Well, they care about me, and I don't deserve it all the time. [He could be awful mean to them when he put his mind to it.] Just because a person does terrible things sometimes doesn't mean you stop loving them.

[His father had abandoned him for ten years. Ivar should have hated him for that. Instead, when he'd come back, he'd found Ragnar an easy person to care about. Maybe it was just part of his natural charm or maybe Ivar was just that desperate to have his father be part of his life. Either way, they'd grown close again in a short amount of time before he'd been cruelly ripped away again from the teenage Viking.]