Summary: Mr. Foley just wants to keep him safe. Does that make him a bad father? (A/N: Yes.)
Disclaimer: I'm just a pathetic teenage girl who imagines sexual tension between cartoon characters. If you sue, I'll plead insanity.
Additional Disclaimer: Remember this additional disclaimer from the Hotstreak chapter? The one saying that I didn't agree with the views of the character whose POV is represented? Well, I just want to make it clear that this goes double- triple- quadruple for this chapter. There isn't any hateful language, but instead a man attempting logic for opinions that I would like to make clear I don't consider logical in any way.
Rating: T for language, racist and homophobic themes.
Platonically
He just wanted him to be safe. Who could blame him, really? Things were very different then when he had grown up. Perverts snatching children off the streets, gangs and school shootings, drugs and rap music that take good kids like his son and convince them to rebel against their parents and steal and God knows what else, teen pregnancies, and AIDS, and more and more things that keep coming out.
Well, that's not what was so different. They had all that stuff around when he was a boy. He had seen those things all the time. He and his brothers had grown up in a bad neighborhood. He'd never forget his mother's expression when his brother Ryan had spent the night in prison after that bad fight, or how scared he had been when he had gotten robbed on his way home from school. No, the difference was the way people looked at it all, the way you had to look at it. It was the era of 'P.C.,' where parents were supposed to overlook these things, or accept them as normal. So what if your son listens to gang music, and wants to get an earring, and spends all of his time with people that look like the people who made his home growing up an unsafe place to live? In this new generation, this new world, he was supposed to forget all of that, pretend it never happened, and watch as his child is caught up in the mess.
He wasn't going too stand for it. Ever since Richie was born, he'd been working late nights, weekends, holidays, leaving Maggie to take care of the boy herself, and for what? So Richie could live in a place where they wouldn't have to worry about him walking to the bus and riding his scooter to the mall, so that he could get a good education and meet nice people, who wouldn't get him involved in all of that shit that he was supposed to overlook. But this society, this culture, was making his son blind to what was really going on. With the bang, with all those freaks running around town, and you knew which part of town they lived in, after all, and how many of them were people like the Foleys? None of them, just gangs of mutants that worried decent, hardworking people. And he was just supposed to overlook this?
Not for Richie. They told him that Richie was safe, that the places and people he spent time with were safe. But his son had been kidnapped by one of the mutants, and what would have happened if he hadn't been there to stop anything from happening? His son had been shot, and only God's grace had saved him from being fatally injured, hanging around those people. His son stayed out late at night, always with a different excuse, and came home looking tired and dazed, sometimes even bruised. And it frightened him. Was he a member of a gang? When he overhead the lyrics of that music he listened too, when he heard the way his son lied and ran off and barely spoke to him, when he saw the clothes he wore and the pierced ear that Maggie had talked him into allowing even though there were only two kinds of boys who pierced their ears, and Sean didn't want his son to be either one, well, then, he was afraid.
Hawkins, who'd had the audacity to lecture him, to look down at him, to treat him like he was a bad father- what did he know? He was only trying to protect his family. The man had no right to lecture him. He could talk all day, defending the hoods and the criminals on the streets, overlooking the problems and being politically correct and looking down on Sean for not following suit, but the truth was obvious, because Maggie was still alive, and Sean would never have allowed her to get mixed up in the riots. If Hawkins couldn't even keep his own family safe, how could he criticize Sean?
He wasn't a bad father. He just wanted his son to be safe.
He loved Richie. He'd had four brothers growing up, and he and Maggie had always wanted a large family. But there had been complications, with the pregnancy- a large family would not be an option, and they hadn't been sure Richie would make it. But he had been born, a bright healthy boy, just the son he'd always wanted to have, and he'd be damned if anyone was going to take that boy away. They'd had their difficult moments, of course- he wasn't always around because of work, wasn't always there to show Richie how to stay out of danger. Richie didn't understand that he had to yell because he was scared, because Richie didn't understand, didn't know nearly as much about the world as Sean did, and he had to learn. He had to be kept safe, and to be safe, he had to learn to obey his father.
It had been painful, the first teacher's night that Richie didn't want him to come, the first time Richie pretended to have homework so he could eat dinner in his bedroom, the first time he realized that he didn't know the names of any of Richie's friends. Richie stayed away from home so often, and even when he did come home, he rarely left his bedroom. Was this his fault, because of the fights? Was it normal teenage sullenness?
Then Richie did mention a friend. One night at dinner, more to Maggie than to him, but Sean smiled at the way the boy's eyes lit up when he talked about him, the way he grinned as he recounted one of their adventures together, the excitement in his voice when he announced one day that he had been invited camping with the family, and was going to learn how to fish and pitch a tent. Virgil Hawkins was the name of the friend Sean knew about, and he pocketed and memorized the name, something he knew, a clue as to the kind of person his son had become behind the closed door of his room. Virgil was Richie's best friend, who read comic books, sat with Richie at lunch, and liked a girl named Frieda; Sharon was Virgil's sister who was in college studying psychology and whose cooking Virgil always made fun of; 'Mr. H' was Virgil's dad, who was very cool and let Richie borrow his tool kit from time to time.
So he had thought he'd known about Richie's life, thought he had an idea of what he got up to, a mental picture of this nice kind of family that his son gravitated to. And then he met Virgil, and he realized how little he knew- he realized this was where the rap music was coming from, this was why Richie talked like a hood and wore the baggy clothes and insisted on the earring, these were the people who were taking his son away and exposing him to the world and the danger and turning him into someone Sean didn't recognize.
But it became clear to him that somehow, somewhere along the way, Richie's loyalty had been given to these people, these Hawkinses, this Virgil, instead of to his family where it belonged. It became clear that he could not force Richie to give up this friendship without risking losing his son altogether. So he was forced to accept the boys, and their music, and even the lies, the late nights, the poor excuses. He was forced to accept that only Hawkins would know what the boys got up to, and it made him angry, wondering whether the man would let the boys use drugs or join gangs in their spare time, or worse.
Because he saw that look, the look that was there occasionally, the one Maggie told him was just imagined. But when he looked at Virgil Hawkins with his son, the way Virgil Hawkins looked at his son when the boy wasn't watching, it made him sick. When he saw the way they would walk sometimes, with Virgil's arm just draped around Richie's shoulders, it would make Sean want to strangle him, that pervert who should just keep his hands off his son, his innocent son, taking things as just a gesture of friendship until someone convinced him that this, too, was a thing to be overlooked.
He could accept Richie's earring and clothes and music, he could accept his friends and his interests, but he would not allow that boy to use his son. He only wanted to keep him safe.
Author's Note: Well, this was supposed to be Sharon, but Sons of the Fathers was on the other day, and I got inspired. I really love that episode, firstly because it was very brave of such a new show to deal with an issue like that, secondly because they don't make racism a faceless evil, but give it to a guy who has redeeming qualities and a son we all like, and thirdly, because this was really the episode in which I fell in love with Richie, because there's just a way he behaves through the whole thing, when you realize that he is just such an awesome character.
So, um, Sharon next, I guess, unless I get inspired by anything else.
