Dad Character Analysis

"We're all dead anyway. I should make a shish kebab of your kids."

I didn't mean it. I looked at their round eyes, wet and watching but not nervous enough for the threat of a human. Their dad was there, after all, and they knew they were safe. I felt tears collecting behind my own eyes like sand in a windstorm. I opened my mouth...to say what? To apologize to a group of wild guinea pigs? To explain that I hadn't meant what I'd said? To let them know I just missed my family?

It was painful, but I didn't really mind. The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered, like the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi's tent as she drifted off.

In them, there is always this feeling, an understanding more than an emotion, of protection. It didn't matter what was happening in the world, my job was to be Francis. That was all. Just remain myself. And now? Well, now I had a different family to take care of. My job was to hunt, and scout, and build camp, and break camp, to protect the others. I winced even thinking about it. My failure. I'd failed at protecting, and now, as a result, I failed at remaining myself.

I took off running, away from camp, the Council, my family: running toward Rose, who was somewhere beyond the birch-beaded edge of the woods, running towards an idea of home that I wasn't willing to lose, not even if it meant running away from the family I had already found.

"We're all dead anyway. I should make a shish kebab of your kids."

I didn't mean it. I looked at their round eyes, wet and watching but not nervous enough for the threat of a human. Their dad was there, after all, and they knew they were safe. I felt tears collecting behind my own eyes like sand in a windstorm. I opened my mouth...to say what? To apologize to a group of wild guinea pigs? To explain that I hadn't meant what I'd said? To let them know I just missed my family?

It was painful, but I didn't really mind. The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered, like the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi's tent as she drifted off.

In them, there is always this feeling, an understanding more than an emotion, of protection. It didn't matter what was happening in the world, my job was to be Francis. That was all. Just remain myself. And now? Well, now I had a different family to take care of. My job was to hunt, and scout, and build camp, and break camp, to protect the others. I winced even thinking about it. My failure. I'd failed at protecting, and now, as a result, I failed at remaining myself.

I took off running, away from camp, the Council, my family: running toward Rose, who was somewhere beyond the birch-beaded edge of the woods, running towards an idea of home that I wasn't willing to lose, not even if it meant running away from the family I had already found.