Mecha Man | Robert | Dispatch

The blood pooled in his skull like water filling a basin — slow, inexorable, throbbing against the backs of his eyes with each labored heartbeat. Robert had lost track of time somewhere between the third blow to his ribs and the moment Coupé had dragged the tip of her knife across his shoulder blade, not deep enough to sever muscle but deep enough to make him understand she remembered exactly how much pressure caused the most exquisite kind of pain. His ankles burned where the rope bit into them, the coarse fibers grinding against bone as his body swayed gently in the stale air of whatever godforsaken warehouse they’d dragged him to.

Coupé’s knife traced slowly across his skin, reopening a scar — still red, not quite healed, the one he’d earned after the Mecha suit explosion. The pain forced his whole body to coil into a tight spring, as much as a man hanging upside down by his ankles could. He bit the inside of his cheeks, trying to swallow the strangled, guttural sound rising in his throat, refusing to give her — or Shroud — the satisfaction they craved.

"Well, dispatcher," she crouched beside him, tilting her head as she examined his battered face. "I can see it hurts. Perfect time to start talking."

"Fuck you," he muttered, feeling blood trickle down his torso, over his neck, reaching his chin before rolling in thickening drops across his face, flooding one eye, sticking to his eyelashes. Robert squeezed his eyes shut, blinking hard to push back the red blur.

Coupé rolled her eyes and rose to her feet, beginning to circle him slowly, tossing a few reassuring glances toward Shroud, who stood in the shadows, watching the negotiations with the patience he had been cultivating since the day Mecha Man was blown up by his people. Since the day Mecha Man — since the day Robert Robertson III — should have died, leaving no heir to the metal and hydraulic throne of the suit. Leaving the legacy to rot and rust, leaving the yellow tabloids to speculate, leaving all of Los Angeles under the rule of the Red Ring.

“Where is the Astral Pulse?”

Shroud’s voice came from somewhere behind him. The man hadn’t moved from his position since they’d strung Robert up like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse — just stood there in that ridiculous dramatic cloak, arms folded, watching Coupé work with the detached interest of a man observing a mildly entertaining television program.

"Already fucking told you," Robert managed, his voice coming out thicker than he intended, syllables slurring together as gravity pulled at his tongue. "I don’t know where the fuck—"

The fist connected with his stomach before he could finish the sentence. Coupé had always been fast — that was her whole thing, wasn’t it, that supernatural speed that let her slice through obstacles before they registered her presence. She’d been wasted on the Z-Team, really.

Robert’s body jackknifed involuntarily, abs contracting around the impact point as bile surged up his throat. He swallowed it back down, tasting copper and stomach acid, and forced his eyes to focus on Coupé’s face hovering somewhere near his midsection.

"You were Mecha Man," she said. "The great legacy. Three generations of Bobbys playing hero in their fancy tin cans. And you expect us to believe you don’t know where your daddy’s most valuable tech ended up?"

"Believe whatever you want," Robert let his head hang, watching blood drip from a cut above his eyebrow and splatter against the concrete below. The red looked almost black in the dim lighting. "Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have what you’re looking for."

The knife appeared in her hand with that unsettling speed—one moment empty palm, the next a blade catching the industrial light and throwing it back in fractured pieces.

"Stop." The sudden command from Shroud was suddenly deafening, making Coupé turn her head toward him, her expression a boiling mixture of confusion, indignation, and frustration at losing the chance to finally answer her tormentor physically, her gaze glued to the red lens of his mask.

The seconds stretched into something elastic and strange. Robert focused on breathing—shallow inhales that didn’t aggravate his ribs too badly, controlled exhales that kept the encroaching darkness at bay. His shoulders had progressed beyond numbness into a tingling, electric agony that suggested nerve damage he’d be dealing with for weeks. If he survived long enough to deal with anything at all.

"We’re leaving." Shroud’s voice cut through Robert’s haze, sharp and decisive.

"What?" Coupé’s outrage was palpable, vibrating through the blade still pressed against his back. "We’re not finished. He hasn’t told us—"

"He doesn’t know," the words were flat, final. "A source has provided a more... promising lead. The Pulse was recovered from the crash site by a third party. Robertson is irrelevant. For now. Let him... live just a bit more."

Irrelevant. Robert would have laughed if he'd had the breath for it. Months of recovery, years of legacy, generations of sacrifice — and in the end, he was irrelevant. Just another dead end in Shroud's methodical pursuit of power. His father would have appreciated the irony. Or maybe not. Robert had never really known what his father appreciated.

The knife withdrew from Robert's back, and he heard Coupé's sharp exhale of frustration — the sound of a predator denied its kill. She circled around to face him, grabbing a fistful of his hair and wrenching his head up to meet her eyes. Blood rushed away from his skull in a dizzying wave, and for a moment her face blurred into abstract shapes before resolving back into sharp, furious features.

*This isn't over," she hissed. "When Shroud gets what he wants, when I'm not useful to him anymore — I'm coming back for you, Robertson. And next time, no one's going to interrupt."

She released him with a shove that set his body swinging on its rope tether, pendulum arcs that sent fresh waves of agony through his shoulders and ankles. Robert watched her retreating form through half-lidded eyes, watched Shroud's shadowed silhouette disappear through a side door, watched the industrial lights flicker once as if in commentary on his situation.

Then he was alone.

The warehouse settled into silence around him—the kind of silence that pressed against the eardrums and amplified every small sound into something monstrous. His own breathing. The creak of rope against the ceiling beam. The distant drip of water from some unseen leak. The sudden, unknown steps somewhere behind his left shoulder. Fuck. Fuck.

If only that night he had lost nothing more than the suit.

He wrapped his hands methodically, the familiar ritual grounding him as white cotton wound between his knuckles. His fingers had lost some of their dexterity during those months of nothing — months where his body had lain still while machines breathed for him and his muscles quietly atrophied into something soft and unreliable. The wraps felt looser than they should. His hands felt smaller somehow, though he knew that was probably just his head playing tricks. He couldn’t have lost mass in fingers, could he?

The rhythmic thud-thud-thud against the heavy bag sounded pathetic to his own ears. It wasn't the sharp crack of impact he was used to. It was a dull, laboring noise that betrayed just how much muscle he’d lost during those lost months in the hospital bed. He saw it in the mirror, too — but looks were nothing compared to the powers he’d lost.

Robert wiped sweat from his eyes with a wrapped hand, frustration burning hotter than his lungs. His timing was off. His reach felt clumsy. The body that had once piloted armor now struggled to maintain a basic rhythm and punches that weren’t even reciprocated. He could feel his heartbeat in his temples, in his throat, in the hollow spaces between his ribs.

"Fuck," he muttered, stepping back. His reflection caught in the mirrored wall opposite again — thin, pale, the muscle definition he’d maintained for years now softened into something that looked almost fragile. The scars remained, a painful reminder that he had once truly been able to fight and win, even when the odds were uneven. Silver and red lines of puckered tissue mapping out a history his weakened body could no longer live up to.

He abandoned the bag, patting it with his palm like a sparring buddy, conceding an unquestionable victory to an opponent that hadn’t even swayed toward him tonight. The gym was barely lit, deserted — the way he preferred it, after the shift. No well-meaning colleagues offering unsolicited advice about taking it slow, about listening to his body, about how he wasn’t a real hero anyway, so why bother.

Cardio. He needed to rebuild his endurance.

The treadmill beckoned from across the room — a sleek black machine that promised simplicity. Just running. Just one foot in front of the other, the way he’d done a thousand times before in Mecha suit or without its hydraulic legs. It was easy to maintain movement like that — he felt like meditating while running sometimes, his thoughts dragging him out of the material world into some bubble of his imagination.

Running always cleared his mind. He talked himself through old missions, reworked decisions, shaped sharper, smarter replies to the villains he’d brought in. He drifted so easily into the routine that each glance at the timer showed minutes slipping away without him feeling them.

For the first five minutes, everything felt almost normal. His legs remembered the rhythm, his lungs found a sustainable cadence, and he allowed himself to exhale with relief, accepting the quiet, calm satisfaction settling over his heart. Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Maybe his body just needed reminding of what it was capable of.

By the seventh minute, a stitch tightened in his side. Heart felt somehow larger and heavier, pressing outward, trying to claim the space of lungs that weren’t managing well themselves, warming uncomfortably, demanding more air. Robert kept tracking his breathing — inhale for four counts, exhale for six. His usual 8–8 rhythm he could no longer maintain.

On the ninth minute, his head flooded with an insistent, pulling hum, as if the distant rumble of a passing train — the kind heard from miles away — was reverberating inside his skull. His vision trembled at the edges, old-style TV static creeping in, buzzing faintly at his temples. He told himself he could brace through it. The first ten minutes were always the worst. Right.

At ten minutes and thirty-two seconds, Robert’s heart did something it had never done before — skipped, stuttered, then hammered so violently against his ribs that he gasped aloud. The room tilted. His hand shot out blindly, slapping against the console until his palm connected with the emergency stop button.

The belt jerked to a halt beneath him, and Robert collapsed forward against the display panel, gripping the handrails so hard his knuckles went white. His breath came in ragged, wet-sounding gasps that echoed off the gym’s walls. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the machine’s surface in a steady patter.

"Fuck," he wheezed, the word barely audible. "Fuck, fuck, fuck—"

This was what the coma had left him. This was what remained of Mecha Man — a man who couldn’t run for eleven minutes without his body staging a full revolt. His father had fought villains until the day he died. His grandfather had built an empire of heroism from nothing but ingenuity and will.

And Robert couldn’t even finish a light jog.

He stayed there, hunched over the treadmill’s console, forcing air into lungs that felt too small, waiting for his heart to remember how to beat properly. The short hairs at the nape of his neck rose — that sensation never lied to him. He felt a silent gaze on him, far too heavy for his exhausted shoulders. Robert let out a slow exhale.

"Saw it all, didn’t ya," he muttered, turning his head, still resting on the display panel, to meet {{user}}'s eyes. "Don’t tell Flambae, he’ll use it as a joke fuel for the next three to six shifts."