"Spirit Albarn, what are you doing."
It isn't a question. Kami doesn't realize until she is halfway through speaking that she is using her Mother voice, the one she uses with Maka when she and BlackStar are getting out of hand, the one that goes straight to some instinctive part of the brain and makes the hearer feel like a cringing child, but Spirit flinches instead of arguing with her tone and she really doesn't regret using it, given the circumstances.
The paving stones of their front step are cold under her bare feet, but she doesn't notice until she has pulled the cigarette from Spirit's unresisting fingers and tossed it to burn out on the pavement.
"Uh," he says, eyes blank of explanation and filled with guilty surprise.
"You will not smoke in my house, around my daughter." Kami's voice is grating in her throat and she is glaring so hard she can feel the muscles of her face cramping around the frustrated lines, but her adrenaline is egging her on and self-righteous rage is pooling in her thoughts.
Spirit cringes, looks away, and when he looks back there is a spark of resentful defiance in his eyes. "Hey. She's my daughter too." He is trying for defensive but it is a weak rebuttal and the lack of strength undermines the tone he is going for.
That is a road that Kami does not want to go down right now, partially because he is right and partially because any sort of comeback she might make is such a low blow that even her long-steeped anger shies from it. She changes the subject instead, bracing a hand on her hip and leaning in towards Spirit so he angles away from her and undoes whatever advantage his extra height might give him.
"You should know better than to smoke around our daughter. You are her father, Spirit, you should be trying to keep her safe rather than putting her health in danger."
His eyes go wide with horror and the fight drains out of his face so completely that Kami sees the lines of exhaustion rise under his eyes, along his cheeks. Against the backdrop of his physical strain he looks very pale and very tired, oddly fragile for a man who is inches taller than her and can turn into a pure black six-foot scythe at a moment's notice.
"I wasn't," he begins, but when Kami raises an eyebrow he loses whatever the rest of his statement is and looks away. "Thinking," he finishes after a pause that indicates that wasn't what he was originally going to say.
"No, you weren't." This is kicking him when he's down, Kami recognizes, but the awareness is at a great distance and she doesn't really have control over the bite in her words anymore. There is a masochistic satisfaction in hurting the man she loves, in visiting revenge on his directly for the pain he has been inflicting on her indirectly with every cheerful interview and every business trip and every day he has left her alone. "What would even make you start smoking, Spirit? It's terrible for you and you never used to and I will not have it in my house. What possessed you? Or were you not thinking?" Her words are razor-sharp, cold and honed by the nights of insomniac practice her mind has given her, the imaginary arguments she played over and over until her every comeback is perfect.
He isn't looking at her. His shoulders are slumped forward, his hands in his pockets, and for all that he is pushing six feet he looks like nothing so much as a chastised schoolboy. "It -"
"Did you pick it up from one of your girlfriends?"
He jerks his head in the negative before arresting the motion and flushing red at the passive admission to having the girlfriends mentioned. It isn't like he's giving anything away that Kami doesn't know, that she doesn't see in the television spots about the popular new Death Scythe whose wife and daughter are somehow never mentioned or in the tabloid articles that always feature photos of her drunk husband between two or three or four laughing blondes. But Spirit never says anything about it directly, even when Kami needles and needles him in an attempt to gain an admission or an apology or an argument - she's never sure which - and seems to consider every accidental slip as more of a failure in himself than the fact that there is anything there to admit in the first place.
When he talks it is too fast, stumbling over his words in an attempt to cover up the admission of body language he has already granted her. "It's soothing, you know, I just tried one once and it helped me sleep and it's so hard to fall asleep recently and there's always so much to do I never have enough time for it -"
"Maybe if you tried sleeping alone you'd have somewhat more success," Kami spits past clenched teeth, her voice quiet but so diamond-hard that Spirit's words cut off mid-syllable. He looks at her for a moment, his eyes wide and blue and hurt, and it's not fair that Kami should feel so guilty when he is the one who is doing the hurting, and she turns on her bare feet and goes back inside, slowing her steps to a stalk instead of a retreat, and she only slams the door a little when she blocks out the apology and the pain in his tired eyes.
