Title: Changed
Summary: An exploration on how Ogun reshaped Kitty in his own image and how deep those changes run.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to their respective owners and this story is produced without profit of any kind.
Characters: Kitty Pryde/Ogun/Logan
Genre: General. Parental Issues.
Rating: G
Warnings: Pretty dark and depressing but nothing explicit.
Status: Completed.
Archiving: Please PM me.
Inspirations/Dedications: Story quote is from Ogun to Carmen Pryde and takes place in Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #2
Author's Notes: musume-san – daughter chichi – father
"Heed my words...your child is as one dead. She is MINE now, and lost to you forever."
~Ogun~
...
Changed
...
Six years on and she still has dreams about it. The worst kind.
For the briefest of moments, while she struggles to regain her breath and her heart beats so fast and hard it hurts, her whole world dangles on a thread in front of her. She can see herself as clear as day.
"You okay, pun'kin?" Logan mutters from the futon next to the bed. They are in a motel in Okinawa and he never lets her out of his sight. Not in Japan.
"Fine," she tells him, her breath still patchy and disturbed. His face is an outline in the darkness but she can sketch his expression with her imagination. Concerned, worried, afraid. For her.
That is a father, she thinks. A father's expression. What would she have done without him? What would she have become?
He regards her for another long minute and with one quick, comforting glance he buries himself beneath the covers. Only the silence, the lack of grumbles and snores, give away the fact that he's not sleeping. He is as haunted by dreams as she is.
What does he think when he looks at her and sees Ogun's dark eyes staring back at him?
Because she's not stupid. She knows what Ogun did to her, she knows better than they ever will. She is the one who has to live with the dreams or the random memories that come to her when she least expects it and burn a hole right where her heart should be.
It was never a few minutes for her. It was never a day or a week or even a month. It was a lifetime and a lifetime of dreams to live through. A lifetime of memories to pretend that she doesn't have.
She can still remember the month after her and Logan came home from Japan and she went to Chicago to visit her mother. She walked into the front room and thought "This isn't my home. My home has hand crafted furniture and a cherry blossom tree right outside the window of the room where we eat. My home smells of oranges and lotus, not brisket and wine."
"Did you enjoy your trip to Japan?" her mom had asked, polite and somewhat uninterested. She didn't know the truth but Kitty saw how her eyes flickered between childhood photographs and her daughter's face. Subtle changes but a mother knows-even one as distant as hers.
The answer that formed in her head was in Japanese. The words that came out of her mouth were spoken in her typical Chicago drawl.
If it's her language then why does it feel so stilted and false?
She compares Logan to her father all the time. He has never hurt her or used her. He has always protected her and guided her but there are some similarities. They both smell of old smoke and Kyoto tea. They are quicker to grin than to smile but when they do, it reaches down to their souls. They use the same tough love method of teaching. They wield swords like gods and words like weapons.
Then she stops and thinks that isn't right. My father has never held a sword in his life.
"Ogun has broken a part of you that will never heal," Logan once told her. He was wrong. Whatever Ogun broke, he fixed with pieces of his own. Everything up until him is an echo of a life so abstract and distant it could have happened to somebody else.
He is the reason why she favors plain white rice and speaks Japanese with a Kyoto accent and fights with far more skill than a girl her age should ever possess. It is because of him that she finds something else to do when Hank asks for volunteers for his new DNA comparison experiment. She doesn't want to know how much of herself is not real.
"You're like a father to me," she tells Logan one day. His arms around her is enough that the truth only lingers between them and never takes root because they both know, even if they both need to deny it, that when Kitty hears the word 'father' it is not his face she sees, even if she so desperately wants it to be and it is not Carmen Pryde's either.
It is the man who held her on his lap and pointed out the name of birds and flowers and taught her how to fight and when to kill. It is the same face she sees when she wakes with the word chichi on her lips and musume-san still ringing in her ears and a too sharp, too clear memory of running and being chased and laughing together.
Six years on and she still has dreams about it. The worst kind.
~fin~