Time froze around them. Chipendale held Chakira hostage on the offering stone, staring Kady down with a mixture of fury and certainty. Kiara watched Kady, peripherally aware of the knife in his hand. Kady stared back at his mom, unmoving and unblinking. Flik and Atta looked between the two teens, both tensed to move.
Under his breath, barely a sound at all, Kady whispered, "What would Hopper do?"
"You don't need to worry about what Hopper would have done," Kiara said quietly. "You don't need to be like him. Not when you have friends like us." Her eyes flicked meaningfully past Chipendale. Behind him, Ratigan and his rat mount had climbed onto the offering stone, Ratigan holding up a rock as they snuck closer.
Kady looked back at Kiara and nodded with a tremulous smile.
"OI! Don't you care what happens to your mum?!" Chipendale demanded.
Ratigan spiked the rock down hard on Chipendale's head, and the chipmunk fell in a heap. Ratigan jumped down from his mount's back as it began to savage the tiny chipmunk, biting through his torso.
Chakira screamed, backing away from the carnage. "NO! No, what have you done?!" She turned to Kady, tears overflowing. "This is all your fault! If you'd just done what you were told, we could've had it all! He promised us everything. He would've started treating you right, he would've started treating me like a queen, if he'd just gotten what he wanted!"
"No," Kiara spoke aloud in the growing quiet as the battle concluded. "That's not true, and you know it. I know now why you got together with Chipendale and put up with him. You were trying to replace the man you lost in Hopper. And maybe you only started dating Hopper because there was another void in your life you wanted to fill, another person to replace."
"Shut up!"
"But you can't do it. We all need to stop trying to replace the people in our lives." She turned to Kady and stepped to him, taking one of his hands gingerly. "Our fathers are our fathers, irreplaceable, no matter how bad or good they are. We shouldn't try to replace them because we shouldn't be defining ourselves by our parents. We are so much more than them. They gave us as much as we needed, and that doesn't need to be supplemented by anything else. We're already complete."
She cupped one hand on Kady's cheek, and he leaned into her touch, exhaling softly. "I'm done looking for men like my father. I want to know people for who they actually are from now on," she whispered.
Kiara began to lean up towards Kady, and he bent down towards her. Their lips were a hair's breadth apart when lightning cracked directly overhead.