Please listen to this song before you read the one-shot.

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Lying on the hood of a broken-down car, the two teenagers held each other close. Dirty and ragged, still smelling like smoke and gasoline. They were fresh off an arson job — third one this month for one of the East Side crews.

The stars were dim over the junkyard. They always were.

Smoke curled into the air as Nasir exhaled. He passed the cig to Robert next to him.

The metal under them should have been cold, but Nasir's ambient heat wouldn't allow it. Robert turned into him, pressing his cold nose against his neck. He breathed him in. Smoke and the fancy cologne they stole yesterday.

"How many jobs do you think we have left?" Nasir's voice was quiet.

Robert didn't answer right away. When he did, he didn't look up.

"I don't think it fuckin' matters. I don't think Shroud's going to let us go."

"Probably not." A long silence. Robert's thumb moved against his ribs, slow and absent, the way he got when he was already thinking past a problem to its solution.

Nasir exhaled slowly, running his fingers through the messy auburn hair. He studied the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose, the curve of his jaw. The patchy stubble coming through.

Then his gaze drifted up to the SDN billboard across the lot. Astroman. Nightcrawler. Bruiser. Bold lettering. A call-now number. Behind it, a giant building ad for the Astroman film, opening in two weeks.

"One day I'm going to be up there." Nasir's voice had shifted into something steadier. "Walking the carpet. Cameras everywhere. No one's ever going to touch us again."

Robert pressed closer, his lips brushing the underside of his jaw.

"Mhmm. If anyone could pull it off, it's you."

He looked back at the stars. One brightened as he looked at it.

They were silent for a moment. Then:

"Would you still love me just the same?" Robert asked, looking up at him with those brown eyes that caught the light just right.

"Of course." He ran a hand through his hair again, messing it up more. "You'd be right there with me, bitch."

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15 Years Later

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The alarm came in as a 10-34 at midnight. Possible explosive device. Commercial building under heavy renovation. No civilians on site except for a late night construction crew.

Blond Blazer was dispatched.

He landed on the roof. Clean landing, the kind that photographed well. SDN's media team had drilled it into him until it was muscle memory.

He looked across the roof.

One of LA's most wanted was sitting on the ledge, tilting a box of candy into his mouth.

Exo Blue.

Robert.

He’d put Sweet Talker in the hospital three weeks ago. He was still in physical therapy. Seasoned hero, popular, both hands broken where Robert had caught him mid-strike and decided that was the message he wanted to send.

Nasir had read the incident report twice. It increased Sweet Talker's hero standing by six points from the sympathy coverage.

He looked closer at the box of candy. Pop rocks. Their flavor. The one Nasir had named outside a gas station after their first job. Fifteen years old, both of them reeking of smoke. This is what my fire tastes like, he'd said. But, like, spicy. Robert had laughed so hard he'd choked.

Robert had been here for how long, Nasir wasn’t sure. Whatever he'd come to do, it was already done. The pop rocks were dessert.

The helmet was off and set to the side. The breeze moved through auburn hair. His legs dangled over the edge like he was sitting on a dock somewhere, the exosuit's brackets the only thing grounding him. Six stories of nothing below his boots. Past him, the city spread out like its own map of the night sky, every car and window a dim star.

Somewhere south, his own face glowed on the SDN billboard. Forty feet wide. He'd stopped keeping track of the rest of it. You learned not to.

Robert’s suit was different from their last encounter.

The mask was minimal, same as it always was. A dark band across the upper half of his face, contoured to the bridge of his nose. Left his jaw exposed. His smirking mouth. The freckles, fewer now, harder to find amongst the scarring that mapped his chin, the corner of his jaw, the old burns that had taken part of his ear and marred his cheek. The cut in his lip that left his smirk slightly uneven.

Nasir knew the scars ran all over his body. He knew the shape and placement of each one.

Some had been from him.

Robert's body didn't close wounds the way Nasir's did, the way most supers did — every fight left a permanent record, and the suit had evolved the way scar tissue evolves: in direct response to damage already done. The suit had changed, the exo suit that once started as boots now ran up into the spine.

Robert wiped his mouth with his sleeve and swallowed.

Nasir had spent a significant amount of time, once, with his mouth on that throat.

"You're going to want to move," Nasir said. "SDN has a second unit ten minutes out."

Robert stood. Something crossed his face, quick and involuntary, and was gone. Then came the smile, slightly asymmetrical now from the scar tissue.

"Flambae."

The name landed like a lit match.

"Don't."

"Don't what?" Robert tossed more pop rocks into his mouth, smirking.

Nasir's chest did something he didn't have a name for. Years, and Robert still reached for that one first. The stupid joke alias Robert had made up at sixteen when Nasir blanked on an intake form, the first time they were arrested. It had never been a real name. Robert had never stopped using it.

Nasir said nothing, looked to the side.

"Aw, you're embarrassed." His eyes moved down the Blond Blazer suit and back up. The way he always looked at things he planned on stealing later. "They make you pick the new name, Blond Blazer, or was that one yours?"

"Theirs."

"Hm." He looked up at the bleached hair. "Explains the job."

"Stop."

"I guess it makes you more white passing." Robert's mouth moved at one corner as he walked around Nasir, like he was sizing up his prize. "PR knows what they're doing, but I think you looked way sexier before."

Nasir said nothing.

"Didn't they change your civvie name to Chad, too?" Robert said as he tossed more into his mouth.

"Been stalking my socials, bitch?" Nasir said.

Something shifted in Robert's expression. Then he grinned. "Now there's Nasir." He tilted his head. "Are you going to actually arrest me this time, bitch?"

Nasir crossed the distance in one step and got into his space, close enough that Robert had to tilt his chin up to hold eye contact. He didn't step back. He never stepped back.

Robert didn't even flinch.

"The charge is on a timer," Robert said. "East wall. You've got about five minutes."

Nasir looked at him. "Building's clear?"

Robert held his gaze. "Should be."

Should be. Nasir looked toward the stairwell door.

"How long have you known I was coming?" Nasir said as he looked back at him.

Robert had a rule about only hurting supes, people who he felt could fight back. He would have cleared the building of the night crew.

"Since you tripped the sensor on the roof. Would've warned you sooner but you seemed too busy looking at me like old times."

Nasir looked at the box of pop rocks in his hand. "You knew I'd come."

Robert didn't answer. That was an answer.

"You hacked the dispatch schedule."

"SDN should be more careful about their posts." A beat, like he'd been waiting to say the line. "It's just pattern recognition. They always send you to 10-34s."

"You set a fucking charge in our neighborhood."

"I set a charge in a building." His eyes moved briefly to Nasir's mouth. Didn't move back fast enough. "Neighborhood's incidental. Crew that owns this block's been moving product through it anyway. I'm doing the East Side a favor."

"This used to be our block." Nasir looked beyond Robert, toward the junkyard. They had spent a lot of time there scrapping parts.

Something shifted in Robert's expression. Gone before Nasir could name it.

He looked back at Robert. Really looked, the way he hadn't let himself in years. Not since they stopped being on the same side. The sharpness at his cheekbones that wasn't there at twenty-two. The way he held his left side when he thought no one was clocking it, something in there that hadn't healed right and probably never would. The scars that hadn't existed when they were young and burning things together and Nasir had promised no one would ever touch them again.

He'd built his brand on what they burned. Robert had been the one to get them free of it — the night Shroud stopped being a problem, the knife, the way Robert had used and carried it without once asking Nasir to share it.

The manslaughter charge had followed Robert after that like a second shadow.

When the SDN talent scouts came sniffing years later Nasir had a relatively clean record and Robert didn't, and Nasir had told himself that wasn't his fault. That the math was just the fucking math. 

He'd used the same logic at the diamond heist. Robert was already marked. He was just recognizing what was already true. He'd told himself that for fifteen years and he was still telling himself it now, on a rooftop, watching him hold a box of their pop rocks, with a charge counting down and he had to play hero to Robert's villain.

Again.

Robert took a breath. Nasir smelled chemicals.

"You smell like a pharmacy," Nasir said.

Robert shrugged, looking at the billboard past them, the one with Nasir’s face. "You found heaven, I found pills."

"Don't bullshit me, man."

Robert looked at him like he wasn't sure what the bullshit was supposed to be. "I'm not." The shadows under his eyes. The tension at the corners of his mouth that meant he was holding something behind his teeth. "It’s for the pain."

"When did it start," Nasir said. Not a question.

Robert's jaw shifted. Held. "After you left me stranded on that billboard. The bank heist."

The night Nasir had called in the tip. Robert had taken the arrest because he couldn’t jump off a billboard without breaking his back. Apparently he had tried anyway. The news had called it heroism and Nasir walked away clean. He'd stood outside the precinct in the cold and told himself Robert would understand, that he'd have done the same, that the math had worked out the only way it could. He'd believed it for almost a year. Then he'd stopped trying.

Nasir looked at the exosuit again. How it extended up into the spine now. The cost was the pain. Damaged nerves from every upgrade, every attempt to keep up with a world built for supes whose bodies healed. To keep up with Nasir. To keep up with a game Nasir had never wanted to keep playing with him.

“Three minutes, Chad.”

"I'm not arresting you."

"Sweet Talker would have notes on that." Not apologetic. "I'm not going to stop. You know that." Something in his voice that wasn't quite a dare. Nasir knew what it was then stopped the thought.

"I'm not fucking arresting you." His hands heated. Smoke curled. “Stop it. Just leave.”

"I saw the clip. The one that went viral. Fourteen million views last I checked. When you got that award." His voice was dry, not cruel. Worse than cruel. "You cried a little at the end. Very tasteful. Thanking everyone who got you where you were."

Robert stepped closer.

“Did you forget about me?” Robert tossed a few more into his mouth as he smirked. “Too busy with your PR approved relationship with Brainbook to remember, I guess.”

Nasir heard the candy crackling inside his mouth.

Would you love me just the same?

Nasir's hand came up. He didn't decide to do it. It was already happening, two fingers curving under Robert's jaw, tipping his face up the last inch. The scar tissue was smoother than skin, warmer somehow. Robert went still. Not thinking two steps ahead for the first time tonight. His breath came out slow and and completely even, which meant he was working for it.

Nasir kissed him.

He didn't decide to do that either.

Robert made a sound against his mouth. Low. Not a protest. His hands found the back of Nasir's neck and held on, and it wasn't gentle — Robert's hands were never gentle, Nasir knew exactly what they'd done to Sweet Talker’s hands and felt it now in the pressure. Nasir's hand moved from his jaw to the back of grip the hair that was exposed from the mask and Robert let him, went with it, tilted into it like something that had been braced against pressure for a long time and finally stopped.

His grip tightened on Nasir and for one moment his whole body leaned in, just him. The same way he'd pressed his cold nose into Nasir's neck at fifteen, the same way he'd always moved toward warmth before he'd learned to stop.

He tasted like poprocks.

The building ticked under them. Maybe three minutes. Maybe two.

Nasir pulled back.

Robert's hands stayed on him. One beat. Two. Like his body was running a different decision from his brain and the lag was showing. Then he let go.

They were still close enough. Both of them. Close enough that it would take nothing.

Robert didn't take it.

His mouth was slightly open. The mask's lower edge had pressed faint marks into his cheek. He was looking at Nasir the way they'd looked at the stars at fifteen, like there was something out there he could almost reach and already knew he wouldn't.

Nasir had to try. "Turn yourself in. Do the program. Then we could do jobs together again." A beat. "Like old times."

Robert looked away. It was a lie. They both knew it. The SDN would never sign off on that. Even if Nasir pulled strings.

"The hero scene’s your thing, not mine." Not resigned. Decided. "I don't do well on leashes like you do."

Nasir sighed.

"Just tell me to let you go, Robbo."

Robert's eyes widened slightly at the nickname. Just slightly. The building ticked under them.

"Please." The word hung between them.

Robert closed his eyes. Just for a moment. Nasir felt the line of his jaw under his fingers, the old freckles and the new scars and the warmth that had always been there underneath both. He understood that Robert was memorizing this moment for later — for 2am, for whatever got him through the long nights alone in the dark. That he'd been planning on doing this from the moment he set off the call. That this goodbye had been the job all along.

"Let me go, Nasir." Low. Even.

Nasir dropped his hand.

Robert pressed the box of poprocks into his palm.

He stepped back. One step, then two, and the distance between them turned back into what it was supposed to be. Hero. Villain. Opposite sides of a line Nasir had finally crossed in the public eye and intended to stay on.

Robert pulled the helmet on. Visor down. Whatever his face was doing, gone.

"The building had been cleared all along, hadn't it." Nasir said. Not a question.

He stepped off the ledge in one motion and the exosuit's boots fired.

Then Robert stopped, hovering just over the edge.

"It’s a good look, Chad." He turned slightly, his face unknowable under the helmet but Nasir knew anyway, “Suits you.”

Then he was gone over the far ledge, and sixty seconds later the east wall came down in a clean controlled line, exactly the way Robert did everything, and Nasir ignited his body and hovered over the roof in the settling dust.

Watched the city swallow Robert whole.

He stood there until the embers went dark.

Blond Blazer filed his report. Noted the device had detonated before he could disarm it. Noted the building was clear.

Left out the rest.

He had another interview to prepare for in the morning.

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