Fluff - p

 Elly sipped her margarita, toying with the stem of the glass and licking the salted rim before drinking again. Hizashi watched these actions as she repeated them and tried to stifle a small bloody nose.

She didn't notice him sniffling. "Let me guess... 'P is for pet names'."

Kayama beamed at her. "Yep!"

"Oooh, tricky."

"You already call me stuff!" She exclaimed. "Like Aizawa said, you've been doing it for months."

"Babygirl," Aizawa snickered.

"Yeah, <i>babe</i>, but not like, for really real." He passed a hand over his hair and frowned. "Those're just placeholders. Ya gotta have a special one."

Yagi nodded. "I think I know what he means. Special names show love and affection, like the ones your family call you."

"Oh, like 'princess'." The other woman nodded.

"That wasn't me." Elly shook her head. "I was never called anything good. Even the pet names I had from my family were, like, 'shithead'. The nicest one was 'booger'."

Aizawa chuckled softly.

"Oh." Hizashi sounded almost as sad as she was, and his arm curled around her in a different way, a more protective fashion.

"I was never 'daddy's little princess' like all the other girls were. He - he didn't love me. My biological father didn't, either. He didn't care." She spoke in a carefully unemotional voice.

Hizashi literally choked on that information. "N - yer <i>dad</i> didn't..? An' ya had two?!"

Elly smiled bitterly and shook her head. "That 'nice' name of 'booger', by the way, was from my grandpa. He was the best of a bad lot, though he still did some terrible things."

"Hrrggk." He swallowed his outrage and changed direction, speaking in a sweet tone instead of the angry snarl that had been building. There was time enough to talk about her upbringing, later. Now was a time of healing. "Well... how about if you're <i>my</i> princess?"

Kayama tucked her tongue in a corner of her mouth. "Woohoo!"

Elly's ears laid back.

But Hizashi shook his head. "It doesn't hafta be a creepy, uh, daddy thing! Honest! I just meant, well... you were ripped off." He pouted, his jaw thrust out as his leg jittered nervously under the table. He held back for a few seconds, then blurted out all at once, "It's not fair, an' <i>I'm gonna fix it</i>!"

"Oh, Hizashi," she said quietly. "It's okay, I -"

"Yeah, princess?" He turned those spiraling eyes on her, absolutely filled with adoration, and everything she was about to say died on her lips. She took a shuddering, shaky breath and wrapped both arms around him, holding on tight. The blond-haired man looked startled - though happily so --  and he bent in to the embrace, murmuring to her in a comforting way.

"I think they need a little break," Yagi murmured with a catch in his voice.

"Yeah, looks like it."