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How does his immortality work? Is it a power or something imposed on him?

Like, if it were something imposed, my idea would be something like Voldemort's Horcruxes. Parts of Robert's soul were removed and placed in some object, and as long as that object(s) are not destroyed, he will be immortal

The objects I imagine could be the Astral Pulse itself and maybe some photo of great sentimental value (like a photo of Robert with Chase)

Or the classic one, that Robert was born with powers

Sorry it took a while to respond—I looked at your ask, got sidetracked, and then completely forgot to come back to it! 

My idea was just that it was something he was born with (kinda boring, I know, especially after the cool ideas you just threw out lmao) 

Immortality as a natural-born power has always been really interesting to me because the character will never even know they have it until they die. Like imagine being fifty years old and dying from a heart attack and then coming back, and that’s how you find out you’re immortal, I’d be so pissed off 

Stories with natural-born immortality always bank on something bad happening to the character at a pretty young age, which I feel fits Robert pretty well with all the Mecha Man stuff. I haven’t decided when or why he first died—part of me wants it to have happened before he even became Mecha Man, but I think dying for the first time as a result of his failure as a hero would be more impactful. Plus it would make more sense why no one else knew; by the time he was Mecha Man, everyone in his life was either cut off or dead 

If we wanted the max amount of angst, maybe he died in his very first fight as Mecha Man. Maybe he was too confident—the villain went down, Robert unbuckled his harness to get out and apprehend them, and then they got back up and kept fighting and Robert didn’t have time to buckle up again. Maybe he got thrown around the cockpit and hit his head so badly that when he touched it, he felt his skull shift. Maybe he found himself sniffling against the steady trickle of clear fluid dripping out of his nose, and through the sharp clarity of adrenaline, he felt a dawning horror as he understood what it meant.

He knocked out the villain and just barely managed to haul himself to safety before the world went dark. He came back for the first time confused and terrified because he couldn’t move and wasn’t breathing and couldn’t see or hear. I think it would be especially angsty if this was the 30 minute long resurrection he referenced before, and he just had to lay there for what felt like an eternity—wondering if this was what death was like, if he was in some kind of purgatory where he had to exist with the knowledge that his very first day as Mecha Man was such a horrific failure. 

And then all of his senses slowly came back, and he realized he was on the floor of an empty warehouse, the air thick with the smell of iron. He lifted his aching head and found the Mech kneeling with its hatch still open, blood in the cockpit and blood smeared over the hatch and blood pooled around Robert’s head. 

One thing I do wanna add just because this is always my first thought with immortal characters is: what kills him?

Personally, I really like the idea that slowly little bits of him die every time he does. Maybe it starts as a numbness in his fingers and toes and then after it’s happened 30- 50- 70 times he eventually wakes up and his sense of touch never comes back with him. Then maybe next it’s his taste, his smell, his hearing- and then one day everything goes black and he’s lost so many senses that he doesn’t know if he’s finally dead for real or in he’s just lost his sight too. Maybe he actually is dead or maybe he’s stuck in this abyss as a vegetable, sedated in a hospital until they finally get approval to try to put him down like a criminal on death row. They do it again. And again. And again. Until his heart monitor finally never starts again and his body begins to rot.

I imagine that as members of the original team died/retired, they were replaced with new reformed villains, and Robert trained and dispatched and worked alongside them all. But he never had that same connection with them—the original Z-Team was lightning in a bottle, and there would never be another team like theirs. 

Also, by this point, Robert would have seen most of the team grow old and some even die, and I think he would have closed himself off to ever feeling that kind of pain again. He looked at new recruits and remembered how it felt to see Bruno dissolve into inanimacy, to listen to Courtney’s last, wheezing breaths, to hear Janelle’s last words to Colm.

(To feel Chad go cold.) 

And it was worth the pain—of course it was, to know them, to love them—but he couldn’t do it again. He pulled back from new members—a mentor, a team leader, but never a friend. 

The video quality was ass before crunching it down to one minute from twelve, so can’t wait to see how this app butchers it even more.

Z-Team plushies:

After they defeat Shroud they're now big time hero's, which means PR training and merch.

Robert wants to help, he doesn't want someone to feel bad for not selling well or start fighting about sales.

Right before the launch he gets one of every Z-team's plush and posts a picture on his Mecha man account hyping them up.

Right after he posts a video with all the toys sitting on a shelf and explains why he has them in the order he does.

Golem and Invisigal have to be together, they're besties.

Same with Prism and Flambae but he refuses to explain why his own plushie is next to Flambae's.

Coupe and Punch up are also paired but Punch is facing the wall, apparently Coupe is mad at him right now but Robert won't say why.

Phenomaman and Waterboy are together, Waterboy is really patient and helps Phenomaman understand humans better.

Malevola is by herself but Robert explains that Sonar should be there but he's not allowed right now.

He then has to post a follow up video showing Sonar on the self but facing the corner by himself, Robert says he has to stay there until he apologizes for stealing his twinkie. (The internet loves everything about this)

After the plushies drop, (sales are booming), Robert keeps posting videos but only when he's upset and has put them in timeout.

Invisigal jump scared him, Punch Up took the last donut, stuff like that.

The most notable time is when Flambae is put in a cabinet under the sink, apparently he was mean to him in Robert's dream.

The very first thing Flambae does is drop Robert’s body out of shock. He snaps out of it upon hearing Robert’s winded groan and very quickly gathers him up again, but he definitely just fucking dropped him like a sack of potatoes, and it’s something he’ll be teased relentlessly about in the far, far future when they can all joke about this without crying.

I figure this is pre-relationship, but Flambae has already started to catch feelings by this point, and it really fucks him up (even more than it already would have) to have to watch Robert die.

He can’t stop thinking about how cold Robert was. He held him the entire time he was dead, and that unnatural cold just threw him into further panic. It’s worse now that he’s back he’s back he’s back he’s back but he’s still just as cold as he was when he was gone gone gone gone. 

When Robert comes back, it always takes a few minutes for his body to start warming up again (no heartbeat=no blood flow=no warmth), and Flambae insists on holding him until he’s a normal temperature again, using his own heat to speed the process along. He can’t shake the nagging thought that if Robert stays cold, he’ll die again.

For the rest of that night, right up until they all pass out in a heap on Robert’s apartment floor, Flambae’s glued to his side. He keeps complaining when anyone else takes him away for a tearful (sobbing) hug, insisting that they’re all crowding him when really he’s the one shoving himself into Robert’s space every few minutes. 

Robert doesn’t mind; the coldness after coming back always intensifies the ache, and Flambae’s heat is soothing. He lets the hero bully his way up next to him and act as a space heater, and Flambae takes his approval and runs with it. He hovers around him, sometimes reaching out and physically drawing Robert closer, sometimes just standing without touching, emitting waves of comforting warmth. 

And he continues to do so for days, weeks, past the point where it stops making sense, past the point where it stops being appropriate. He no longer hovers; instead he practically throws himself at Robert like he can’t help it. He just shows up out of nowhere in the bullpen or the breakroom or a crowded bar and bodily drapes himself over Robert, clinging on for a few minutes before pulling himself away and quickly reverting to his usual bluster. 

They get a few weird looks, but Robert chooses not to say anything, assuming Flambae’s still traumatized from watching him die. He figures if this is what Flambae has to do to soothe himself, it’s far from a chore for Robert to endure it. It’s actually really nice; Robert naturally runs cold, so the heat is welcome—on most days.

(There are a couple days when a heatwave hits Torrance and Robert has to temporarily put a stop to the clinging, and Flambae spends those days moping around the office, pouting glaring at Robert from across the room.) 

All in all, Robert's relatively unconcerned with this particular coping mechanism.

Meanwhile, Flambae is definitely still traumatized by Robert’s death. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night half convinced Robert is still gone, and he can't go back to sleep until he calls him and hears his voice.

But he also just wants to be closer—to touch his skin, to run a hand through his hair, to ward off any interested parties warm him up.

Okay sorry @visuky I had to put this here because you really got me thinking and I have a stupid amount to say and I don’t think it’ll fit in a comment

So Robert’s normally pretty quick on the uptake in matters of attraction—the problem is that all of Flambae’s weird behavior can be directly traced back to Robert’s death. That’s when the clinginess started, that’s when Flambae began hovering around him, and that’s when Robert started feeling amber eyes on him whenever he enters a room. 

And Robert is smart, okay, he’s connecting things. He knows Flambae has a history of anxiety, and he also knows that while he’s never killed anyone, his profile listed his birthplace as Herat, Afghanistan. 

He doesn’t know when Flambae immigrated to the US, but he knows that Afghanistan has been pretty consistently embroiled in armed conflict since the 70s, and that it’s possible Flambae witnessed some traumatizing things as a kid. It’s not too far of a leap to assume that Robert’s death brought back some disturbing memories, and that Flambae is using Robert to cope with that. 

It doesn’t help that since Flambae’s in such deep denial, that dumbass is doing everything he can to make it look like he doesn’t actually care about Robert. When he isn’t clinging to him, he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum—calling him a bitch, insulting him, making fun of his (nonexistent) dating life and scrawny body. He’s trying really hard to make everyone think he’s not into Robert at all, and since he never showed any outward indication of attraction before Robert died in front of him, Robert firmly believes him. 

He’s also not the only one to have picked up certain habits after Robert’s death. When they go out to bars, Coop and Punch Up tend to sort of guard their group, watching for threats even as they drink and have fun. Malevola stays close by, just in case Robert needs healing, and Sonar always keeps one ear turned toward Robert’s direction. They all refuse to let him leave a bar by himself—one of them always takes him home and makes sure he gets inside. 

So even when Robert does start to feel something for Flambae—when he finds himself admiring his body or tracing the cut of his neckline with his eyes or itching to touch his long hair—he doesn’t do anything about it. Flambae is a valued member of his team, and he refuses to take advantage of his trauma. 

It makes sense, since Robert never? had anyone witness his deaths before, I feel like he’d be pretty torn up about inflicting this trauma to Flambae and the team.

While some of them had dealing with death before (either killing or seeing people be killed), it might have been the first time for some of the crew to see someone (or someone close to them) die in front of them.

I’m thinking Waterboy of course, but also Prism or Golem, or even Sonar (EDIT: I just remembered that Sonar might have eaten people before u_u). They had lesser charges compared to the others, so they might not have been in close quarters with death before.

Robert would be more accommodating of their meddling, I feel, no matter how bothersome they might be, to ease his guilty conscience.

For Flambae, like you said, Robert knows enough about him to guess why it shook him so much. For someone who needs to always be in control, having Robert die right in front of him must have triggered memories.

When Robert starts having feelings, I’m sure the guilt is back tenfold: not only did he give the man PTSD flashbacks, but his touch starved mind is equaling Flambae’s response to trauma to affection. And since Flambae’s made plenty sure to state to whoever might listen that he did not like Robert, Robert’s going to sit in his feelings and his guilt and not do a thing.

Robert’s immortality is his oldest and most well-kept secret. No one has ever seen him come back to life—there were a couple times a villain killed him in a fight, but they got out of there before really seeing the aftermath and just chalked up Mecha Man’s continued survival to him not being as injured as they thought 

But no one he knows personally has ever seen him die, and he never really considered how traumatizing it would be. He’s so used to the whole resurrection thing that he’s gotten numb to how actually fucked up it is

I’m thinking Flambae was the only one there when Robert actually died, since that creates an angsty little bond between them, but it definitely wasn’t any less disturbing for the others to see his body when they got there

I think there’s even more angst possibilities if we imagine that, instead of this being the first time certain team members have seen someone die, it’s the first time someone they care about has died as a result of their inaction. Maybe they were fucking around and weren’t where they were supposed to be, so when they got the distress call it took them longer to get there than it should’ve. Maybe Flambae himself just barely made it in time to watch Robert die, while the others arrived not long after 

I think this would hurt a lot more because there would be a lot of guilt/personal accountability tied up in it. Specifically I think it would hit Malevola and Waterboy the hardest as the two healers of the team (if Waterboy has his holy water spit thing). They’d constantly be thinking of what they could’ve done to help Robert if they’d just been a little earlier, if they’d just gotten to him before he took that last breath 

Also in keeping with your original idea, I do think this might be the first time Waterboy has seen death like this (depending on what the situation is with his parents), so it would affect him really badly. Like a lot of people, I headcanon that everyone on the Z-Team has mandatory therapy sessions, and I think specifically Waterboy (but probably a few others as well) is going to be double booked for the foreseeable future 

So yeah, everyone’s acting way more affectionate/hypervigilant around Robert than usual because number 1, they’re just glad he’s alive, but number 2, they feel intensely guilty/responsible for his death in the first place 

So Robert’s seeing all of this behavior from the others, and Flambae’s behavior doesn’t appear that different aside from lasting a lot longer, so he just assumes it’s more trauma. Maybe he thinks it’s just especially bad for Flambae because he was the only one to have to watch him die (again, connecting back to Robert’s assumptions about his childhood)

And Robert’s feeling guilty for causing all this strife in the first place (because of course he blames himself for dying in a way that traumatized other people), so he’s that much more careful not to show it when his feelings start to change. Even if he really, really wants to.

Meanwhile Flambae’s fighting internal demons trying to convince himself and everyone else that he doesn’t like Robert Like That at all. He just wants to be around him and protect him and scare off any potential girlfriends/boyfriends and touch his hair and trace his freckles and—

I believe it's many times, and if so, how would Z-Team/Flambae react to finding out? (That is, if you haven't already answered this, of course)

I’m not sure about the exact number, but it’s definitely high enough that he hasn't bothered to keep count for a while.

I’m thinking that a good amount of his deaths happened early on in his Mecha Man career, when he was still young and inexperienced. When he started to find his footing as a hero and learned how to fight smarter/dirtier, the frequency of his deaths eventually slowed, to the point where it wasn’t uncommon to spend a year or two without any deaths at all. 

But then Shroud broke out of prison, and Robert got increasingly more reckless the more the villain evaded him. His thought process began to shift. Suddenly, he found himself wondering, did it really matter how many times he died if he would always come back anyway? Yeah, it was terrifying and it hurt, but he was no stranger to fear, and what was a little pain compared to closure? 

He got careless, started taking more risks. Unnecessary risks. The deaths started racking up again, quicker than ever. 

There was a particularly dark point in time when he even stopped bothering to hide his power. He didn’t care who found him. The suit was barely holding on, and his inheritance had long run out. He couldn’t picture continuing on as he had been—doing odd jobs, trying to scrape together enough money for cheap fixes that would fall apart in the next fight. He was hard pressed to plan any further into the future than catching Shroud and avenging his father. 

In the end, he got incredibly lucky—despite his carelessness, no one ever found out his secret. When he was blown out of the sky, his power healed the injury that killed him and left all the rest, leaving him in a coma for months. 

And then he got the job offer, and met his team, and started rebuilding his life and his hero career. And aside from that one disastrous bar fight and the event that blew his secret out of the water, he hasn’t died since. 

The Z-Team are various mixtures of horrified and furious when they eventually find out all of this, because it’s immediately pretty obvious that 1, Robert was—is?—passively suicidal, and 2, he spent the better part of a year using death as a form of self-harm. 

Robert tries to argue that the suicidality is not a huge issue, since he can’t die anyway. He also tries to argue that the phrase ‘self-harm’ is too strong a word. 

Obviously, that gets him yelled at by most of them—which he rolls his eyes at—and cried at by Waterboy—which he awkwardly panics over—but what really strikes a chord is the lecture from Coop. She bluntly points out exactly where Robert is wrong and how his apathy negatively affects the team, and her firm delivery of the facts actually leaves him feeling abashed. 

In the end, he agrees to try and work through it with an SDN-appointed therapist, just for their sake. In the meantime, the team move up their scheduled ‘meet up at Robert’s place to huddle around him under the pretense of watching a movie’ by an entire week, and they spend the night eating take out and arguing over what movies to watch and touching Robert as if to reassure themselves he’s still there. He thought they’d mostly gotten over their lingering trauma from his death, but it seems like that might not be the case. 

One person in particular sticks around after everyone else has left. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet the entire night—he didn’t even get in on the argument about whether Grease 2 was better than the first, which Robert knows damn well he has strong opinions on. 

The lights have been slowly turned off throughout the night, and now the only lamp still on is working overtime to brighten the room. Even in the dim light, though, Robert can see how stiffly the other man’s holding himself. 

“You didn’t get out of the way,” Flambae says, his voice low and tense. 

“What?” Robert asks, furrowing his brows. 

“When you said you were Mecha Man,” Flambae bites, as if he can barely force the words out. “When I tried to set you on fire. You didn’t move. All you did was hold your arm out in front of you. As if that would do anything.” 

Robert says nothing, unsure what Flambae’s getting at. 

“Were you really going to let me fucking kill you?” Flambae demands, eyes bright with anger and fear. “You were just planning to let me live with that for the rest of my life?” 

And then he spins on his heel to face away from Robert, the wide line of his shoulders taut as a bowstring as his back heaves with heavy, angry breaths. 

And because Robert graduated with honors from Chase’s school of ‘We joke, we laugh, we suppress our trauma,’ he can’t help saying dryly, “You should be honored—I’ve never died by fire before. You could’ve had my first time.” 

“It’s not fucking funny!” Flambae snaps, swinging back around to face him again. Robert is horrified to see that his eyes are glassy and red.

He clenches his hands at his sides, unsure what to say or do in the face of Flambae's uncharacteristic vulnerability. He can do banter and pep talks all day, but this? This doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s not good at it. 

Flambae must catch on to his discomfort, because he roughly scrubs his hands across his face, clearing away any evidence of the tears. As if that will make Robert forget they were there. 

“I wasn't actually trying to—” Flambae breaks off, the words catching in his throat. His hands are still pressed over most of his face, but Robert can see his chin quiver just slightly as he says, “I didn’t want to.”

“I know,” Robert murmurs. He reaches up and draws Flambae’s hands away from his face, pulling them behind his own back and encouraging the man to hug him. 

Flambae immediately latches on, hunching down to bury his face in Robert’s neck. Robert pats his back, and can’t help but feel that the motion is wrong—too robotic, not human enough. He’s gotten used to Flambae’s clinginess these last several weeks, but it still feels strange to be the one reaching out first. He feels clumsy and incompetent. 

“I got out of the habit of dodging,” he quietly confesses. If he speaks the words into his hair, he can pretend they’ll be lost among the thick black strands before they can reach his ears. “I just wasn’t thinking. It had nothing to do with you.” 

Flambae’s arms tighten around him. The small, shuddering breath he lets out would’ve been inaudible to Robert if they weren’t pressed so close together. 

“Yeah well,” Flambae mutters after a moment, his voice hoarse, “fucking think about me next time, okay, bitch? Stupid fucking asshole.” 

And to think himself used to cause irremediable harm - with his fire nonetheless! - would absolutely fuck him up.

Flambert Plushies are now ready for preorder dispatch~!!!

(more info in the link above and below) https://www.tumblr.com/y00bi/818213412213555200/y00bi-x-mycraftzone-collab?source=share

Robert now regularly receives twinkies from random civilians after this