Life is quite complicated, and he was well aware of that, but just because a rose has thorns doesn't make it any less beautiful.
These were the thoughts of Greg Universe, at this moment.
The complicated situations he got himself into as a young man seeking attention from her barely compared to the madness his daughter constantly dove into, and deep down, he didn't like it.
Greg wasn't particularly strong or exceptionally intelligent, but he was stubborn as a demon. He knew he wouldn't always be there for her. So, all he could do was make things easier for his offspring, so that his little girl wouldn't worry about her father.
Even with all that said, it's not like he wasn't aware of what his daughter was doing — the craziness and the danger of the missions she went on with the other Gems, her social circle, her friends, and most recently, that "being" she called a friend.
Like everything else, he analyzed it deeply. Who was he? What were his intentions? Was he a threat to his daughter? Was he even human?
Greg researched as much as he could, and initially, the results were "discouraging" at best.
The boy rarely left his home, making information about his surroundings nearly useless. Well, almost useless; the little he did find out was that he was occasionally seen around the outskirts of the city, heading towards one of the most distant junkyards.
Greg took this information cautiously. What did the boy need to do in such a remote place? A few days later, he found out: forging.
An odd hobby, but hey, it's not the strangest thing he's seen in this town. With that, Greg stopped investigating that side of the boy.
Next, he sought information, which was a bit more difficult to obtain, but with a little help from an outlaw, it wasn't too hard as long as he paid the right price.
What he found about the boy was perplexing: one January night, he showed up at the local hospital with a broken leg and several other fractures. According to the tampered report he obtained, he knew nothing more than his name, no family, no records of his existence in the judicial system. It was strange, as if he had appeared out of nowhere.
If his daughter hadn't already confirmed he wasn't half Gem, that would have been his suspicion, given his absence from government records. But the boy referred to himself as a "Mage," which could be a clue, or not, but it was something.
It was most likely he used a false name, as the report said, but neither his face nor his fingerprints even loosely matched anyone in the government database.
So, a "Mage"? That would be hard for anyone to believe, but he married an alien woman thousands of years old, so who was he to say magic didn't exist? For the love of stars, he could even be an alien, and that would be totally plausible.
But that narrowed his research options considerably, so he set that aside and focused on the few clues he could gather.
The rest of the report detailed the few times the boy left his home, spent time with his friends, typical outings for a normal teenager, he initially thought.
And he would be right, except for the use of strange powers that he rarely seemed to use, at least rarely noticed by his informant. But that didn't match; he knew the boy himself and didn't get the impression he was shy about showing what he could do or say, so was it caution? But if that was the case, why even use those powers? The answer came from continuing to read the report.
"Security" or "Arrogance" was the conclusion he came to after reading about one of the battles against Gem monsters in which the boy participated. Throughout the battle, his expression never changed, never overwhelmed by the Gem monster, the informant described him while in combat: confident, determined, efficient, and with an aura of "Beyond imagination," so with the doubt of what he meant, he went ahead in the report.
A separate note was that recently the boy had noticed his informant but he only sighed and ignored him as if he didn't care in the least.
What followed was more of the same, so Greg didn't get much out of this investigation.
Reserved type with quite security or arrogance, someone quite direct in speaking, too reserved, interest in blacksmithing, varied powers whose limit is not clear, seems to analyze things too much, he deduced.
He didn't seem to want to harm anyone, but the opposite. Although his own reserved attitude made him seem more of a mystery than anything else, whether he sees humans as equals or as inferior was something he couldn't deduce with so little.
He didn't have much to work with, but he had faced more things in this life than just a Mage. To protect his little girl, he would sacrifice anything.