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With Loona, Blitz has learned that progress is measured with the little things. She used to slam the front door every time she walked in, now she just closes it, which is a relief for him and the landlord. She refused to have any pictures taken of her at all, now she’ll acquiesce to a celebration selfie or a group shot with only a groan and some muttering.
However, only when Blitz walks in the door one day and sees keys in the fruit bowl, jacket thrown over the couch, and two white paws crossed over the armrest, does something clenched inside of him finally settle. She’s decided to stay. The first few months, getting Loona to sit down at all was a challenge and more than once Blitz had woken up shivvering to see the window open and most of the cash in his wallet gone. She would stand there, staring out into the dark, money in hand, bag over her shoulder, but had never let Blitz see whatever expression she was making. The one time he’d tried to touch her shoulder, she’d taken a chunk out of his hand.
“Yo, Blitz!” The imp blinks and realizes he’s still standing on the welcome mat, eyes unfocused, hand outstretched. He lets it fall as his daughter speaks, her ears up and alert. “There’s leftovers in the oven, don’t touch my wings.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replies, knowing that this, like so many little things, is a sign of trust. “How was your day?”
“Um, fine? You were there, why do you even ask?”
“Habit, I suppose,” he lies, knowing that after she clocks out Loona can still sometimes take the long way home, through dark alleys and bad neighborhoods. He’s not quite sure what she’s looking for when she does this, if it’s anything at all. She finds fights, which she wins, and only once, when a knife had gone in under her third rib and wedged terrifyingly close to her heart, had she come to him for help. The other times, she’d drag herself through the door and into her room, where she keeps medical supplies Blitz pretends he doesn’t notice are missing.
Other demons might laugh and tell Blitz he was being stupid, maybe chauvinistic, or overprotective, but they lived in Hell. Blitz had adopted Loona and part of that was making sure she was safe, even if that meant occasionally from herself. He shrugs off his jacket and lays it next to hers, throws keys and cufflinks into the fruit bowl and bustles around the kitchen, pulling the take-out from the cheap cookie sheet that prevents the paper from catching fire. There’s only wings waiting for him, some spicy, some barbecue. “Looney, which ones are yours?” he asks, trying to not let the annoyance into his voice. She does this sometimes, builds situations where his only option is to lose, just to fuck with him.
The parenting book he keeps hidden under the floorboards next to the holdout piece and emergency cash says she’s testing how much control she really has, how safe she really is with him. It’s aggravating, but Blitz tries very hard to not let it show and lose gracefully. At least he gets to pick how to loose. Fizzaroli never gave him that choice.
A shrug. “The good ones, duh.” Blitz deliberates and takes the spicy wings, sliding the barbecue back into the oven, so they stay warm until she needs them. Like the jacket he bought her for winter, or their home in general. Home. It’s nice to have, Blitz knows. Painful to think about when you don’t. He somersaults over the top of the couch and lands in the empty space with his wings. “What’re we watchin?”
“Shut up Blitz,” says Loona, her ears pointed at the TV, but her claws tap-tap-tapping away at her phone. Blitz grunts something sufficiently vague that one of her ears momentarily swivels towards him. “The building’s doing a fire pit or some shit for winter,” he says around the wings, stacking the bones in little squares. “If there’s anyone you want to burn, just drop ‘em in there while everyone’s at work. They’ll never hear the screams and we can stock the roast for later.” This gets a bark of amusement from her, and Blitz counts this foray a success.
What he meant was: If there’s anything you want to burn. Because Loona writes things, things that are for her alone, painful and scary and unfortunately too easy to remember and live in again. A part of Blitz that is tender and kind, and which she brings out of him so easily, wanted to talk about the things he’d read, the one and only first time he’d found her handiwork on a notebook page covered in Post-It notes. He knows better, just like he knows a flock of sheets covered in Loona’s scribble will find their way onto the pile to shrivel into ash.
This is why he’d pushed a little too much around that Vortex hound, had been overbearing and stupid. Thinking with his heart, not his head, and she’d been pissed at him for weeks. Perhaps rightfully so.
He finished the wings, his little Tower of Babel complete and slides it sideways. So he can put his feet up on the coffee table, obviously. She’s listening, and he’s watching an adventure show of some kind. There’s a tall coal-dark Malebolgia as the lead, all rippling muscle and chiseled features, a succubus on his arm, and a few imps scattered around for comedic value. Blitz sees one furry arm reach over, hesitate for a moment, then take the plate. A staccato of crunching bones makes the second act impossible to follow, as does the slurping noise she makes when sucking out the marrow. He doesn’t care, and it goes to commercial anyway. The first time Loona had taken his bones, he’d been curious and been pelted with the remains for his trouble then abandoned in favor of her room or possibly the cold solitude of the streets. He’s done some careful Foogle-searches since then and hasn’t openly brought it up since. It’s partially a hellhound thing, cracking bones to strengthen and work out jaw muscles, partially a never-let-food-go-to-waste thing, and partially just a Loona thing. He knows she appreciates the gesture though, because in crossing and uncrossing her legs shortly afterwards, her paw pads come to rest against his thigh. For all his chatter in the office, for all her discontent and snapping, this is where they are. Living in the comfortable silence, where they can find it.
After a while, she gets up and takes the plate to the kitchen, returning with her own wings. This makes Blitz perk up, because she often just stands at the counter, watching the tv from there, eating on her feet. (Possibly another hellhound thing, but he knows in a instinctual I-too-have-been-hunted way that this is almost certainly a Loona thing.) Now she’s sitting down. Before, eating his bones required her to maintain a certain level of deniability. If he’d asked how the bones were, she would have unleashed a staccato of crunches, swallowed with a pained expression, and say “What bones?” She couldn’t have gotten up, but now, deniability gone, here she was, voluntarily spending time with him again, even as her phone still went tak-tak-tak.
Suspicion began to rear its head, its hissing silibance sidling into Blitz’s mind despite the ostensible progress this represented.
“Full moon’s on Friday,” she said. “I might go see a movie, shop. We have the money for that?”
Ah. A full moon. This time, Blitz couldn’t stop the thing that contorted his face and insides. A full moon meant Stolas, which meant Loona had free reign, Queen of the castle. For Blitz, it meant a night and sometimes morning of fucking the feathers out of one admittedly quite fuckable bird. The thing was still making its way through Blitz and it had been long enough since he’d felt it that Blitz wasn’t sure if it was nerves, anticipation, worry, lust, or some unholy combination of all four. He sighed and let his right hand arc up his horns, feeling the small divots there. “A movie, sure,” he said, the red and black of his budget never far away from his mind. “What kind of shopping did you have in mind?”
“There’s a sale at S&M on 4th street, and I’ve been meaning to get a few tops. Maybe check out K Street…” Another Loona shrug, feigned disinterest. “Might meet up with a friend.”
Aaaand there it is. A sentence that encompassed everything from Shopping with Millie to Bloodsport Cage Match to sex with strangers in an alley. “Mmmmmmmyeahhh, depends on the friend.”
“You don’t need to know everything,D-Blitz!” Loona looks over her phone, red eyes meeting his yellow ones. “I don’t ask about what you’re doing on full moons, can’t we just-“
“It’s a business thing,” he says, knowing she’s gotten under his skin. “Loonie, you know why I have to do this, how tight I.M.P’s been squeezed this year. I-“
“Bullshit,” she snaps, baring her teeth momentarily. “I see that stupid little half-grin on your face, how you swan about the office-“
“Okay, first off, I do not swan anything or anywhere!” retorts Blitz , raising a finger and remembering just in time to not point at her. (His daughter does not like to be pointed at.) “Swanning is for Natalie Portman and for Moxxie’s stupid play where everyone dies. Second, I’m not leaving you alone.” Blitz hates how that sounds as soon as it leaves his mouth and Loona starts to growl. (He silently vows to scribble himself out of another photo as punishment.) “ughh, fuck, that’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean, Blitz?” The phone’s discarded, she’s in his face, teeth bared, eyes ferocious, and in moments like these they’re both aware that while she could tear him in half with contemptuous ease. But Blitz could never be afraid of her. He proves this by closing his eyes and kneading his eyelids with one hand.
“What I meant was, I trust you to hide the evidence, bury the bodies with quicklime and a hacksaw, and understand whatever’s fashionable these days. But it’s Hell, Looney. I at least want to know who to start gutting on the off chance you’ve somehow become pals with the Radio Demon.”
“Don’t even go there,” she mutters, leaning back and flicking her ears down in disapproval. “Guy gives off a noise that’s teeth-grinding to every hellhound in three city blocks and he does it on purpose.”
There’s an explosion on screen and Blitz looks over, pretending to be distracted to let himself think and let Loona recover her strange teenage dignity. His key point earlier, had simply been “I trust you to hide the evidence”. If she shoplifts instead of buying, don’t get caught. If she spends the money on booze or drugs, be clean and sober when he gets back.(He really hopes it’s not drugs.) If she finds some pink-skin from Lust, use protection and for Lucifer’s sake, don’t get pregnant. Not only would she be a wreck, hellhound pups would destroy their fragile equlibrium and both he and Loona would have to put children right back into a situation they’d both narrowly escaped from. It would, he knows with bone-deep certainty, kill them both.
“It’s Octavia,” says Loona, so suddenly Blitz almost missed it. “She and I were going to go shopping, that’s all.” Now the reason for her defensiveness is painfully obvious. Hey dad, while you’re plowing Hell’s royalty in silk sheets, I’m going to go shopping with his daughter so we can pretend this isn’t happening or acknowledge that it is and then what?
Blitz finds his voice and his wallet. “Ah, no problem then,” he says as if Octavia’s been her friend for years and this is a regular outing. “You girls have fun.” He hands her twice as much money as he should, money he’s going to have to cut from elsewhere, but Blitz knows you can’t put a price on guilt. Loona snatches the bills from his hand. “Great,” she snarls, but the heat’s mostly gone from her words. “Enjoy your sexcation!”
“You’re the one who brought it up!” He throws up his hands as she stalks into her room and at least doesn’t slam the door. (She comes close though)
Three seconds later she’s back to snatch up her phone, her glare daring him to say anything, and this time, she does slam the door, hard enough to rattle some of the dishes. Blitz allows himself some grumbling once the hiss of the sink and the clatter of dishes muffle his words from hellhound ears, but his heart really isn’t in it tonight. Not when the person he’s really mad at is himself. You have to figure this shit out, he thinks, rolling up his sleeves and slipping into the dishwashing speed-trance that had saved him many a late shift at a greasy diner. M&M get all smug and elbow-y whenever Stolas comes up and you can’t seem to say a straight sentence. Heh, which is the only kind of straight, yadda yadda. If Looney brought up the thing, that’s the last straw. You promised to raise her right, not let your shit seep all over her shit. He touched one sudsy hand to the red skull choker on his neck, which suddenly seemed to weigh a ton. You promised.
Those two words lingered in his mind for the rest of the night as he absently puttered around and Loona stayed in her room. Supposedly. He got the feeling after this particular incident, she was out there stomping through the ash snow and looking for something to punch or bite. He made sure the windows were unlocked (normally a security no-no, but his daughter was out there tonight) and unfolded his thick blanket from on top of the TV. Warm from the now-slumbering electronic device, Blitz climbed back onto the couch, dragged in the pillow and tried to get to sleep.
In this, he was unsuccessful, mostly because Loona had been leaning on it, so the pillow smelled like her. (Passive ownership, a hellhound thing for their soul-smell) The imp and the hellhound, both near the bottom of Hell’s pecking order, scraping out existences where they could, little of it glamorous. The money they made from I.M.P. was either devoured by Loona’s appetite or Blitz’s stupid impulse purchases, usually involving horses and the mutual guilt there was another arms race he’d been putting off addressing. We live in a one-bedroom apartment and your daughter has the only bedroom. Enough with the horses Blitz!
That had been their first real fight. Not about horses, but the bed. Loona, had still been on eternal tenterhooks, waiting for Blitz to get tired of her, to stop trying, to send her back to the orphanage so she could damn herself like any bad citizen of Hell. Her “father” sleeping on the couch seemed like a fast ticket back, or at least a quick swap to the hellhound on the couch. She was a dog, after all. It was almost expected. She’d come to expect that sort of thing. But Blitz had put his foot down, all four hoofed inches of it. She might have been only a year away from eighteen, might be hardened and stronger and faster than he was, but he’d made a promise. Even if he hadn’t told her about it in words, in his anger and caring passion, Blitz had shown far more of his hand to Loona than he’d meant to.
Perhaps that’s why she’d stuck around and now, settled. Even if she wasn’t at home, this apartment, with its crummy heating and one bedroom and little red imp was her home. He’d promised to make people smile and laugh, a long time ago when he’d thought it would be easy, possible even. They’d be laughing with him, not at him.
He’d gotten small smiles at the corners of her mouth, he’d gotten half-huffed chuckles, he’d gotten Loona home. One day, he’d see her smile, and even if it wasn’t because of him right then, Blitz would know.
He dozed as his thoughts played out in this vein, sappy daydreams of walking Loona down the aisle next to hot blood on his hands as he pulled the knife out and tried to ignore the wetness in her eyes. Blitz woke up when something glided around the foot of the couch. Silent feet-no. Paw pads, the swish of a tail. He kept his breathing deep, even, and knew that Loona hadn’t heard him from the way she stumbled into the counter and cursed quietly. He guessed she was making something hot and was right when the soft noise of a coffee cup edge-rolled onto the counter masked its movement. She drank, throat pulling the brew down her throat and finished the cup with a soft sigh. “‘S warm in here,” she said softly to herself. “ ‘S good, Dad. I just-“
But Blitz never found out what Loona just, because with a press of cushions and a grunt that took all of his circus-assassin-busboy training to avoid, she climbed onto the edge of the couch. Loona walked in a half-circle before settling down with Blitz’s blanketed feet pressed against her back. Warmth, yes. But more importantly, security.
She was still going to be snappy tomorrow, and probably all the way until Friday, but Blitz didn’t care. He fell back asleep shortly after Loona did. Warmed not by the blanket or her fur, but that three-letter word that in a library of curses, he had only heard tonight.
Dad.
Paradise Lost Book 1, Line 234-237:
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,