MULTI MUSE

"Nah, nah, somethin' goes wrong n' Imma say it was all ya fault n' that I didn't do nothin'." Also said at a lower volume to keep quiet, yet the snark remained full force as he grins stupidly to himself.

Billy walks towards the end of the alleyway where it splits off in opposite directions; a clone manifests next to him, taking the left while he takes the right. Though he probably should've just let his duplicates handle the situation entirely, since the second he turns the corner, some hooded, cloaked vagrant sucker punches him right in the middle of his face then beelines it the opposite way.

"The hell—" He stumbles back a few steps both from pure shock and the force of the punch, nose immediately pouring out blood as the clone starts to run to try to catch up to that fuckface.

"Ain't no goddamn way that just fuckin' happened—" The multiplier groans out in frustration as a hand instinctively wipes at the flowing blood. A superhero instinct-type move from him and he gets schooled; what a joke.

Courtney’s first instinct is to roll her eyes and huff at him in annoyance. She almost considers leaving to let him deal with this on his own but they work well together and she won’t do herself any favors with the team, so after only a few seconds, she slowly follows after him. 

Unlike him, she’s more careful and stealthier instead of wanting to run fast like he’s doing, though she remains pretty close to him. “Whatever.” Visi grumbles under her breath as she follows behind, foots light, not making a sound as she moves. 

It happens fast. All of a sudden Billy is punched. Hard. Visi can’t help it when she bursts out laughing. She told him! She told him, didn’t she?! Her hands fly up to her mouth to try and muffle her giggling in case there are others nearby, the laughter only getting greater and greater the more she laughs. 

“Ahaha! I told you!” Visi says between her laughter. Shit, if she’s not careful, that laughter is going to send her into an asthma attack. Courtney inhales and exhales a couple of times, trying to calm herself down as she crosses the distance between them to peer at his injury. 

“Looks like he got you good, but I don’t think anything’s broken.” She glances in the direction one of Billy’s clones had run off towards to chase after whoever the hell had just punched him. Unless there are others to worry about, Visi isn’t too concerned with chasing after the cloaked man either. 

“Do I?” She nearly choked out, caught off guard by how casually Sara had asked it. Ophelia would hardly be opposed, especially given the other woman was currently on top of her, but she didn’t think it would turn into anything else so soon.

Sara arches an eyebrow at the woman at her response, “I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.” How adorable, she thinks. Maybe she should stop teasing Ophelia but it’s fun and the woman doesn’t seem to mind at all. As far as she can tell, anyway, and Sara’s pretty good at reading these things. 

Sara leans down closer, far enough that her blonde hair brushes across Ophelia’s skin, but not close enough that her lips are close to Ophelia's, even though she’s tempted. 

Yeah, she’s going to have to teach her to fight if she’s going to be around her. There’s often a need to fight around Sara with her job and the dangers that come with it. She may not exactly be a vigilante anymore but what she does is still dangerous. 

Most of it? 

Jesus. 

There is an instinct inside of him that he has to resist. Both the doctor and the boyfriend in him wants to lecture Robert about all the ways this could have gone very very wrong, but Robert knows this, and focusing on lecturing could lead Robby down a path he doesn’t want to visit. 

Like how this could have killed Robert. He can’t imagine a life without him, the mere thought of a life without him hurts so much Robby has to take a moment to himself to inhale and exhale, preparing himself to see all the other injuries that litter Robert’s body. 

Once the shirt is off, Robby’s eyes drift from bruise to bruise, silently inspecting with a quick scan over each one of them. Searching for anything that might indicate there is something very wrong here. 

Internal bleeding is a possibility. Robert is just going to have to get used to Robby watching him like a hawk until he can be certain there isn’t any. Robby knows it might make him seem overprotective or overbearing but so fucking be it. He won’t lose another person he loves, and he especially won’t lose them over something he can prevent. 

If he loses Robert because he was neglectful, he might as well throw himself off a roof, because he will not be able to handle the guilt. Robert might get annoyed with him for sticking to him like glue and watching him, doting on him even, but Robby doesn’t give a fuck. 

Let him be annoyed, let him snap or let his annoyance be known, or even be angry because all Robby cares about is keeping this man – who has come to mean so much more than he’d ever thought he would – alive.  

Robert means everything to him. Losing him would be like losing a huge chunk of his soul. Not the pieces that get whittled away every time he seems someone die, but if Robert dies, half his soul will go with him. Perhaps even more than that. 

random asks // always accepting

The second those words leave her lips, Victor's attention is immediately stolen from what he was currently working on, hands hovering over the scorpion's corpse, a pin in hand poised to arrange its small body into the shape he needed.

Courtney looked so serious, like she was genuinely curious about how he'd decorate her enclosure. Oh god, was he seriously about to bug out in front of her?

Yes, he absolutely fucking was.

"Well, we'd first have to consider the type of bug you'd be." Carefully, Victor sets the pins down nearby, spinning in his chair to face her and give Courtney is undivided attention. "You don't really like really hot weather, so that gets rid of a lot of desert-themed enclosures, and arthropods and arachnids don't fair well when it's too cold, so that eliminates everything else."

He taps his chin, considering. "It'd be way to easy to assume you'd just be a Glasswing Butterfly. Especially since most insects have camouflage to help blend into their surroundings. So we're looking at a Visi needing precise conditions that aren't too hot or too cold, in a space that has plenty of ways for you to camouflage without fear that you'll become someone's snack."

Rotating all the different species in his brain slowly, churning it over slowly, Victor thinks about all of his different species of arthropods and inverts, absently chewing on one claw as he ponders this. Of all of his little creatures, it's pretty easy to eliminate them one by one based on those needed criteria.

Got it. He knows just the critter.

"If we're imagining that you're an adult Orchid Mantis," Victor starts with an easy grin, reaching upwards on his desk to pluck a journal down. He flicks rapidly through the pages and finds just the one he's looking for. "You'd be put into a terrarium rather than a full enclosure. Orchid Mantises aren't too big and require very specific temperatures to thrive."

He flips the book around to show Courtney the picture he drew himself, soft pinks and whites colored meticulously by hand with colored pencils. Visi did mention to him that she really liked the color pink. "Their soft and gentle pastel hues help them blend in among flowers to catch their prey, so while I'd give you plenty of the basic plants, some ferns, some branches to climb on, you'd also be given some flowers, definitely a specific coloration of orchid so you can blend in easier and still be able to catch your prey items."

Making it as naturalistic as possible is always the goal; Victor always tried to make every enclosure exactly what they'd see in the wild, temperature wise and flora wise.