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Sometimes, Demo felt like a weapon. Supposedly, he was the expert over the weapon, but at the end of the day, Tavish wouldn't be himself if explosions didn't follow.
His entire family tree counted on him understanding demolitions. Considering how lazy he was in contrast to his dad’s nearly thirty jobs he had while he was alive, it was easy to imagine his ancestors looming over his shoulders. A quick turn of the head and glance with his eye and they'd be gone, but at times he almost thought he could hear them cursing him for his flaws. The thought either kept him in the workshop for hours, perfecting something almost nearly good enough, or drinking whatever alcohol he could find.
Maybe it’s why he puts up with his bastard of a sword. He knows how it feels to be given up on because he didn’t have a use. To be just a weapon. It was the DeGroot family tradition to abandon their kids until they learned in demolitions, after all.
His adoptive family was different. They encouraged whatever he was interested in, giving him books of folklore and piano lessons. His adoptive mother invited patience, offering kind words when his fingers slipped onto the wrong keys, creating ugly cords and destroying perfectly good music, and his father always reminded him to take breaks when he found him laying on the keys, groaning at his mistakes. He was a DeGroot, though, and life could never have stayed that simple. He just had to pick up that interest in chemistry, and his adoptive parents just had to have supported him through it. Would they have supported him if they knew it would have led to their deaths? Would they have even taken him in if they knew the monster he really was? For a long time, he cursed his family name. If he wasn’t a DeGroot, the only family that loved him for every part of himself wouldn’t be dead by his own hands.
He could never hold it all against his biological family, though. They were raised the same way. Even though they pushed him hard to be a demolition expert his ancestors could be proud of, they treated him decent. They let him drink when he was real young, waking up in the middle of the night, shaking as memories of his actions came back to haunt him. His father would pat him on the back and say "Good job, Lad" every time he created a new explosive with his very own hands. His parents deserved to live comfortably now, and with his dad as comfortable as he could be six feet in the ground, it was his job to make sure his blind, nearly deaf mom enjoyed the rest of her life. If she felt anywhere near the pressure that he did, she had almost certainly earned it. She fulfilled her part of the DeGroot legacy, and now it was his turn to do the same.
While his eye was cursed, his last name was a bane he would wish on not even the worst man. Oftentimes, he wondered if he would be in this position today if it weren’t for his last name. Would he still be an alcoholic? Would he still have taken as many lives as he had already? Would his adoptive parents have lived? Would he get to finally be his own person?
He would never dare speak any of that, though. If he did, his mother would chide him for even considering it, and his teammates were certainly not paid to deal with his complaining. So here he sat, at the base’s kitchen table at 2 AM with no lights on, drinking whatever alcohol he could find, just like when he was a kid, hoping that maybe he’d forget about it all before the rounds started in the morning.