Chapter Text
Blond Blazer bursts through the portal, momentum too high to do a full stop, and it lands him high above Torrance, CA’s city skyline, with no clue as to where to return to the massive multidimensional fight that'd been raging across the northern coast of California. He flies down, towards the street level, and something twigs as off from the onset. Billboards sporting Phenomaman’s awkward smile rather than Blond Blazer’s smarmy one dot the cityscape, and instead of the sprawling complex the well-established Torrance branch he knows boasts, it's just a single building and parking lot.
Shit is, clearly, fucked. But if he's in an alternate universe with zero long-term consequences, he knows exactly where he's going first.
He bursts into the SDN bullpen, yanks Robert Robertson’s office chair out by the back, and plants a devouring kiss onto his thin lips as he reflexively starts to stand. Five o'clock shadow rasps against his jaw, and Robert makes a surprised, disbelieving noise against his mouth, his dispatching headphones falling off his ears and onto his shoulders, familiar voices in the middle of a conversation that's suddenly free to be heard by all ears instead of just Robert’s. Then his hands come up to grab the sides of Blond Blazer’s head.
Before he can do anything more than that, he grabs him by the thighs and hoists him up against him, tonguing at his lips, inviting him to deepen the kiss.
Robert rips his head away with a gasp and asks, “Chad? When did you go blond? And what's with the costume change?”
The voices on the headset explode.
Robert stares at the alternate version of Flambae from across the conference table, arms folded over his half-open weird leather crop-top ensemble, listening to Mandy explain some of the differences in their worlds’ and organizations’ respective circumstances with honest to God genuine interest and investment in his eyes behind the obnoxious sunglasses, as well as his fringe, platinum blond haircut and extra long right-leaning bang hanging over his face bouncing as he nods along and all. It's bizarre. Guy even has earrings.
“ - and the thing is, it's entirely possible we get you back to your universe by same time tomorrow. We've got a new contractor who can portal biologicals as long as either they or the person being teleported knows where they're going.”
Mandy leans back, gesturing at the air with exasperation. “Big issue? He's usually booked at least three days in advance. They might make an exception for this, but, genuinely, we can't know until he gets back to me. Any questions?”
“Yeah. Who can I stay with? Because if I get to have a preference,” Chadli, because he'd foreseen two Blond/e Blazers getting complicated fast and had preempted the problem, more out of character behavior, jabs a thumb at Robert. He lets himself blink instead of flinching. “Robertson would be great. I know him back home. Anybody else from the rest of my team would be great, too. Except the local me. I don't see that going well.”
“You'd be right.” Robert allows, “I don't think Flambae even knows what the word ‘roommates’ means. I’ll ask Chase to hold onto Beef for as long as this takes, he loves him.”
In the corner, where he’d slouched against the wall after insisting on being part of the meeting, Flambae grumbles but does not refute it, and takes umbrage with his double’s phrasing instead. “Who says I'm the local you? Maybe you're just the corporate, sucks-shit me. The beta plan.”
His arms are crossed too, an imperfect mirror of Chadli’s. The resemblance truly is uncanny. Like twins separated at birth. Save for the missing fingers, which, oddly, Chadli still has. Did he not encounter Robert before he joined the Phoenix Program, or did it just go getter for him? Assuming he even joined SDN through the program.
“Which of us has the better approval rates?” Chadli asks rhetorically, and then interrupts Flambae as he opens his mouth, “Ah, ah, I know it's me. Your face not being on any billboards here proves enough.”
Flambae scowls and a bit of faint smoke wisps off his arm towards the ceiling.
“He has you there!” Mandy interjects cheerfully, clearly taking a side whereas Robert's stayed middlingly neutral. Though. Huh. Didn't expect that.
“You’re on billboards?” He inquires against his own will, and Chadli nods, beaming brightly. “You're looking at the Superhero Dispatching Network’s poster boy for their best up-and-coming team. How Phenomaman got stuck with the job here, I have no idea. Must be personality issues. After all, I'm gorgeous, no matter the world.”
He even flexes a little to prove the point, puffs his chest out and pops his collar a little wider, all polish and still with that bright white smile.
Flambae scoffs in disgust under his breath.
“You hate me ‘cause you ain't me.”
“Who would want to be your smarmy ass - “
“Okay, Okay,” Robert verbally puts himself between the two of them before they get into a fistfight like a pair of territorial dogs after pissing on the same sidewalk corner. “I'm fine with you staying over for a few days. We'll go over the ground rules later. Where are you spending your workday?”
“Here at SDN, obviously.” Robert can practically hear the swear left out of the middle of that clipped sentence. “I'll happily let you keep an eye on me for Blazer here, at all hours of the day. Maybe reenact earlier.”
He doesn't go as far as licking his teeth at the idea, but the way he's looking forward to the possibility of a repeat is obvious. Robert is tempted. Not like he's gonna hang around long enough for either of them to get attached. Flambae’s expression is incensed. “Don't just - let him leer at Robert like that.” He hisses to Blazer across the conference room, furiously gesturing up and down at the entirety of Chadli with his hands, and she shrugs blithely. “He's not technically employed by our SDN, it's not my problem.”
Flambae throws his hands into the air and storms out of the room. After a moment, he peeks back in and stabs an ‘I’m watching you’ motion at his eyes and then at Chadli, before he's gone for real this time.
“Tough crowd.” Chadli leans back in his chair.
Robert quips, “Maybe having you around will force him to shape up a little. You're everything he hates, after all.”
Chadli’s response is all glee and schadenfreude as he shifts towards Robert. “Oh, baby, you're gonna make me worse.”
“Flirt on your own time, not mine.” Mandy declares, and walks out of the room before their locked gazes get so hot she has to report them anyway.
Robert unlocks the door to his shitty apartment and lets them both inside. Chadli whistles low and slow, scanning the bare floors, the lumpy couch, beaten TV, the huge crack in the wall haphazardly filled with messy spackle and mesh, and concludes; “This is a dump. Too late for me to walk it back?”
“Well, your bank cards won't work, and all your money would be considered counterfeit,” Robert walks through the entryway, already unbuttoning his shirt in preparation for going to bed. Thankfully, by the end of his first month of dispatching he'd collected a mattress to go back on the old frame, then some sheets from a movie watchparty someone had left in the morning, and before he knew it he had a mismatched full set including pillows, complete with a quilt Flambae had outright thrown at him one night when the team was watching K-Dramas. He still doesn't know when his place became the default for team sleepovers after crisis events where they all almost die. “And Blazer is probably already home for the night and can't subsidize a hotel for you until tomorrow, so it's the couch or nothing.”
He’s about to whip the shirt off his shoulders when Chadli’s warm hand slides into the small of his back. “Anything I can do to earn something better than the couch?”
“There's probably something.” Robert lets his head tip back, Chadli stepping close enough for it to fall onto his warm chest, hand advancing to dip under his beltline and rub his thumb across the sharp cut of his hip. “Why? What’s your boundaries here?”
“Nothing you're gonna scratch.” Chadli dismisses him. “But I'm good to bottom or top. I like getting told what to do, but none of the pillow-biting shit like Flam-”
Robert presses a finger to his lips, silencing him, a little inexplicably angry. Huh. First time for everything. “If we're gonna do this, here's the first rule: no mentioning other people in bed.”
Chadli grins, opens his mouth, and draws Robert’s finger into his mouth to suck on it.
Arousal hits him like a gut punch as Chadli practically fellates it in front of him, eyes burning into his, until Robert remembers himself and slowly starts to draw the finger out. Chadli chases it and bobs his head a little until, skin slick and shiny with spit, he lets him pull away.
“Works for me.”
They tumble into bed together, Chadli peeling his pants, underwear, and shoes off in one go while Robert discards his shirt, and then Chadli rolls over to throw his leather jacket plus his sunglasses to the floor while Robert is getting his slacks in order and there's a tramp-stamp being shown off right in his face, fiery arms cupping the dimples in the small of Chadli’s back, clearly in view above where his low-waisted pants normally sit, and Robert nearly chokes.
And then Chadli turns back over, taking his piercings out of his ears, and Robert’s brain zooms in on his beautiful, pierced tits and makes a Sound.
Chadli pauses. Finishes removing his earrings and setting them down somewhere on the floor.
He crawls onto Robert, pins him to the bed with his weight as he crowds into his space, and whispers in his ear, “Wanna pull on ‘em after some prep?”
Chadli bounces in his lap, practically yowling out his moans as Robert yanks at his piercings with both hands, hips slowly thrusting up into his ass in turn, coming together with the slap of skin on skin as they sync their movements as best they can, Chadli’s palms planted on the bed for leverage. Pleasure builds slowly between them, lube slowly being pushed out of Chadli’s ass and dripping down onto the towel spread underneath them both.
“Jesus,” Robert breathes, and Chadli rocks backwards in his frenzy, forcing Robert to tighten his grip as the piercings get tugged even tighter, whining under his breath, “FuckmeharderohmygodRobertson - “
Hot. He's so fucking hot, he wonders if Flambae is like this in bed, all needy and demanding -
Robert slams his hips up into that wet furnace between his legs hard enough to bruise even a super and Chadli’s cock drools out a dribble of precum onto his stomach, accompanied by a loud shriek.
“Are you a masochist?!”
“Yyyh-yhheeee-ee-ees,” Chadli hiccups, and Robert bites into his bottom of his lip hard enough to draw blood, pure want dragging its claws down his spine. A burst of iron and copper explodes into his mouth as Chadli recovers slightly, only to sob out, “Want itttt!”
He almost wishes he'd listened when Chadli begged to sit on his whole goddamn hand while he was prepping him. Would've been fun. He'd nutted anyway before Robert even got into him when he cracked his hand across his ass, but he was still raring to go, so it'd been fine. What a painslut.
Robert pulls him forward by the grip on his nipples, a present practically tailor-made for both him and the crying brat on his cock. Chadli gives a token resistance for a moment before Robert knocks him forward with another brutal thrust, and he cries out, scrabbling against the blankets to hold himself up at the new angle.
“Good boy.” Robert breathes, staring up at those burning, watering irises, flyaways coming undone from that curved bang, and Chadli closes his eyes and groans like his whole world is falling apart, collapsing onto his elbows, bringing his neck and shoulders into mouth’s reach. So, of course, Robert bites. Now both of their blood is in his mouth. He works his jaw back and forth, widening the wound, before withdrawing. And then he bites again.
“FUCK!” Chadli howls, back arching his hips into their embrace and rubbing his cockhead against Robert’s skin. He cums, eyes closed and wailing on Robert’s dick, slamming himself back onto it and forward into Robert’s teeth with each new bite he tears into his flesh, nearly knocking his front teeth out of his damn skull, leaning into the pain of overstimulation far beyond what's reasonable, until, licking his lips, Robert’s jaw finally half-closes over his and he spits their warm mingled blood onto his tongue.
Chadli’s eyes pop open and he gurgles, and swallows it, panting wetly as waves of uncontrolled heat radiate off his body. He garbles, tongue hanging from between his open teeth, red-tinged saliva dropping from his mouth, “Fuck, 'm gonna burn you - “
Robert chokes down his own mouthful and snarls. “No, you'll be a good fucking boy, and if you burn me, I'll know it was on purpose. You have better control than that. You're SDN’s poster boy, after all. If you were telling the truth.”
He's getting close. Chadli only has to hold on a little longer. Pleasure simmers in the base of his spine, draws up little sparking circles in his balls when he grinds in, and he thinks at this point even if Chadli pleads for him to stop he'll keep going until he cums. Chadli would like it anyway.
“I was! Please - I can't - !”
“You will, Chad - ”
Chadli faceplants onto Robert’s chest mid-word, nailing his torso to the bedsheets, tears running down his cheeks. When Robert strains forward and runs his tongue across Chadli's cheekbones to gather them, they taste like the air at a good barbeque place, all salt and smoke.
“Turn around so I can see your damn tramp stamp, you whore, and I'll finish on it.” Robert growls straight into his ear, and Chadli shudders from head to toe before he shifts back up onto his elbows and scrambles to obey.
Robert gets up on his knees and follows him as he pivots on his cock, sinking back into his body, Chadli trembling underneath him, and runs his thumb over one side of the tramp stamp as he fucks into him hard, just a wet and hot hole to get off into as it whimpers beneath him in that pretty, broken voice -
Robert curls over Chadli possessively, one hand over his, fingers threaded together to push it to the sheets and pulls out right as he starts to empty his balls inside him before switching to rutting between Chadli’s cheeks (as he's rocking back and forth beneath him, with thick, wrenching pulses from the core of his abs) and gazing down like he wants to eat him alive as his cock paints that sexy little black tattoo in shades of pearly white.
“Jesus Christ, were you mauled??” Chase sounds genuinely worried for Chadli. Robert sits down for his shift the next day, wincing slightly, eyeing the exposed new bruises and barely scabbing over odd dozen bites decorating Chadli’s body as he drags over a second chair. They'd fucked again in the morning and reopened most of them. It was pretty good.
“Only in the exact way I liked.” Chadli defends him, and Chase makes eye contact with Robert for only a moment, eyebrows raised straight to his hairline, before he quickly ducks his head back down into his cubicle with a bitten-off, “I do not want to know.”
Robert snorts as he puts his headphones on. Prude.
He logs into the dispatching portal, watching his team’s icons load in, and Chadli drapes himself over the back of his shoulders to peer at the screen, murmuring, “They look a hell of a lot like my team of heels, with a couple of exceptions. Introduce me?”
Robert taps on Victor’s icon with a nail and brings up his profile. “Sonar. Changes forms to a big ass bat monster. Constantly falling off the wagon, but he's been doing good lately.”
“Mine has a big bat monster in his shadow, and his nose is a lot wider. Ears are bigger too. Kind of a boring office work type. If he's got a drug problem, it's very under wraps.” Chadli replies.
Robert skips Flambae and highlights Courtney next. “Invisigal. Invisibility powers. Blew my ass up, then she turned herself in out of guilt and I forgave her.”
Chadli hums consideringly in his throat. “She's mostly the same. Hell of a lot more tattoos, though, more artsy in general, and this one looks a bit sweet. Mine's just mean. All work, no play. Dull.”
Robert moves onto Colm and starts, “Punch-Up, strength of - ”
“He's short?!” The table digs into Robert’s diaphragm as he's pushed forward into the desk, Chadli incredulously trying to get a better look. “Oh shit - uh, sorry.”
He backs off, and Robert sucks in a gasp of air. His bruises complain at him acutely for a moment, before falling back to their normal pain levels.
“As I was saying - strength of ten men and density control. Former carnie, made a deal with a sorceress. Got the powers, but he shrunk, some kind of trade off. Yours is tall?”
“Tallest on the team, other than my good buddy Gol’, or Sonar in his other form. Guy’s huge. And he's missing his hat. I'm gonna hold this against him for forever. How's their relationship going?” He taps Coupé. “She looks the same except she doesn't have that cutesy swan bill helmet they rebranded her with. They let her off leash once in a blue moon, so she puts up with it.”
“They're sickening,” Robert tells him. They really are. He's a little jealous. At this point he's pretty sure the ‘break up’ was actually so neither of them would be denied from the program based on bias towards a teammate, and they've been sneaking around ever since.
Chadli’s finger moves back and hovers over Alice’s icon until Robert clicks it. “Wow. Pri is looking diff-er-ent.” And then he reads something in the sidebar and laughs disbelievingly. There's an undercurrent of reluctant affection under his voice, like he's talking about a skittish dog he's been trying to lure out with treats, but it's already nipped him more than once. “Pop star? Shit, no wonder the me here has so much syn with her, she looks a hell of a lot more fun than mine. Real egghead. No innate powers, she makes it all in a lab on company grounds, half of it comes out stamped with a patent and she doesn't even use it. Only comes out for shifts. Now,” His finger moves to Malevola. “By the line-up, I'm assuming this is Gibbs, but she's looking a little. . . I dunno. Dry?”
Robert clicks on the icon out of reflex, staring absentmindedly into the screen. Dry? Was Mal in his world - a water elemental or something?
“Yeah, the hell is this outfit? My Gibbs is green and pink. This one. . . This one doesn't even have fins. Practically a real-ass Christian fire poker demon.” Chadli sounds unnerved. “Fuck, don't tell me she also fights with a pitchfork - ”
Robert blurts out, “Your Malevola’s a fish?!”
“Her dad’s got like, face tentacles, or whatever, don't be speciesist. She's great.” Chadli’s voice sounds distantly irritated, far more preoccupied by Mal’s weirdness. “So what if people could sometimes go a little mad when she takes off her like, literal faceplate, she never does that. It's in her contract not to do it in public. Judgy bitch. And she's great with the ocean kaiju and as an ambassador.”
Apparently, in Chadli’s world, the early underwater civilizations had survived the arrival of kaiju. Or, had evolved alongside them? Hard to judge.
Wow. When you got down to brass tacks, their worlds had ended up really differently. Like a bunch of stuff from Chadli’s got outright cut from Robert’s, plus some handicaps.
Chadli finally moves on to tap on Bruno. “This guy’s your team construct, right?”
“Golem. Like your guy, except I'm assuming you don't recognize him?”
“My Golem’s made out of lava and he's mute, but we're chill. Learned sign language when we hung out more on missions. He's really articulate, and he takes direction well. And he swaps out his face sometimes for new expressions, I don't know if he like carves them himself or melts them or not. He came like that.”
Sounds a lot like his Golem, actually, despite the differences in appearance. They were both chill. ‘He came like that', though? Did the company place an under the table order for a sentient construct to fill out the team, in their universe?
He inquires, softly. Chadli whispers back, “I mean, we're never gonna ask him that, but, yeah. We're pretty sure that's what happened. The muteness might've been a feature, not a bug. He doesn't talk about it, so we don't bother him. Visi really took him under her wing.”
Chadli hesitates, as if uncertain if he should move on, and then points to Herman. “Who's this earnest little guy?”
Robert’s heart drops a little. No sign of recognition. But then again, of course a high level corporate team wouldn't have taken a chance on Waterboy. They already had something that worked, and no open spots.
“Waterboy. One of the team members got kicked off for a bit, he filled in, and after they came back we just kept him. Sweet guy. Acts a little young, but he listens to stuff like death metal. He can handle himself. Poor guy used to be pretty anxious. Still anxious nowadays, it just doesn't come along with fuckin’ power outbursts.”
“Damn. Probably a wash-out on my side. We got a lot of those the early days.” He sounds very blithe on the surface, talking about Waterboy, but he actually sounds a little sad underneath. “Too many to remember. New heroes we didn't know how to mentor got stuck with us, couldn't keep up as we rose through the ranks, and then they’d get assigned to a lower ranked team just to avoid dragging our average down.”
Ruthless. Corporate cutthroat shit. Hopefully Waterboy swam instead of sinking there.
“That's everybody.” Robert nods. “Now, you mind sitting down so I can start the shift?”
“You left someone ooouuut,” Chadli croons into his ear, the lapels of his leather jacket brushing against the back of Robert’s neck as he presses against him. He can practically feel him waggling his hips slowly with the way his weight is shifting, showing off that tramp stamp to whoever walks by. Like he's wagging his nonexistent tail. It's reminiscent of a big cat, all curled up in his lap and needling him with its claws. It's inexplicably charming, how earnest he is with it. “What am I like? I saw a lot yesterday, but tell me. From your point of view.”
“Flambae is. . . Fine.”
“He's me. He's gotta be good. C'mon. Dole out a little praise. I know you want to.”
A wave of exasperation drowns out most of the charmedness, along with some of his good mood. He knows exactly what's going on. Robert reaches up, threads his fingers into Chadli’s hair until he has a fist full of blonde threads, and yanks him to the side and down, so he can talk in his ear. “Are you bratting. In my workplace. On Flambae’s behalf.”
It's not a question.
“C'mon, man. It's not that bad.” He whines. “‘S just, he's me. And he got sooo pissed when we were flirting yesterday.”
“Yeah. He just hates to see me happy.” Robert deadpans.
“He hates seeing you happy with someone else.” Chadli corrects him. Across the office, someone’s knee bumps into the bottom of their desk, hard.
Of fucking course Robert knows this. But he's not gonna make the first fucking move. He's Flambae’s direct superior. He can't.
Distantly, he can hear Flambae hissing to Prism across the bullpen, “Where the fuck is that teleporter, shitty crop-top guy needs to go - ”
She replies, “Bitch, you are pissing and crying over a guy you've been in denial about for a month and a half and embodying Dr. Don't Do Shit - “
“Shshshshshsh! Sh!”
"Don't you shush me!"
Robert rolls his eyes and sighs. Hard. “If it'll get you to sit down. He's great. He's the point lead. He gets shit done. I can leave him alone and unless somebody provokes him, nothing is gonna explode. But he considers everything from me to be fucking provoking, so, I've given up on trying to differentiate, these days. Me even glancing at him makes him smoke at this point. Happy?”
He's panting a little, not having taken a single breath during the whole monologue. He sucks in a breath, holds it, and blows it out his nose.
Chadli smiles, plops his ass down in the spare chair and scoots it closer with a couple plastic creaking sounds. “On fuego, baby.”
Robert pulls his mic into place, clicks the button to clock in, and starts taking calls.
Prism’s light projections snap into being and twinkle at them from afar. Probably keeping all the smoke Flambae’d put off just by watching their conversation from reaching the detectors.