#soldier comes down from wherever he’s chosen to station himself in the midwest every so often

[presidentbungus]

in a similar vein to my last post i very much think demo’d be so good with kids. i don’t know if he’d be a good dad necessarily with all that emotional baggage and undoubtedly enough generational trauma to permanently ruin a toddler within seconds but he’d be a great uncle, godfather, weird neighbor, etc.

consider with me here. uncle tavish with the eyepatch and the peg-leg. he looks scary but he tells great stories about wizards and wars and explosions and he leaves in all the gory bits. he’ll show you how to make a pretty good firework out of the cleaning stuff your mum’s got lying around the house as long as you won’t tell on him. he’ll help you pull pranks on your adult relatives and he’ll take the blame for them. he’ll let you sip on his beer and scrumpy if you swear up and down you’re grown-up enough and when you hiss and stick your tongue out at the alcohol he’ll tell you that means you’re probably more mature than him. he doesn’t seem that rich but he’ll buy you a dirtbike or a pony or a whole set of expensive action figures for your birthday and he won’t even act like it’s a big deal. there’s something so simply enjoyable to him about kids (kids that aren’t his), so kicking with wonder and fierce excitement about the world, and he does whatever he can to give them what he never got—the push to run around and discover and do what they want, and to spit and curse and play-swordfight in the backyard and everything else all the adults in his life never really let him do. really, under it all, at the end of the day he’s got the big dumb heart of an absolute bloody sap and he knows it, and it’s almost relieving to know he’s still got it after all these years. you know? it works out