290 287. Born loser.txt (1/2)

Which is Aikawa Uzumi's earliest memory?

Of course, I can't say that the day I first met Rustyala and Dia - the moment I wandered into the labyrinth of the Confederacy - is the oldest.

I remember that there was a story before that, and I remember that there was a story before that. But I wouldn't even say that the memory of a thousand years ago in my head is the oldest.

Even earlier than that.

Life in my former world. A world where there wasn't a single magic or magical stone, a world of concrete roads and houses. The memory of living with my sister is the oldest memory - but not the oldest (・・・・).

Living alone with my sister is a memory of the original world 'at the end'.

It's much, much earlier than that.

It was back when my siblings and I still had a family.

Not just my sister, but my father and mother. ......

First of all. My sister was still a baby and I was still very young when I finally established my self-awareness.

I remember that time clearly.

For some reason I can remember everything about that day, even though my life has been full of memory loss. The light I saw, the sounds I heard, the scent that tickled my nose, all of it comes vividly to mind.

--It's a good thing that you're not going to be able to find a way to make a living.

Half the walls of the room are covered with pure white wallpaper, and the other half is covered with glass. On the other side of the glass, I could see the buildings of the big city and a sky of dark clouds. The concrete ground is so far away that you have to stick to the glass and look down to see people walking the streets.

It's definitely not a cheap house to rent. It's the top floor of a top-of-the-line apartment building that has won the city's height contest. It's a world where only a handful of people - one in ten million winners - can get their hands on it.

I loved the strong smell of disinfectant wafting from that room.

It's a smell that symbolizes my father and mother to me, and it's a smell that makes me feel like I'm home.

I love this house.

Even though I've never seen my parents together here ......, I love it, even though it's minimal white furniture and no playground equipment, and it's too big for me, just past the age of three, to ever see them together here.

My earliest memories are of that favorite scene in the house.

I remember a rare occasion when I was alone with my father.

It was raining that day.

Raindrops falling from the dark clouds, pounding the glass endlessly.

The rain dripping on the glass window was like tears, and it was a strange sensation to stare at it for so long. I feel as if someone, not me or my father, is crying very close to me, and I feel sad because I'm caught in the middle of it for no reason.

I wonder if my father sensed this sensation in me. ...... On rainy days, he would always take out his instrument and play it for me.

That day it was a violin-shaped stringed instrument. The sight of my father holding the instrument on his chin and holding the bow was cool, even as a child.

In hindsight, however, it is not surprising.

My father is a famous actor in Japan. He is naturally well-groomed in appearance.

If anyone saw my father, they would at the very least rate him as one of the coolest people in the world. Never less than ”normal”.

From the instrument in his hand, a magnificent melody begins to flow, as good as if it were coming from the other side of the LCD screen.

The high notes of the stringed instrument smoothly pass through my ears.

The sound is high and sharp, but it doesn't hurt my head in the slightest.

The music is as if a soft, thin thread runs through my ears and winds gently around my heart.

Naturally, the heat came from the bottom of my body.

I shivered from the bottom of my heart.

Before I knew it, any feelings of sadness had disappeared.

Watching my father's back as he played the instrument, I felt a new emotion.

It's a feeling of admiration. As a son, I admired my father.

Wherever I went, there was no one who didn't know my father's name.

Everyone admired his ability to do anything.

And my father was successful in everything he did, as he should have been.

I looked at his too big back and admired him from the bottom of my heart.

This is the earliest memory I can remember - the most memorable memory is the father-daughter interaction in a luxury mansion where money was at stake, and no matter how many times I recall it, I can only let out a dry laugh at my little me's lack of discernment.

A few years later, the little me comes to a realization.

Aikawa Uzumi's father is a human scum, and I have to face the reality.

As time passes, I learn more and more about the man's ugliness. The more she learns, the more she despairs.

To put it simply, my father was the best of the best, but he was a terrible human being.

My father loved to look down on the weak, trample on them and prey on them. He spread misfortune around like a breath of fresh air and found it amusing.

He made fun of hard-working people and would never acknowledge the talented ones. He routinely crushed promising newcomers with power, and all competing rivals were kicked off with dirty tricks.

The women he's targeted will try to trick him into getting them. In some cases, they try to dominate by throwing money around and using violent collaborators. Although he is married, he takes women into his room on a daily basis. Once a week, a woman yells at him. Then he makes her cry loudly and then turns her away.

He was honest in his desires and yet sensitive to his honor and status. He's such a bad guy that you'd think he'd dropped the idea of morality before he was born.

However, he could still be as bad as this.

The most evil part of my father was that he had no guilt whatsoever.

He took all of those evil deeds for granted.

He was a man who believed that it was all his right to be a genius, and he could boast to his son and daughter without hesitation that he was doing justice to them. He was a man who could laugh out loud and say, ”Oh, that was fun” in front of all those who sacrificed for him.

A particularly troublesome and ugly scum among a handful of evil people.

That was the father that Aikawa Uzumi admired.

Incidentally, her mother is the same kind of person. I think it's easy to understand when I say that she married that father and never once discussed divorce. My mother was also a good-looking and talented person, and she was loyal to her own desires. Needless to say, she was an evil person, since her interests were aligned with those of my father until the end.

These two were the father and mother of the Aikawa family, and the two born to them were Aikawa Uzumi and Aikawa Yotaki.

Naturally, my siblings and I did not grow up properly under these parents.

We couldn't even become a normal family, let alone find normal happiness.

Our parents, who gave birth to two children out of spite, started treating us like toys without any sense of responsibility. However, it's not uncommon for parents to raise their children as if they were playing with dolls. In the eyes of the public, they are still considered good parents for having tried to educate their children at an early age.

But the problem was that their parents' standards for education were not those of ordinary people.

They were greedy and selfish parents who were just as talented, able to do anything, and perfect as they were - and who finally felt that their children were their own.

Hence the gifted and talented education they were given - starting with the usual English conversation and piano lessons, followed by traditional dance and performing arts, and then multiple sports at the same time, as well as training in their parents' professions as actors and artists, and finally getting top honors at a prestigious private school. He imposed an uncommon amount of study - such as studying to make me - anyway.

--And the result of that education was that I would be discarded.

It was simple.

I had no talent.

No, in fact, I had more talent than most people can be proud of.

But I didn't have anything to compare to my parents. That's all that mattered, and even before I entered elementary school, it was decided that Aikawa Uzumi was not their child.

They weren't their own kind - and because of that, my parents lost interest in me and treated me as 'something that wasn't there'.

There was only one daughter in the Aikawa family, and only my sister was adored and taken out of the house. I remember well how she would decorate her house with no strings attached and show it off to her acquaintances.

Unlike me, my sister had talents that rivaled those of my father and mother.

Unlike me, she was not a quick learner like me, but a real person in every field.

The difference between myself and my younger sister was so great that I was shocked, even as a child.

I remember I was stunned for months, as I secretly admired my father for that reason, as I was regarded as 'the one who never existed'.

My father was really strong.

He believed that he was the strongest when it came to competing with others.

The fact that he was strong alone was enough to make me feel cool and unbearable as a young child at the time.

But I couldn't live up to my father's expectations.

I couldn't be the child my parents wanted me to be.

The only person who was able to become one was his sister, Yotaki.

My sister inherited all of her parents' talents.

Both my father's talent as an actor and my mother's talent as an artist.

Naturally, my parents were satisfied with my sister's talent and continued to only love her.

I, on the other hand, despaired of my sister's talent and gave up trying to compete with her. It was impossible to keep up the will to fight against the talent, as if the whole world was favoring Yotaki.

For example, I was good at memorization-based studies.

Compared to kids my age, I was able to memorize twice as fast as kids my age.

But no matter how much I read books to increase my knowledge, my innate intelligence could not be beaten. If I spend ten hours learning ten things, my sister will learn ten things in one hour. The more I work hard, the more I am reminded of my inability to do so.

The most frustrating thing was that my sister would happily report it to me.

I want to win over my sister no matter what the cost, but she always rubs me the wrong way, looking like she wants me to praise her. He looks at me with the purest of eyes, and there is no evil in his eyes, he just smiles at me, his older brother.

It's a far cry from me being jealous and reckless. I thought I was losing not only in talent but also in personality.

Immediately I gave up competing with my sister. I had no choice but to give up and accept the reality that Aikawa Uzumi was not our child.

Fortunately, my parents are not indifferent to me, but they don't neglect me in a malicious way to make the world a worse place.

They won't teach me anything in particular, but make sure I attend school as a proper and compulsory education.

It was. He regularly gave me more than enough money and also told me to live as I wanted.

The amount of money they could give me was honestly too much for a student. Either my parents have a strange sense of money, or they tried to minimize their involvement with me by giving me more: ...... Maybe it was both. Anyway, I was never in need of money.

From then on, I was a normal kid, living a normal life.

I'm not going to be able to say that I'm not the only one. I lost the meaning of working hard, so it was very natural for me to indulge in entertainment.

In order to avoid the fact that I couldn't beat my sister, I didn't try to leave my room much.

If she left her room and came face to face with her sister, she would not only resent her, she would feel a desire to kill her. It's also very hard to face the reality that our parents treat us as something we don't have. I've got to treat my parents and my sister as if they weren't there, or I'll go crazy.

All the time outside of school, I kept escaping reality.

That was enough for me, because that was how I was able to live. I don't have any high hopes that I was born wealthy. Even at a young age, I knew that there were many children who were born worse.

But I realized that I was a born loser, so I spent as much time as possible in school as modestly as possible. It wasn't the same as my sister's school, but still, it would definitely be troublesome if people knew about my parents. I refrained from being assertive and lived to blend in with my surroundings.

I had a good amount of friends, played with them in a good way, failed in a good way ...... and lived a really normal school life, from elementary school to middle school.

I turned away from everything in the Aikawa family all the time--and

The turning point in his life came in the middle of junior high school.

He had gotten used to living alone, forgetting his parents and sister, and was finding his life worth living.

--My father was arrested.

I heard about it on the morning news.

I continued to watch in my room as many difficult words came out of the blinking speakers on the LCD screen.

It was broadcast that my father had been detained over the use of illegal drugs and new charges were being exposed in a chain of events. An actress who looks like an acquaintance of my father's speaks in tears to the outraged stranger commentator. Everywhere I looked, it was the same. The world treated him as a criminal, and it was clear that he was plummeting from that perfect life.

I was surprised and bewildered to learn that my father, who was an absolute in my mind, had been caught by the police.

I'm not upset by the litany of my father's misdeeds on the television. I just couldn't help but wonder how that calculating and perfect father could have made a mistake.

I couldn't fully understand what was going on, followed by my mother, who found herself in the same situation. The police markings were on against the couple, and this time I could hear over the speakers that they were able to give evidence at the same time.

I stood at home, forgetting to go to school and watching the end of the Aikawa family.

It was then that I heard the sound of the speaker.

My cell phone (smart phone), which doesn't usually ring, was shaking.

There are only a few people who know my phone number.

At first, I thought it was a prank to get a call from an unknown number. But the timing of the call is perfect. I thought it might be important, so I pressed the answer button.

Unexpectedly, the call was from the hospital.

I was still in the middle of my confusion, but the frantic voice of the stranger on the phone got me moving.

I walked out of the house, took the train, and spent a long time on the train, but my mind was still messed up, so I came to the hospital I was called to and was led by a guide into a certain hospital room.

It was a pure white hospital room.

It was very similar to the room the Aikawa family had lived in and smelled of a strong disinfectant solution. It was lined with minimal furniture and medical equipment, and a girl was lying on a white bed in the window garden.

I walk past the doctor and approach the girl as if I'm being sucked in.

The face of the girl lying there is the beauty of her parents, and her long black hair is flowing without a trace. At first glance, anyone would think that she is perfect, just like a doll.

It's a good thing that you're not the only one who's been in the market for a while.

''Brother .......''

The girl - my sister Yotaki - smiled weakly.

I didn't know how to respond to her words and could only stand there.

After all, the last time I spoke to my sister properly was when we competed as children.

'I'm sorry, brother. Your brother is supposed to be busy too, but it's my fault .......

My sister was on the bed, looking apologetic.

The meaning of this is conveyed by a man who seems to be a doctor in the back. First of all, ”You're Aikawa Yotaki-san's brother, aren't you? It took me a few dozen seconds to answer the question. When I asked him about it in detail, he told me that he hadn't been able to get in touch with the other relatives and that I was the last option.

The doctor seemed to know what was going on in our house and proceeded to treat me as an emergency guardian.

But as they explained it to me, I was wondering.

First of all, how did my sister get my phone number?　In the first place, is this something I, as an underage person, should be allowed to hear?　No, more importantly, I want an explanation about my parents most of all, so why are they here?　Is something wrong?　Are there too many shocking events stuck in one day?　I don't have time to settle down. Somehow, I need time to calm down for once. ...... I need time to think calmly--

There was an endless stream of questions, and I couldn't think straight at all.

All the while, explanations continue to be given.

The doctor tells me, with anger, that Yotaki's condition is bad.

Apparently it's rare for a body to be so overworked at this young age. Even with a light blood test, it seems that the abnormal numbers were in the double digits. They also told me that I would have to do some long-term tests because of an asthma attack, the cause of which could not yet be determined, and that they would write a referral letter for a psychotherapist because there were parts of his body that could not be caught up with the physical treatment alone.

Like the TV I mentioned earlier, it's hard to catch up with understanding when you're suddenly crammed with a huge amount of information.

In short, does that mean Yotaki is sick: ......?

But that's not right.

She can't be sick.

My sister is perfect. She is perfect, just like my father.

I never saw my father get sick.

My sister couldn't be sick either.

She was just like my father, a genius, blessed, successful in everything she did - and that's why I was jealous. I resented her.

But what I see in front of me is the complete opposite of what's inside me.

That do-it-all little sister, who can do everything, has never been more vulnerable. I've been told that she sings and dances effortlessly and is a promising child prodigy everywhere she goes, but she has lost all her sparkle.

''I'm really sorry ....... I have no one else to rely on but my brother ......--

My head chills rapidly as I look at my sister, who stares at me with a blue face that looks like she's about to fall over.

The questions may be endless, but there are more important things to ask.

The only thing that is true is the sister who is suffering in front of me right now.

My sister, with whom I have shared blood, needs help.

My sister is still a child.

She's a smaller child than I am as a child.

There is no way she can be the same as my father. And yet, I had neglected to understand my sister by saying she was perfect.

My sister was not perfect. The trauma of my childhood defeat had most likely made Yotaki an absolute. There was no doubt that she was better than me, but there was no way that she could have the same level of strength as my father, who was the evil one.

Looking back, my sister was the only one who had always laughed at me. At the time, I thought she was making fun of my lack of talent, but now that I'm a little older, I can understand.

She liked me as an older brother and was just trying to get along with me.

And yet, I've always been--.

First and foremost I apologized and grabbed my sister's thin arm in both hands.

''I'm sorry, Yotaki ....... I was crazy all along ....... I was taking it out on you. It's all my fault for being so pathetic, but I hit Yotaki for everything ....... I'm your brother, but I kept ignoring you ......

And my sister looked as if she had been saved from the depths of her heart.

''Oh (...), I knew it (・・・・) ....... Your brother is a kind .......

Oh, I knew it.