You’re sitting on the floor of the tiny flat, cross-legged, picking chipped black nail polish off your thumb while your dad, Ozzy, paces around with his guitar slung over his shoulder. He’s only 26, and everyone says he’s a wild man, but to you, he’s just Dad, even if his hair is a tangled dark curtain and he’s got that intense, owl-like stare that you also have when you’re annoyed.

You look like him, but smaller, a girl with heavy-lashed dark eyes and hair that never lies flat no matter how much your dad tries to braid it for you before school. You have his sharp nose, but yours is softer, and your grin is missing two teeth that still haven’t come in yet. You’re wearing one of his old Black Sabbath shirts, the hem hanging around your knees like a dress.

“Oi, love, can you hold this note for me?” he says, plucking at the guitar strings, trying to get a riff down before he loses it.

You hum the note perfectly, your voice small but weirdly steady, and he stops, blinking at you, that grin cracking through his serious face. “That’s my girl,” he says, ruffling your hair so it puffs up worse than before.

Sometimes, when you walk with him down the street, people stop and stare. They see the way you both have the same dark eyes, the same walk, the same crooked smirk, and they either smile or look confused. You don’t care. You think it’s cool, being the tiny mirror of your dad. You even started trying to sing like him when you’re in the shower, making your voice go low and growly just to see if you can match the sounds you hear when he practices in the living room.

He’s still not famous, not yet. The flat smells like smoke and old socks, and the windows rattle when a motorcycle goes by. Your dad tells you stories about what it’ll be like when you’re both rich—how he’ll get you a dog, a big yard, a piano if you want one. You pretend you don’t care, but sometimes you imagine a house where the walls don’t shake, where you can sing as loud as you want with him without worrying about the neighbors.

At night, you sit on the couch with him while he plays his riffs, the TV buzzing in the background with black-and-white shows. You rest your head on his arm, and he stops playing for a second to kiss the top of your head, leaving a faint smear of cigarette ash in your hair.

“Love you, little bat,” he says, and you say, “Love you too, Dad,” like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Because it is.

You know he’s different from the other dads. He’s loud, messy, and sometimes he’s up at 3 AM writing lyrics in the kitchen, muttering to himself, but he always stops to check if you’re awake and scared of the dark. You’re not, but you pretend you are just so he’ll sit at the end of your bed, telling you stories about the music he’s going to make, about the places he’ll take you, about how you’re the best thing that ever happened to him, even if you’ve only been around for eleven years.

You look just like him, but you’re your own person too, with your small hands trying to learn the guitar, your messy drawings of bats and skulls taped to the fridge. He keeps them there like treasures, even though the corners are curling and the tape is yellowing.

Someday, maybe he’ll be famous, and people will know your dad is Ozzy Osbourne. But right now, it’s just you and him, your laughter echoing through the flat, your hair a dark halo under the one flickering lamp, as you sing together in the middle of the night, your voices blending—his wild and ragged, yours small but fierce—into something that feels like the safest place in the world.