Chapter Text
“So, uh, come here often?” Invisigal asked.
“Get the fuck off my chair,” said Prism. Invisigal did quickly, and jumped up off of the pool chair on the SDN roof. Prism debated sitting down, but decided not to, leaving the chair empty.
“Who pissed in your coffee?” Visi looked Prism up and down.
“What?”
Invisigal lit a cigarette and took a quick drag, looking Prism up and down again. “You look like someone took a shit in your shoe, what happened?”
“Why the fuck are you smoking, didn’t you just get new lungs?” Prism snapped.
“Dodging the question, ouch,” Invisigal feigned being hurt, “and after all we’ve been through?”
Prism opened her mouth to insult Visi, but bit her tongue. Instead, she took a hit of her vape, turned off her comlink in her ear, and exhaled out directly into Visi’s face. Visi coughed a little, and then held out her cigarette. Prism took it, took a long drag, and said,
“Fuck, I don’t know.” She handed the cigarette back and fought the urge to pull out her phone. “Robert’s been pissing me off.”
“Oof, yeah. I heard he and Blazer kicked your ass the other day. Sorry about that, by the way.” Invisigal said with a small grimace.
Prism shrugged and looked around the roof. She tried to think of why she was mad at Robert, but she was coming up blank. Was it because of the lecture? No, she was over that. Was he being particularly rude to her? No, he literally just apologized for being a dick. So why did the idea of him piss her off? Was it because he was Mecha Man again? Her fingers itched under her gloves, but she didn’t want to take them off. Was she sweating? In November? She had a stray train of thought that let her know that it was snowing back home. Her lips curved downwards.
“It never fucking snows here.”
“Yeah,” Visi looked up at the blue California sky, “it really doesn’t. Hey, want Mal to make a portal to like, I don’t know, the North Pole?”
Prism considered it for a second before shaking her head and sitting down on her pool chair. The two smoked in silence for another minute before Invisigal spoke up.
“So… wanna talk about earlier?”
“About what?”
“The book? What was that about you not reading it?” Visi asked, she looked angry now. Prism didn’t know why she was angry, weren’t they just getting along? Despite the two of them being the same age, Prism could never get a good read on Invisigal, and that pissed her off all over again. Her phone buzzed, saving her from answering. She pulled it out, and answered the incoming call despite not recognizing the number.
“This is Prism,” she answered.
“Oh, good! I got it correct- right!” The caller said.
Prism knew that stupid studder! She found herself smiling and gave Visi a happy look. “Hey WB! What’s up? What’s going on?”
Visi’s angry look vanished. “Waterboy?”
There was a lot of noise on the other end, like wet gloves were trying not to drop the phone, but eventually Waterboy responded. “Hey! Hi! I’m, uh, calling from DTLA- that’s the downtown Los Angeles branch?”
Prism went ahead and put him on speaker. “Yeah, no shit. I know where you are, bitch,” she said with no hostility in her voice. “Visi’s here too, what’s up?”
“Oh! Hello Invisigal!”
Visi laughed a little. “Hey Herm, what’s up?”
“I was calling to know- to ask if Prism- Miss Prism was free sometime today?” Waterboy said.
Prism choked out a laugh. “Excuse me?”
“No! Oh- that’s not that I meant!” Waterboy stammered. “I mean my boss wanted to know if Miss Prism was available- I mean, can you come downtown sometime today?”
Prism put her finger to her ear and flipped on her comlink. “Hey Boberto, I gotta clock out. Waterboy says I need to go downtown for something.”
Robert tried to ask her for more information, but she turned her earpiece off again and gave Invisigal a wink.
“Give me a second, I’ll be there,” Prism said. She got up off her chair and started to walk away, but Visi reached for her.
“Are you gonna finish the book in time? We’re voting to read the next book in the series, and I don’t want you to be behind.”
Prism took her phone off speaker and glared at Invisigal. “I’ll get to it when I get to it. Go finish ruining your lungs or something.”
She left the roof, and Visi watched her go with a strange look.
A few hours later, Prism and Waterboy sat on a bench and stared out at the small park in front of them. Waterboy had a tiny wet bag of seeds he was tossing at birds, but neither he nor Prism were that focused.
“I can’t believe Brainbitch asked me that.” Prism said after a while.
Waterboy flinched a little, but then shrugged. “She, uh- Miss Brainbook is- she’s very straight forward.”
Prism looked at him. “She asked me if I wanted to take your place in front of you! That’s fucked up!”
“Well, she’s not wrong to ask,” Waterboy said, “I mean I don’t really- I haven’t really- I don’t fit in much. Here. At all. And so when she asked if there was anyone who could do better- who could be a better fit, I said you!”
Prism smiled and gave him a light, wet punch on the arm. “Aw, thanks babe.”
“It really was nothing,” Waterboy’s face flushed a deep red, and water trickled through the grooves in the bench onto the ground. “Punch Up- Colm told me how you helped him with Coop- Miss Coupé, and it meant a lot to me. You’re usually so scary, but you’re scary for good reasons!”
“Bitch- what?”
Waterboy’s eyes shot wide open. “I mean! I’m not really tough enough for some of the bad guys over here! But you are!”
Prism sat back on the bench and gestured to Waterboy. “So what about you? If I take the job, where are you going?”
He shrugged, and tossed some more soggy seeds. Prism sighed and watched one of the birds in front of them chase off another before returning to peck at the seeds. Realistically, her mind should have been full of thoughts, full of questions and ideas for the future, but her mind was blank. Her righteous anger at how Waterboy was treated had faded to a low simmer in her gut, but now her chest was pinching again. The bird picked up a couple of seeds, and then flew off into a tree.
“Tell Brainbook I’ll think about it,” she said.
Waterboy nodded and emptied the seed bag out onto the pavement in front of him. He then pressed a finger to his ear, cringed, and gave Prism an apologetic look.
“Ah! Gotta- got to go! It was awesome- great to see you! Do you need a ride back? I can- I’ll call you an Uber!” He started to pull out his phone.
Prism started to tell him that she could pay for her own ride, but he waved her off (who the hell taught him to do that?) and insisted. He texted her the ride details, she remembered to save his number, and then he jogged off to go respond to whatever call his dispatcher had for him. Prism waved as he left, and watched the birds finish off his pile of wet seeds before climbing into her uber. Because it was November, the sun was already going down in California. Because it was California, it never snowed in November. She wondered if her family had started putting out Christmas decorations yet.
When she got back to the Torrance building, she changed quickly and popped her earbuds back in to keep listening to the book. If she was lucky, she could get most of the way through it before Wednesday. Chase - still young - , Robert, and some other guy Prism vaguely remembered were huddled around a desk while Phenomaman sat in the chair with a headset on. Robert was in his Mecha Man suit, and a sickening, twisting pain stabbed itself into Prism’s chest. Her blood boiled under her skin, and it made her want to punch something. Or burn his hair off. Prism hid in the elevator when Robert suddenly peeled away from the group and ran towards the stairs, and once he was gone she took the elevator back to the lobby. She made her exit from the building as quietly as she could, texted Malevola to make her a portal to the North Pole, and the two had a therapeutic screaming fest in the freezing cold together without any further spoken words or explanations between them.
That night, Prism dreamt about digging her first car out of a snow drift, and in the morning, she slept through her alarm. She knows this because Flambae broke into her apartment to drag her to work and she nearly took off his eyebrows for it. She was still pulling on her clothes in his car, brushed her teeth in the locker room, and cussed out the team when they gave her shit for being late. All was as it should be after that, normalcy was restored. Robert was in her ear giving her tasks, the team was competing amongst themselves to get the best completion rates, and that ugly feeling in Prism’s chest made itself scarce. Everything was fine. Everyone was normal.
Prism and Golem got assigned to a call together sometime in the afternoon. It was an easy task: direct traffic away from a nasty car accident and help first responders clean everything up. With their powers of self-duplication, they were the perfect heroes for the task. Prism had music playing on a speaker so she could have fun while trying to keep rubberneckers from crashing into each other, and Golem was able to carefully pry mangled cars apart for tow trucks to drag away.
“Need any help over there?” Prism asked when the cars around the accident were finally detoured.
“I’m good as gravy, baby,” Golem said as he helped the last tow truck. He looked around the intersection, and pointed up the street. “Oh. That doesn’t look good.”
“What now?” Prism’s eyes followed his finger. “What the fuck is this bullshit? Wait here, I got this.” She then took off running up the street towards the metro bus that just blew through two red lights and was careening towards them and the crowd of bystanders that Prism’s holograms were keeping away.