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The thing is, demons can not hope.
When other demons grilled her for answers she didn't have on how she'd managed to survive over a decade in the city under heaven's deadliest agent's watch, she lied. She claimed it was luck or her own insignificance, a mixture of both. Maybe some instinctive hyperawareness, born out of living in constant proximity to a killing machine, the ability she had picked up along the way to become invisible, to keep out of its radar. None of that however made sense in the privacy of Solo's own judgment, having experienced living next to Peril first hand. Luck never seemed to be on her side to begin with, the terminator's keen senses honed inexplicably on her, and, for all that she put up a front, and as much as demons were susceptible to pride, the only time she did not feel insignificant were the moments when Illya would look at her.
"Loving your work, Chort." Illya was perched up on a canopy over an entrance to a gay club the demon was just leaving in a fluster. "Her wallet was not even in her back pocket."
Solo was pressing her knuckles to the flushed cheek where her prey-to-be had slapped her.
"I wasn't trying to steal from her, I was feeling her up."
Illya looked doubtful.
"Your romantic endeavors are a thing of pity," he commented on another occasion, catching sight of Solo jumping out of the bedroom window of a luxury residence, accompanied by a string of vicious curses and threats carried by a feminine voice.
"I wasn't there to have sex with her you twit, I robbed her!"
She hissed from pain in the injured ankle or at the angel himself and took of running.
"Why do you bother?" Illya asked the second she stopped for a breath at the river banks, startling her senseless. Solo must have put a mile or two behind her, having run at the inhuman speed. "No need for theft when you're a demon."
"I lure people into thievery, I need to keep up with how it works."
"More lies."
Police sirens wailed close by and approaching. Solo's eyes widened.
"How-" She recalled Illya vanishing his phone when he'd just reappeared. "Why won't you just terminate me?! You sure as hell do everybody else!" She screamed, at the end of her rope. "Playing cat and mouse-- Are all angels sadists or are you just a special snowflake?" Why am I one?
"Mice don't enjoy cats' games."
"Yeah. No shit, Peril!"
"You do."
Attacking a malakhim was effectively a suicide for any demon but Solo had proved it (barely) survivable on more than one occasion. Illya seemed to rile her up beyond recklessness habitually. And Solo was just about to push her luck again.
"You steal to put your skill to the test, Chort." Illya picked up their earlier exchange. "Or you're a klepto, can't help yourself. Either way it's so human my instincts go haywire. Can't decide whether to smite you or protect you." He grimaced in half distaste, half condescension.
"Prote—" Solo gaped, speechless for once in the face of a slight. To hell with the police; Solo could hardly call herself the demon of thievery if an arrest cell would hold her. Attacking the malakhim it was.
In a nutshell, this was how they passed the time during their frequent encounters. Not quite the usual trail of carnage the heaven's mightiest was renowned for. Solo genuinely didn't know what to make of this. It's not like she was an idiot – quite the opposite, actually. It's just that demons really were incapable of hope.