"Matilda!" Pizzazz bellowed from her place on the couch. The door bell rang again. And again. Whoever was out there on the porch had the nerve to lay on the damn thing. "MATILDA! Get the damn door!" She dropped the latest issue of Italian Vogue across her lap and glared at the empty space in the foyer where Matilda OUGHT to be answering the door. Why did she pay that woman?

And then she remembered: Matilda had left earlier that day on her two week vacation. Some family reunion she was so hot and bothered to attend... in North Dakota. As if there could ever be any reason to waste two perfectly good weeks in North Dakota.

The bell chimed again, relentless and uncaring about her lack of staffing for the weekend.

"Ugh!" She flung the magazine aside and stomped to the foyer, hell bent on ripping the face off whatever pain in the ass religious nut or paparazzi jerk was out there. "What?!"

"Is that how you greet all your friends?"

Pizzazz faltered and stepped back, but recovered quickly. "Riot! Sorry, I was expecting someone else." She lied and leaned in the doorway as she looked him over. The normally fastidiously dressed and well groomed Riot was a mess! Disheveled shirt, scuffed and dirty boots, blonde curls going to friz in the mist they let pass as a downpour in LA, he looked like he'd been up drinking all night and half the day and the bottle of vodka he was carrying, open and half missing, seemed to prove that. "What's wrong?" She asked him, wandering back inside and leaving the door open wide for him to follow. "Jem too busy for you?" Because that was normally what brought him to her door.

"My old man..." Riot stood in the entry of the mansion staring blankly ahead. He wandered inside after her, closing the door limply behind him. He shook his head and sat down on the steps into immense sunken living room and took a long swig off his bottle. "My father died yesterday. Cancer. He's been sick for three years and they never told me. I had to find out from my mother's neighbor!"

Pizzazz stared at him, shocked, but not by the news so much as that he was telling her. Her, and not his precious Jem that he claimed to love so damn much. "So? Why tell me? Jem doesn't have a shoulder to cry on?" She asked. So what that Jem was out of the country on tour at the moment, they had phones in Europe.

"She's in Paris," And this, he could see when he glanced up at her face, was not news to Pizzazz. "God, Pizzazz... Can't you lay off Jem for a moment? I just found out my old man is dead!" Riot sobbed and returned to his bottle of vodka for comfort.

Right. Lay off of Jem when she knew the only reason he was here was because Jem wasn't available to him, knew that he was just using her again- again! Because she was nothing to him but a fall-back girl when Jem wasn't around. His father better actually be dead, she thought, or she'd kill him AND Riot.

Pizzazz sighed and took a seat next to him on the steps. "I thought you and your dad didn't get along?" She asked, though she already knew the answer to this, too. Pizzazz swiped his bottle of booze and took a drink, her price for hearing his sob story.

"We didn't. He hated that I left the ARMY to become a musician," Riot said, words slurring a bit. "He took every opportunity to tell me how much he hated it. He... he told me only sissies and queers want to be singers. He never once said he was proud of me, no matter how many awards and tours and gold records... Nothing I could do was right if I wasn't in the ARMY. I bought that old man's house and paid his mortgage and he never even said thank you!" He shouted at the wall, practically tearing his golden curls out at the scalp.

"Fathers are assholes," Pizzazz told him this truth, as if it was universal and explained it all. "At least he cared enough to have an opinion, even if he hated your music."

Riot snorted in drunken disbelief. "Is that supposed to help?"

She shrugged. 'Helpful' was really not her bag. "I'd kill for my dad to tell me he hates the Misfit's music. At least I'd know he listened to it once."

He stared at her, a little stunned and vision a little blurred. "Your dad's never heard... What? That's not possible, you're on every station."

"I don't know. Maybe he has," Pizzazz shrugged again and took another slug of vodka. Riot was a rot-gut drunk, and the booze burned going down. Cheapest shit he could buy by the gallon, she thought glancing at the label. She got up dumped his bottle at the mahogany bar at the back of the room and fixed them fresh drinks. When she sat back down next to Riot she shoved a tumbler full of a better breed of vodka straight from the freezer into his hands.

"Of course he has."

"If he has, he's never told me one way or the other what he thinks about our music. He never tells me anything at all. He sees me coming and he just throws money at me to make me go away. It's his idea of 'problem solving'." And she'd be a fool to think she was anything but a problem for her father.

"That's... cold." Riot took a drink and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. "What is it with fathers?"

"They're assholes," Pizzazz whispered this basic truth in his ear one more time.

"I loved my old man," Riot shook his head. "All I ever wanted was for him to give a damn. I just wanted to make him proud." He sobbed and laid his head down in one hand.

"Yeah... I know." Pizzazz sighed and rolled her eyes. Me, too. That fact tore her up inside, it was one thing she'd really prefer not to have in common with Riot. But fathers were assholes, all of them. Riot's was an conservative jerk who believed a man could only be a man if he had a Purple Heart pinned to his chest. And she... well, her father might live in the same city now but he had most certainly abandoned her to the wolves the same time his wife, her mother, had skipped town. He'd never had time for her. He mother walked out on him and he shipped her off to boarding school the next day. She'd grown up in schools in Switzerland and France, the best education money could buy and easiest way to keep a kid out of his hair in order to free up all his time for business deals in Sao Paulo and Tokyo. Growing up, she'd see him on holidays if she was lucky, but he never had time to get to know his growing daughter. She'd become the wild child, the terror of every school he'd sent her away to study at. She'd staged stunt upon stunt, anything to try to get his attention, but nothing worked. His one true love was his business. He didn't have time for her.

And the less time he had for her, the more desperate she'd become to make him notice.

If her Daddy died tomorrow, she'd wind up just like Riot: drunk and crying- probably on Stormer's shoulder, because she was good for that kind of thing- and so broken that she'd never been able to win his affections and crushed she'd never have another chance. All she'd ever wanted was to make him proud, to hear that he loved her, for him to smile at her and know that she was the most important thing in his life, just once.

"I'm so sorry," Pizzazz stroked Riot's long blonde hair and put her arm around his shoulders. "I don't know what to say that'll make it better." This was the truth. Even if she did know what to say, it wasn't her that he wanted to hear it from. Jem would probably be better than she was at this kind of thing, she withered at the thought. Jem, who could do no wrong. Jem, who could win the hearts of others so effortlessly it was practically a damn magic trick. Her own father preferred Jem over her, why should she have ever been surprised that Riot felt exactly the same way? Her face could be on every billboard across the nation, and she'd still be invisible to the two men whom she loved above all others. "You're dad was wrong to treat you that way. You're a good man, Rory."

A good man who treated her like shit. Just like her Daddy.

He trembled and sobbed like a wounded animal in her arms and Pizzazz set her drink down to hold him. In his grief he kissed her. She let him, and she knew he'd be staying the night.