ren loved li a lot and so did li in turn, but he wasn’t the best parent.
li wasn’t ready to have a child when an told him she was pregnant / with his background he has never believed he could be a good person / let alone a good father. an was one of the only people he confided in about his background as a former assassin, and he thought it was foolish to think someone like him could ever raise someone else. his past could always resurface and come to hurt them, especially if they ever eloped and left the security of the lie compound ( which they eventually did, waiting in kuroyuri while oniyuri finished building. )
li didn’t want to be a father, but he kept this a secret all throughout zhilan’s pregnancy until something awful happened. she had a miscarriage. he felt awful during that depressive period more for her, but he had also realised he was disappointed too. he had been mentally preparing himself for this, and all in one night the chance of a real family away from his awful upbringing took that away. an didn’t intend to try again, because the doctor said it was just naturally difficult for a woman with her biology. even still, ren was born on the spring equinox, a miracle baby.
li justified taking more and more dangerous missions while he was away and his son grew up without him as an excuse. he was earning a little cache so when they moved to oniyuri they wouldn’t have to worry about expenses. the truth was that fighting, in any form, is an ingrained part of who li is. he has been fighting so long, that he doesn’t know how to function well without it. it used to be people he tore apart, but grimm make a good substitute.
he also didn’t know how to be a good father. in the assassin clan he was raised in, all children raised in the same age bracket are brothers and sisters, no matter the blood relation. you never meet your mother or father, you look to the elders for guidance. li could have very well interacted with his mother or father while he was raised in the clan, and it became a sort of mission to distinguish who it could have been, but he never found out. you are not supposed to tell your child that you are their parent, to build up a sense of cult - like unity. he wasn’t given the kind of upbringing that ren deserved, so didn’t know how to provide.
he never liked leaving all their living expenses up to an, using the remains of an’s rich family money to survive. she had been disowned for running away with him after all, they couldn’t live like that forever. she was still a medical practitioner but she volunteered to stay home and take care of ren in that one year.
li couldn’t see ren all the time for the first few years of his life. ren was raised in zhilan’s family property until they moved to kuroyuri and zhilan’s father hated him. he definitely wouldn’t have let li stay if zhilan wasn’t his favourite daughter. this was one of the reasons he spent so much time away from ren, and all the more reason he felt guilty that ren still idolised him when he was away. even when li could see his son more often, he was always paranoid that the enemies he’d made in his past would come back to haunt him and harm his family. he’d never had a reason to protect anything before instead of killing.
li had a lot of issues he kept to himself even up to the point where he died on the canon timeline, where my version of li was heavily injured and lost his memories. an knew that he was of a former assassin clan, but he never told ren anything about himself. anything ren knew about li he had to figure out through observation ( li was a man of action, but didn’t say much at all. ) he was always good at hiding his emotions because there weren’t that many there to begin with, but those few precious slivers of non-apathy he reserved for people closest to him. he made friends, of course, but it was easy for him to grow apart from people, keep a distance, to the point where no one was there to recognise him after he lost his memories ( save for enemies. )
when he eventually gains his memories back, his guilt complex is worsened for leaving ren on his own. he might not be familiar with his own son anymore, but he had no excuse before the nuckelavee, he was distant and consistently gone before then too.
