Tyra is 6. She never gets sick, but every once in a while, she still gets to take a sick day.
Charles was never quite sure what he expected when the door to his office swung open first thing in the morning, but Logan calmly informing him that he and his daughter had chicken pox and would be taking a sick day was definitely not it. "You do realize that an average child would be out for at least a week with chicken pox...," he answered, taking a stab at what was really going on without reading Logan's mind.
Tyra had inherited her father's regenerative powers, and neither of them should be sick, but stranger things had happened since he started the Institute. Still, Logan was clearly well, and if his daughter ever managed her first illness, he doubted Wolverine would look anywhere near this calm.
"Oh," Logan replied, "Better make it the flu, then."
Charles forced himself not to laugh. "Still at least a week."
Logan raised an eyebrow, "A cold?"
Charles thought for a moment. "Just tell them it's a stomach bug."
Logan nodded, face still serious even though Charles himself couldn't help grinning. "You know, I think you're right. I think it is just a stomach bug. Probably be better by tomorrow."
As Logan closed the door behind him, Charles almost called him back to ask what had prompted this spontaneous sick day, but then he decided it didn't matter. While Wolverine would never admit it, they all knew he was taking Tyra's acsension to elementary school and away from home harder than he'd expected to. He supposed he could grant the gruff PE teacher one day hanging out with his daughter again.
Out in the hall, Logan called the school, informing them calmly that Tyra was sick and would be staying home today. Then he hung up and rubbed his hands together, excited about the sick day. It had taken some doing, but Tyra had convinced him that it would be suspicious if she never got sick and missed school, and now that he had decided to do this – well, the decision was made, the pieces were in motion, and there was no going back now even if he wanted to. So he might as well enjoy it.
They'd spent hours last night planning for today instead of reading Tyra's usual bedtime story and while he hadn't thought he would actually do it, he'd eventually crumbled and now he was more excited than he wanted to admit to spend the day with his six-year-old
First on the agenda was breakfast. Usually, breakfast was a hurried affair for everyone, as they tried to get most of the kids off to high school, their two eighth-graders off to middle school and Tyra to her own school without anyone being late. Milk jugs and orange juice cartons made the rounds and ran empty and sat leaking their last few drips onto countertops and tables, cereal boxes flew through the air and spilled on the floor, coffee landed in people's laps, kids snuck spoonfuls of sugar from the container by the coffee pot and ate it by itself, and at the end of it all, he and Hank were usually left to clean it all up while Ororo met delivery vans and took inventory and replenished their breakfast supplies for the next day's assault on the kitchen. He'd rather clean than have to deal with the complicated color-coordinated paperwork of Storm's system. But today, he was doing something different, because today they were going to have breakfast separately after the rest of the kids left.
He packed the older kids off to school with a little more force than he usually did, ending the normal morning chaos, and then pulled out the package of bacon he'd hidden away carefully at the back of the fridge, smiling to himself. He'd missed bacon, but with so many kids and so little time in the mornings, they just couldn't make it very often. Dinner was often fairly involved, but breakfast simply didn't work that way.
Tyra helped Hank clean up, but then she insisted in her adorably strict six-year-old manner that he and Aunt Ororo and Uncle Charles all stay out of the kitchen because she and Daddy were making them a surprise. He doubted they'd be very surprised by their "surprise," because Ororo had been in the kitchen when he came in from his late-night grocery run with the supplies for breakfast, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he got out a bowl and they got down to work.
By the time Charles came to breakfast, the table held French toast and bacon and orange juice and the rest of the kitchen was nearly as big a mess as it had been when the rest of the kids had left for school. A trail of drips led from the bowl of egg wash to the stove where Tyra had dripped it as she handed the bread over to her dad, the raisins they'd put on top had rolled under the counters and the table after Tyra and Logan had thrown handfuls of them at each other, and their powdered sugar fight had left a thin film of the stuff nearly everywhere and whitened both Howletts' hair so that Logan looked, for the moment, almost as if he was finally aging.
Tyra had a splotch of cinnamon on the side of her nose, but she refused to let her father wash it off, running around the room as he chased her, dishrag dripping water onto the floor behind him. "Tyra Anne, get back here!" Charles almost intervened, but with Hank and Ororo already on the way, he decided to stake his claim on the first of the toast instead, watching as Logan resorted to his usual tactic of tackling his daughter and pinning her arms down.
To anyone not familiar with Logan and Tyra or not aware of their powers, Logan would probably have seemed nearly abusive most of the time. Those who knew them could see that they were much more like a lion with a cub. They fought and wrestled and rough housed and sometimes Tyra bit her father and sometimes Logan dragged his daughter around in a headlock and no one thought much of it, not even when Logan was sitting on the kitchen floor on top of his six-year-old, scrubbing cinnamon off her face while she tried to wriggle out from under him.
By the time Logan had managed to get the worst of the mess off of Tyra, Hank and Ororo had shown up, and when he let her up, she bounced joyfully over to the table, inviting them to breakfast as if Professor Xavier and Dr. McCoy hadn't already started eating. Ignoring them, she served Ororo some toast and then got plates for herself and her dad, who was trying to get the egg up off the counter before it dried.
"Me'n Daddy did good, didn't we?" she asked, pouring syrup all over her plate until everything was swimming in it.
"You certainly did, Tyra." Charles said, after swallowing his orange juice. "You should make us breakfast every morning."
Tyra grinned, but the Professor didn't even need to look to know that Logan was glaring. He probably shouldn't put ideas into Tyra's head, especially not ideas like ditching school to make breakfast every morning. She had enough ideas of her own. He just wasn't sure he cared. They usually didn't like to admit it, but most of the staff members were as taken with the little redhead as her father was, in spite of how much trouble she could get into.
It had been touch-and-go for a while when she was younger, but she'd finally grown up enough to be left alone for the occasional 15-minute stretch without doing too much damage. Six years old and indestructible was a much better combination than the ages from two to four had been with her powers. She at least understood, now, that other people could get hurt and they wouldn't get better right away like she did.
As penance for the fact that Tyra had spent most of breakfast debating with her father the merits of getting Uncle Charles to convince her first grade teacher that she wasn't supposed to be at school until the afternoon, he decided to help Hank and Ororo with the cleanup and let Tyra and Logan run off for the rest of their day.
It won him one grudging half-smile from Logan and one sunshiny hug from Tyra and that was probably the best he could have expected to get in return for sweeping powdered sugar off the floor. Even when said powdered sugar was also sprinkled with squashed raisins that had been stepped on to make a sticky paste that couldn't have held onto the sugar better if they'd been designed to do it. Even so, they got it clean and he rolled back to his office, smiling at the clacking sounds coming from Tyra's room, ones he recognized immediately because they were coming from the Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots game they'd dug out of the attic last Christmas. He could remember Banshee and Thunderbird playing with them when they were new, and it was good to know they were back in use again.
The rest of the day was a series of interruptions for the rest of the staff, and Logan felt absolutely no remorse over it. Living in a mansion full of teenagers, he was sure they were used to it. He certainly was. And anyway, they were the fun sort of interruptions, rather than the usual Jamie-stole-my-hairbrush, Ray-hit-me, I-think-Jubilee's-leg's-broken sort of interruptions.
He and Tyra buzzed Hank's office four times with a remote control helicopter. Logan dragged Ororo into a tea party so he wouldn't have to do it alone. A few of the water balloons from their water fight broke against Charles's window – and not all of them were accidental. When Hank nearly tripped over the hot wheel track, it really wasn't their fault, but he still decided that meant it was time to move on to something else.
And then they read Tyra's favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are, and the usual chaos followed. With one childish shout of "Let the wild rumpus start!" doors shut, locks clicked, and he and Tyra had the run of the mansion so they could roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes, and most especially so they could show their terrible claws.
They had stopped needing the actual book a long time ago. He was pretty sure everyone in the mansion had it memorized, but even if they didn't, he and Tyra did, and they acted it out as often as they read it, starting with a staring contest he always threw because Max had won in the book and ending with a long chase through the mansion as he shouted "I'll eat you up, I love you so!" and Tyra laughed uproariously. And when he caught her, he always made sure to do it where no one could see them, because even though it actually came in the middle of the book, after he caught her, he always told her that he loved her "best of all."
All too soon, he realized it was nearly time for the older kids to come home from school, and Logan decided they needed to do something quiet and peaceful and out of the way, something that didn't require any cleanup afterward and that wouldn't get in the way as the other kids got home and took their space back over. And so they watched his favorite movie of all time. The only movie he and Tyra could both reliably sit through without getting bored. The Karate Kid.
At the start of the movie, it was just him and his daughter curled up together in the corner of the couch. And then Ororo took the other end of the couch. And then the older kids got home and Sam said it was his favorite movie too, so he and Bobby and Ray joined them, and Kurt had never seen it, so Kitty dragged him onto the floor in front of the couch and caught him up to where they were, and Rogue leaned against the wall behind them all with her usual cool and before long, half the school was clustered around the television. And then they watched The Karate Kid II instead of training, even though it wasn't as good as the first and he couldn't quite sit through all of it. Instead, he and Tyra went back to her room to play checkers until dinner time, because every good fighter had a little bit of strategy, too.
At the end of the day, Logan was exhausted – more exhausted than he'd expected to be – but he didn't mind it. Not even a little. He was glad he wasn't going to be doing this again tomorrow, but he was equally glad he'd done it today. As he waited for Tyra to come back from chasing down her usual string of goodnight hugs and kisses, he made the same routine checks he did every night. Towel actually hung up to dry? Check. Toothbrush damp? Check. Dirty clothes put away in the laundry basket? Check. Then he made sure her gameboy and flashlight and latest book were all safely away from the bed and looked under her pillow in case she was hiding anything that would keep her up all night on a school night. Clear.
The routine of it all reminded him that he needed to mow the lawn tomorrow and made him feel like today was already slipping away before it was even finished. But that was the way of it, he supposed. Being immortal, or nearly so, seemed to make time go faster, not slower, and Tyra was growing up at what seemed like lightning speed. And there wasn't much he could do about it. So he picked out the longest picture book on the shelf for her bedtime story, swung her dramatically into bed when she ran back in, and continued to make the most of their sick day until Tyra fell asleep. And then he kissed her on the forehead and whispered "I love you best of all."