Just realised I forgot to share anything about this other Dispatch fic/AU idea of mine:
Post-game, after everything with Shroud is finally over and Robert's left in the fun little emotional wasteland of having achieved his revenge and still somehow not being fixed, he and the Z-Team respond to what should be a normal call. Instead, they get there and find a confused man at the scene who very much should not be there, because everyone knows he died 41 years ago.
As in the original Mecha Man, Mecha Man Prime, Robert’s grandfather. The man the whole family legacy started with. The man history says died in an explosion fighting a villain decades before Robert was even born.
(NOTE: I’m calling this an AU because I know the prequel comics apparently give at least some brief mention of what actually happened to Bobby, but I don’t have access to those right now and this version is more fun for me.)
Except it turns out he didn’t die. Not exactly. The explosion sent him and the villain he was fighting forward in time. So now Bobby is here, 36 years old, only 5 years older than Robert, still carrying the last moments of his old life like they happened yesterday, and Robert is left standing there with the living version of a family legend he only ever knew as a dead hero.
Which is a problem, because Robert was already quietly considering being done with Mecha Man for good. Not in a dramatic way. Not even in a way he was fully admitting to himself, but the thought was there. After Shroud, after getting revenge, after the suit being damaged and rebuilt and damaged again, after everything, Robert started wanting to live more than he wanted to die in the armor. He has friends now. He has the Z-Team. He has Flambae, because yes this is post-game Flambert and they are very much together, even if Robert is being deeply normal and emotionally well adjusted about having a boyfriend, which is to say not at all. He has a life that's starting to look like something beyond the suit.
And then the original Mecha Man shows up. So now Robert has to deal with the fact that he wants to quit while standing face to face with the man who started it all.
The thing is, Bobby is not what Robert expected. He's not some grand marble statue of heroic legacy. He's a mechanic, a gearhead, a little obsessive, a little too capable of vanishing into a project until the rest of the world falls away, warm but flawed, funny in this very practical dad way, and completely horrified to learn what happened after he disappeared. He never wanted Robbie to become Mecha Man. He definitely never wanted Robbie to raise Robert to become Mecha Man. As far as Bobby is concerned, the suit was never meant to be a family curse.
Which is where the real meat of the fic is. Robert and Bobby end up having all these painful, complicated conversations about Robbie, because they're both grieving completely different versions of the same man. Bobby remembers Robbie as his 14 year old son. Robert remembers Robbie as his father, the man who pushed him into the suit, the man whose love Robert could never fully separate from duty and expectation. Bobby wants to know who his son became. Robert doesn't know how to tell him without feeling like he's betraying the dead. Chase is also tangled up in this because he's the only person around who knew Robbie as an adult without being his father or his son, and he doesn't entirely trust Bobby at first because, frankly, Robertson men have historically not been great for Robert. The whole thing becomes this emotional autopsy of the Mecha Man legacy.
Bobby built the first armor with his own father, but it wasn't even supposed to be a superhero suit at first. It started as a construction and disaster relief project to help people. Something that could let ordinary, nonpowered people survive dangerous situations. Then Bobby’s father died in a meta attack, and Bobby turned the armor into Mecha Man because he wanted to prove that people without powers were not helpless, that they could still protect others.
And then Bobby disappeared. And Robbie turned Mecha Man into inheritance. And Robert turned Mecha Man into survival.
So Bobby has to sit with the fact that something he created out of grief and hope became the thing that swallowed his son and then his grandson. And Robert has to sit with the fact that the original Mecha Man is not disappointed in him for wanting out. If anything, Bobby is devastated that Robert ever felt trapped in it at all.
There's also the time travel grief of it all, because Bobby cannot go home. He keeps trying to treat it like a problem he can solve, like a machine he can repair if he just finds the right part, but eventually it hits him that his wife is gone, his son is gone, his friends are gone, and the world kept going without him. His wife did live long enough for Robert to know her, which means Robert becomes Bobby’s only real bridge to the life she had after him, but that is its own kind of awful because Robert only knew her as a kid. Bobby wants a husband’s answers from a grandson’s memories.
Meanwhile Robert is dealing with Bobby being this weirdly paternal presence despite being barely older than him, and also with the horrible realization that Bobby is more accepting of Robert being with Flambae than Robbie ever would have been. Which doesn't magically fix anything. It actually makes some things worse, because it means Robbie’s toxic masculinity and obsession with heirs and legacy were not just inevitable Robertson traits. They were choices. Or at least wounds Robbie chose to pass on.
The villain is also tied into all of this, because he's basically Bobby’s dark mirror. He was born unpowered too, and he also wanted to protect ordinary people. But instead of building armor to inspire and protect them, he built a machine to give people powers. His own power ended up being matter absorption, and he kidnapped his daughter to give her powers too because he genuinely thought he was protecting her. Still killed people in the process, though, so you know. Good intentions, horrifying execution.
When he comes into the present, he eventually gets his hands on Shroud’s augment tech. The problem is that without Shroud, the tech is faulty and broken. Shroud was the one who made it work. Without him, it starts destabilizing the villain’s powers until he's no longer fully in control of himself. His matter absorption starts going haywire. He starts devouring everything around him, not as some clean evil master plan, but because he stacked one unstable power source on top of another and now can't stop.
At the same time, Robert is dealing with the Astral Pulse acting up. Royd realizes that if Robert keeps pushing it too hard, it's going to explode. Very badly. Which is basically Robert’s whole life turned into a power source: this damaged inheritance he keeps forcing to work because he thinks he has to.
So in the climax, when the villain is on the verge of becoming a world ending problem, Robert makes a call. He grabs him in the Mecha Man Blue suit and flies him up into the atmosphere, pushing the Astral Pulse past its limits so it will vaporize the villain completely.
Everyone thinks he's sacrificing himself.
That's the important part. Robert is not planning to die. He knows the suit is done, he knows Mecha Man is done. But he also knows his friends will come after him. He ejects, trusting them to catch him, and when they do, when everyone is furious and terrified and ready to scream at him for apparently trying to martyr himself, he just quietly says, “I knew you’d catch me.”
Which is maybe the biggest thing Robert can say at that point. Because this time, he did not choose death. He chose to trust someone else with his life.
The suit is destroyed. Completely. Mecha Man Blue dies in that explosion, and the public believes the man inside died too. Robert lets them believe it, because honestly, Mecha Man really is dead. The mantle is gone. The machine is gone. The family curse is finally over.
And when Robert starts apologizing to Bobby for destroying the suit, for ending Mecha Man, for destroying the thing Bobby and his father made together, Bobby just hugs him and tells him he's happy Robert is alive.
Which is what Robert always needed to hear.
Not that the mission was worth it. Not that the legacy was preserved. Not that Mecha Man would be proud.
Just that Robert lived, and that matters more.
In the end, Bobby stays in the future and starts building a new life. He studies modern mechanics and works toward finally making his and his father’s original dream real. Specialized armor for construction workers and emergency services. Not superhero armor. Not another Mecha Man. Something meant for teams, for rescue, for ordinary people surviving dangerous work.
Robert remains a full time dispatcher. He's not Mecha Man anymore, and there are still days where the guilt tries to sneak back in, but he's learning that guiding his team from the chair still counts. He helps Bobby with projects sometimes, he and Flambae move in together, he starts picking up hobbies just because he likes them, which is maybe the most shocking development of all.
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