Chapter Text
“Let’s do this shit,”
The staticky sound of the phone line distorted the edges of every sentence spoken into Herm’s earpiece, but Flamebae’s voice, deep and accented, was always especially distinct. It was 9:00am – and though there were a couple stragglers (Bruno tended to have trouble with his earpiece) the bulk of the Z-team was connected to the line, ready for their morning shift.
Robert’s voice was clearer than the others’ – his microphone was larger, didn’t have to be so compact as to fit into an earpiece. The irritation in his voice, too, was clear. “Not so fast. Conference room in five. All of you.”
Audible groans from multiple voices.
“We really don’t need to be motivated this early, Robert.” Though she was all the way in the ladies locker room, Herm could practically see Alice’s eyes rolling from her tone of voice. “Can we wait until lunch or whatever? I need to get my morning steps in.”
“Yeah, not really a motivation meeting. Be there.” The line clicked as Robert disconnected. Herm felt the back of his neck get hot with nerves.
—
“Alright,” Robert said, and he closed the door harshly, starting to talk before the lock had even fully clicked. He had a trash bag in hand, swinging ever so slightly as he made his way over to the table, visibly weighed down by something at the bottom. It seemed otherwise empty. “Whichever one of you it is needs to fess up. Now.”
The whole room looked around at each other, befuddled.
“It isn’t even ten a.m. and you’ve already got your panties in a fucking twist,” Chad complained. “What gives? And what’s with the fucking trash bag?”
“I’ll tell you what gives,” Robert said, and he yanked the bag up, tugging the orange drawstrings loose, reaching his hand inside. When he pulled out the item from inside, Herm felt his jaw drop involuntarily, a small spat of water falling into his lap.
The (reasonably large) translucent purple dildo flopped around enthusiastically in Robert’s hand as he swung it down in an arc and stuck it to the conference room table, the suction cup at the bottom making a heavy silicone thwock sound.
A silent beat, and then the entire table burst into laughter, except for Herm, who looked vaguely horrified.
“Ew,” Courtney said, through a grin. “Robert, keep that to yourself, man,”
“I didn’t take you for the type,” Malevola said from beside Herm, looking vaguely intrigued. “Though, I guess looking at you. . .”
Chad snorted from across the table, near the head where Robert was standing. “Didn’t take him for the type? How? He looks like he’d practically be begging to be –”
Robert sounded exhausted as he interjected. “Obviously it isn’t mine. I’m trying to figure out which one of yours’ it is.”
“Ours?” Colm said, aghast.
“His is probably at home. Stuck right on the floor in his empty bedroom,” Chad said. Robert ignored him.
“You all are the only ones in this office immature enough to be leaving them around.”
“Them?” Courtney asked. “As in multiple?” The grin on her face had yet to disappear, and she was swinging side to side in the rolling desk chair, hands resting on her thighs. She had been healing well – Robert was even sending her on real missions again, instead of having her organize files in the basement to earn her pay. For as nice as the LA branch was, their records were a nightmare. “You gonna take that one home with you? One for each hole?”
Robert ignored her, too. “Need I remind you all that we’re guests in this branch? If you’re all going to leave a bunch of dildos in offices–”
Victor piped in. “Offices? Whose office? It wasn’t in your cubicle?”
Robert narrowed his eyes at him. “No, it wasn’t. Was it supposed to be?”
Victor shook his head. “You know me, Robbie.” Robert made a scrunched up face at the name, and Victor put his hands up in a faux surrender. “I’m not really a cock guy. With some small exceptions. If she’s bad enough–”
Alice cut him off. “Robert, do you know how expensive those things are? None of us at this table makes enough to stick them all over the damn place.”
“You certainly do,”
“You think I don’t got better shit to do than stick a bunch of fucking dildos around the office? Be fucking forreal, Robertson,”
“None of you are clear of suspicion. Except maybe Herm,” he said, sighing as he caught sight of his face, which was redder than it already was on the regular. The whole table suddenly seemed to remember he was there.
“Never seen one that big before, huh?” Courtney asked him. “You’re blushing,”
“W– wha? No, I was – I mean? It's not – that’s –”
“It’s not what, lad? Not that big?”
“He’s definitely seen bigger,” Courtney decided.
Water was coming off of him pretty quickly, now. “No! No, I’ve never seen a – someone else’s — I don’t – wouldn't know about that. Penises.” His mouth was set in a wobbly line. It was sort of true; he hadn’t seen another that big. Not in person, at least. Not that wasn’t his own.
“Penises,” Bruno repeated from behind Robert, deadpan.
“You’re so fucking lame that it makes me feel bad for you, man,” Chad offered. “Aren’t you 25?”
“24,” he retorted, weakly.
“Lay off him, guys,” Robert reprimanded. It fell on deaf ears.
“24 and no play,” Courtney said, frowning at him patronizingly. Herm’s mouth moved wordlessly as he tried to come up with a retort. No meaningful sound came out.
“He could just be straight,” Malevola shrugged.
Chad snorted. “Him?” His tone of voice implied that he felt he was the resident expert. “I don’t think so. Clearly none of you have seen his bedroom. He’s got posters of–”
Herm cut him off loudly, and quickly, glancing at Robert — Mecha Man – at the head of the table. He grabbed at the edge of the conference table in horror. “The –! This isn’t really – relevant. To the-” Chad was smirking.
“Either way, you’re obviously getting no play,” Courtney decided. “That’s sad, man.”
“Real sad,” Alice agreed. “24 years old,” she said, shaking her head.
Before Herman could even attempt to defend himself, Victor was speaking again. “Yeah, yeah, Waterboy’s a loser. Whatever. Whose office was it in, Rob?” he asked, mercifully redirecting the Z-team’s attention toward Robert.
“I don’t know why that’s so important to you, but if you must know, someone left this one on Blazer’s desk.”
“It’s like, rule one of detective work, Bobby. You need clues to solve a mystery.”
Across from Chad, Janelle finally spoke, looking delighted at the prospect of catching the dildo bandit. “I would like to help,” she said, and Victor flashed her a thumbs up. She turned to Robert. “Where did you find the others? How many have been found?”
“Is your girlfriend being targeted?” Courtney added.
Robert ran his hand over his face. “Not that it matters, but Blazer isn’t my girlfriend. And I am in no way asking you to solve any sort of mystery. I’m just trying to figure out which one of you assholes is responsible,”
“Bob-bob, I know you’re going through some shit or whatever, but have you never heard of a prank?” Chad asked.
“So it’s you?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, raising his shoulders. “I just dont understand why you’re wasting our time over a fucking dildo. It wasn’t any of us and even if it was it’s not a big fucking deal. C’mon. I chugged a bang, I want to get moving. People are out there dying and shit.”
“It’s 9:25am on a Tuesday. No one’s dying,”
“C’mon Robert, give it a rest,” Colm said. “It wasn’t us. I thought we were past this.”
“Can’t believe you’d think it’s us after all the shit we’ve gone through together,” Alice accused him. It was a light accusation, playful, but there was truth underneath. “You still don’t trust us?”
Robert pursed his lips for a moment, and then shook his head. “Fine, fine. Okay. Maybe it’s not you guys. But if I find out–”
Everyone was already getting up, pushing chairs in.
“Whatever. Meeting dismissed,” Robert said, and he opened the door for Golem, who side-stepped into the hallway as carefully as he possibly could.
The dildo stayed stuck resolutely on the conference room table.
—
SDN’s Downtown L.A. branch was huge. Their hero roster was already twice the size of Torrence, and even then, they could still comfortably accommodate the entire expanded roster of Z-Team, plus a couple stragglers from the currently-under-repair Torrence branch.
Despite the work that the Z-Team had put in during the Red Ring attacks, and their defeat (or rather, Robert’s killing) of Shroud, the perception of the Z-Team around SDN was still in limbo, unlike it was in the public eye. They had come to the Downtown location alongside Blazer – Mandy, now, without her amulet – who was still tasked with keeping a watchful eye over them. Or maybe she was tasked with keeping a watchful eye over Robert, of whom his legal proceedings were still . . proceeding. Either way, where she went, the team followed.
Herman himself had taken a liking to the place. With the sheer number of heroes on the roster, there were inevitably a couple that had issues similar to his. One of the lounges was. . . waterproofed was one way to say it. The walls and the floors certainly were, in order to accommodate the huge pools inside, where a couple of his coworkers, who he was relatively certain were at least amphibious, swam around between missions. Though he didn’t utilize the pools, he was happy to have somewhere to hang around where no one minded the fact that he was spilling all over the place.
Working at getting it under control had been slow going. Everyone on Z-Team had been examined by the SDN doctors after the Torrence fight, to make sure that there weren’t any adverse side effects from the. . . sickness, that Shroud and his goons had spewed everywhere after Robert had given him the astral pulses. Most of them had been unfortunate enough to get splashed, at some point or another.
His doctor had been surprised when she asked him about his powers.
“You can’t control it?”
“No, ma’am,” he had told her. “Er – well. I can. I can make it. Uh.” He welled his mouth up with water, and pointed, to which she nodded. He swallowed, hard. “But I can only ever make, uh, more. Not – not less.”
“Interesting,” she muttered. “That’s relatively rare,” she said, to which Herman shrank.
“Is it?” he couldn't help but be a little bit dejected. It figured that he’d be a special case.
“For your age, yes. Elementals usually have a handle on that by their teenage years,” she said, puzzled. “I’m surprised you don’t.” Herm had furrowed his brow.
“What?”
Dr. Zanin’s head had tilted ever so slightly to the side. “How often do you go to the Doctor?” she asked him. “Or, better yet, who’s your primary care physician? I can have your chart transferred here,” she said, and she swiveled in her chair to type something into her laptop.
“Um,” he said, embarrassingly. He knew the names of each and every one of the doctors and specialists that his grandmother had – up and back from a to z. He was drawing a blank for his own.
“Do you not have one?”
“Not – really? The last time I went to the Doctor. . .” he glanced up at the ceiling, trying to recall. He wasn’t sure if the high school nurse counted. He had thrown up a lot, in school. Though, it was almost always water. “I guess – think, when I was a kid,”
“And what kind of doctor was it?”
“The uh? Normal. . . kind?”
“For metahumans?”
“Is there, uhm. A d–dif–difference?” he asked.
“Oh, sweetheart,” is all she said. She was frowning at him, hard. She turned back to her computer, and typed rapidly for a moment. When she finished, she swiveled in her chair, and stood, patting his shoulder. “I’ll be right back. I need to order some labs. And when I get back we’re gonna fill out a bunch of paperwork.”
The visit had ended up being a rather long one. Apparently there was a lot he didn’t know – couldn’t have known, really – about his powers. Never had the chance to know, at least. His parents hadn’t had powers. Up until middle school, he hadn’t known he had had powers, either. For all intents and purposes he had just seemed an especially sweaty child. With some inexplicable bedwetting issues that he had always insisted (correctly) that he didn’t know the source of. Eventually, when the reality of the situation had hit him, hard as a ton of bricks (or maybe flooded his life like a tsunami), he, understandably, lacked any answers to his problems. As far as he had known he was just. . . wet. Irrevocably so.
But according to Dr. Zanin, that was not the case. There was nothing irrevocable about his condition. It was completely and utterly revocable – with sustained and learned effort. Effort that most people like him – elementals – learned with the help of specialized Doctors and teachers throughout their adolescent lives.
For the longest time, he hadn’t known that things didn’t need to be the way that they were. Didn’t realize that he had the ability, somehow, to stop himself from. . . overflowing.
And the fact that he hadn’t known for as long as he did had only served to make it harder to fix.
But he was trying. He had physical therapy every Thursday, and exercises to do every morning and every evening. It was slow going, but it was something to work towards, and he had never shied away from a challenge. Besides – in the meantime, the shiny, plastic-y couches in the humid amphibious break room were nice. Certainly nicer than soaking through the old Torrence couches from the 80s.
The channel in his earpiece was quiet. Not abnormally so, but comfortably so. Ever so often Robert would patch in to dispatch a couple of them, but otherwise, he spoke to them on their individual lines. Herm had been on two missions that morning, and he was resting from the second, which had involved a particularly high-speed on-foot chase. Courtney – or, Visi, as he tried to keep to calling her at work – had been busy with some intelligence work for a client, and he had been sent as second best.
Successful but exhausted, he was happy for the break, and a mostly-gone box of apple juice was resting on his chest, straw being chewed on in his mouth, as he thumbed through his ziploc-covered phone.
As he saw yet another post containing Robert’s mugshot, plastered side by side with CCTV footage of his hands around Shroud’s neck, he couldn’t help but think that it was no wonder Robert was strung as high as he had been this morning, and, more generally, recently.
Mecha-Man Identity Revealed Through Historic Break From No Kill Vow – Follow for Trial Updates.
r/CNN. The sheer volume of the posts felt absurd. It was a fault of his own algorithm (it was hard to shake the consequences of a decade of posting on r/MechaMan), but it was the fourth article on the subject that he had seen during this break alone. Fourth from official sources, at least. As far as unofficial threads. . .
People had a lot to say. It was unfortunate. He could only imagine how Robert was feeling. . . Not only had the identity of Mecha Man become public knowledge, it had happened through scandal – however deserved the death of Shroud may or may not have been. Robert, though out on bail, was being tried by the state for murder in the first degree. The proceedings were slow, stalled and ever-interrupted by Mandy and her team of SDN lawyers, but, in the eyes of the law (if not the public), Robert was now as much a criminal as the rest of the Z-Team. Mecha Man’s legacy had grown. . . infinitely more complicated.
The worst part was that killing Shroud had only seemed to make Robert feel worse. The steadfast way in which he had plunged himself into his work had not been lost on the Z-Team. Nor had his eyes, which, when he thought no one was looking, were cast with a deep heaviness, the kind that made your heart sink. They had all been taking turns bringing him extra food for lunch that they had “accidentally” made too much of.
A sudden voice in his ear made him jump. “Herm, you ready to go back out?”
He dropped the apple juice straw from his lips as he hurriedly raised his hand to tap his earpiece. “Always ready, sir!” One of the frog-men in the pool turned to look at him with a puzzled expression.
“Great. Go meet Malevola out front so you can portal out. Looks like some guys set fire to a gas station,”
Horrified, Herm booked it downstairs.
—
The rest of the day was a busy one for Herm. He was happy about how often he was being sent out – he hardly had fifteen minutes of rest between missions before Robert was in his ear asking if he’d be able to go back out. The most downtime he had had was at his late lunch, where he spent most of it scarfing down the food he had packed. His lunch was always packed neatly, in a zippered fabric box with a handle, and a starcrunch snuck on top from his Grandmother. Chad often made fun of him for it, to which Herm always told him, shakily, that he was sure he was just jealous. He didn’t mean of the lunch, of course, but rather of the fact that he had someone who loved him enough to sneak desserts into it. He always smacked his hot hand away when he tried to steal the treat for himself.
There was no stopping after lunch – he was sent out with Prism for a presentation at one of the local high schools, then sent out on a mission for a regular client, for whom he watered her garden nearly twice a week. As tedious as it was, he liked the old woman, because she always had a ginormous pitcher of lemonade for him, and a couple of cookies, different ones every time. As easy as it would be for her to water the garden herself, he figured she was lonely, and he had grown to like her company as much as she liked his. He stayed out at her place for just a little bit longer than he probably should have.
And he was glad he had, because as soon as he was done, it was still mission after mission. The entire city of Los Angeles – large as it was – was still putting itself back together after the Red Ring attacks. There was much do be done, both by hero and civvies alike. By the time he got back to SDN for the final time that evening, it was later than normal, and a good deal of dispatchers had already packed up and left, or were in the process of doing so. The other members of Z-Team had said goodnight as they were released – as far as he could tell, he, Colm, and Bruno were the only three members of the Z-Team still clocked in.
“Go ahead and log that last mission as overtime,” Robert told him, in his ear. “Didn’t give you much of a break today, sorry. You can head out now. Good work, Waterboy,”
“Th–than– no problem!”
“See you tomorrow,” Robert said, and Herm heard his personal line click off.
He pressed his earpiece, deciding to match the trend; “Good— goodnight everyone!”
“Night,” said Bruno.
“Have a good one, Herm,” from Colm.
It was just a couple ‘goodnight’s, but he felt his chest warm pleasantly at the goodwill from his coworkers. His friends, he had begun to feel.
Herm stuck the fingers of his damp glove in his ear, wiggling the earpiece free, and clutching it lightly in the palm of his hand to deposit in the case he kept in his locker. The locker room was empty, the automatic light switching on a couple moments after he walked in.
Herman stopped in his tracks when he saw it, suctioned to the locker room bench, a bright, violent pink. It was just as large as the one from the morning, and, considering what it was, ominously still.
He openly stared, slowly feeling as if the dildo were staring back. He felt his face get hot.
Surely he should leave? What if someone walked in and saw. . . He was the only person in here. Surely they’d assume. . . If not that it was him, leaving them throughout the office, then at least that it was his. He wasn’t sure which possibility was worse. Either way he’d look like some sort of pervert, bringing that to work. To the locker rooms. Or worse. He’d look like some sort of desperate virgin. Who was also a pervert. Being known as the former was already bad enough — 24 and no play — but the prospect of both was more than he could handle.
Unfortunately, though, he couldn’t just leave. He needed to get the earpiece out of his increasingly wet hand before he managed to damage it.
He quickly glanced behind himself, ensuring he was still alone, then walked quickly around the bench, leaving a wide berth between his path and its. . . affliction.
The only sounds were his own soggy footsteps and the slow drip of a leaky showerhead. Or maybe the drip was him. He couldn’t tell. He was so focused on getting his damn locker open. He fumbled with the padlock, uselessly, turning it just a tad too far each time, the click never coming. He took a deep breath, frustrated, and dropped his hands to his sides, smoothing them out over his thighs. Another deep breath.
He needed to calm down. It was just a dildo. It was just. . .
He got the lock open, and he fumbled open the contact case, stuffing his earpiece inside. It clicked closed, and he set his hands at to rest at the metal bottom of his half locker.
He looked over his left shoulder at the dildo.
He looked around the empty locker room.
It was the only one in there that he could see. Should he. . . Was he supposed to confiscate it? Was it evidence? Would it be better to take it than to leave it? If all of them got taken — disposed of? Would they stop coming? Or would it make it worse? Would there be twice the amount as before? He imagined SDN littered with brightly colored silicone cocks, all of which were wobbling slowly. No. No, surely that wasn’t a possibility. Alice was right. These things were expensive. Too expensive to just be. . . wasting.
Still staring, he swallowed hard. In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but agree with Courtney. It was pretty big. The big ones usually cost even more.
Eyes darting around in his head, then, and taking one last glance toward the door, he lunged forward, and, with some effort, pried the toy off of the locker room bench.