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The thing about Robert being Mecha Man — the thing that still fucks Victor up, even weeks after he first heard it in the break room — is that Mecha Man is a hero-hero.
Like; a good one.
A memorable one.
A beloved one.
The kind that people have been calling the last of "the old guard" since his debut fifteen whole years ago. The kind that people name to soothe their kids when they're feeling scared. The kind that people actually want to save them when they're in deep shit. They don't hope that "Water Barf Boy" or "Invisibitch" are coming, they pray that Mecha Man is already en route. Victor watched the coverage, after his suit exploded, half because it was all anyone wanted to talk about and half out of morbid curiosity. They talked about the guy like he was a thing to be worshiped — a merciful, loving god on the horizon. An angel dressed in metal.
It was ridiculous.
Heroism is a sack of shit, and he knew that long before he'd promised Malevola that he'd give the Phoenix program a shot. "Redemption" Blonde Blazer had called it, like anyone with half a brain believed her or her ugly ass posters and pretty words. You didn't need to be a Harvard graduate to know that if heroes were ever real, they were long dead. Buried in the dirt beneath their feet with whatever delusions of grandeur they carried with them when they were alive. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or naive as balls, and Mecha Man, Victor was sure, could be no different.
This opinion, shocker, did not change with their first dispatcher. Some ex-hero living on long dead pride who called them the most disrespectful ingrates she'd ever worked with, screaming in Victor's ears with no regard for their sensitivity. She quit that evening, and the longest anyone lasted after her was two days of the most shitty dispatching they'd ever had. Bets were easy to get started, and he didn't think Robert would be worth more than the twenty he and Malevola staked on him quitting the Monday after his first shift. "Robert Robertson" was a temporary, not-as-annoying-as-it-could-be voice on a headset.
Another snake oil salesman looking to convince Z-Team that happiness was just within their reach if only they could be bothered to try, like they weren't already trying dammit.
Victor would know, on all fronts.
Learning that Robert was actually Mecha Man — entirely on accident, by the way — was the first piece of a puzzle Victor didn't even realize he was looking at until he was already trying to solve it. Mecha Man was a false martyr made untouchable by the public, and Robert was some bumfuck with the world's worst case of deadpan. An exhausted body covered in more scars than it knew what to do with. It was like telling Victor the sky was actually green and he'd just been hallucinating blue his entire life. He didn't get it. How could anyone that fragile be mistaken for someone so… invincible?
It felt wrong.
Like he'd just missed the last step on a staircase and was about eat shit on the floor, or some other equally unpleasant turn of events where he fell face first onto broken fangs. But then Malevola was there to make sure he didn't have any lasting damage, and playing hero left him off kilter as it was. He couldn't tell if he tripped because of Mecha Man or because of everything else, and he couldn't be bothered to. If he cared enough, he thought, he'd have the answer in time to watch him quit like all the others. And maybe that was the problem; he assumed he could fathom a singularity with concepts taken from the multiplicities before it.
As it was, Blonde Blazer had opened the next work day by hanging their crash-and-burn careers over their heads and, suddenly, it was whatever they could do to avoid the bottom. Coop handcuffed him to a squat rack, of all things, and the rest of their team was well on their way to killing each other if it meant anyone other than themselves would be getting the cut. Malevola locked Flambae in a sensory deprivation tank. Prism put laxatives in Punch Up's coffee. Punch Up pushed Golem into wet concrete. So on so forth until Invisigal tripped Malevola up, and let Thunderstruck get away again.
That was the first time he saw it, he thinks; how Robert and Mecha Man could be one in the same.
When Robert walked into that conference room, he was a slight thing barely taller than Invisigal and hardly worth the attention it took to listen. Then he threw a chair at Golem. Then he was more. That crackling voice in their ears became a physical presence that demanded their obedience — a figure dressed in uniform that did nothing to diminish the way he drew them in and sucked the air out of the room. He left them hanging onto every word for their next breath, with the steady beat of his footsteps punctuating each drawn out syllable. "Redemption" he had promised them, and he looked them in the eyes as he did.
Redemption.
For a single moment, Victor could believe that Mecha Man was everything they said he was.
When he tells Malevola this later (as in, "after the big ass bar fight" kind of later) she looks at him with those bright, pupil-less eyes of hers… and seems to see something he doesn't. She says, "I searched up Mecha Man, after Robert's first day."
She says, "I wanted to know how 'just a guy' could get one up on any of us."
She says, "I saw the same posts you did, about how good he is. How kind. How competent. The only true hero left, some insisted, and you just know that they really meant tax-free."
She says, "I wasn't sure if I believed it. But if you had told me that Robert was Mecha Man… I would have. From the day we fucking met him, I really would have."
Malevola, Victor learned early on, knows more of the world than most others. It comes with the territory of being a demon living up-top, where souls run wild and they can't be seen, really, but how she experiences them can't be described any other way. When she tells him what Robert looks like, she says that it's like bearing witness to a dying star — staring right at the sun that keeps the planet alive and knowing that it's going to burn out eventually. But for right now, in this single moment, it's beautiful and bright and warm. An object of worship, even for those who don't realize they're praying in the first place.
That Robert is Mecha Man was not predicted, but it slots so neatly into his identity that it might has well have been common knowledge the entire time. There is a reason that Mecha Man could beat the shit out of an ass reporter and have no one stop him. There is a reason that Z-Team, however begrudgingly, snapped to attention under the weight of Robert's voice. There is a reason that Victor is still thinking about him now, weeks after he first learned that Mecha Man and Robert are one in the same. And it exists in that perfectly blurry line between them.
Where does one end and the other begin?
With the way Robert talks about himself — and the way Chase talks about Robert, when he assumes no one could be listening in — Victor gets the feeling that he thinks he's nothing without Mecha Man. An accessory. The lesser, more fallible half that isn't even half. More like a really shitty twentieth that is, unfortunately, necessary to the function of the other nineteen twentieths. He devoted his entire life from the age of fifteen-maybe-sixteen, to the care and maintenance of a fucked up little metal coffin that both his father and grandfather had died in. He doesn't even have a bed.
And the thing is; if being Mecha Man were as simple as donning the mask and the metal, then everyone would be him. Fucking Victor would be him. But it isn't that simple. It takes a kind of suicidal selflessness to watch a star collapse in on itself twice and still take up its mantle before you're even a junior in high school. It takes a kind of fervent insanity to nearly meet the same exact end yourself, and decide that you're not done just yet. That you can still burn long enough to give the planet that thrives on your light a few extra years of life, even if it hasn't done a damn thing to earn it.
Victor, now and forever, could not make that choice.
So maybe Victor is a coward, but he thinks that for all Robert seems to believe he's nothing when he's not Mecha Man… Mecha Man would be just as empty without Robert.
Literally and metaphorically.
No one could look at that suit, actually look at it, and think that they could survive being its pilot long enough to meet a natural end. Robert certainly didn't. And how could he, when the legacy of his family line is written in the blood that stains its inner walls? Most would walk away, and let it die a fossilized death in some shitty display to be taken off the shelves just as newer and sparklier heroes take to the center stage. But Robert, the fucking idiot, thought to keep trying. Wants to keep trying. Wants to make the world better in any way that he can, because he's good and he's stubborn and stars must burn to live.
Stars must burn to live.
And so there is this; Robert is not the perfect hero the way children are taught to think of perfect heroes.
He is not infinitely patient. He is not eternally kind. And he is not perpetually gentle. There is a ruthless grit underlying his justice that Flambae and Toxic and Shroud could describe to you in graphic detail, outlined by scars born of metal and plasma. Scars that will never fade. Robert is a mirror canvas of echoed cruelty and apathy, to that. If he could bring it upon himself — if he could vocalize his suffering — he could describe to you what it is to be a hero in a world that adores its martyrs, but does not treat them kindly when they're still alive. That values dramatic, heroic sacrifices over the suffocating reality of maggot-filled rot and decay.
In the same breath, he would tell you that your effort matters. That you tried. That you have to keep trying. Because you wouldn't be here if you didn't care, deep down, and fuck everyone who would spit in the face of your struggle. Even if that person is you. Especially if that person is you. And you would listen, because no one before or after him will look at you like they actually see you the way he will in that moment. Push and he'll push back. He'll meet you beat for beat where you are and where you want to be, and you'll feel more like yourself than you ever have for every second of it.
Mecha Man is a memorable, beloved, invincible hero because Robert Robertson is a fragile, dying star that imposed his own desperate will on the impossibilities of his finite mortality.
The day he chose "Sonar" over Coop, Victor lay in bed and wondered what, if anything, made him worthier of the redemption Robert truly believed could rise from the ashes of Z-Team than her. Knew that nothing did. In another reality, it was him in that meeting room. Sitting face to face with a gaze that saw through him and knew him, and, even like this, would refuse to look away. Worth is a vicious thing to want in yourself, and a mortifying thing to want others to find in you. It's easier to pretend that you don't ache for it at all, and easier still to pretend it doesn't hurt when you screw yourself over.
So when Flambae shows up to Robert's house warming party — and again when Invisigal takes a fucking bullet for the guy — he thinks, "you want him to keep looking at you. You want him to keep believing in you. You want him to keep finding worth where you can't."
It's hysterical.
It's also not entirely untrue.
Victor is circling a point, here, and he's not sure that even he knows what it is. Heroism is still a sack of shit, "real" heroes have still been dead and buried for ages, and anyone who says otherwise is still a liar or naive as balls. Mecha Man is not and has never been the merciful, loving god on the horizon or the angel dressed in metal that people adore him as. But he is something. But he is, in one word, good. But those stories had to have come from somewhere. And when Victor pulls back to assess the puzzle that is Robert, he can almost believe that the world has always been kind.
That maybe he can be kind.
Just a month ago, not a single member of Z-Team could say that they believed the Phoenix Program was working the way they wanted it to. Blonde Blazer cared, but Blonde Blazer didn't get it — Blonde Blazer didn't know how to take their fractured parts and turn them into something whole. Something beloved. Something people could want. Maybe it's uncharitable, but she was made to save those that already know how to be saved. And Robert, for all his rough edges, has always been an opportunist. He took scrap metal and welded it to the remains of twice dead stars well enough to fill the black holes they left in their wake.
If there was anyone in the world who could convince a crew of liars and thieves and murderers that a hero was something they could be, it'd be the man who lived to die. It'd be the man who watched his father and grandfather's lives play out before him like a prophecy, and walk hand in hand with fate.
So dammit if that snake oil salesman isn't convincing.