Chapter 69.1
Chapter 69.1
‘Oh, the grudges I’ve accumulated! There were so many! Even now, we don’t get along, but when we were kids, I hated him even more. At least now he’s become more human.’
If anyone who knew the Duke of Richard Aion were to hear this, they’d be shocked to learn that as a child, he was sensitive, emotional, and a bit of a rascal. He was the perfect, opposite match of Risha.
When he was elegantly playing the violin, Risha was breaking the piano. When Richard was reading plays and discussing them with his teacher, tears welling up in his eyes, Risha was solving math equations on a page of the play and getting caught and punished for it.
While Richard was out riding horses and playing sports with his peers, making a ruckus, Risha hated the sunlight, found noisy kids annoying, and preferred to spend her time in the cool library.
So, they couldn’t understand each other at all. From hobbies and tendencies to personalities and likes and dislikes, they had nothing in common.
Watching an opera, Richard would get emotionally involved, feeling sad, angry, or irritated, while Risha, sitting beside him, found it all so boring that she yawned. She even wondered if her brother might have a bipolar disorder or some emotional instability.
“It’s all fake anyway, why so serious?” Likewise, Richard wondered if his sister lacked empathy. To him, his sister was flawed in every way except for her intelligence.
She did whatever she wanted because adults coddled her for being a genius. Her intelligence was so high that she seemed oblivious to social cues (sometimes he wondered if she ignored them on purpose), she had no manners (though their father and brother drilled into her the habit of using honorifics), and her knowledge outside math, medicine, and science was below average.
Above all, she rarely washed or cleaned!
That was the worst part!
“Do you even understand what it means to have dignity as a noble? Wash yourself! You’re a girl!”
“Do you think it’s 400 years ago? Cleanliness has nothing to do with being a woman.”
“Don’t be cheeky with your brother. So you admit you’re dirty?”
“Stop nagging! You’re worse than father!”
“You, you! Are you not going to fix your speaking habits?”
“Get lost! You cry over novels!”
“It’s not a novel, it’s the Nazarene Epic, you fool! Are you really a genius? How can you not be moved by that great poem? What do you know? You should at least understand the basics! And I didn’t cry! My nose just tingled a bit!”
“Ugh, so noisy. Why learn useless things? You read it and cry all you want! I hope you end up with a belly like father when you get old.”
As children, the boy and girl fought loudly. Their father, the former Duke, who tried to intervene in their fights, was secretly hurt by his daughter’s vicious curses.
Later, in a literature class, they swapped the poems they had written. One of them laughed out loud, while the other muttered, “What kind of nonsense is this?” which led to a big fight.
Predictably, Richard laughed, and Risha muttered. Both were hurt for different reasons.
Risha, who hated writing poetry, had worked hard on it, only to be mocked. Richard, on the other hand, was outraged that his sister couldn’t recognize the value of his poem, which had been praised by renowned writers. Their resentment towards each other grew.
Fortunately, as they entered adolescence and focused on their studies, they were separated more often. Otherwise, if they had stayed under the same roof during that extreme period, they might have ended up in a civil war.
What was unique, though, was that despite despising and being annoyed by each other, they both recognized that they were each other’s only sibling and comrade.
Richard was annoyed by his sister’s behavior because, as his family and sister, her actions fell short of his standards. He was also irritated by her lack of basic boundaries, which he found annoying.
Risha, on the other hand, thought Richard was too inhuman, living only for his own perfection, and saw his control-freak perfectionism as a disease. As a doctor and his only sister, she viewed him with a kind of concerned pity.
‘Will he ever get married? If he suddenly dies, I’ll have to deal with all the annoying stuff. I don’t want that.’
Just as Richard acknowledged his sister’s exceptional talent, Risha also recognized his sense of responsibility and competence in managing the family’s affairs. It was true that because her workaholic brother was the eldest, she could live comfortably doing whatever she wanted.
“Is something wrong? You look really ugly.”
“Choose between speaking formally or informally.”
“Hmm, you must be fine if you’re nagging.”
An awesome story 💖💖
Thank you for the translation 💜
You are welcome, Israella!