A/N: So apparently I wasn't the only one to wonder about that weird, rather disturbing subtext between Ahamo and... well, everyone else. This is what I do when I find weird and disturbing things: I write about them.
Thinking Of Me (The Same Old Way)
She was walking in the garden, breathing in deep the smell of flowers that she'd never known existed, six months ago. No, not even that long— she took a minute to calculate it out. Allowing for the fact that, here in the OZ, the day/night cycle was closer to twenty-eight hours than the twenty-four she was used to, it had been no more than thirteen weeks since she'd come here in a tornado, and her head was still in a whirl.
It was so different here, almost painfully so, the air clear as crystal, as polished glass, but not the sun-warmed, slightly dusty smell of the wheat fields back home. She wished absurdly for some small task she could perform, make use of her mechanical knowledge culled from her growing-up years on the farm, a balky tractor with rusty parts, anything. She closed her eyes.
"Miss it, don't you?" came the voice of Ahamo, from behind her. She turned towards him with the half-smile she reserved for him— not too encouraging, none too trusting, but unwilling to beat him down, after all he'd done for them. She still couldn't bring herself to call him 'Father.' But his face was gently knowing, and despite herself her smile grew fond. "Our world," he prompted. "On the other side."
"Your world, maybe. I was born here, remember?"
He grinned, rubbed at his chin ruefully. "I remember. Oh, your mother was so happy. Blue eyes, and though the midwife said they'd likely change as you got older, she was determined they never would. And she was right— what do you know?"
This made her relax a little. It was true, her eyes were very similar to both her mother's and Ahamo's— so perhaps one day, even if only on the strength of that resemblance alone, she could come to have the feeling she should: a daughter's for her father. The way she felt for the man she still thought of as her real father— the one who turned out to be thoroughly mechanical. Programmed to love her. She still was not convinced that mechanical love was any less authentic than real, living love.
"DG," Ahamo called her softly, and she returned to the present, met his blue eyes with hers.
"Don't you miss it?" she asked. He smiled.
"Of course. All the time. That's how I guessed what you were thinking— I've felt that same wistful sort of expression on my own face many at time." He lifted his hands to his face to demonstrate. She eyed him. No, she decided, resemblance alone would never be enough to make her feel like this was her father. In her mind, her father was still an older fellow in worn blue jeans and a plaid shirt, tinkering ineffectually with mechanics, not this frock-coated, slightly seedy gentleman with muttonchop whiskers.
"Well, why didn't you ever go back? You could have done that instead of waiting here on your own all these years. In a driftwood teepee, no less." She scoffed at him, but gently. "You didn't even know that things would work out, you could have gone home and started your life over there. Where you belong."
He watched her closely. Where you belong meant something more than the sum of its words, to DG. Where you belong was the clicking of the magic heels, the chant of power. No matter how many people told her that this was where she belonged, she was still having trouble believing it.
"Yes, I guess I could have. Could have hitched a ride on the next wind headed for the Mid West."
"So why didn't you?"
He tilted his head to one side, then the other, thinking it over. "Would have been kind of a letdown, I guess. Even after everything went south with Azkadellia, it was still so exciting here. Everything was new, was different, was shiny and strange." He gave a little shiver, almost like a shrug, lifting his shoulders to indicate not indifference but enthusiasm. "Couldn't quite bring myself to turn my back on it. And then there was your mother."
Oh yes. "Right," said DG, turning back to him, her hands on her hips. "So why didn't you guys ever get married, if you loved each other so much?"
"Because," said Ahamo, pausing delicately, "even the OZ has laws against bigamy."
DG felt her jaw drop. In vain she tried to keep it from doing so, but there was no fighting against gravity in this case. Ahamo went on regardless.
"Now, granted my wife was who knows how many thousands of miles away at the time, and I'm sure back home I've been declared dead, so Cathy's probably married to someone else anyway. But I'm certain that Lavender's husband would have had something to say about it."
This time she caught it, just barely; her mouth opened slightly but no sound came out. Ahamo went on blithely.
"Of course he wasn't royal and there wouldn't have been that big a fuss, but your mother is old-fashioned, and she thought divorce was a very common thing to do."
"Wait, wait." DG waved her hands in the air. "She was married? Mom was married?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," said Ahamo patiently.
"So you two just— what— sneaked around behind his back?" She was aghast at this unexpected revelation. Since she'd learned the truth about the robots she always thought of as her parents, she had held her mother up as something high and perfect. To find this out dragged her down with the other humans, to play in the dirt and mud and strive for something better, to much the same end.
But Ahamo was shaking his head, with that sharp unsettling smile.
"I never touched her."
DG blinked at him.
"You— what?"
"Oh, I wanted to," he assured her, and his eyes fixed themselves on her. "You remind me of her so much, the way she used to be. All coiled intensity and the softest exterior. You think you're simple and straightforward, and that's what makes you most devious of all."
"What are you telling me?"
"It's not a difficult concept to understand," he wheedled. "It's an old love, your mother's and mine, and it settled down on itself in its age. There's so much room in my heart, after all this time—"
"Ahamo, what are you telling me?"
"DG," he said, and he smiled, his eyes half-hidden. "I am not your father."
She stared at him for a moment, then lifted her arms and let them fall to her sides, a gesture of surrender, of defeat. He watched her closely.
"And you know it, too. You knew it all along, that all was not right."
It was one of many things she had suspected, one of many things that might be true. It made her inexplicably sad— to have him as her father was romantic and fit in with the fairy tale of it all; to have him stand so close and speak of his love for her mother as though it were dead was another thing entirely, and was not anywhere near as simple. She realized suddenly that she should be afraid of this man, for the power he had to harm his mother, to air the truth and reopen old wounds. And she was afraid, vaguely, unsettled under his gaze as though under a microscope. She shivered a little, involuntarily.
"Why would she tell me that you're my father, if you aren't?" she managed, feeling like she was trying to find her way around a darkened room.
Ahamo shrugged lightly. "Didn't want you to ask questions, I suppose. It was not a happy ending for your mother and her husband." He shook his head a little. "I always promised her I'd be there when she needed me, which was more than she got from anyone else."
"But— Glitch told me the same thing. What motive would he have for lying like that?"
Another shrug, and Ahamo smiled gently. "I'm sure it was speculated about in the court. He may still think it's the truth."
"Yeah, well, I'm not sure it isn't. You lied about it, too. How do I know you're not lying now?"
"You don't," he told her, and his voice was unexpectedly soft; just as his eyes were soft, looking at her now with a fondness that was inexplicable, impossible for her to understand. There was no pull there of father and daughter; there was no pull of anything that had a definition or a name. "All you know is how you feel. And you don't feel like my daughter— do you?"
She didn't, and she couldn't tell him any differently. But she wouldn't agree with him, either, and so they stood for a moment poised on the ragged edge of the difficult conversation, with neither of them quite prepared to say what they meant or felt or thought.
Finally she steeled herself and said the only thing she could manage.
"So what now?"
He picked up the thread swiftly. "Now? Nothing's different. But you're too smart to go around pretending that we're all one big happy family— at least, one big happy family that's related by blood. Sometimes the family that's closest is the one that started out as perfect strangers— and that's okay. Just so long as you're surrounded by the people you love."
Blue on blue— she had to meet his gaze to be able to tell him what she wanted to. "But I don't love you."
The gentle smile never faltered.
"But someday you will," he said, and she wondered what crystal ball he'd found, to peer so closely into the future, to believe so firmly in this unlikely possibility. He was definite; she remained unsure. She shook her head a little, and his grin sharpened.
"DG!" It was Cain, calling from the edge of the garden, hat pulled low; her eyes darted from his, distracted, and Ahamo breathed in deep.
He stepped close before she realized it, bent a little to put his lips to her cheek; he was warm, and he had the same earthy, slightly dusty quality as the sunlight back home. "Someday you will," he said, and this time it was a promise.
He moved away, giving the advancing tin man a nod; Cain came alongside DG and gave her a quizzical look.
"You okay, Princess?"
She looked away from him.
"Fine. Why?"
"You look—" What was the word he was searching for? He'd never been very good with them; they didn't serve a lot of purpose to a cop. "Upset."
"Me? No, I'm fine." Her glance fell on the retreating broad-shouldered form of Ahamo, and she turned very quickly and looked back at Cain. It's an old love. "Nothing's changed," she offered, as an explanation that she knew he wouldn't understand. "Nothing's different. I'm always fine, aren't I?"
He hesitated, then nodded; not affirmation, but the understanding that she hadn't expected. His eyes were softer now, these last few weeks, than they had been for the whole of their adventure. All that was metal and stone was turning to warmth and breath, she thought, and she knew enough to be grateful. His eyes were blue too, startling as an ice cube dropped down her back. It proved nothing; it disproved nothing. Everything, she felt, was in a state of flux.
She took his arm. He made her feel safe, protected from everything.
"I think I could walk a little further," she said.
They fell into step.