Chapter Text
Angel could have shot himself for agreeing to this...but that would have left Bella unprotected from Val. The little girl, not quite four, clung to two of her mother's hands with two of her own as they walked into Vee Tower. In her other arms she held a homemade stuffed bunny, purple with yellow patches and yellow lining in the ears, and one of her favourite books.
Bella had been okay with coming to see Papi, because she hoped she could teach Papi to be nice. In her favourite cartoon, one of the characters had a Pop who was mean, but he became nicer because he and his son loved each other so much.
Val may not have owned Angel anymore, but he could still get Angel to agree with him if he said the right thing. In this case, he had told Angel that if Angel brought Bella over for a Father's Day visit, Val would not send gifts to Bella for three months. Angel had increasingly been able to stay sober for way longer than that.
Angel considered just picking up Bella and running out of here, but then Val appeared.
“Angel! Bellita! I'm so glad you finally came to visit! I missed you!”
Bella clung to Angel as Papi towered over her. She whimpered a little as Val patted her on the head; her antennae were sensitive. She and Angel backed up. Angel remembered how when Bella was a baby, Val thought it was funny to pull her antennae and make her cry. And yet Val had cursed at Bella for pulling HIS antennae.
Val looked down at Bella, at her braces and glasses. The braces had boring little daisies patterned on them, and the glasses were still thick and geeky-looking. Val had tried to get Velvette to design better, preferably more glittery braces, but Velvette had snapped, “I'm a designer, Val, not a bloody doctor!” Val had also heard that botox might help with Bella's bad legs, but Angel shot that down. Didn't Angel see that Val was only trying to look out for his daughter's wellbeing?
“Oh, Bellita," Val cooed, "you're not wearing the heart glasses Tio Val gave you!”
Bella grabbed her glasses as though worried Val would try to take them away.
“She needs special prescription glasses, Val,” Angel said flatly.
Val's fingers twitched. If only he still owned this disrespectful little bitch. Angel had gotten a lot more arrogant since being freed. No gratitude at all.
“And no more than four hours, Val,” Angel reminded him as the three went into the elevator. “You promised.”
“Oh, amorcito,” Val said smoothly, “when have I ever broken a promise?”
Lots of times, Angel thought, but didn't say so out loud. In the elevator, Angel and Bella stayed as far away from Val as they could.
“And you're wearing a different coat than the nice one I sent you, Bellita,” Val added.
“Not coat,” Bella said. “Big girl wings!”
She opened her silvery wings a little, and Val pursed his lips, still feeling a phantom pain in his own wing from where Angel had shot it.
Up in the penthouse, Angel tried not to think too much about the night he and Bella had escaped. He tried to focus on the good parts of that night: holding his five-month-old close and whispering reassurance in Italian as they waited for Cherri to show up. Val tried to show them the old nursery, which now had a little bed and a bunch of new stuffed animals, mostly pink ones. Bella ignored them; they smelled funny.
Then, Val led them into the kitchen and pointed at the fridge door.
“Look, Bellita, Papito kept the nice drawing you gave me!”
It was just a drawing of a pear that Bella drew when Uncle Alastor took her to a boring Overlord meeting last month. Val had asked if he could keep the drawing, and Bella agreed so that he would leave her alone. She found Val very confusing. Was he Tio Val or was he Papito? Couldn't he make up his mind?
“I have treats for you, Bellita,” Val said, pointing at the chocolate milk and gingersnaps on the counter.
Angel rubbed his forehead. “Val, chocolate milk makes her puke, and we only let her have ginger a couple days a year.”
Ginger was like a drug to moth demons, so Bella was only allowed to bake and eat gingerbread cookies on Christmas Eve and Christmas.
“I like chocolate cookies, not chocolate milk,” Bella piped up, feeling a little braver. “Uncle Husk gives me chocolate cookies.”
The corner of Val's mouth twitched, but he forced a new smile on his face. “Papito got some nice paints for you, Bellita. Do you want to paint with Papito?”
“I like paints,” Bella said, though she looked a bit nervously at Angel.
“It's okay, Bellina. You can paint with Papi.”
So Bella and Val painted together, while Angel watched them like a hawk. He noticed how Val tensed up when Bella snapped, “No!” every time Val tried to get her to talk to him. Bella preferred to paint and draw quietly. The kid didn't have to be so rude, Val thought. He was just trying to tell her how to properly hold her paintbrush. She had wrapped her paintbrush in a fist instead of holding it delicately between her fingers.
Once she was done, Bella held up her painting, which was just a lot of purple and red blotches.
“What's that supposed to be?” Val asked.
“A painting,” Bella said.
“Paintings are supposed to look like things,” Val snapped, holding up his own painting.
Angel snorted. So many colours, and Val did a boring, black-and-white zebra. Angel noticed Bella's lip wobble. Bella loved animals but she didn't like horses or anything that looked like a horse. Angel was not sure why.
“Val, she's only three,” Angel pointed out.
“I could paint way better than that when I was three,” Val boasted. He had an increasingly vague memory of Mami bringing him paints and crayons...when she was sober.
“And you got your hands all messy,” Val whined at Bella, as Angel quickly took Bella to the bathroom.
As Angel helped Bella wash her hands, he eyed the bathtub, where she had been born. That had been such a scary night.
Once her hands were clean, Bella went back into the living room; she had left her book and her stuffed bunny on the couch, and now she held the book out to Val.
“Papi, you read this?”
The number of books Val had ever read (or had read to him) could be counted on one hand, maybe less than five fingers. But Val wasn't going to admit that, even if reading was for nerds.
Val tried to read the title.
“The...Velvety...” And then he burst out laughing.
“Scherzo?” Bella whispered to Angel.
Angel frowned, knowing why Val was laughing. The book was The Velveteen Rabbit, a perfectly innocent (if sad) classic story that had been around since Angel's living days, but of course, Val just had to see something dirty in it. Angel knew that the Spanish word for rabbit was also a double entendre in Spanish.
“I'll read it to you, Bellina,” Angel said, with an emphasis on Bellina.
So Angel sat as far away from Val as he could, with Bella curled up in Angel's lap with her stuffed bunny, and Angel and Bella read the book out loud together. Bella was a pretty good reader for her age, good at recognizing letters and learning how to sound words out.
“That was a dumb book,” Val whined as the story finished. “That rabbit got used up and replaced with a better one...just like you, Angel Cakes.”
Val sneered, but Angel stayed impassive.
“Let's watch a movie, instead!” Val said, gesturing at the TV as though he thought he was being generous. “Do you want to watch a movie, Bellita?”
“I don't know about that,” Angel said. Val had already sent Bella a bunch of movies that had all ended up on what Angel and Charlie had dubbed The Big No No List, movies that Bella was not allowed to watch under any circumstances until her age matched the movie's age rating. Once, Val had sent Fritz the Cat, and a bunch of other animated movies Val had sent all ended up being Big No Nos. Angel was not sure if Val did this on purpose or if he was too lazy to check the content of the movies.
“Snow White!” Bella said, and Val sneered at Angel as though he had won a game.
This was one of Bella's favourite movies (and Molly had liked it too, even though Pop told her she was too old for cartoons; even when animation was a new thing it quickly seemed to be typecast as kid stuff). Val ruined it. He wouldn't shut up.
“Poor turtle,” Bella said at one point. She was talking about the turtle who had trouble going up the stairs in the dwarfs' cottage, and she looked down at her leg braces.
Val snorted and hissed at Angel, “She feels bad for a stupid cartoon turtle?”
“She's only three,” Angel said again, tightening his grip on Bella.
At the part where the Evil Queen died, Bella smiled and said, “Bye bye, witch! Ciao!”
Val had expected that Bella would be scared of the Evil Queen, especially in her witch form, and that Bella would look to him for comfort. Now it was Angel's turn to sneer at Val. For whatever reason, Bella had never been that scared of the Evil Queen.
Once the movie was over, Angel decided it was time to leave. Coming here had been a huge mistake.
“Wait just a minute, Angel baby!” Val said as Angel and Bella made for the door. “I thought Bellita might like to have a sleepover.”
Angel felt his heart sink. He should have known Val would ask something like that, and in such a creepy way, too.
“What do you think, Bellita?” Val asked, trying to lower his great height down to Bella's level. “Papito will let you stay up as late as you want. We can watch what you want, do what you want, eat any treats you want...”
“I want my chocolate cookies at home!” Bella squeaked, clinging to Angel. Angel picked her up.
“No,” Angel said. “We are leaving.”
Angel spoke in an eerily calm voice that briefly made Val flash back to when Angel shot him. Angel's eyes had looked neither fearful nor angry at the time, but completely dead. It spooked Val enough that he made no further attempt to keep Angel and Bella in the penthouse.
As Angel carried Bella out, Bella called out, “Bye bye! Ciao, Papito!”
Once they were gone, Val went to the balcony, lighting one cigarette after another and flicking the butts and ashes over the railing.
Stupid kid. But Val was sure he could find a way to win her over. Maybe with a pet; giving Fat Nuggets to Angel had worked. He knew the girl hadn't liked the quieve he sent her, but there had to be something else. A horse? All little girls liked horses, right? Bellita had never sent back any of the stuffed unicorns he sent to her...
“Scusa, Bellina,” Angel said as he hurried Bella through the lobby of Vee Tower. He was talking to her in Italian because Vox and Val wouldn't understand it if they heard him talk on the security feed. “La mamma e molto dispiacuita. Non ti portero mai piu qui.”
“A casa, Mama?” Bella asked.
“Si.”
By the time they got back to the hotel, there was already a package waiting for them on the doorstep. Angel sighed. He should have known better than to trust Val to keep his word.
Sending Bella inside to Husk, Angel opened the package. It turned out to be one of the new toys from the penthouse nursery: a new stuffed rabbit, a fluffy pink thing with little horns on its head, and it had a strong perfume-y and smoky smell. Angel reluctantly took the toy inside. He knew Bella probably wouldn't like the smell of this thing, but he would present it for her to keep or reject as she wished.