Chapter 75. Executing Operation, Codename: Date, Night. (3/3)

“Haha, please stop teasing a child like me. A woman as charming as yourself would only see me as a snot-nosed brat.”

“Heheheh,” She giggled then blew me a kiss and said, “Here’s a kiss for the snot-nosed brat.”

I tilted my head to the side making the motions of dodging out of the way.

“Hey, that’s not fair, you can’t dodge a blown kiss~”

“I don’t accept charity, even if it’s from a beautiful woman.”

“Hahaha, is that so~”

“Yes.”

“I see. I see. Anyway, I still haven’t forgiven you for taking my daughter away like this~ soooo~ that being the case, you have to make it up to me.”

“Make it up to you?”

“Yes. Since your lie was exposed and you lost this round, you have to agree to my request.”

“What do I have to do for the forgiveness of such a benevolent woman like you?”

“Nothing too hard, you just have to come over with your girlfriend tomorrow and spend the night. Keep Alicia company. That girl’s never bringing home any friends. I said it before but I want to meet her friends.”

“Stay over? You mean just Rosa, right? There’s no reason for me to stay over.”

“Sure there is, silly~ I want to see you and deliver an appropriate punishment for the bad boy playing around with two girls at once.”

“A punishment? Uh… am I going to be chewed out or something?”

“You could say that. I’m definitely going to put you through the wringer and put you in your place a bit.”

“That sounds a bit scary when you say that with a smile.”

“Anyway, when you bring my daughter back tomorrow I’ll be sure to give you both an earful. Since it’s already so late, I’ll save it for tomorrow. I’m seriously tired right now after worrying so much all night. My daughter is probably also really sleepy too if she’s been up for this long. Anything I say to her now will only go in one ear and out the other.”

“Haaaah. Sorry for worrying you.”

“It’s fine, as long as my daughter is safe that’s all that matters. Oh, right, one more thing. Try not to push my daughter down tonight and restrain those wild desires of yours, okay~”

Before I had a chance to retort she disconnected the call.

Haaaaah. It was seriously hard to deal with her.

When I returned to the living room, both Rosa and Alicia were on the couch. Alicia had already fallen asleep face up on the couch. Rosa was on top of her with her face buried in Alicia’s chest, hugging her, and using Alicia’s chest as a pillow.

Seeing them in such a state, I didn’t bother to wake them from their slumber. Instead, I laid down on the carpet and took the chance to do some writing. It was best to do so while the ideas were still fresh in my mind.

With my back to the ground, I plugged my earbuds into my phone and selected a random song I liked, and had it play on repeat in the background. The title on the video was ‘「Nightcore」Numb ( Arc North, New Beat Order, Cour & Aaron Richards/Lyrics )’ It was an overly long title for just being a nightcore version of Numb by Linkin Park, but all that was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that it sounded good to me.

A lot had happened today and it had inspired many different scenarios to write in my mind. I didn’t write the full thing out, only the core structure of events which I’d flesh out later in much more detail.

It took an hour to write everything out. Only when I finished did I finally fall asleep to the song still buzzing in my ear on repeat. Sleeping on the ground wasn’t something I was unfamiliar with. It was something I was used to, starting from a long, long time ago, when I was still very young. I was still a toddler at that time in my life.

It was inside a basement in another country my mother and I lived in for some time. Rats scurried about the place and it was infested with cockroaches. There were always mosquitos to worry about as well. Even yellow jacket wasps from the nest which hung from the gutter on the side of the building’s roof paid us an occasional visit in the middle of the night.

There was always a strong smell of burning insect repellent in that dark room devoid of a single working light. During the boiling hot nights in that room, sweating profusely, the only form of relief was a single small fan turning and blowing hot air on us. I remember how I always saw a small, nearly unnoticeable, faint orange glow from the green coil that slowly burnt away and turned to ash in the middle of those long nights. That was the only thing to look at in the pitch-black darkness of that room.

We had a thin mattress flat on the floor, but it could hardly be said to do anything. Sleeping on the hard ground felt the same as sleeping on that brick.

I still remember the way my mother often had her back turned to me at night. Sometimes, her shoulders trembled in silence. Occasionally, she wept, all alone, but she never allowed the young child behind her to see it. If she fell ill, she had to deal with it. There were no breaks or days off for her. I barely got to see her. She was always, always, working herself to death during the day. Only at night did I see her sleeping in front of me, rarely did I see her during the day.

There was a backyard as well right outside the basement. Well, the backyard there and here were two completely different things. Here, someone’s backyard was well maintained and rather small. But in that country, the backyards were huge. Far from well maintained, the grass was tall, even taller than my mother, three or four times taller than me. Something like mowing the lawn was a foreign concept in that country. Backyards were extremely dangerous. I still remember my mother’s warnings to never go into the backyard. There were scary things like hidden snakes big enough to eat a child like me whole, she said.

Backyards were a scary place. That was something I often thought, as a child. They were a mysterious region where an unknown world resided.

Overall, I didn’t have many memories of those times in my earliest years of life, but I knew they existed somewhere at the back of my mind. Forever engraved into my body.

To me, the term family was a sick joke. This was how my mother was treated by her so-called… family. The same could be said for the man I’d never seen once in my life.

To me, they were all strangers. Evil, vile, and greedy creatures. Scary monsters wearing the skin of humans. Their smiles were all fake. Sinister. I was a tool. To control my mother. To keep her in her place at the very bottom. A hostage.

These were the sort of conditions she put up with every day she remained in that place she called her home. She struggled hard to crawl her way out of that endlessly dark abyss.

What I put up with in life amounted to nothing compared to her hardships.

That was why I firmly believed I didn’t need others.

Having others support you was a concept I didn’t understand.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand such a thing.

I went to a school there, it might have been equivalent to what a daycare here was. My memories were so vague and indistinct as a result of the very limited time I spent there, and I could hardly remember it.

What I did remember... was by no means pleasant. Even at this place where I didn’t need to see ‘family,’ I did not belong. I was an outsider. An outcast, someone thrown away by the country he’d been born in. Forcefully deported after that person abandoned us without mercy.

I didn’t belong to the country I was born in or my mother’s homeland. In my eyes, I had no home country, there was nowhere for someone like me.

The first time I remember coming to such a realization was inside that place. Where other children would keep their distance from me and look at me like I was some sort of foreign out-of-place alien.

I’d keep my head down low, eyes glued to the ground to not have to see the looks in their eyes. As a child, I didn’t understand what was so odd about me. Only when older would I look back and realize it was something very simple.

I didn’t look like them. The color of my skin was very light. Their skin was dark. It was that simple. Nothing complicated. There was nobody who looked like me there. Perhaps I was the scary monster to them. A freak of some sort.

To me, at the time though, they were all the scary monsters. They talked differently, extremely fast, with thick accents that were hard to understand. Over time, I eventually grew accustomed to it by listening to the adults speaking and I could make out what they were saying. But I still never made any friends there or got close to anyone.

Haaaah. But in the end, all these things are of a long-forgotten past that not even I fully remember. None of them matter to me anymore. I was numb to it. So very numb. These sorts of experiences shaped who I am today. There’s no point crying over things that don’t matter anymore.

They’re all irrelevant.

Everything.

I don’t live there anymore.

Those people are all as good as dead. I don’t even remember their names anymore. There’s no point in remembering worthless people I’d never see again. Even that man’s, I never learned it.

The only name I remember is my mother’s. It’s the only name I need to remember which makes things easier for me.

While I subconsciously recalled such faint, fragmented memories of the past, I finally fell into a deep sleep.