Fic: Ain't That a Shame (Logan/Daken) - R - 1/2
Title: Ain’t That a Shame (1/2)
Pairing: Logan/Daken
Rating: R
Summary: Logan and Daken get another chance at revenge-and at being family.
Genre: Angst. Hurt/Comfort.
Warnings: Intimacy issues (leading to eventual sniktcest).
Ain’t That a Shame
Each day they drove, they got farther away. From other people, from the city, from what was expected of them. Each mile they put between them and the West coast took them further away from themselves. The story of what they had once been to each other-absentee father to a criminally pathological son-waned in its emptiness. It fell apart.
They reinvented themselves mile by mile, town by town, piece by piece. As they drove they started over.
Logan became what he had always wanted to be: a better, stronger, younger version of himself. He strove to remake himself as the man he once was-or perhaps as the man he had once pretended to be. He stopped eating meat. He threw away his cell phone. He even lost a little weight. This was him, he told himself. The real him. The him who had won Itsu over all those years ago (prettiest girl in the village). Peaceful convert to the simple life. Dutiful husband. Expectant father-of a child he hoped was a girl and dreamed was a boy.
Daken’s desire was more direct: he wanted to become her.
By the fifth day, they had stopped speaking English.
***
At first their objective was simple: hunt down the Red Right Hand man and everyone who had a damn thing to do with Logan’s recent incarceration in hell. Kill everyone. Make them suffer just as Logan had been made to suffer; torture them just as Logan’s loved ones had been tortured.
Daken was along for the ride.
Logan knew he shouldn’t involve Daken for one crucial reason: He couldn’t trust his motivations. Daken claimed that he also had a stake in seeing the Red Right Hand Man suffer-the guy had hurt him too, after all. But Logan was skeptical. Daken was not, Logan knew, about beefing or grudging unless there was something in it for him. He didn’t take things personally; he was not the sort of man to lie awake at night worrying about settling scores unless he could profit from them in some way. And besides, the last two times Logan had involved Daken in a revenge plot? Kid had ended up working for Norman Osborn and then bedding down with Romulus.
If this goes shitside, Logan thought, that’s on me.
But there was something else going on here. Daken’s earnestness kept Logan from benching him. Or from tying him to fence to deal with later. “He played us,” Daken said simply as they drove together. He looked at Logan and shrugged. “He played us both. No one uses us against each other-except us.”
“Except that you were on board too,” Logan said. He was well aware that Daken had been something of a Red Right Hand collaborator. He was also certain that Daken had no regrets about what he'd done, that he was incapable of regret, maybe.
Daken smiled. “Let me tell you something, old man. The day I kill you? You won’t even know you’re dead. Because I’m that good. But sending you to hell was just tacky.”
“Glad you realize that now,” Logan said, one hand on the steering wheel. He gave Daken a quick glance.
Something had changed. Something inside of Daken was different. Logan knew it. He felt it. Smelled it. Daken was off tilt.
The question was why.
Logan drove them through the desert and didn’t put on the air conditioner until the thermometer read a hundred and five. Daken didn’t complain. He simply rolled down the window and dangled his non-tattooed arm out the window. He looked at Logan. He didn’t smile.
At night they stayed in nice places-none of that seedy roach motel stuff for Daken. These places weren’t especially fancy, but for Logan, who was used to sleeping outside or in his car, a Best Western or Marriot was an extravagance.
“I’ll pay for it,” Daken offered on the second morning when he caught Logan taking a long look at the printed-out invoice that the housekeeping staff had slipped under the door. They were standing in the lobby getting ready to check out. “I’ve got the coin.”
“I’ve got it,” Logan said. He blinked. He took his Utopia credit card out of his wallet and stepped up to the hotel counter. (Later he’d have time to explain this to Scott.)
“You sure, Wolverine?” Daken smiled but his expression was blank. “I’m happy to contribute to the cause. In any way that I can. And I always know how to balance my checkbook to keep things on the up and up.”
“Next time,” Logan whispered and handed the credit card to the cashier. He felt Daken staring at him. His son might have been different, but he still knew how to make Logan uneasy.
“I’ll put the stuff in the car,” Daken said. He bent over and picked up their duffel bags.
As Logan waited for the cashier to print his receipt, he watched Daken leave through the revolving door. Kid was dressed as always-tapered leather jacket over a vest and dark pants. Chain wallet dangling from his pocket. But outside in the sun-bleached morning, his body seemed made of light.
***
They drove. They drove through the desert and the plains. In Oklahoma they ate at a diner with a jukebox and a sixteen-page menu. Then they shook down a couple of small-time Tulsa cartel lackeys. By the time they made it to Kansas, they had a general idea of the bigger picture. Things were starting to add up.
They were tired. Daken seemed very tired. In a hotel room outside of Topeka, he took off his tie and laid it on the bed. Then he unbuttoned his shirt.
“Taking a shower?” Logan asked. He sat on the end of the other bed and reached for the remote. (So far they had always managed to get rooms with two double beds. Daken constantly asserted that he wanted his own room-Logan snored and groaned in his sleep, he said, and he hadn’t been able to get much rest since they’d started traveling together-but when each night came he simply tucked himself into the adjacent bed and didn’t say anything.)
Daken kicked off his shoes and set them next to the nightstand. “No.” Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. Minutes later, Logan heard water running.
Logan took out his cell phone and flipped it open. He thought about calling Melita. But then the water stopped and he heard Daken’s voice. He turned down the TV and listened. Daken was having a conversation in Spanish. “¿Está Martinez?” he said. “Bueno.”
Then, silence. Logan was still. He listened. Then Daken called to him through the door. “Wolverine? Come in here. I have to tell you something.”
Logan got up and went to see what Daken wanted. He gently pushed the door open and stepped inside the small, narrow bathroom with its fogged up mirror and low white toilet and perfumed smell. Daken was sitting in the bathtub, the shower curtain pulled so that Logan could see the upper half of his body.
Logan looked long enough only to size up the situation. Then he looked away. “What’s wrong?”
“That was Martinez. He’s got a lock on Salvidar, but we’ve got to double back and go to San Antonio. Maybe even Mexico.”
“What?” Logan said. “Mexico? What about St. Louis?”
“It’s a jerk-off.”
“So what? What’s in San Antonio? Or Mexico? And which is it?”
Daken simply stared, chin tilted toward his bare chest. He rested his arms against the side of the tub.
“I say we go to St. Louis,” Logan said. “Then, if that doesn’t work out, we double back. We take it as it comes. We’ll find this Martinez before he jerks us off even more.”
Daken shrugged. “It’s your call. But if we go to St. Louis and Salvidar slips farther away, then we’ve got even more miles between us and him. Not to mention the chance that someone could tip him off. He could be in Argentina before we catch up to him.”
“But we will,” Logan said. He studied the bathroom. Daken’s cell phone sat next to the sink. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’re taking a bath. You in pain or something?”
Daken glanced down at his body. Shrugged again. “I like to soak sometimes. Why would there be something wrong?”
“It’s a hotel bathtub,” Logan said. “It’s . . . not all that clean.”
“You’re an expert in cleanliness?”
Logan thought. He wasn’t nearly as fastidious as Daken-he wore the same clothes for weeks on end and sometimes dried himself off with damp and moldy-smelling towels-but he wouldn’t take a bath at a hotel. He had the vague idea that people used hotel bathtub drains for nothing good.
“I cleaned it,” Daken said. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Trust me. It’s sparkling and new. You want to get in with me? Wash off that gas station bathroom smell? Or you can wait for me to finish and enjoy my old bathwater.”
Logan paused. Then he put the toilet lid down and sat. He made a pointed effort to not look at Daken. (He knew that Daken wanted him to look. By this time, he was well-versed in Daken’s intimidation tactics. Like the Celts, Daken went naked into battle.) “You sure you’re okay?”
“Your suspicion-masquerading-as-concern is touching, Wolverine.” Daken splashed the water a little. “My cell phone is on the sink there. You can check the numbers if you like. No, I didn’t converse with anyone besides Martinez. Call him. Get him to confirm what I just told you.”
“I didn’t come in here to-”
“But you were thinking it, and probably for good reason. After all, how can you be so sure that I’m not going to do you like last time?”
Logan gave Daken a quick sideways glance, careful not to look too long. “I can’t. I can’t be sure of anything.”
“Ah,” Daken said. He seemed to relax, settling into the bathtub. “Go ahead and check it. You want to. Let’s not pretend that there’s trust here. You and I? We’ve never trusted each other. And we’re not going to start now. So do what you’ve wanted to do since you walked in here. Check it.”
“If you’ve done anything, you could have just as easily erased it,” Logan said. “I’d have to pull your phone records to know what you’ve really been up to.”
Creases formed at the corners of Daken’s eyes.
Logan set both hands on his knees to get up. “I’m thinking food. You want?”
“Hmm, I don’t know.” Daken sniffed. “In this place? This is meat-packing country, so burger and fries is probably the only thing they can’t fuck up. So get me that. Rare, extremely rare. Run-through-a-warm-room rare. Fries extra, extra crispy. And a bottle of cabernet. Nothing later than 2005.” He laughed.
“What else?” Logan said. “A hooker and a hand-job?”
“And a Cuban cigar.” Then he waited another beat and laughed again. “Listen to us. We’re joking together. We’re joking. You’ve actually made me laugh.”
***
Daken’s hamburger was overcooked and dry, but he didn’t complain. He sat at the foot of the bed cross-legged, hair wrapped up in a towel. He ate. He drank wine out of a plastic hotel room cup.
Logan wanted morning to come already. He wanted to be on the road. He hadn’t quite decided what they should do-double back to Texas or keep moving to St. Louis-but he had a few hours to decide. It was one in the morning and they were parked for the night, and neither of them was good enough to go anywhere without a few hours’ sleep.
He watched TV. He flipped between CNN and MSNBC. Nothing much was going on.
“You keep track of things, yes,” Daken said. He leaned back on his elbows and nodded at the TV.
Logan realized he was asking as question. He wondered-and this wasn’t the first time he wondered this-if it was evident only to him that Daken spent much of his time thinking in another language. Most of the time his accent was flawless-if you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t have any idea that English wasn’t his first language, or even that he wasn’t North American. But occasionally he slipped up: phrased questions as statements or used a strange, awkward preposition.
“I don’t watch much TV,” Logan admitted. “Don’t have the attention span for it. But sometimes shit happens, and you have to know.”
Daken shifted so that he was lying on his side facing Logan. He was wearing nothing but boxers and a white tee shirt. “Right. Must be a slow news week, though. You haven’t gotten a call from anybody. Not the X-Men. Not the Avengers.”
Logan looked up.
Daken smiled, but he seemed to look past Logan. “Not that other team, either. The one you keep a secret.”
Logan rose from the bed and went to the table in the corner of the room. His suitcase sat on the chair. He had to be careful now. Careful not to lie or Daken might know, might see that he was concealing something. Daken was bluffing. He had to be. This was nothing but a fishing expedition. Daken had heard a rumor, that was all. And with what Logan did and who he was, there were always a lot of rumors. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Daken sat up and finished toweling his hair. He tossed the towel across the back of a chair before going back to his bed and pulling back the covers. “Here I thought we were finally leveling, and now you want to be coy. Heart rate’s picking up a bit. Palms are a little sweaty. Did I see you blink?”
Logan stopped in the middle of unbuttoning his shirt and looked up. His heart rate was steady. His palms were dry. “Second-rate interrogation techniques. Thought you were better than that.”
“Oh, I don’t care about what you’ve done, Wolverine,” Daken said. “And I’m not coming after you. I know you think I want to squeeze you for more information so I can use it down the road. But I don’t, believe it or not. I already know enough, anyway-I don’t need any more leverage. For someone in your position? The slightest hint of an indiscretion is a threat to your hard-earned status. Believe me, I know. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it already. So ask yourself why I haven’t.”
These were familiar waters. Since when hadn’t Daken dangled something over his head? As he stepped out of his pants and tossed them onto the chair, he wondered what he might do if Daken decided to snitch about X-Force. Certainly Daken’s accusations were unsubstantiated-even if he generated some kind of proof, it was unlikely to be convincing-but superheroes had been hung out to dry for less. Last thing Logan needed was for the Avengers or the Fantastic Four to start turning over rocks. Eventually X-Force would be under one of them.
He pulled back the covers and paused, remonstrating with his discomfort. Daken wouldn’t yak. He was certain of this. His son wasn’t the type to relinquish his leverage for nothing in return. No-Daken liked his blackmail material. He liked to hold onto it. It was a way to fill his emptiness.
In thirty seconds, Logan had moved from pity for Daken, to anger, and back to pity again.
“It’s not a rhetorical question, Wolverine,” Daken said. He leaned back against the headboard and pulled his knees to his chest. “Why? Why haven’t I said anything?”
Logan was tired. He hated this conversation-hated its pointlessness. “I don’t know, Daken. Maybe because there’s no truth in what you’re saying. Maybe because your accusations are bullshit and a waste of everyone’s time. Including yours.”
“I’ve got a lot of time,” Daken said.
“Good for you,” Logan said, climbing into bed. “I don’t. Especially not for this horseshit. You want to call somebody? Just do it already. But Christ, I’m fucking tired of this pony show. It’s always the same. Fuckin’ sack up or shut up.” He slid over to the other side of the mattress and reached for the light.
“Wait,” Daken said. “Logan, wait.”
Logan stopped, his hand under the lampshade.
Daken crouched in his bed on his hands and knees. Like a small child. Then he knelt upright. Put one foot on the floor. Then another. Stood between their bed so that he was hovering over Logan. “You’re not-you’re not listening to me.”
Logan pulled his hand back from the light and braced himself. Then he looked up.
He expected to see in Daken’s face what he always saw-that strange emptiness, that lust for power, that same proprietary gaze that said I own you. You’ll do whatever I want. But in the soft hotel room light, Daken was inscrutable. He blinked. Held his hands to his sides. Appeared bizarrely unfocused.
Perplexed and a little frightened, Logan sat up in bed and planted both feet on the ground.
Daken twitched, pulling both hands up in a defensive posture. He stepped back. His eyes were blank, as always-but they was searching, Logan thought, not shifting.
Daken relaxed and then stared at the floor. “I didn’t-I didn’t tell. Wolverine. Wolverine. I didn’t tell.”
Logan studied him. He wondered where else inside of Daken words had gotten lost.
***
At first they just sat there. Across from each other. Daken sat on his mattress, bare feet braced against the metal bed frame. He balanced his elbows against his knees and hunched his back. Logan kept both feet on the ground. He angled his body toward Daken.
Daken talked.
This is how Logan thought of his son now: a sketch artist who gave the barest outline before choosing to fill things in, his order random and unparticular. Logan had assumed that Daken didn’t have much interiority. He was surprised to learn that his son was both unbelievably blunt and strangely elliptical. Certain things he seemed to confront head-on. Other things he liked to talk around. Sometimes he was abstract. Other times very thorough-obsessive about details-about what someone wore or ate, about how someone dropped a coin from a hotel room balcony and it didn’t make a sound.
“I didn’t realize he was Russian mob until it was too late,” Daken said at one point, his eyes focused on some spot on the wall above Logan’s head. “Luckily I kept Romulus out of it. I kept him from finding out how badly I had fucked up.”
Another point: “I don’t Norman ever knew how close Bullseye came to raping and killing him and cutting him up. Bullseye would have put a million little pieces of Norman into the New York City drinking water. Norman owes me his life-or whatever is left of it, anyway. I kept things calm.”
Who was Daken talking to? Logan kept having to remind himself that this strange soliloquy was for him-or perhaps the him that Daken had invented. This was Daken, he thought. Unused to having any audience except for himself.“When you do battle with gods, things become unpredictable. Complicated. You think you’re staring down a certainty, when all you’ve got is speculation. Lies.” His eyes fell on Logan. “You know what I mean?”
Logan did-sort of. He nodded.
Daken put his feet down and sat up straight. “Of course you do. It’s-it’s like with him. He was always there. There was certainty in that. It was something you could guarantee. But you never knew what he would do next. He told me more than he told anyone-I was his, you know-but I still didn’t know what he might do. He was beyond unpredictable. It wasn’t that he was incomprehensible, either. It was that he was completely deadening.”
Logan pressed both hands against the mattress. He didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say-Daken’s narrative allowed no intrusion. This was not a dialogue. Tell me what he did to you, he wanted to say. But he knew Daken would offer him nothing solid, nothing complete. And besides, he already knew. He already knew everything about the man who took Daken away from him.
“Here,” he said. “Here.” He inched to the right and glanced down at the empty space on his mattress. Then he looked at Daken.
Daken understood. He crossed the threshold between their beds and sat down next to Logan.
The bed was big enough for both of them to sleep comfortably without touching. That night they lay next to each other, Logan on his back and Daken on his side facing away from Logan. When he awoke in the morning, he felt the cold bottoms of Daken’s bare feet resting against his right shin.
The next morning they awoke. In the hotel room, they boiled water with the coffee maker and made tea. Then they got ready to go. To Texas. Then Mexico. Then the world.
***
Daken found him in the hotel bar. He’d just finished using the payphones near the restrooms. They were outside of Dallas, confirming some facts and planning to rest for a few hours. Sidling up to Logan, he touched his shoulder and signaled to the bartender. “My dad,” he said. “My dad needs another whiskey.”
Logan looked down at the ice clinking in his glass. He set it in front of him.
“Your dad,” the bartender said, approaching with the bottle in her hand. She glanced at both of them and smiled. “He doesn’t look old enough to be your dad.”
“He started early,” Daken said, his hand grazing Logan’s arm. “I didn’t even know he was my dad when I was growing up. I spent half my childhood thinking he was my brother.”
“Wow, no shit,” the bartender said, eyes widening. “That must have been intense.”
Logan listened, both awed and irked that he was being discussed while present.
“It certainly wasn’t boring,” Daken said. “But we’ve come through it, and here we are on the other side. Better than ever.” Resting his hand against Logan’s shoulder, he waited until the bartender was out of earshot. Then, in Japanese: “I want to go upstairs now. I’m tired.”
Logan turned his head to look at Daken. “What? You didn’t find anything out?”
“Not here, Logan. Upstairs.”
In the room they were sharing, Daken debriefed him. Said there was something big going down in Corpus Christi. And San Antonio wasn’t going to be a total bust-they just had to be stealthy about it. As he talked he unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up. “We’ll get the drop on him tomorrow,” Daken said. “And we’ll squeeze him until we get what we need.”
“Maybe I should go alone,” Logan said. “Two of us might attract attention.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You need me. You need me to pull this off.”
Logan hated to admit that Daken was right. Daken’s stealth made him indispensable to this revenge plot, but that wasn’t all. What he possessed in sheer doggedness he lacked in empathy. He was deaf to other people’s protests, their suffering. There was a limit to how much human suffering Logan could stomach, but Daken had no such limit.
And these were traits Logan didn’t want to see right now, much less exploit.
“Okay,” he said, “we go tomorrow.” But in his mind he envisioned waiting until Daken was asleep or in the bathroom and slipping out of the hotel on his own. It wasn’t that he wanted to keep Daken from doing something bad. (Daken had already done a lot of bad things-many of them right in front of Logan.) It was that he didn’t want to be the reason for another bad thing. Or its audience.
He glanced down at the bedspread. There was only one bed. This seemed a non-issue now. They hadn’t asked for separate beds, and they hadn’t complained when they had seen the room.
Daken sniffed and then gave him a hard look. “Don’t bullshit me, Wolverine. You don’t want me along for this ride. Fine, that’s fine. If you tell me to leave? I’ll go. Just say the word. And I’ll leave you to your own devices.”
Logan angled his body away from Daken. He went to sit down on the bed. “Hell was something that was done to me, not you. Don’t take this the wrong way-well, take it whatever fuckin' way you want-but I don’t understand why you’re so interested. In this whole revenge idea. This is my fight.” He swallowed and thought about the people he’d left behind. “My people. My victims.”
“You think I don’t have a stake?” Daken said. “I told you-I told you my stake.”
“And I don’t recall it being all that compelling.”
Daken puffed up with anger. “What are you talking about, Wolverine?” He set his hands on his hips. Then he dropped them to his sides. And when his voice came, it was quiet. Almost wounded. “I told you everything. Last night. I told you. I told you everything that I had ever done. And you? You’ve still told me nothing. I don’t know what more I could say to you-what the fuck kind of evidence you’re looking for.”
“What?”
“I told you my story. I told you about Romulus. About Norman. About the Red Right Hand.” He turned away. Then he rested against the dresser. “And it’s not about showing you mine so you’d show me yours. Not that I’m above that-but I didn’t tell you just to get information. No, I didn’t. I could get whatever I want from you anyway-and we both know that. But it’s not about whoring myself out to you, either. It’s about disclosure. About . . . knowing things. . . . Each other.”
Logan stared at his son. He recalled Daken’s long, wandering, elliptical speech. Was it possible that Daken had considered this a confession? An overdue attempt at getting absolution? Had Logan misinterpreted his son so severely that he’d assumed Daken was simply talking to hear himself talk? “Jesus, kid.”
Daken shifted, turned around. He placed both hands on the dresser and propped himself up, staring at himself in the mirror.
“Jesus, kid,” he said again, as though it might clarify things. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything,” Daken said. “I want to get what other people get from their parents. Their entitlement. The story of how they came to exist.” He looked at Logan in the mirror. “I want to know everything about myself-starting with who she was and why you fucked her.”
Fucked was said with a tenderness Logan didn’t know was possible.
“Don’t tell me she was beautiful,” Daken continued. He looked at his face again. His voice softened. “You’ve told me that before and-and I know. But certainly there was something else about her that you liked. That made you . . . stop there. I know the town. I’ve been there. Jasmine Falls.” He whispered the name in Japanese. “It’s a shithole. A dark patch on the map. You wouldn’t have settled there if there hadn’t been some other reason.”
Logan stood but he didn’t approach Daken. He stayed where he was.
Daken turned to face him. “Was she . . . was she like . . .”
“She was kind,” Logan said, but the words came out raspy. He cleared his throat and went on. “And smart. And open-hearted.”
Daken’s gaze steadied for a second, and then he tucked his hands in his pockets and looked away. “That could be anyone. Forget it. You’re no help.”
“Open-minded,” Logan continued. “She didn’t care who I was. What I’d done.”
“Did you tell her everything?” Daken’s gaze swept over him.
“No,” Logan admitted. “But a lot.”
“Still vague. So she was a woman who didn’t scare easily. A lot of women like dangerous men. Even in Japan such is a woman isn’t hard to come by. For them, a dangerous man is just another thing to brag about doing.”
“She wasn’t like that.” Logan paused. Thought. “She wasn’t like us.”
Daken went still. Then he brought his eyes to meet Logan’s. “So I am. I’m just like you then.” It was more a statement than a question-a relinquishment.
“Oh.” Logan realized what this was about-he began to understand the shape of this investigation. Daken wanted to know what he had inherited from her, what small quirks they shared, what traits he possessed that lay outside of the ill-fated DNA Logan had gifted him.
He went over and sat at the end of the bed. Waited a moment. “Not-” He thought and then found his words. “Your mother. She had knack for beauty. And I don’t just mean that she was beautiful. But she made things lovely. Places. People.”
Daken rolled his eyes. “Again, nothing that couldn’t be said in any woman’s eulogy. So she was a brilliant homemaker. Bravo.” He touched his chin. “I always knew that this conversation would be a waste of my time. Nothing but a window into your prosaic little mind.”
“Like I said, she was smart. Well-read. Read . . . books. Other things. Liked music but didn’t have the opportunity to play it-not in those days. Had friends but kept mainly to herself. I think she was a little guarded. But she didn’t seem it. Might have been cultural, but I don’t think so. She probably just seemed sort of closed-off because of the war.”
Daken placed his hands on the dresser again and stared into the mirror.
“The war took a lot of people away,” he continued. “Family. Villagers. So when I came . . .”
Daken glanced over his shoulder at him.
“I don’t know, Daken.” Logan touched the rough patch of skin on the back of his neck.
“You saved her. From being alone. In a country where all the young men were dead.”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. But being with me? I got the definite feeling that it was a choice she made. Not something she felt compelled to do-not out of love or obligation. In a different reality, in a different time, she could have been alone. And accepting of that.” When the words came, they were both more devastating and more affirming than he had intended them to be: “I wasn’t somebody she needed.”
He thought of himself like Daken at this moment-like a sketch artist. He was venturing an outline of the things he had imagined were true all these years but hadn’t been able to say. Itsu had been a good woman, but he hadn’t been indispensable to her. He had loved her, but she had chosen him, and she might have loved another equally if her life had gone differently. At the same time, she had chosen him, and it wasn’t a decision to be taken lightly, or an act to be dismissed.
Daken stared at Logan in the mirror. Then, suddenly, he smiled. “So she settled for you?”
“No-no,” Logan said. “I’m not saying that.” But then: what was he saying? “I’m saying-well, maybe. Maybe you could see it that way. But what I mean is that the woman left no stone unturned. She didn’t care what people thought of her. Going off with some white guy and everything. She had-” How to put this delicately? Screw it, he thought. “She had a pair.”
Daken hunched over the dresser. His shoulders began to twitch, and Logan realized that he was laughing. He pushed himself upright and turned around. “Oh Wolverine. I always knew you made up in poetry what you lacked in self-worth. That’s priceless. Oh well. At least we’re getting somewhere interesting.”
***
He searched his memories, pillaged his mind. Tried to articulate his thoughts about Itsu-thoughts he had kept so long compartmentalized in a separate part of his past. She loved eggs on rice. She had unusually long legs for such a petite woman. She didn’t mind insects but disliked rodents, hating the field mice that made their way into their brand-new country house, even going so far as to set traps for them. But she let spiders take up residence in the high-ceilinged corners of their bedroom.
Daken lay next to him in bed. A half an hour into the conversation, he turned toward Logan and tucked his hands under his cheek. His hair grazed Logan’s bare shoulder.
They met when Logan first came to the village, he said. He loved Itsu when he first saw her, thought she was confident and beautiful. But she had seen him before that. Three days before he made contact with the villagers, he’d been staying in a meadow a few miles upstream. She had been wandering there-she had loved to walk in the woods-and through the trees she saw him. She was so still that he didn’t detect her presence. (The wind must have carried her scent in the other direction.) She watched him as he killed a fish in the stream, cooked it and ate it.
“So my mother spied on you,” Daken said. “How voyeuristic was my parents’ courtship.”
“She didn’t tell anyone,” he said. “She could have gone back to the village and sent twenty men after me. But she didn’t.” He tilted his head to look at Daken. “She saw me spear the fish with my claws, but she didn’t tell anyone. Not even me.” He thought about it. It wasn’t until they were engaged that Logan resolved to level with her; the prospect of telling her his secrets made him almost physically ill. He worried that she would leave him. Then he worried that she’d stay with him out of fear.
Instead she touched his hand, his wrist. They stood outside one day in the pre-dusk light and she told him that she knew the secret. And she also knew that he didn’t mean to hurt them, to hurt anyone-he hadn’t so much as raised a hand against anyone since he’d come to Jasmine Falls. He was gentle and kind. So they would keep the secret-together.
Her reaction was puzzling. He still thought a lot about it. Why would a young woman not be repulsed by a gruff, somber Westerner with claws? Perhaps history was to blame. For a girl who had witnessed firebombings, who had seen children blown apart, perhaps a man with a slight genetic quirk was not so horrifying. Or perhaps she felt that his mutation represented safety and security. If people couldn’t hurt him, they couldn’t hurt her either. A husband with claws could keep the world away.
Logan frowned as he spoke. He wasn’t even speaking English anymore-he was working back through the years, thinking in the language in which he’d known Itsu.
These things he couldn't have articulated in English.
“I don’t think history explains everything,” he said. “I think she accepted me because she was different. She stayed with me because it was who she was. She was strong.”
Daken curled against him, his face touching Logan’s shoulder. When the early-morning light finally touched their bed, he got up and went into the bathroom. Logan rose and got dressed. It was time to go.
***
They tracked down their target and dragged him to an off-the-beaten-path area of town, to a warehouse. “No one’s around to hear you scream,” Daken said before putting a plastic bag over the man’s head. “Now tell us what we want to know.”
Tied to a chair, the man rocked and cried out, his face frozen in horror, his mouth open in a scream that wouldn’t quite come. Inside the plastic bag, he looked strangely prenatal. Daken tightened his grip. Squeezed the bag around the man’s neck.
“Wait, wait,” Logan said in Japanese. He motioned for Daken to remove the bag. In English: “Tell us who you work for.”
“Blow me,” the man said.
Daken laughed and put the bag over the man’s head again.
“Wait!” the man gasped, sucking in the plastic. “Wolverine!”
Daken yanked the bag off again and stood with his arms crossed.
“Wolverine, big hero. Yeah, that’s you. Boy, don’t they have you wrong. You’re really going to let this cumstain torture me to death!”
Logan set his hands on his knees. He looked up at Daken. Then he looked at the man. “No, I’m not. I’m going to do it myself.” He reached for the bag.
“Fine, fine!” the man cried. He whimpered twice. Then he told them what they needed to know.
***
Another hotel, this one not-so-nice. The U.S.-Mexican border. Outside the wind was dry, but inside Daken drank wine and kicked off his shoes and sat Indian-style on the bed, his feet tucked under his thighs.
Logan also kicked off his shoes and took off his jacket. He helped himself to the wine. Then he collapsed into the chair in the corner, a red and yellow chair that looked unwholesome in its ugliness.
Neither spoke.
Finally Logan said, “Oaxaca. That’s far. That’ll take us days.”
“Shush, Logan. No shop-talk right now.” He reached back and touched his hair. Then he began to tell a story.
His adoptive father was bookish, and Daken was the perfect child for him to pass off as his own. He was obedient. Somewhat moody. Bright-but not so bright that he might rebel before a decent, ripe age. His father taught him languages, geography, religious terminology. He made flashcards. He sat across from his son every night and drilled him. He bribed him-not with tangible rewards, but with affection. If Daken got everything right, his father would praise him enthusiastically and smile, sometimes going so far as to touch him, give him some small token of physical affection. Just a pat on the shoulder was enough to keep the other boys’ mockery from hurting him too much. The other boys might have had true parents; they were pure. But in school they were merely average, coming home each day to play stupid games in the courtyard. Daken felt superior to them because he earned his father’s affection. It wasn’t something just given to him because he was alive.
When he was eight, his father entered him in the school’s academic contest. “You will win,” his father said. “There is no one else.” When Daken was out of earshot, he told his wife: “If he does well, I think we should make plans to send him to school in America. Maybe England.” Daken was not meant to hear him.
He was disquieted. Then, devastated. His father was trying to send him someplace else. Didn’t he realize the reason for his son’s academic success? If the rewards were taken away-the closeness, the praise-then what motivation did he have?
The contest was a public affair, held in the school’s small auditorium. He flubbed it. Deliberately. Badly. Visibly. He gave half-hearted correct answers to the easy, stupid questions, and then he began to give calculatedly wrong answers to the more intermediate ones. His father sat in the third row, and even though he avoided his gaze, he knew he was disappointed. He could sense the disappointment, and it both frightened and piqued him, but he went forward anyway. Soon the other boys in the audience were giggling. He was asked to sit down.
After the contest, he went home with his parents. His father never said anything, but Daken knew he had brought disgrace on his family. His father didn’t understand why his boy had thrown the contest the way he had. So gone were the private tutoring sessions, the closeness, the praise. Daken realized all too late how stupid he had been. In trying to maintain what he had, he lost everything.
Logan stood from the chair as if pulling himself from a dream. He stood beside the bed, next to where Daken sat. He raised his hand and Daken leaned forward, closing the space between them. Logan cupped his cheek, his chin. He ran fingers along Daken’s smooth face and touched the bare skin of his head. Then he touched his hair. He remembered Itsu’s hair-how straight and fine it was, and how he loved it when she wore it down-and he knew that this fixation on a woman’s hair made him so bland, so like most other men.
In bed that night they were closer. Their bodies touched. Daken twined his fingers through Logan’s and asked for more details about his parents’ courtship, their young marriage. Logan spared nothing. He felt hypnotized by his own memories, by his own words. They waited until they were married to sleep together-of course. He hadn’t so much as kissed her before they had their ceremony. She got pregnant right away, so soon he suspected it might have been on their wedding night or shortly after. He always felt slightly bad about that, always felt that maybe he should have been more careful with her. “Not that I didn’t want you,” he said hurriedly, glancing down at Daken, who was resting against his chest. “I-I did. It’s just that she was young.”
Daken set his chin on Logan’s chest and looked up. “So she hadn’t been with anybody else?”
“No, of course not.” He swallowed. He felt momentary guilt. He remembered how private Itsu had been. She wouldn’t be happy that he was talking about their sex life. She’s dead, he reminded himself. She doesn’t think anything anymore.
Daken fixed his eyes on him. Then he lay his head back down again.
He told Daken that Itsu had some morning sickness, but otherwise she enjoyed being pregnant. Looked forward to motherhood. (Was not as nervous about childbirth as she should have been, so Logan worried for the both of them.)
Logan knew he shouldn’t be sharing these details; they were personal, the stuff of the marriage bed, the stuff that most kids never wanted to know about their parents. And he shouldn’t have been telling Daken especially. He wondered how Daken might process this information-or worse, how he might use it. But who else could he tell? He’d been forced into silence for so long. Words had gotten lost.
He realized that he was crying. He’d probably been crying all night. He wondered what price he'd eventually have to pay for this disclosure, this opportunity to be close.
Daken snaked his arm around Logan’s waist and crouched above him in the dark. Then he gave him a single, close-mouthed kiss. Almost chaste. After it was finished, he settled against Logan again, threading his finger’s through his hair and pressing his face against his neck.