When I was five years old, my father's favorite hobby was making chainmail. He made a coif sized to his head, and put it on me, and had me pose fiercely. He took a picture because it was so cute. Now he doesn't make chainmail anymore; he has built his own forge and learned to cast metal.
My father and I are both fond of writing poetry. He once wrote a poem about anger management problems, the first line of which was "beware the page whose master is rage."
He has a tattoo of a soldier of fortune skull, whose empty eye sockets I used to poke with my tiny fingers.
He has worked as a combat medic, and as a corrections officer, and as an EMT, and as a security guard, and as many many other kinds of people. He was an aimless shiftless jack-of-all-trades before he was my father, and he knows it, and he very much sees himself as a soldier of fortune, a knight, a contractor of combat.
He knows the law well, from his amateur studies of it. He is very much "up" on law that concerns guns and all other manner of slings and arrows. He knows the penalties for assault and battery and homicide and manslaughter and countless other things. Because he likes to argue law so fiercely, he often takes the same knowing and devious tone in personal arguments. He has read "The Art of War" by Tsun Tsu. He recommends it.
His family was not kind to him growing up; I don't think they knew how to be kind. He is not kind with others, because he does not know how to be kind. He is always fighting and struggling and feeling himself pursued and oppressed. He is his own prisoner in a string of meaningless personal battles.
When I was ten, he and I made an agreement that we wouldn't argue for that whole day, and we would be kind and gentle to each other. And we were. And we knew that one ceasefire of a day in length.
He is a Scorpio, and I am a Sagittarius. There is a myth about the great scorpion pinching the centaur's arrows out of the sky; he clips the only wings the centaur knows. He steals the only way he sees to fly.
My father the lawman, the soldier for hire, the knight, dressed his page in armor he wrought himself. He cast a sword to fight back at him. He clipped the wings of his celestial neighbor. These metaphors are so personal. You can't know what they mean unless you've lived in my house.