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Merle was not the best father. Far from it. He constantly was haunted by his past mistakes and perhaps he had taken it a bit better than Magnus—Pan bless him and his wife—but his almost dependence on Pan (read: very exotic plants with very exotic effects and some panpipes) in the years before the Bureau of Balance left their fair share of scars on him.
(Sometimes, when his hands trembled and his lungs itched, he would remind himself that he had his kids now and his boys and Killian and Carey and No-3113 and, hell, even Angus. That quelled the need for a bit but on his worse downswings he would still roll and rip, making sure that there wasn't anything else he had slipped in during his moment of weakness.)
When his faith wavered, he would look down at his living wood hand and think. It had been loss that lead to this, but the gain had been greater. The hand that never got to hold his children's hands was gone. The hand that had caught that damned crystal was gone. Lucas—damn Lucas, who thought that his loss outweighed others', who loved his mother more than death, who stood steadfast in the face of three angry adventurers and the Grim Reaper and refused to repent—made him this hand and it tied him to Pan, more in the literal sense than anything else. This was his reminder that his god was real and tangible. This was his token of faith. And sure, he missed his flesh-and-blood arm, and fuck if the damn stump (haha) didn't ache when it got too damp or loud bells rang, but to be given a second chance—both in life and in limb—was a blessing he would never turn back on.
(The image of June, younger than him but still imperceptibly old and wise beyond her few years, the Chalice speaking through her, flickered through his thoughts from time to time. He was grateful that Taako had the common decency to tell him and Magnus that Refuge was safe. The knowledge that they had saved a town only to damn it through inaction would have probably caused him to go back to his old ways.)
Fuck though, when he saw Mooky and Mavis and they smiled, he felt as though everything had been worth it. And in the end, if he died—Pan-forbid that happen when he still worked for the Bureau because he wanted his kids to remember him, as selfish as that seemed—he wanted everything he had to go to them. Maybe not their mother because he still had some issues to work out there, but definitely them.
(And he didn't want to leave his boys alone with the weight of his existence either. They were his boys as much as they were his friends—though Taako insisted that he was close enough to Merle in age that 'boy' was an insult and Magnus just chuckled sadly when he called them that—and he cared for them. Sometimes, a nasty part of him thought in the wee hours of the morning, that he cared for them more than his own flesh and blood.)
(The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, as it were. Not that he would ever say that out loud.)
But in the end, no matter how bad of a person he had been in the beginning, he wasn't like that now. He was different. He was changing, like a tree growing upwards, and reaching for a sky that seemed, at one time, so far away. But sitting on the moon, looking out to the stars beyond, he thought that maybe he could one day take a star or two back to his kids. Mooky would try to eat that piece of the cosmos and Mavis, bless her, would study it until she knew how it worked. She was similar to Lucas in that respect—though he hoped that was all she shared with him. And maybe, just maybe, when he died he too would become a star in the sky. After all, what are stars but dying light?
And aren't we all just dying?
(Pan, he hopes he goes with grace. Pan, he hopes it isn't soon.)
(Pan, he prays that he's a good father. That's all that matters in the end.)