đĽ prompts from the trespasser - accepting.
@dispatcherrr3 is being a total bitch about something -
"the bit of silence suits you."
đĽ THE DEAD SPEAKER above Flambae's head crackles back to life.
the bit of silence suits you.
Robert's voice pours from it, worn thin by old wiring until it seems like some fuckin' ghost speaking through the building. Flambae stops beneath the emergency light. rain hammers the roof of the abandoned relay station, leaking through cracks in the ceiling and pattering against banks of dusty equipment. every monitor along the corridor has been black for years, but now they flicker awake one after another as he passes, each screen briefly filling with surveillance footage of himself from various angles: broad shoulders rolling like powerful snakes coiled beneath a torn suit, dark ponytail hanging wet between them, orange eyes raised toward whatever camera currently has the fuckin' nerve.
fuck, he looks so good; he almost flexes. then the image skips.
another camera catches him farther down the hall.
Robert could have simply told him where to go; that creepy ass fucker could have left the directions glowing on one of the terminals, sent a neat fuckin' route to Flambae's earpiece, behaved like a normal coworker with only the regular, professionally acceptable amount of deeply rooted disdain.
instead, he has crawled into every unprotected circuit in the place and made the whole goddamn building stare at him.
Flambae's tongue presses hard against the gap in his teeth before giving an irritable click.
"you know what'd suit you?"
his accented voice carries into the damp corridor, aimed at every camera at once.
the nearest monitor shivers with static and Flambae stares into it, heat licking beneath his skin. rainwater hisses from the shoulders of his suit and turns to vapour around him, leaving his hair drying into a thick, disobedient fall down his back; he fuckin' hates how humidity curls his perfectly slicked back hair into its naturally wavy state.
there is blood on one cheek from some fuckin' chump getting ambitious with a rifle as he cleared the downstairs floor; the cut has already stopped bleeding - the temper has not.
Robert has been inside the security system since they breached the perimeter, opening doors before Flambae reaches them, locking others directly in his face, killing lights with a glance from wherever he's hiding. his presence moves ahead of him electrical whispers; a camera rotates. an access panel flashes green. somewhere beyond the wall, machinery begins humming after a decade of silence.
smug fuckin' poltergeist.
and it should be pathetic, really - irritating at best; Robert reduced to haunting electronics because his precious tin can is beyond him. Flambae should be enjoying every miserable fuckin' second of that; their entire history suggests that he ought to be throwing a fuckin' parade. instead, each hijacked screen and murmuring speaker swirls something hot and unpleasant through his stomach. because there is a new ugliness living in Robert now.
Flambae finds it ... fuck. whatever.
"thought you were supposed to be guiding me," he calls, continuing down the corridor. his boots splash through a shallow pool beneath the collapsed ceiling. fuckin' gross. the corridor narrows toward a reinforced door, keypad glowing an unnatural blue. Flambae reaches for it with his maimed hand.
the whole place has started to feel like some fuckin' backrooms bullshit, and it gives him the creeps.
the lock clicks before his fingers touch.
he pushes through. the control room beyond is half dark, lit by the cold spill of a dozen camera feeds while towering servers hum around him. Flambae appears across all of them, caught from above and behind, and he checks himself out-- again. and there, among the machinery, is Robert. there's a quality to him, like a presence separate from his body; like if the lights went down all the way, the outline of him would still be there. Robert is the kind of person he looks at against his own better judgement, a fuckin' splinter he keeps finding every time he thinks he's gotten clear of it. Flambae doesn't know what to do with it and he refuses to examine it, so he has been pointedly ignoring it the way you ignore a crack in the wall that's been getting longer.
piercing orange eyes zero in on the short stack of concentrated fuckin' grievance, standing there in the dim light that it gives his face a cold, beautiful wrongness.
Flambae hates his face. he has hated it through mission briefings and every order Robert has ever delivered. but apparently hatred does not prevent a man from wondering what that expression would look like without all that composure--
the door swings shut behind him, and the heat of his body begins spreading through the room. he makes no effort to disguise the slow appraisal now - Robert wants to watch him, fine. Flambae has never been shy about giving an audience something worth staring at. he closes the distance until Robert has to look upward to meet his eyes. the height difference should make the creepy little bastard less imposing, but Robert always looks like he carries darkness as another hidden weapon. Flambae can feel it pushing back against his fire, cold and malignant and unbearably fuckin' intimate.
his lips curve, showing the gap in his teeth.
"careful, Bob Bob."
Flambae plants his damaged hand against the console beside him; circuitry complains beneath his palm as the surface warms, the nearest monitor bending into bands of colour.
"you keep saying shit like that, and I might actually believe you can't handle me."
he leans closer, smug as a tomcat.
"and well ... we both know that's true. but the others might not. yet."
