A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, b49 – write about gaining an understanding for something
Not a Father After All
There had been no love between them, and maybe that was why it was so easy to dream, to dream they weren't related, weren't constant disappointments to each other – but she had to wonder if he was even capable of disappointment, or if anger and yelling and heavy fists and drinking were the only things he was capable of…
That was cruel, Minda knew, but he was also a deplorable father, a deplorable man. He still lived only because others were too kind, or no better and no worse. At least none of them had powerful friends, friends that could shove a man to the maggots and be nothing short at the end.
But she was disappointed. He was not the father she saw other children possessed. He was not the man her teacher was, or the kind old woman and man who often called her to aid. Her father asked for help as well but never kindly. And he never showed her how, but there were other staff who'd deal with his heavy words and heavy fists because he paid them well, and he paid them well because his was the only inn in town and there was no need to make another one and get him to take his anger out on all those girls under his roof…
At least that was one good thing about his character. He had many a girl under his roof, including one of his own flesh and blood (or so she, and everybody else in that village, had thought), and as much as he yelled and threw things, including fists and boots, he never touched them otherwise. To the workers, it was a relief. To Minda, it was another separation from what a father should be and what hers was. And, back then, she was too young to know about sex and sexual behaviours. She only knew friendship, and familial love: a love she saw from others, towards others – but never from that man called her father.
And she grew up like that, loved by others enough to grow up, longing to escape but still healthy, still alive, still sane and undamaged. She grew up and longed to leave, waited until she'd worked enough (elsewhere of course, because she had to work at the inn for free and that and a roof over her head and food were about as much as she got for being his child) and saved enough and could hope to live off.
But then one day she was swept away by a dream and danger and adventure, and it all changed. Her life, her perspective – and she learnt the truths she'd always considered but never really believed, that she wasn't that man's child after all. And it didn't hurt at all, because there was no love lost between them and her real parents were dead and couldn't have hoped to spare her.
In fact, they had spared her – had spared her the fate that had stolen them and the rest of their race. And fate had spared her as well: spared her by this revelation, by this realisation – that she didn't need to have expected things like love from that man who his mother had picked to help hide her because of the very thing that made him incapable of love. And she couldn't be angry at her mother for that, couldn't be angry because the ones that she'd been hidden from had found her anyway, and they would have found her much sooner otherwise.
And he had taught her strength, if nothing else. The strength to trek through the wilderness of another world, because its thorns and branches scratching her were lighter than fists and pots and pans and broom handles. The strength to turn away from downed comrades and move on, because that was the only hope they had, the only way for the rest of them to live on. The strength to stand and choose between a paradise that looked perfect and a reality that wasn't – because her dreams had never lasted very long, before they'd been interrupted with him banging on her door and yelling at her to get back to work. So he had left his mark as a guardian to an orphan, not a father to his child – and since that's what they'd been, in the end, it had worked out fine after all.