A/N: Written for the Female Character Appreciation Challenge (Ruki) and Digimon Bingo – the non-flash version for #672 – prompt: "Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time" Sylvia Plath, both on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in profile).

A Dead Daddy

Ruki had loved her father. Maybe she'd loved him even more than she loved her mother. Because her father was the one who connected with her, the one she could watch a good soccer match with and run after and go shopping with and buy jeans and t-shirts and sneakers that she was comfortable in. Not like her mother who would try and dress her up like a doll and make her look pretty. She didn't want to look pretty. Not when looking pretty meant the entire world was looking at her mother – including people who had no business looking at her that way.

Ruki didn't like that; Ruki's father didn't like that either and Ruki automatically followed him because he was the one who did all the parental stuff with her: played with her when she was bored, took her out, walked her to and from school. Her mother went to all the parent things and tried to take her daughter out occasionally, when work allowed it – but Ruki had less fun on those outings, because she'd spend the rest of the time happy and muddy and suddenly she had to be prim and proper.

And when her parents started fighting loud enough to break the walls down, Ruki automatically took her father's side. It was the logical choice; she spent a lot more time with her father. Enjoyed her time more with him. And her mother would turn around sadly when she'd join in the screaming and her father would give her a hug.

And yet it was her father that left, left her and went away on a new life. Ruki didn't stop crying that first night, because he'd broken her heart like no lover could do an adult. Because she was just a child, and she'd loved her father more than her mother – and yet it was her mother she was still staying with, and her father was gone.

'It's your fault!' she'd screamed at her mother. 'You made him leave me!'

She ignored the wounded look on her mother's face; she didn't care. She might have even hated her mother.

But that didn't matter. Her mother did the same things she always did, and a little extra, a bit of her father's share. And her father became a distant hand who wrote to her twice a year and sent her a little present. He might have rung at the beginning, but Ruki had been mad and upset and refused to answer the phone. Her mother had refused for her own reasons, and eventually changed the number.

They still had his, but both of them were too angry, too upset, to call. And it wasn't until the D-reaper that they both got over that, when they met Renamon, and Juri's grief – the complete loss of a parent that someone like Ruki had taken for granted. Because she'd just struck her father from her life; she could have gotten him back, kept him, If she'd put the effort in. Not Juri. Not poor Juri; her mother was dead forever.

But then she lost Renamon to the Digital World and spend too long grieving. Because when she finally picked up her cell phone and dialled the number on a well-worn card, it was to receive condolences, closure and nothing more.

And she was worse off than Juri now, who hadn't wasted so many years and lost the chance to say two very simple things: "goodbye", and "I love you". And the news had been given to her so casual, so detached – it was like she wasn't his daughter but just an acquaintance who was getting the news a little late.

And she couldn't be mad; she'd wasted all that time being mad. She'd cut him out of her life instead of tried to keep him, and now he was dead thinking she didn't think a damn thing about him.

She didn't. She thought a lit.