back there, he’s back there. This is his life now, they’ll never let him go.
“Hold on, baby, just hold on, we’ve got you,” Alice says, voice thick.
Candy-Ass crouches down. “Hotter.”
“Flambae,” says Robert. “...Shahab. We need you. Your family needs you. I—”
He swallows hard.
“I need you. You can do this.”
It takes Shahab a moment to locate his middle finger so he can raise it, but he gets there.
The second shock is worse. His abdomen spasms so hard he nearly chokes on his own vomit, but he — he’s gonna be okay, he’ll be okay, Alice says as much into his ear the same way she says it when she holds his hair back on a drunk night out, and Herman’s gonna hose him down with his gross powers, and Robert’s voice is gonna guide them all through this mess, and they’re gonna be okay.
But he’s gonna pick the damn restaurant this time. They deserve actual, good Mexican food for this.
He tries to ignore how the water in his mouth has started evaporating.
His ears are still ringing when Robert says it.
“What the—”
Mashing one key over and over, like he can make the bad thing he’s seeing go away if he refreshes hard enough. Then panicked typing.
“No,” he says, right as Shahab hears the screech of Prism and Waterboy whipping it into the parking lot — doubly so, one in the earpiece and the other muffled by the refinery walls. “No. Stop, you can’t go in there!”
“Rob,” Prism says, barely constrained, “you better have a damn good reason to stop us.”
“It’s five hundred degrees in there and I can’t access the water main. The heat, the circuits couldn’t survive the heat. You two can’t survive the heat, and I — I — I can’t flood the place. I can’t cool it down.”
Shahab fully blacks out for the third shock. He comes to with Prism screaming in his ear and Candy-Ass dragging him into sitting by the hair.
He assumes it’s Candy-Ass, anyway. His eyes stay closed; they won’t cooperate with his attempts to open them. Every muscle twitches and jolts. He can feel blood in his throat from how hard he’s been screaming. He can feel his heart flutter like it wants to give up.
“Fuck, I don’t know, I’ll send one of my clones in there!”
“You’ll take the same damage they do!”
“We can’t just leave him there!”
“I know, I know, just let me think!”
Candy-Ass pries his unfocused eyes open to address him. He can feel their moisture drying in the superheated air.
“What are you holding out for? What’s gonna care about you like fire does, huh?”
He wrestles for control of his shaking jaw. Maybe it’s phantom pain, but he swears he can feel hot electrodes burying themselves into his neck.
“M-my fr-friends — my R-Ruh — Rob — Robert—”
He hears a sob. Distantly, he realizes it’s Robert.
“Rob,” says Prism. “Robert. Robert. Where the hell is Waterboy?”
Shahab’s eyes only catch a yellow blur before the world explodes.