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Her father is a drunk.
Holly isn’t delusional about that fact, she can’t be.
Not when it was her chauffeuring him around when she deemed him too inebriated to do it safely, and all his probable deniability couldn’t fool even the most inept, so it definitely couldn’t fool her even if she wasn’t the one taking care of him.
And Holly does mean taking care of him.
She was the one who ran the house with the cooking, cleaning, and the shopping and everything else on top of that like answering the door and phones, while simultaneously keeping him on track with not only his work when he had it, but the bills and maintenance as well.
Leaving him mainly to do what she couldn’t do as easily with her age and school schedule to work around, that being bring in the money they needed to survive, and he did so as a private investigator.
How he did that wasn’t always quite moral when it came to the charge, but that was business, and he got the job done.
No matter if he wrung out a bit more money than his services were probably worth.
Then again, if they were paying it, and he got the job done; even if he got it done with a mixture of his own talents and a bit of inordinate luck he didn’t have elsewhere in life, he was worth every cent.
Part of her admires it, more-so for the fact he was smart enough to play out an essential con on top of his work, but her morals had never fully agreed with it.
And maybe that’s where a bit of the delusion that often came with having drunk or otherwise troubled family members you loved comes in.
Her head and heart could face the fact he was a drunk head on, but neither would outright admit he wasn’t a good person unless she needed to cajole him into acting like he wasn’t one either.
Something that often came out through scathing remarks in an outburst that are all him, one she knows she doesn’t need to hold in in the same way she holds in so much else.
Holly isn’t sure if she’d fully been lying when she’d barked out she’d hated him, but she knows with certainty she loves him too.
Loves him enough to give him credit where credits due because he tries. He tries despite himself to be there for her.
He takes her and her friends that she knows he hates out for her birthdays, in the heat of any moment he’s checking on her, he offers smiles, dumb jokes and remarks if only to see her smile-
There’s never been any doubt in her mind that he doesn’t love her.
That’s more than she can say she’s heard from others about their own drunken, addicted, or just outright abusive or negligent family members.
It’s harder than one would imagine to parse that she shouldn’t idolize him for not being as bad as he could be.
There’s no prize in that he doesn’t beat her in the way she knows some drunks toss around their wives and kids in blind rages they won’t remember the next morning.
And she isn’t necessarily lucky that even when his voice does rise in pitch, he’s not actually yelling at her in a way that sets her body on alert, or scars her psyche.
He’s just loud, eccentric, scared.
More afraid than she thinks she’s ever felt in her whole life, and while she knows it's unfair of her to put his woes on her shoulders, he can’t face them alone.
He can’t face them by himself or he’ll die, and Holly isn’t ready to lose him. Not after mom, because he’s all she has, and she still loves him.
There’s proof of that when he smiles down at her and isn’t ruffled by the effects of a bottle, and intrinsically she smiles back just as wide, just as happy to see him.
People have commented on her self-sufficiency before, she’s heard the jokes that aren’t really jokes that she would be fine on her own.
(Without him.)
And maybe in a physical, contributing to society and the world type of way, that might be true, but Holly’s in no hurry to find out.
Not when she knows the alternative, that she too might fall in the way her dad did to guilt, woes lost at the bottom of a bottle or several when one is no longer enough.
She might have grown up quickly, and put on a brave, efficient, face for him and to stem off her own grief about losing her mother, but she was still young.
Young enough that the well-meaning and not know her actions for what they are.
And they pity her for it.
They pity the work she puts in for her dad, they pity when she grocery shops on her own, and they pity when they catch her hanging back either in bars as he drinks or in the car outside of said bar…as he drinks.
They pity her in the way she sometimes tries and fails not to pity her dad.
It’s a March thing she surmises, not needing nor wanting to be pitied. It’s why her head stays high and he says nothing as she drives him around or helps him slide on his jacket or holster when either his inebriation or a varying injury gets in the way.
Holly knows it's normal, knows it's not technically wrong of her to feel bad for him. He’s her dad and he was processing the same loss as she, a loss he blamed himself for.
One grandma and grandpa blamed him for and quite a few of mom’s friends too.
Holly doesn’t know how to tell him she’s never blamed him.
It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t smell the gas, nor was it his fault he was often too busy to be able to take such concerns too seriously.
She doesn’t blame her mother, but in the middle of night when Holly is in bed and can’t sleep - on nights she knows her father is passed out on the diving board hovering above an empty pool - she wonders why her mother hadn’t called to have it fixed it herself, and why her mother thought her scatterbrained husband was the one to take care of it.
Holly also wonders what would have happened if it had been her to die instead. If mom was still here to take care of dad, would he have fallen as hard?
Holly wonders if her mother could have taken better care of herself and dad, or if she would have done what Holly found herself doing, acting without much of a care for anyone but dad.
She wonders if mom and dad would lay at the bottom of the world's largest ashtray and find the will to start building their home again even if there’d be one less person filling it.
Her and dad had yet to start rebuilding, he says there’s too much involved for it to be up anytime soon, but Holly knows he just isn’t ready to actually start.
These are things Holly can question she tells herself. Never does she ask what would happen if she and her mother had perished in the flames together, because she knows the answer, dad would join them sooner or later in some catastrophe or another.
The other, well the other it seems Janet has no qualms with talking about aloud: “It should have been your dad, not your mom.”
Janet says it as if she knows that would have been the best thing for her, and Holly…Holly has never been a violent person.
She’s never wanted to hurt anyone, not the man whose arm she crushed in the car door, not the woman whose body she’d nearly smoldered with hot coffee if it’d actually been hot, and not even the man who’d threatened to stab her when she very well could have shot him.
It doesn’t stop her from swinging now.
From lunging the best she can in rollerblades because Janet was fairly tall in her own right and even more so with hers on, with long hair Holly has no problem pulling in a way she knows hurts, maybe even more than the man’s arm she smashed in the reinforced door.
The taller girl screams, Holly doesn’t care, and can’t tell if the girl is swiping back. Holly can’t tell if she’s receiving blows as she’s giving them, and she can’t care because Holly can’t give thought to any of it.
She’ll sink and crash and burn, and the arms wrapping around her waist and others trying to grab her arms are nothing if not hindrances for a small moment before she’s pulled off Janet in her entirety.
It’s like a spell broken.
Holly goes from those horrid thoughts of her father burning, drowning in his own spit, to the party around her. Jessica’s this time, at the roller rink as hers had been, this time with all eyes on her and Janet’s person.
Janet is crying, curled up on the floor, babbling adamantly that no matter how sorry she was her words were still true.
Holly kicks out again at that, attempting once more to lunge as another white hot flash of rage and fire burns through her but the arms around her don’t let up.
Instead they lift her off the ground entirely and pull her back. The hands that had tried to keep her arms down and that are now valiantly trying to stop her pumping legs reveal themselves in belonging to her dad.
He steps in front of her fully then so her failed assault will cease, his eyes as wild as Holly feels, which oddly answers the question of the person holding her up and back most definitely being Mr. Healy.
She says nothing, in fact she can do nothing more than pant as silence and static buckle in her ears and she’s carried out to the car.
At some point her roller blades have been taken off, but her normal shoes aren't returned to her feet, they are set primly at her side in the backseat for the ride home.
Holly isn’t sure how they hadn’t crashed, not with the eyes she’d felt on her the entire time through the rear view mirror, but today isn’t her best day for answers, even the trivial ones.
She finally takes her shoes and slides them on haphazardly as they pull up to the hotel they were staying at now that their rental was destroyed.
Dad opens the car door for her, and the minute she’s on her feet he has a guiding hand on her that trembles ever so slightly.
Mr. Healy leaves then, and she regrets not thanking him for driving them even if he’d only come today so he and dad could work on a case.
Hopefully she could thank him later.
The hotel is nice but it isn’t exactly the ritz, no one looks twice at them as they head to the elevators, and while she didn’t know exactly how she looked, the warped reflection she sees in the elevator doors is ghastly enough.
Dad’s fidgeting. Not uncommon, but more so than usual, she can feel it as much as she can see it in the reflection and corner of her eye.
They’re on the fifth floor, and it’s not even a very long elevator ride, but it feels much longer than it should even when it hasn't made any other stops than their final destination.
There’s little room to amble about as they come across their door. This is where he has to let her go, both his hands awkwardly frisking his pockets until he finally finds the one he put their room key in, before he’s sticking it in the lock and ushering her in.
He’s not usually this quiet, not unless he was stressed, really stressed. Holly doesn't enjoy being the cause of it, or his deeper than normal breaths, so she begins to push back into the fold she knows so well.
She takes off her shoes against the side of the door, and moves to go into the bathroom to clean herself up, and then she plans on making dinner.
Holly only gets as far as the bathroom before there’s a sigh and knock on the door before it’s even been fully closed.
Propping it back open, Holly gains the courage to glance up at him. The worry in his eyes is unclouded, open, and his hands are soft and hesitant as he reaches out and traces injuries her brain had blotted out receiving.
There’s a few scratches down the side of her face and neck from sharp nails he helps wipe down with a wet towel and left over antiseptic from some of his own old wounds that she’d cleaned for him in exactly the same way he was doing now.
When he's finished he pulls her in for a hug, reassuring himself that she’s okay before he lets her go.
“You shouldn’t hit people,” he tells her, probably because as her dad he feels he has to.
It’s why when she’d met Mr. Healy the second time, Dad had tried to ward her off from the idea violence was the acceptable resolution Mr. Healy’s profession made it out to be.
Holly ignores him now in the same way she had then, staring at his tie that she had fond memories of laughing into.
Truthfully unable to take him seriously when her ears still echo with the remnant of the gunfire that tore out of her fathers gun and into a man that tried to kill them both.
That red suited man who’d tried to kill her, the reason her father had actually shot.
He’d do worse for her. He’d done worse for her. What she’d done to Janet was the least she could do for him.
It felt like the least she could do for herself.
His shaking fingers card through her hair, detangling friction knots. Holly lets him sort through it all until she’s pretty sure he’s combed through it better than an actual comb could, before she finds her voice:
“You don’t like Janet anyway,” she deflects so her mind couldn’t follow through with the popular image of the man she’d eavesdropped on falling into the pool and her father…not.
Valiantly he tries to hold back a laugh at that, leading him to awkwardly snort and clear his throat, “That’s not the point.”
You didn’t hear what she said, she wanted to argue. She doesn’t, not when she knows he’ll clam up like he always does, douse himself in drinks, and silently agree with the sentiment Holly herself cannot fathom.
Instead of carrying on with a conversation neither of them are all too willing to have, she asks, “What do you want for dinner?” while gently trying to push him out of her way.
He looks stricken as she does so, catching her again to stop her.
“Why don’t we order something, sweetheart?”
Holly tries not to be disheartened by the subtle attempt he puts forward to not feel like shit because he didn’t want her trying to take care of him when he felt now was his time to take care of her.
“Okay,” she acquiesces, only to quell his heart, watching as he approaches the phone and then stalls at the realization he doesn’t know the number.
Holly, mindful of his pride, smiles softly as if endeared, and takes the phone.
She’s got this.