Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 966: Proud

"Walk away?"

Damian’s breath stopped, because that was not the voice he had braced himself for.

Kaiden had his head tilted, smiling. There was nothing behind the smile that belonged in a conversation with a kid bleeding on a loading dock floor.

"They said that about Aria where you could hear it, and you think I’d tell you to walk away." He turned the idea over out loud, in no hurry whatsoever. "No. I would never tell you to do that."

Damian did not move. He had both hands flat on the ground beside him and his good eye still screwed shut.

"It was your duty to stand up for that wonderful girl who has done everything for you. She worked herself down to nothing keeping you and Lux fed, and she has never once made you feel it."

Kaiden shrugged.

"Somebody spits on her name in front of you and you stand up."

"Damian."

"...What."

"That was outstanding."

The eye opened.

For a moment the boy only looked at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence, the part where it turned around and became the other thing.

"...What?"

"You went at him." Kaiden was grinning, and there was nothing gentle in it, only delight. "Three of them. He’s got forty kilos on you, and he’d already put you down twice. You got back up and told him to say it again."

"I lost."

"And?"

"I got beaten up. Behind a smoothie place." Damian’s voice was climbing and breaking at the same time. "I didn’t land anything. I’ve never landed anything. You watched the whole-"

"Did you know you were going to lose?"

"...Obviously."

"You swung anyway."

Kaiden laughed, once, and it was pure delight.

"For the first time knowing you, I’m proud of you."

Calypso got there before the boy could argue with any of it.

She folded down onto her heels beside Kaiden so that her horns came into his field of view, took his chin between two fingers, and turned his face toward the light to have a proper look at what had been done to it.

"Oh, this is good work," she said, delighted. "Look at the eye. Who did the eye?"

"...The big one."

"The one whose arm came apart." She let go of his chin and sat back, enormously pleased with the entire evening. "Little brother, listen to me."

"I’m not your-"

"Darling has already said the true part, so I will say it again with the volume it deserves. A man’s duty is protecting his blood, his family. Somebody spat on your sister’s name in front of you, and you were outnumbered three to one, and you went at the biggest one first."

Her tail came around and thumped the concrete once.

"You did your duty. You did it badly, because you are small and soft and you have no training whatsoever. But you did it, and where I come from that is the part that counts."

"...I didn’t win."

"Demonfolk would have carried you out on their shoulders and then fought each other over who got to buy you a drink."

"I fell over. Twice."

"You got up. Twice."

"That’s not the same as-"

"It counts," Calypso said, with total finality.

Bastet had not come any closer.

She stood where she was with her arms folded and looked down at the boy long enough that he began to shrink under it, and when she finally spoke it was to the boy himself, in the tone she used for delivering a verdict.

"No wonder Aria is so proud of you. Good job, kid."

Then she looked off toward the daylight, having said the whole of what she intended to say, and it landed on Damian harder than either of the other two.

Kaiden reached into his pouch and came out with a vial the length of his thumb, capped in silver, the liquid inside it moving slower than liquid had any business moving.

He held it out.

"Here. Drink it before that eye closes all the way."

Damian looked at it, and his hand did not come up, because he had spent his whole adolescence reading everything there was to read about the awakened world and he knew exactly what he was looking at.

"That’s-" His voice quit on him. He tried again. "That’s more than I make in a year."

"In a smoothie stand? I think it’s more than a lifetime’s income."

"...For a black eye."

"For a job well done," Kaiden said. "Drink it."

The boy took it. Then he closed his fist around it, and put the fist against his chest, and did not drink it.

Kaiden’s eyebrow went up. "What are you doing?"

"...Nothing."

"Damian."

"It’s too much." His ears had gone red under the blood. "For this. For an eye and some ribs." He got his chin up out of his collar. "It’s too valuable to waste on nothing. I’ll keep it. For if something actually happens."

Kaiden looked at him for a second.

Then he grinned. "Good."

Damian sat there with a fortune in his fist and blood drying on his face, and tried to work out what had happened to him in the last four minutes.

It had gone nothing like the version he had built in his head on the way down the wall. He had been braced for the alley again, for the voice that told him what he was and what he was never going to be. Instead the Paragon of Sin had crouched down in a loading dock and called him outstanding.

These were people the entire country watched. They had found him bleeding on the floor of a service corridor, and they were impressed with him.

The shame he had been carrying since his first week on that job let go all at once. He got the back of his wrist up against his good eye and held it there. His shoulders went, and nobody standing over him pretended not to notice.

"Don’t tell Aria," he said into his own sleeve. "Or my mom. Or Lux. Please."

"Nothing about today leaves this corridor," Kaiden said. "Same terms as the alley."

"I never saw you," Calypso agreed, cheerful and enormous about it. "Terrible memory. Ask anyone."

Kaiden stood, and Bastet’s hand found his arm again without either of them looking for it, and Calypso fell in on his other side.

At the corner he heard the boy getting up off the concrete behind them. It took three tries. He did not turn around.

Back in the loading bay, Damian Levander wiped his face on his sleeve, put the vial in his inside pocket where nothing could happen to it, and went to find his hoodie.

A strange fire was burning inside his chest for what felt like the first time in his life.

’They are proud of me...’

...

The drive home ran into the sunset, the city going amber in the mirrors, and the SUV smelled like spilled mango smoothie.

Calypso had shotgun, and she was narrating the day back to them in highlights, the liar chair, the generous machine, the claw machine war, ranking every event against a rubric she was inventing as she went.

"The massage chair goes last," she concluded. "It gave up on me."

She twisted around in the seat to look at him, and her grin was enormous.

"Everything else was perfect, darling. Today was perfect."

"Yeah," Kaiden smiled. "It really was. I’m glad I could take you two out."

Both girls beamed back at him.

"And you didn’t even hiss at each other much. You’re becoming inseparable friends," Kaiden added.

"Master, you’re pushing your luck..." Bastet scoffed.

"Hahaha! I agree, Darling~" She rubbed Bastet’s ears, eliciting almighty felinid hisses. "This hopeless girl is far too good to me."

At a red light, the third-row door opened and closed by itself, and Yuna Park was simply present thereafter, sitting very straight in the back with her hands on her knees.

She was radiating contained joy, because Calypso had informed her, over her professional objection, that it was past six and the mission was now a car ride.

Bastet removed her ears from the demoness’s reach with what dignity the last minute had left her, and resettled into the middle row, which she had claimed on the way out and converted into a chaise.

She lay back along it with her sandals off, one ear still flicking about the outrage, the caramel cat tucked against her collarbone and the photo strip held above her face in two fingers, studying the fourth frame in the last of the light.

Her hair was coming loose from the updo. Her anklets lay pooled in the cupholder like treasure in a very small vault.

"Master," she said.

"Hm?"

"Can we do this again?" There was no crown anywhere in it. "Can we go somewhere else next time?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"Calypso wants to see the jellyfish."

"I do," Calypso said, solemn.

"...And I would also like to see them," Bastet admitted, to the roof of the car.

"Then jellyfish it is," Kaiden said.

Bastet lowered the photo strip and looked at the back of his head for a while, the man driving his two monsters home through amber light.

Then she came up off the chaise on one arm, leaned across the console, and made good on her promise, unhurried and thorough, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was operating a vehicle.

"Some of us are trying to enjoy the sunset," Calypso observed, enjoying it enormously.

Bastet did not stop on her account.

When she was finished she settled back into the seat corner where she could keep him in view, curled her tail over her own ankles, pulled the cat in, and purred.

It filled the whole car, low and rolling and shameless, all the way home.