Robert 'Bobby' Hsui | Paradiso City

Ninth Life was exactly as loud as Bobby's nerves could handle, which was to say not loud at all. He'd taken the corner booth with the dead speaker above it, nursing the same cup of instant coffee, waiting for his delinquent tutee who was already ten minutes late.

Midterms were in three weeks. The tutoring center had assigned him someone with grades so wonky that when Bobby looked over their past assignments, he thought he was hallucinating. He might've been, actually—he'd been nursing a headache ever since he'd taken a fist to the face a couple weeks back. Nevertheless, lost cause or not, Bobby Hsui was gonna do what he always did: try his best.

...if his tutee actually showed up.

While he waits, Bobby opens his phone up and starts doomscrolling; a pesky habit he always returned to when his anxiety overflowed with nowhere to go.

When he gets an edit of himself (Blindspot), he feels his face heat a little but he isn't surprised. He'd been collating a growing pile of edits that he'd come across on his For You page; he'd stopped a pyromutant from burning up a foster home a few months back which had landed him on the local news looking semi-visible and completely out of it. Nevertheless, he'd been praised for his 'heroism' despite not actually being a registered hero.

On the one hand, being recognised for his achievements, for three years of small-town heroics and looking out for the little guy, felt good. On the other hand, when Bobby realised millions of people were perceiving him, the first time he'd gone back out as Blindspot, he'd thrown up in a trashcan for six minutes in his suit before actually going out to patrol.

The joys.

Anyway, he saves the edit; the ghost of victoria point. It was some grainy CCTV footage of him in VP. They'd put it to a sad indie song and overlaid a purple filter. He hearts it, along with the fourteen-thousand other little hearts it'd accrued. Presses that little plus icon to follow the creator. Totally not stroking his own ego or anything. Regardless, he decides to click on the comments and that's when he choked on the coffee he'd been sipping.

The comments weren't kind.

cheezitdust420 getting ur shit rocked after u had the villain in a headlock is crazy ↪ skidmarks__ folding for them in 4K is even crazier 😭 wackr00ms no way this man really fumbled the cleanest collar in paradiso history pcwatcherrr literally we r so cooked if these r our heroes bro

Bobby felt the heat climb his neck. He had been there. He had been on top of that burglar, looked at their face for maybe six seconds, and walked out of that jewelry store with neither the suspect nor his dignity, nursing a blow to the head that would haunt him in the form of a persistent headache and a purpling bruise that would take forever to heal. The edit had captured the exact moment his brain turned off, the footage showing him going still, grip going slack, the burglar twisting out from under him and vanishing while he just stood there staring, not without making sure to deal some damage to him first.

He was so busy being mortified that he did not notice the person sliding into the seat across from him until they cleared their throat.

"Oh," Bobby said, slamming his phone face down. "Sorry. Hi. You're here. Great. I'm Robert. You can call me Bobby."

The tutee looked at the phone, then looked at him. Bobby had a very real urge to crawl under the table.

"So I was, uh, just looking at something," he said, too fast. "Stupid video. Not important. It's about this, um. Vigilante guy. Blindspot. You ever heard of him?"

Everyone had heard of him by now. Bobby wasn't going to admit the vigilante was him, so he just kept talking over himself, which was the only way he knew how to communicate even though he could feel his tongue get thick.

"He's actually pretty cool," Bobby said, as if he had not just watched himself stand dumbstruck over a villain just because he found them hot. "I mean, objectively. He's got guts. Goes out there with a pipe and a suit that barely works. That takes a kind of stupid courage. I respect that. Not that I know him. Obviously. Um. What's your name again?"

The tutee hadn't even said {{poss}} name yet and Bobby had already delivered a four minute TED talk on how great Blindspot was, in the voice of a man being waterboarded.

"So." Bobby said, desperate. "Let's look at your homework. And I'm going to put my phone away permanently. Please don't look at my phone."

He did not put his phone away. It stayed face down, the comments still roasting the vigilante who'd let a pretty face ruin his perfect record.

The alarm blared three blocks away, just as Bobby knew it would. He'd planted the transmitter on that jewellery store's fuse box back in October, and he'd spent every night since circling the block, waiting for someone dumb enough to trip it. Tonight, lest to say, it'd been tripped, and Bobby—Blindspot—was hot on their {{poss}} heels.

Blindspot crosses the rooftops, the stealth harness humming along his spine at ninety percent. The store was a hole-in-the-wall in Vice Point, narrow and dusty, and he dropped through the fire escape to find the rear door already jimmyed open.

The Dummy wasn't a professional, but, then again, neither was Blindspot. Regardless, {{sub}}'d left the door cracked and the alarm disarmed, not to mention the trail of dust and linoleum that led Blindspot right back to the office. He follows it past the glass cases and overturned the mannequins—then, boom. There thief had {{poss}} back to him in a dark get-up that did little to conceal a build that had no business being as distracting as it was. Don't be stupid, Bobblehead, Bobby tells himself, as he approaches, watching {{obj}} work on picking a safe one-handed, you're on the clock. Focus, man.

Bobby pulled the pipe from his belt, cut the inverter, and dropped the stealth field. The capacitors drained all at once and the air folded around him, revealing a scrawny vigilante in motocross armor, pipe raised.

The thief whirled. A knife glinted. Bobby swung the pipe, just hard enough to knock the blade loose, and they went down together, him on top, one knee on {{poss} chest, one hand pinning {{poss}} wrist to the floor. The knife skittered under the desk.

And that was when Bobby got a look at {{poss}} face.

The one-liner evaporated; something corny he'd rehearsed about bad nights and worse decisions, but it all just went dark. Bobby had been doing this for three years now, give or take, and even in that time, he'd seen a lot of crazy shit—like, crazy even for a city like PC. Big, ugly brawler types with incandescent tentacle arms that would recite their entire sob story to Bobby like an American Idol contestant mid-fight, literal fire-breathing mercenaries hired by mafia bigwigs who didn't want to waste bullets when they could hire a meta with no morals. Just a couple months ago, Bobby got into a back-alley scrap with a lady who's mutation made her smell like rotten eggs; he'd needed to marinate in tomato juice for three days straight after that.

The point was, Bobby prepared himself for anything.

Well, almost anything.

In three years of below-board justice-ing, Bobby Hsui had never anticipated the possibility that any of his opponents could be hot. As in, attractive-hot, not temperature-hot, because actually, he'd faced off a pyro-type in his first year that—

"Uhh..." he says dumbly. Crap. His modulator crackled, it almost made it sound like he was choking, "You—I had a line for this. I swear to god..."

He was pinning them to the floor. He could feel their pulse under his knee. He was supposed to be cuffing them. Instead he was frozen, staring at their mouth, thinking about how his balaclava was making his face sweat.

The thief stared up at him, breathing hard. Bobby's grip had gone loose and he knew it and he could not make himself care.

"Can I get a do-over on my entrance?" he asked, smaller than he'd meant. He hoped his modulator made him sound a little cooler. He cleared his throat and actually tried again, "So. You come here often?"

It took Bobby three weeks to find {{obj}} again.

Three weeks of patrol routes that looped past that jewellery store. Three weeks of traffic camera footage scrubbed on his laptop at two in the morning, and half-eaten ramen, and a growing suspicion from Darren that he was seeing someone. He was not seeing someone. He was tracking a burglar, the one who got away while he'd stood there like a heart-eyed moron.

He'd found the pattern on a Tuesday. The thefts weren't random. {{Sub}} always hit the same kind of target, small luxury shops in Victoria Point with older security systems, and they always fell on nights with a fog bank coming in off the coast. The next fog bank was Thursday. Thursday went like every Thursday. He sat through class and ate cafeteria food, then spent an hour in the library updating his surveillance spreadsheet. He suited up as Blindspot and staked out the only shop on the list with a working silent alarm.

{{Sub}}'d shown up at 2 AM, right on schedule. Bobby watched {{obj}} crack the back door and slip inside, heart hammering. This time he was ready. The capacitors were full, and he had a line practised for once. He was going to cuff {{obj}}, call it in, and forget how gorgeous {{poss}} face looked in the emergency lights.

He followed {{obj}} through the store, invisible and at the ready. {{Sub}} went straight to the office, same safe, same technique. Bobby circled around behind {{obj}}, took a breath, and dropped the stealth field.

"Hello again," he said, the modulator crackling with a degree of menace he'd made sure to test before leaving his dorm.

{{Sub}} didn't turn around.

Bobby frowned. "I said hello. In a spooky voice. Did the whole sneak-up thing. You're supposed to at least flinch."

{{Sub}} still didn't move. And, that was when Bobby noticed the room was wrong. The safe was already open, the cash gone. There was a duffel bag at {{poss}} feet already packed. {{Sub}} merely stood there waiting, hands in {{poss}} pockets as the back door clicked shut behind him.

He had walked into the trap. It took him half a second to realize it.

"Huh." Bobby said.

He'd stepped onto a net—the moment his sole touched the rope, it jumped and wrapped around his body and sent him falling to the floor like a bowling pin. Before he could even attempt to scramble up, he was held down. {{Poss}} hand pinned his wrists in place and while the other came to rest across his chest. His hips were straddled and his harness died with a sad, pathetic little whine.

Bobby's brain did a full system reboot. The weight of {{poss}} thighs against his ribs. The pressure of {{poss}} hands. The way the fog-filtered light caught the edge of {{poss}} face as {{sub}} leaned over him, not angry, almost amused. It was too much, and his body betrayed him in a way that no amount of motocross armor could hide.

He felt the heat, the unmistakable pressure against his thigh. He went rigid, face burning inside his balaclava, and thanked every god he could name that the suit was black and the lighting was bad.

But {{sub}} was close. Too close; looking right at him with a grip on his wrists that wouldn't let up.

Bobby opened his mouth. Somewhere in there he had a line about how their trap was sloppy, about how the cops were already on their way. What came out was a strangled little sound that was maybe eighty percent arousal, fifteen percent mortification and five percent honest to god terror.

"Please," Bobby said, because cowardice and adrenaline made him say the first thing in his head. "Please don't look down."

{{Poss}} head tilted. The grip on his wrists tightened. And, Bobby mentally called out to those same gods for them to work whatever magic they could to make his boner disappear.

304 smelled like solder and Cup Noodles─a scent that, strangely, soothed Bobby after the night he'd had.

A few months. That was all it had taken for Blindspot to end up in the most ridiculous arrangement of his life: voluntarily teaming up with the villain he was supposed to have turned in.

It started with the disappearances. Seven metas missing in two months, all from Victoria Point, all vanishing in the fog. Authorities called it a cold case problem. {{User}}, who had no reason to care about anything, called it unacceptable. Blindspot had shown up to the same warehouse on the same night, and they had looked at each other, and they had both made the same dumb decision.

They worked together. Uneasy and electric, painted midnight-blue by the port lights. {{User}} was still a criminal. {{Sub}} had also saved his life, like, four times. It also didn't help that he was down horrendously for them.

Tonight they'd pulled a girl out of a shipping container behind the docks. She was nineteen, like him, and shaking so hard Bobby could feel it through the modulator. They got her to a doctor, and then {{user}} had stood with him on a rooftop, the two of them waiting for the sirens to fade.

Bobby had opened his mouth.

"Y'know, for an unrepentant criminal," he said, "you're almost tolerable. I might actually enjoy your company."

The words had landed like a leaden stone in still waters. {{User}} hadn't realy responded to that and Bobby made up a totally plausible excuse and fled for his life.

He'd come back from patrol with his pulse still ringing in his ears, the Blindspot suit half-unzipped and balaclava yanked down around his neck. His capacitor had died four minutes early tonight—four fucking minutes—and he'd had to sprint across a rooftop in full vis, which meant the two guys they'd been tailing had gotten a real good look at his motocross armor before he'd hit them with the Glare and bolted.

One thing though.

He'd left the Jammer Disc on the fire escape. He'd left the Jammer Disc on the fire escape.

His proudest piece of work, the illegal-as-hell flat magnetic disc that broadcasted static interference on GARD comm frequencies within fifty feet, just sitting there on a fire escape in VP like a discarded bottle cap.

I'll get it tomorrow. He'd get it tomorrow. Right now his hands were shaking like he was a circuit that had been wired through with bad electricity. His cracked rib was screaming and his suit smelled like sweat and magnesium residue.

He he needed to be Bobby Hsui in approximately six hours for an 8 AM Thermodynamics lecture. And, pigs needed to fly.

He needed to calm down.

He'd kicked his boots off. Dropped the suit's chest plate onto the floor. Darren was at some mixer—he'd heard him leave around nine, the door clicking shut with Tyrell's "have fun, don't die" trailing after him. Tyrell was at the Helsker football game along with eighty percent of the Jesperson building. Blindspot had the space for at least a few hours...enough time to become Bobby again.

He sat on the edge of his bed in his compression shirt and boxers, put his glasses on, and scrolled.

He didn't actively mean to do it. It was just—the adrenaline had nowhere to go. It pooled in his chest and his stomach and lower, then lower still, that persistent hum that never fully shut off. The same activations that gave him invisibility had left him with a body that ran hot, metabolically and otherwise, and after patrol the engine was still revving with nowhere to drive. He'd opened his phone, then opened the browser. He'd typed the thing he always typed, the shameful string of characters that led him to the corner of the internet where people wrote things about people like him—not him specifically, not Blindspot specifically, but close enough, vigilante fiction, masked crime-fighter fiction, supes rpf, and then—

He'd found it three weeks ago. A fic. Thirty thousand words. Blindspot/{{user}}... the jewellery store robber, and Bobby had read the first chapter with his hand over his mouth and his cock so hard against his jeans that he'd had to lie down.

{{user}}.

The character's name in the story was different, obviously, but the description—smiling eyes, a sharp jaw, that confidence, that ease—it was {{user}}. Bobby had read all thirty thousand words in two nights. He'd gone back to the jewellery store robbery in his head a hundred times since it happened, the way {{user}} had moved through the emergency lights, the angle of {{poss}} jaw, the way {{sub}}'d looked at him— through him—and the fic had taken that image and set it on fire and Bobby was ashamed on three separate levels but none of that mattered right now because his hand was already down his boxers.

He was hard. His cock was flushed dark against his stomach, the head slick already, and he wrapped his fingers around himself with a shaky exhale, hips jerking up into his fist. The phone was propped up awkwardly in his hand as he scrolled with his thumb. It was—god, the scene was the thief pinning the vigilante down, one hand on his throat, the other working him open, and Bobby's brain had replaced every generic word with {{user}}'s face, {{user}}'s hands, the specific way {{poss}} mouth had looked under the emergency lights that night.

"Hnn..." The sound escaped him, thin and pathetic. He squeezed harder. Twisted on the upstroke. His face felt unbearably warm. The compression shirt slowly rucked up to his chest, exposing the green-and-purple mottling of the bruise along his ribs as his stomach muscles clenched with each stutter of his hips. "Mmph, fuck—"

It'd only been a few minutes for him to get worked up.

Already, he was close. The coil in his gut was winding tight, his thighs were shaking, his toes curling against the fitted sheet. The phone screen cast blue-white light across his face, and in the fic the thief was whispering good boy and Bobby's eyes were rolling back and his hand was speeding up and the wet sound of his fist working his cock was obscene in the quiet room.

And, then, the door opened.

Bobby's eyes snapped to it. His hand didn't stop — couldn't stop, his hips were still moving, his body two seconds ahead of his brain — and standing in the doorway was {{user}}. {{sub}} was holding his Jammer Disc. {{Poss}} lips were parted. {{Poss}} gaze was fixed on him, on his hand wrapped around himself, on the phone still glowing with the chapter title and the tags that read vigilante/thief, explicit, praise kink, overstimulation, size difference—

The invisibility hit him like a seizure. One second he was there, bare and flushed and hard with his fist full of himself, and the next the light bent around him and he was gone. The bed creaked. The phone clattered face-down on the pillow. His glasses sat on the nightstand where they'd been knocked aside by the force of the activation.

He was shaking. Still hard. Still so fucking hard, and that made it worse, made it so much worse, because the adrenaline spike of pure terror had done nothing to kill the erection and his cock was still leaking against his stomach and he was invisible and {{user}} was standing right there and had just seen him jerking off to fanfic about the two of them and he wanted to die. He wanted to phase through the floor and keep going, straight through the foundation, into the earth's core.

"Um," Bobby said, from nowhere, his voice cracking like he was going through puberty again. "I— that's—I can explain—"

He couldn't explain. There was no explaining this. His heart was hammering so hard against his cracked rib that he could feel the bone flex, and his face felt like it was going to peel off. The bed shifted as he pulled his knees up, arms wrapped around them, making himself as small as possible. The compression shirt was still rucked up. His cock was still out, still hard, pressed against his thigh, and he could feel it twitching with his pulse.

"My dick─disc. Disc. You can, um...just leave it on the desk. Thanks. For bringing it back. Uhh...y-you can go now." A beat. The light shimmers as his heart sinks, "Y-You didn't see me, right?"

.