Description: Tyra is 7. They get trapped in a cave. Logan comforts her and reminisces about another time he was stuck in a confined space with his daughter.
Logan hated feeling helpless. It always seemed to bring out the very, very worst in him, and it was hard not to let himself get violent and wild. But now he was both helpless and trapped in a cave with his 7-year-old, and the one thing he couldn't do was go feral right now. Clawing at the walls wouldn't actually get them out, not when the entrance had caved in this badly, and losing his temper at the situation wasn't the kind of example he could afford to set for his already-volatile daughter.
Tyra was so much like him sometimes that it was almost frightening, and he had seen in her face when the rocks collapsed in on them that she wanted to fling herself bodily at the cave's blocked entrance just as badly as he did. They didn't like being cornered, he and his daughter, and their instinctive reaction was to lash out and to destroy the thing cornering them. But it wasn't the proper response to every situation, and beating up a pile of rocks wasn't going to help them now. He had to keep calm, because he needed Tyra to keep calm, and he needed to show her that the right thing to do when you were trapped was not to panic.
Taking a deep breath, he turned away from the wall of rubble to face the rest of the cave. He was lucky that 'Ro had shoved a lantern into his hand before they left the mansion, and even luckier that he'd brought it with him even though he didn't really think they'd need it. But as she had reminded him at the time, he and Tyra had a bad habit of deciding that since they didn't want to come home they could manage "just 20 more minutes" in the woods and continuing to decide that it was true every 20 minutes until it was pitch-black outside and they ran into patrols on their way back to the car because their favorite hiking area wasn't actually a camp ground and people had gotten worried about the "lost people" who ought to have returned to the little blue car in the parking lot.
The lantern was electric, and because Charles was overzealous about these things sometimes, it had a crank that could be turned to power it if the batteries ran out. It was also surprisingly bright, lighting the entire interior of the admittedly-small cave and letting him see Tyra clearly.
His daughter was curled against the back wall of the cave with her knees tucked up under her chin, and she was clearly taking very seriously the fact that he'd told her to stay calm while he checked it out. Walking over to her, he crouched down, so that he'd be at eye level. "We're stuck, Tiger. We're just gonna have to wait it out." She nodded solemnly, still working very hard to stay calm.
He didn't know what, exactly, she was trying to hide – his money was on either fear or indignation, but sometimes Tyra surprised him. Either way, he knew it wasn't good for her to squash her emotions down for as long as they were going to be stuck here, and he knew that she wouldn't be able to manage it for long anyway. So he might as well at least try to comfort her, for now.
Moving to sit beside her and draping an arm around her shoulders, he gently tipped her over until she was leaning against his side like she did on the couch sometimes when they were feeling sedentary enough to try watching a movie. She nestled into his shoulder, half head-butting him in the process, but he could tell she felt at least a little bit better at the contact.
"Well, now what are we gonna do? Waiting is boring." Tyra's voice was carefully controlled, still, and he definitely had to fix it, because while not being panicked was good, she didn't even sound like herself the way she was at the moment. Without saying anything, he reached for the ticklish spot on her side and she squeaked and rolled away from him. "Daddy!" she exclaimed, half exasperated and half gleeful, and before long they were wrestling on the cave floor until he could pin her down and tickle her into giggly submission.
It didn't take up as much time as it could have, but it seemed to make Tyra feel better. Not surprising. It always helped to feel like things were normal, even if they weren't. And once some of the pent-up tension was gone, Tyra seemed much more relaxed. She was still fidgety and restless, but it was her normal level of fidgetiness and restlessness, so he wasn't worried about her anymore. She was going to come through this ordeal alright.
It was already late afternoon, so Logan had hoped that they'd be found fairly soon, but as time dragged on, he began to realize how long it was really going to be. The people in charge of the trail wouldn't worry about their car in the parking lot until it was fully dark out, and if they remembered the car from the last few times he and Tyra had let their hikes drag too long, they might not worry until a little after that.
No one at the mansion would think to assume there was a problem until much later than that – probably 10 or 11. They knew how long the two of them could spend hiking, and then they would assume they were eating dinner out somewhere or that they were just out driving around so that they didn't have to come home yet.
But they wouldn't let them stay out indefinitely and they were certain to come looking for them by around midnight at the latest. Finding them would be a whole other story, of course, but it would happen eventually. He just wasn't sure what "eventually" meant.
Luckily, Tyra was good at amusing herself, and before long she'd made up a whole complicated game that involved throwing rocks at various spots inside the cave, at the rocks that had already been thrown, and occasionally at him, but he got the feeling that when she said things like "You can only throw rocks at people if it's exactly 4 turns after you hit that spot over there," what she meant was "Silly Daddy! Only I get to throw rocks at you."
She kept winning, but she was also making up the rules as they went along, so that was mostly to be expected. And she was happy, or at least happy enough, and that was what counted. Even so, he was starting to feel restless, too. He'd never been claustrophobic, but he did wish he could stretch his legs a little more. The cave was only about the size of one of the bedrooms at the mansion, and it didn't take long to walk from one end to the other, which contributed to the fact that even with the constantly shifting rules, the game was getting boring.
By the time they'd been trapped there for three and a half hours, even Tyra was so bored with the game that she couldn't play it anymore, and clearly a little tired, too, from the fact that they'd been hiking all day. (Frankly, the fact that it tired her out was half of the reason they went hiking so often – the others at the mansion always seemed happiest when he and Tyra had been blowing off a little steam on at least a semi-regular basis.)
She threw down her rock with a pout and then kicked it angrily toward the pile of rocks in the entrance and he could tell she was right on the edge of not being able to behave herself anymore. Calling her name, he held his arms out and she ran into them, burying her face in his shoulder as he picked her up. She was getting to be too big for him to carry around, but it didn't mean he didn't do it anyway. "Sorry, Daddy," she said, voice muffled by his shoulder.
After hugging her tight for a moment, he put her back down on her feet. "It's ok, Tiger. I'm tired of being in here too. But they're coming. We've just gotta wait." Her face slid into a pout and he gestured toward the back of the cave. "Come on, Ty. Lay down. It's almost bedtime anyway. They might even get here before you wake up."
Her mouth opened like she was about to utter her usual bedtime protests, but then it snapped shut again. She wasn't in the middle of something, there was no bath to try to scam more time out of him by skipping, and even if she said she wasn't tired, there was nothing else to do. Narrowing her eyes, she asked "Are you gonna go to bed?"
He didn't know what answer she was looking for, but he knew it didn't matter. They'd been through this enough times for Tyra to know that bedtime meant bedtime meant bedtime, at least when it was him telling her so. "Don't worry, I'll be awake to help them if they come looking."
She sighed. "I guess I could go to bed, then. If I have to."
He had to keep a straight face, and he did – but he was laughing a little on the inside. Even now, she couldn't admit that she just wanted to go to bed. "You have to."
It took him a while to get Tyra settled down on the smoothest piece of the cave floor they could find, her head pillowed on his shirt because it was all he had to give her. Now that it was getting dark outside, the temperature was starting to drop in the cave and he would probably be cold in just his undershirt before morning, but he knew he wouldn't mind.
This whole fatherhood thing had settled him down shockingly fast and even though he could feel himself turning into that totally uncool Dad guy he'd pitied for so long he couldn't stop it from happening. He told himself that once Tyra was grown up, he could go back to the whole motorcycle vagrant, bar-hopping thing instead of being so tied down, and because he didn't age, it was probably true. Not that it mattered at times like this, because at times like this, loving Tyra was more important than his freedom anyway.
He was sitting by the entrance, on the other side of the cave from Tyra, but he could still tell that she wasn't asleep. Even so, as long as she was still trying to sleep, he might as well let her. The best part of her growing up a little was that he could send her back to bed and hope that she could fall asleep on her own instead of feeling responsible for it.
After a while, though, she got up, hugging his shirt like she usually did her teddy bear, and came over to his side of the cave. "It's no good. I can't sleep at all" she said with a sigh. Moving a little to lean his back against the wall of the cave, he held his arms open and Tyra crawled into them, sitting on his lap with her head pillowed against his chest, nearly on his shoulder. He spread his shirt over her legs like a blanket, kissing her forehead.
"That's ok," he said with a sigh, "You didn't sleep when you were a baby, either."
She twisted to look up at him. "I didn't?"
He laughed, tucking his cheek against the side of her head. "Nope. You screamed the second I put you in your crib and you wouldn't stop until I picked you up again. Not that you'd sleep when I was holding you either. You just kept trying to play with me."
She grinned. "I knew I was a fun baby."
He snorted before he could stop himself. "Tyra, I think you were the least fun baby I've ever heard of. You wouldn't sleep unless I put you in your car seat and drove around with you, and I don't think I slept more than an hour or two a night until you were a year and a half old."
"Oh." She sounded disappointed, so he kissed her temple again.
"Eh, don't beat yourself up, Tiger. At least I like driving." He even still liked driving, which was a bit of a miracle. More miraculous still, he remembered those days with vague fondness.
At the time, he was pretty sure he'd been thinking about how much he hated the slightly battered little blue car, bought because it was cheap and he could put a car seat in it and because even though Charles had plenty of cars for the X-men to use in general, he liked owning vehicles of his own. He had, admittedly, let the Professor help pay for gas once he'd started clocking a couple hundred miles a night, but the car was his. And he'd hated it and he'd missed his motorcycle and he'd dreamed of the day his kid would be old enough to stick on the back of the motorcycle instead, because he hadn't realized yet that Tyra was the sort to jump off the motorcycle if she got the idea in her head that she wanted to get off and look at something.
Now, the car just made him think of all that driving, out on the empty highway in the moonlight with Tyra zonked out in her car seat in the back, and he suspected he'd be driving it for a few more years yet – probably until Tyra needed a vehicle of her own, though the thought of entrusting his wild child with a few thousand pounds of deadly metal made him nervous in a way that just reminded him how unbelievably Dad-like he'd become in the last few years.
After a few minutes of silence, Tyra yawned. "I wish we could get in the car and drive now. I wanna go to sleep and wake up at home."
He stroked her hair gently. "I wish we could, too." He'd been on enough long car rides in the last few years to know that Tyra slept badly in a car now that she was older, if she slept at all. Not that she hadn't woken up a few times a night even back then. He'd played the radio, he'd driven in silence, he'd left static running as white noise, and none of it had seemed to change how much Tyra still woke up and fussed if they changed speeds while he was driving.
Then, one day, Scott's car had broken down and he'd had to take Jean to soccer practice and she'd accidentally dropped one of her cassette tapes out of her bag. He'd found it in the car and slipped it into the tape deck because he'd been prepared to try just about anything and it had turned out that something about Oklahoma! kept Tyra quiet and calm, even when she woke up in her car seat, and it sent her off to sleep again faster than she ever had before.
He still had to drive, but he didn't have to worry as much about keeping a perfectly steady speed, because she slept more deeply, and he didn't have to worry about not taking roads that curved too much and he didn't have to worry about the radio changing to something too loud and rowdy and everything had gotten easier.
And suddenly he had an idea. "I tell you what. Why don't you just close your eyes and we'll pretend we're driving. I'll even do you one better – we can drive something cool." Tyra gave him a confused look, but then did it with a sigh, leaning back against him and squeezing her eyes shut tight. He closed his own eyes for a moment, thinking through the words, but he didn't have to worry – they came back immediately. This song had always been his favorite of the lot, maybe just because it was basically about what he'd been doing at the time, and he knew it like the back of his hand.
Rocking gently side to side with Tyra along for the ride, he started to sing softly, tweaking the lyrics at will. "When I take you home tonight with me – Tyra, here's the way it's gonna be: You will sit behind a team of snow white horses, in the slickest gig you'll ever see." He paused. "Can you see the horses pulling the little carriage?" She nodded, eyes still squeezed tight shut. "Good."
He picked up where he'd left off. "Chicks 'n ducks 'n geese better scurry, when I take you home in the surrey, when I take you home in the surrey with the fringe on top!" he realized as he sang it that Tyra probably had no idea what a surrey was, but he wasn't sure it mattered. She'd figure it out, and if she didn't it was all about her imagination anyway. "Watch that fringe and see how it flutters when I drive them high steppin' strutters. Nosey pokes'll peek through their shutters and their eyes will pop!"
Probably true. It would be a heck of a thing, now that it was the 21st century, to ride down the street in a horse-drawn carriage, but he bet Tyra would love it. The song moved on to a description of the surrey itself and the smile spreading across Tyra's face proved he was right. She at least certainly liked the idea of it. Which was ok, because he did too.
"The wheels are yellow, the upholstery's brown, the dashboard's genuine leather. With isinglass curtains you c'n roll right down, in case there's a change in the weather. Two bright sidelights winkin' and blinkin'. Ain't no finer rig I'm a-thinkin'. You can keep your rig if you're thinkin' that I'd care to swap for that shiny, little surrey with the fringe on the top!"
The next bit should have been talking, but he could feel Tyra relaxing against him, so he skipped over it and started singing again. "All the world'll fly in a flurry, when I take you home in the surrey, when I take you home in the surrey with the fringe on top. When we hit that road, hell fer leather, cats and dogs'll dance in the heather, birds and frogs'll sing all together and the toads will hop! The wind'll whistle as we rattle along, the cows'll moo in the clover, the river will ripple out a whispered song, and whisper it over and over."
He didn't know if it was the peaceful descriptions or the song itself or just the fact that daydreaming was calm and kept her mind off of the fact that she didn't think she could sleep, but Tyra was almost fully asleep now – it was working. "Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever and y'd never stop, in that shiny little surrey with the fringe on the top?"
She was so close to asleep now that he went ahead and sang that part again – the repeat wasn't in the original song, but he sure wasn't going to do the talking, not with her so close to nodding off. "Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever and y'd never stop, in that shiny little surrey with the fringe on the top?"
Her breathing was slow and even, but he wasn't completely certain that she was deeply enough asleep to stay that way. And anyway, the last part of the song had always been his favorite, and he might as well sing it, even if he was only singing to himself by the end of it. There was no reason not to, not with his daughter growing up so fast, and not when the words of the song were so close to what was actually happening right now.
Voice dropping a little quieter, he finished "I can see the stars gettin' blurry, when we ride back home in the surrey, ridin' slowly home in the surrey with the fringe on top. I can feel the day gettin' older, feel a sleepy head near my shoulder. Noddin', droopin', close to my shoulder, till it falls kerplop! The sun is swimmin' on the rim of a hill; the moon is takin' a header, and just as I'm thinkin' all the earth is still, a lark wakes up in the medder."
That bit was not so true – their rescuers might be on their way, but they certainly weren't here yet. Even so, with Tyra sleeping in his arms, really sleeping now, he couldn't stop himself from singing the line that had made him like this song to begin with. "Hush, you bird, my baby's a-sleepin'! Maybe she's got a dream worth a-keepin'. Whoa! you team, and just keep a-creepin' at a slow clip clop. Don't you hurry with the surrey with the fringe on the top!"
Humming, he started the song over again, not wanting to wake Tyra up by stopping any more than he'd wanted to wake her up by turning the tape off or stopping the car all those years ago. And anyway, it worked ok as a lullaby, especially the end bit, which he hadn't had to change at all because it really was about driving home while . . . well, in the story, it was the man's girlfriend falling asleep on his shoulder, but his little girl fit the bill well enough because he was pretty sure he could never love anyone romantically as much as he loved his daughter paternally, anyway.
After a while he switched to humming "Many a New Day," because with a baby girl in the back, he'd done plenty of thinking about that song, too – Tyra didn't seem like she was growing up into the kind of woman who moaned about her love life, which was a relief – and so he remembered it pretty well. And when that got old, he switched back to "The Surrey With The Fringe On Top" because he realized that he could only remember the A side of the cassette – he'd listened to it more often than the B side because he liked this song so much, and with the exception of the actual song "Oklahoma", the B side was all muddled up in his mind.
He was still humming "The Surrey" when the X-men found them, Kitty and Kurt phasing and poofing straight into the cave beside him to get them out, and he kept doing it because the part of him that had been trained to keep Tyra asleep when she was an infant wouldn't quite let him stop even now.
Everyone else looked incredulous, but he wasn't surprised at all when Tyra slept straight through the others' arrival, dozed against his shoulder all the way down to the car, and made it home to bed without ever waking up. Kids were unpredictable, mutant kids doubly so, but Tyra would always be Tyra, and it was nice to know that at least he knew his own kid better than anyone else did.