"I already avoid being with people," Dark corrected, setting the mug and tie down. "Now I have a motivation to avoid other fathers in particular." Then he took Xander's present from him and opened the box, taking out the engraved piece of wood. Originally, he had taken it out of the box upside down, but when he turned it the right way so he could read it properly, his breath caught in his throat as the words hit him. The sunflower he didn't recognize the symbolism of, but that wasn't what he was focused on.
Thank you for being the father you needed.
Daizi had said something similar to him a few weeks ago, and it had run him over then, too. He saw the imperfect carved marks, and how Xander had, clearly, tried to make him something using the materials he preferred, and understood why that was important.
He really had needed a different father. Deserved a different father, probably, but he still found that difficult to admit. And still needed, and still deserved, but that was even more difficult, too. Once he had been as small and as innocent as Ivy was now. He had once wanted toys to play with and been afraid of the dark. And then he got older, and he made spelling mistakes and liked playing on the swings. He played chess and watched tanks roll up his street and went to sleep not knowing if his home was next to be hit. And at no point was he comforted when he was scared or stressed or crying. At no point when he was praised when he succeeded in something new. Instead, his father was, to him, just as bad as the shadows in the corner when he was little, and just as bad as bombs, or worse, and he was inescapable until he was gone, and then he had to move somewhere new, alone, and had to fall in love and have his heart broken alone, and then fall in love again. He graduated alone, grieved alone, and struggled alone. Cooger had been able to call his parents and his grandparents, Daizi had been able to call her father and her aunts, and who could he talk to? Who could he call?
He got married, he had a baby, he adopted children, and... Who did he have to show him to? Who held him the way Saladin had held Daizi? For all his flaws and all the ways he had harmed his daughter, he traveled across an ocean to be there for her, in the end. Even if his father lived, he would not have made the journey. And Dark would not have wanted him to, because the man his father had been, was not the father he had needed.
But according to Xander, and according to Daizi, he was. And he couldn't save himself, but he was saving his boys, and his daughter was never doing to know what it was like to need to be saved.
"Thank you," He said, softly, and then, furrowing his eyebrows, "and--you are... welcome."
