Work Text:
The job sheet, as Blitzo presented it on the whiteboard with the enthusiasm of a man who did not see anything wrong with any of this, read as follows:
TARGET: Gary Fitch. 62. Retired. Former business partner of deceased client Raymond Burrell. Allegations include: embezzlement ($400,000), destruction of a marriage, and — Blitzo had underlined this twice — keeping the dog.
Moxxie had stared at the whiteboard for a very long time.
"The location," he said, with the measured calm of a man already emotionally bracing for the worst, "is a children's birthday party."
"Easter-themed," Blitzo confirmed, clicking his pen. "Very festive."
"There will be children there."
"Many of them, yeah."
"Small children. Human children. At a party."
"You're looping, Mox."
"I'm — I'm not looping, I'm —" Moxxie pressed two fingers to his temple. "I am trying to understand how we are meant to commit a targeted assassination at a children's Easter egg hunt, Blitzo."
"Chaos," Blitzo said simply. "We create chaos, the target panics, target gets got in the commotion. Easy. Clean. Festive." He paused. "I've already prepared the eggs."
The way he said it made the hair on the back of Moxxie's neck stand up.
"...What eggs."
Blitzo's smile did not reach his eyes because it did not need to. It had already won.
In the back of the room, Millie was doing warm-up stretches because she always did warm-up stretches before a job, and she had not yet heard anything that suggested this one would be any different. Across from her, Loona was on her phone. She had been on her phone through the entire briefing. She would be on her phone until something actually required her not to be, and possibly through that, too.
—✦—
Gary Fitch was, by all observable metrics, a sweating man.
This was in part due to the six-foot Easter Bunny costume he had been wearing for the past forty minutes, which had not been designed with ventilation in mind. It was also partly due to guilt, though Gary had done a reasonably good job of not thinking about that for the last several years.
"Okay, kiddos!" he called through the enormous foam teeth, hoisting his wicker basket. "Gary the Bunny's gonna hide the eggs now! Everybody, close your eyes!"
The children screamed. This was, apparently, delight. Gary chose to believe this.
He lumbered toward the rosebush.
In the shrubbery along the fence, four figures crouched in the kind of human glamour disguises that could charitably be described as passing. Blitzo had sourced a pastel polo shirt and khaki trousers from somewhere, which sat on him with the wrongness of a tuxedo on a golden retriever. Moxxie had chosen, with his own autonomous human free will, a sweater vest. Millie's sundress had a flower crown to match, and she wore it the way she wore everything — like she had specifically prepared for war and found this a pleasant intermediate step. Loona was in a hoodie. She had not engaged with the theme. She would not be engaging with the theme.
"Alright," Blitzo murmured, unzipping the duffel bag. "Swap-out protocol. While Big Bunny hides his eggs, we hide ours." He pressed a cluster of plastic eggs into Moxxie's arms. "Smoke grenades."
Moxxie looked at them. "These are military grade."
"I got a deal."
"From who?"
"A guy." Blitzo was already handing Millie a second batch. "Firecrackers, slime packets — the exploding kind, not the regular kind — and one compressed bear trap."
Millie turned the last egg over in her fingers with genuine scientific interest. "A bear trap. In an egg."
"Took me four hours."
"Blitzo," Moxxie said, very quietly.
"There are children here."
"They're not the target."
"That is —" Moxxie stopped. Breathed. Restarted. "That is not the reassurance you think it is."
"Shhh." Blitzo pointed. "He's moving. Go."
Millie went.
She moved through the yard with the loose, cheerful efficiency of someone who had spent years doing things that should not be possible and had simply decided to enjoy them. Smoke grenade behind the rosebush. Firecracker egg under the slide. The compressed bear trap egg she nestled gently in the birdbath like she was putting a child to bed.
"There you go, little buddy," she murmured to it.
Moxxie followed at a distance, internally composing a letter of resignation he would never send.
"Millie," he hissed, crouching behind a lawn chair as Gary lumbered past. "I want it on record that I love you very much and I am formally objecting to all of this."
"Noted, baby." She patted his cheek without breaking stride. "You're doing great."
Loona had not moved from the bushes.
"Loona," Blitzo said. "Lookout duty."
"Doing it."
"You're on your phone."
"I can do both."
"That is demonstrably —"
"I said," Loona said, not looking up, "I can do both."
Blitzo let it go. He had learned, after years of choosing his battles, that this was not one worth choosing.
—✦—
The egg hunt began at exactly two forty-seven in the afternoon.
By two forty-eight, the party was on fire. Metaphorically. And then literally, in one corner near the petunias.
It started with the rosebush.
A small child — four years old, maybe five, wearing a dress with a duck on it — spotted the egg tucked behind the thorns with the unerring instinct that small children reserve exclusively for things they should not touch. She retrieved it. She opened it.
A twelve-foot column of neon green smoke detonated directly into the sky.
The child stared up at it.
Then she started laughing, which was, somehow, the most unsettling possible response.
The egg under the slide went next. Three children found it simultaneously, which meant the resulting bang was witnessed by a much wider audience than intended. The bouncy castle — which was nearby, and inflated, and now wasn't — folded in on itself with a sound like a dying accordion.
Then a child with the instincts of a golden retriever sprinted toward the birdbath.
Moxxie saw it happen. He opened his mouth. No sound came out.
The egg cracked open. The compressed bear trap launched outward at extraordinary speed and, by some miracle of trajectory, clamped onto Gary's wicker basket and yanked it clean out of his hands at forty miles per hour.
Gary stared at the space where his basket had been.
He started running.
The slime egg went off on its own — something to do with heat, later, was Moxxie's best guess — directly in the path of Blitzo, who had jogged into the yard to locate the target and was not fast enough.
The sound it made was profound.
"I'm fine," said Blitzo, from beneath a solid inch of neon green slime. It covered his eyes, his horns, the bridge of his nose, the entirety of his expression. He stood very still. "I'm completely fine."
"Your eyes —"
"I can't see," he agreed, "but I'm fine." He reached for his gun with the practiced muscle memory of someone who had never once in his life let a little thing like blindness stop him. "Where's the target?"
"He's — he went left, but —"
The gun went off. A lawn gnome exploded.
"Left!"
"He moved —"
Three shots in rapid succession. A birdbath. The sheet cake. The edge of the folding table, which collapsed with a crash and took every juice box with it in a perfect diagonal line.
"BLITZO —"
"I'M HANDLING IT, MOXXIE —"
Gary Fitch, a fully-grown man dressed as the Easter Bunny, sprinted back and forth across the yard with the desperation of someone who had not kept sufficiently up with his cardio and was now regretting many choices. The foam ears flopped. The felt feet slapped the grass. He was, improbably, still alive. The bullets kept missing him by increasingly comedic margins — a flower pot to his left, a lawn chair to his right, an inexplicable hit on a wind chime that had been hanging peacefully forty feet away.
Blitzo spun in a slow, slime-blind circle, firing.
"Is he — is he down? Someone tell me —"
"He's doing laps," Millie reported.
A pause.
"Around what?"
"The yard, mostly."
Blitzo lowered his gun.
He stood in the wreckage of what had been a perfectly nice Easter egg hunt — smoking craters, deflated bouncy castle, children laughing at the green smoke like it was a fireworks show, Gary Fitch still going in the distance, an absolute Easter Bunny of perpetual motion — and he did the arithmetic.
He turned.
He faced the wrong direction entirely, toward a bird feeder that had somehow survived the chaos, and addressed it with dignity.
"Loona. Fetch."
The silence was geological.
He turned forty-five degrees.
Loona was there. Arms crossed. Phone down. Regarding him with the particular expression she reserved for moments when the universe was specifically asking too much of her.
"...Really," she said.
"I know."
"You want me to fetch him."
"I know how it sounds."
"You're asking me," she said, each word arriving with the deliberate weight of a woman who had been to therapy and intended to invoice him for every session, "to fetch a man dressed as a rabbit. On Easter."
"Loona —"
"There are children watching."
"I'm aware of the —"
"I went to therapy," she said. "Specifically. About things like this."
Blitzo looked at her.
She looked at him.
He was covered in green slime. He could not see. His gun hand was still raised, somewhat hopefully, toward a yard that had long since gotten away from him. One of the children was using the smoke as a background for a drawing she was doing in chalk on the patio. The lawn gnome was gone. Gary was on his fifth lap.
"...Pleeeease?" Blitzo said.
His voice had gone very small. This was, Loona had long since accepted, one of his most devastating weapons.
"For Daddy?"
She closed her eyes.
"I'll get you a treeeeat," he continued, in the soft, awful, baby-talking register that she was going to bring up with her therapist specifically, "the good kind of jerky, not the gas station —"
"Fine."
She had already vaulted the fence before the word finished leaving her mouth.
There was a crash from the far end of the yard.
Then silence.
Then, distantly, the sound of someone saying something that was not words so much as pure fear made audible.
Then that stopped, too.
Millie appeared at Blitzo's elbow and patted him on the shoulder with the companionable warmth of someone who had witnessed all of this and found it deeply, genuinely charming.
"She's good at that," Millie said.
Blitzo, still slime-blind, still holding his gun, sniffled.
"She really is."
"Are you crying?"
"The slime got in my eyes," he said, with great dignity. "It's a medical issue."
Moxxie sat down in the grass.
Around him: smoke, sparks, the distant sound of children laughing, the wreckage of a table, the chalk artist finishing her masterpiece (it was, against all odds, very good). He picked up a juice box that had somehow survived. He drank it. It was fruit punch.
He sat there for a while.
—✦—
Loona came back through the gate a few minutes later, dusting her hands off.
She looked at the yard. She looked at Blitzo, who was in the process of being de-slimed by Millie with a dish towel and whatever was left of their cover story. She looked at the chalk art, which depicted — she squinted — what appeared to be a green monster. Flattering.
"He hid one in the bouncy castle," she said. "Last egg. Before things went sideways."
They all looked at the deflated bouncy castle.
"Oh," said Millie.
"That was the firecracker one," Moxxie said, from the ground.
A beat.
The bouncy castle achieved orbit.
Blitzo, newly de-slimed enough to see out of one eye, watched it go.
"Happy Easter," he said.