A portrait of your father:
(this one is also a memory)
You’re 23 in the infirmary, with all your team either gone off to sleep or admitted in another room, and just as you start thinking huh, maybe Dad’s asleep, you hear the hallway doors crash open and you realize that your father was simply not informed. He slams open the door to your hospital room looking deranged with his work bag in one hand. He walks briskly right up to where you’re laying hooked up to an IV and heart monitor, and he’s shaking, and he comes close enough to you until he can feel the heat of his breath. He puts one rough hand on one of your shoulders and grips it too hard and growls, “Draven Kondraki, don’t you. Ever. Scare me like that again.”
And then he collapses in the chair at your bedside.
“Dad,” you say, and your words are muffled because the gauze shoved in your mouth to stem the bleeding gets in the way of your talking. “I’m fine.”
Your father puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
“Jeezus. Fucking…eight hours before they had you here and they didn’t tell us anything about how you were, you know that? We just didn’t know. For eight fucking hours.”
He rubs his face, then runs his hands through his hair. He looks almost as bad as you do.
“Dad—”
“Jesus fucking shit, Draven, what were you thinking?!” your father explodes. “You could have gotten hurt! You could have died!”
It’s rare that your father gets genuinely angry at you; irritated, yes, but never angry, never furious. You tell yourself to keep calm but feel annoyance clip up inside your bandaged chest.
“I didn’t, dad,” you mumble, because your father is on the verge of hysterics if not already there. “These things happen on the field. You know that.”
Your dad’s knee is bouncing, but then again your dad’s knee is always bouncing. He looks at you with the dawning realization of the person shifting back from ‘anxious father’ to ‘site director who does, indeed, know of all the occupational hazard that accompany your son’s line of work’. For a second you think he’s about to explode again, but he doesn’t; he exhales slowly and wrings his hands together.
And then he laughs.
“…God…” He shakes his head. “…God, fuckin'…I’m sorry.”
“Dad. Did something happen?” You can’t help but feel like there’s something you’re missing, and sure enough, your dad smiles widely and shakes his head.
“No. No, nothing happened. Just. Your dad says that books don’t affect his life and then they do.”
Everything is still hazy from the morphine, and for a second you feel as though again, you’re missing something, like you didn’t hear him right, and then he continues:
“I was…damn it, Draven, I was reading that one Stephen King book Pet Sematary. Look, just, the next time your team accidentally walks in on a GoI raid, I’d like a few day’s notice so I can switch to a book less child-death-centered, okay?”
You smile lightly at him, feeling woozy from the drugs and the blood loss, but he’s there, just like he always is. He heard you were hurt and came running, just like he always does. And he was reading, because he’s your dad, and your dad is always reading or writing for one thing or another.
“…Okay. I promise,” you say, and your dad laughs at himself again for thinking that his son might have died a slow and painful death at the hands of some anomaly. He laughs like that isn’t an option for either of them, like that danger isn’t there and never was.
And for the moment, you drift off, and your dad stays and reads.
