The look on your face when she called you “Harold”, wow, that was priceless!

It took me back a while to when I last saw my father. Horrid little man, a head full of cobwebs and not a dream in sight. He was the kind of man that thought it was a good day if he hit his quota at work, and had his supper on the table when he returned. He also loved dishing out punishment for completely benign reasons, like when I accidentally blew up the trash can practicing a new trick.

Like I said, completely benign.

But he had what was coming to him. A life of loneliness, of longing, of languishing as those he let down thrived. Look at me now! Ringmaster of the greatest Circus in Arcadia’s storied history. But this was all to spite him. He raised the belt to me so many times I lost count, and I learned to slink into the shadows, learned to evade his strikes. Learned to grow up all on my own. When other fathers were teaching their sons how to shave against the grain, I was imagining how I could use that same razor to slit his throat.

Why? Well if you imagine what he put me through you can imagine what he put my poor mother through. He was a terrible man, who did terrible things, so I did a terrible thing to stop him.

I put an end to his hatred through my own hatred of him. There’s a fun irony in that somewhere, but it’s as lost as Solus’ brain cells after another javelin throw from Ajax.

But that’s kind of my point. I hated my father because of what he did to me and my family. That rage burned inside me for a long time, and it still fuels me to exceed all the dreams I’ve ever had. But notice that I still call him that word. Father. For everything he did wrong, he was still my father, and though I hated him with a passion, I at least felt emotions – I spent time with him.

The problem with you Harold is that you can’t elicit those same emotions. Michaela can’t love you, or hate you, because she doesn’t even know you. You are just the man that pumped and dumped, and she has not seen for a long, long time. You didn’t care enough to find her, and she will always remember that. That’s why she calls you “Harold”, because she feels NOTHING.

She quite literally has NOBODY as a father figure in her life.

So it’s fine and dandy showing up now, acting like the doting, worried father, but where were you when she needed someone to guide her, for better or worse?

And you wonder why she has daddy issues, Harold?

But the stories I could tell Harold. The stories I could tell.

Let’s just say she calls me Daddy now, when she shows me just how flexible she can be for her NEXT trick…