Cole just felt glad that Eva had someone to play with at home that wasn"t Felicia. He was slightly p.i.s.sed at Libra for appearing whenever they wanted to.It was then he noticed the smell wafting out from the kitchen.
It was the smell of baked pork chop and some familiar scent. Felicia had just finished cooking and just noticed Cole"s arrival.
"Hm? You"re home already? I expected you to take longer."
"The sky"s dark already."
Cole hanged his coat on the chair he would always sit on during dinner time and pointed to outside the window. The familiar colorful night sky of the〈Neutral Zone〉had already set in.
Felicia just shrugged a bit and brought the plates over to the dinner table which Eva had just finished setting up.
"Libra would"ve been the one to set the table if he didn"t cheat!"
"I didn"t cheat!"
"Yes, you did!"
Eva grumbled as she did so and Libra, who couldn"t stand being wrongfully accused, ended up getting into another petty arguement.
"*sigh*...That"s the tenth time you guys have argued today!"
Felicia sighed and thought about what she was going to do with the two children in front of her. The two of them paused for a but before Eva loudly declared...
"No, it"s the 11th!"
"What? It"s the 12th!"
"You aren"t supposed to be proud of that!"
Felicia smacked Eva on the head which caused her to crouch on the ground in pain. Cole ended up remembering another person who got smacked that day.
"Eh? You"re not? But I thought bigger numbers were better?"
"They are. But not too much. Even stuff is the best."
Eva siad with a dumbfounded look on her face while Libra gave her pointless commentary. Cole thought tha it was as if the intelligence she displayed that one day she was in the library with him talking about the possible consequences of a country"s people disappearing overnight was evaporated into the thin air.
Libra had always seemed a but playful so Cole didn"t mind them much. He would still probabgly give them a lecture over it though.
"Maybe I shouldn"t have signed a contract with Libra... If I didn"t, I wouldn"t have to deal with managing four different departments at once either."
"Hey! What"s done is done!"
"Oh yeah, that"s right. They can sometimes hear my thoughts.
Cole put on a regretful expression on his face and out his hand to his chin as if he was in deep thought.
"I really shouldn"t have, should I? After all you called me an apathetic b.a.s.t.a.r.d when we signed the contract."
"I did but..."
"You also just pop out of nowhere and disappear whenever you want to."
"Everybody, shut up. Let"s just eat."
Felicia said with a voice that sounded as if she was tired of everything in life. When faced with her unhappy expression of the only person that was capable of cooking (although not everybody knew that Cole couldn"t cook yet), they all sat down and ate in silence.
"Hm?"
It was then that Cole noticed that there was a recently used rice cooker on the kitchen counter and a plate of rice on the table.
"Hm? Felicia, you eat rice?"
"Ah? Yeah, it"s been some time since I had some after all..."
"Now that I think about it, I haven"t had rice in a long time as well."
"Cole, you eat rice?"
Felicia showed obvious suprise and hadn"t event taken a bite from her plate. Meanwhile, Eva was trying to steal Libra"s other porkchop without getting caught in the background. Libra had already prepared a counter for the moment she would strike but back to the main pair.
"Only occasionally along with some j.a.panese food. When I was with my brother."
"You have a brother? I thought you were an only child."
She mostly thought that because in most of the doc.u.mentaries describing the... "Glorious" exploits of Cole from childhood all the way to his early death, the only said family were his mother and it was also said that his father had left them.
"Eh? Papa has a brother?"
"Oh yeah, I haven"t told you. He"s only my half-brother though."
When Eva heard that her Papa had a brother all of a sudden, her attention immediatley changed from the perfectly baked piece of porkchop on Libra"s plate to her Papa.
"I"ll tell you more about him some other day. We might even visit."
"Really?"
Eva"s eyes shined with curiosity. She had always wanted to meet some kind of extended family. In alot of the storybooks she had read, most of the extended family were really nice.
Except some where they would beat up the main character and mentally abuse them. Eva carefully put those in the back shelves so she wouldn"t ever stumble upon them again.
"Yeah, now go back to eating."
Cole just smiled at the little bunny before he then posed a question to Felicia.
"How about you Felicia? Why don"t you tell us a bit about your family?"
"Well... My family, huh..."
Felicia crossed her arms and and had a troubled expression on her face.
"If you feel uncomfortable talking about them, you don"t have to. You can tell me at another time.
"No, it"s just that there"s not much to talk about my family and I"m not sure where to start."
Felicia continued to think a bit more and Cole finished up the food on his plate quite quickly. Felicia then seemed like she finally found somewhere to start and opened her mouth.
"Let"s see... I have two sisters, one older and one younger. My mom... Not much to say about her except that she was a nice mom. My dad... He was pretty rough looking but was also a nice man like my mom. We were a happy yet poor family."
"And?"
Cole waited to see if Felicia had anything else to add to her story. But she couldn"t come up with anything.
"Hmm... I guess that"s about it. There weren"t a lot of uniqe things that happened in our life as a family."
"Do you visit them?"
"...."
"You don"t?"
"Well... I do so a few times but whenever I go to the〈Avant Zone〉to visit them, they always just happen to be out. The last time I saw them was about... 4 or 5 years ago?"
Cole leaned back on his chair and stared at the ceiling and muttered out.
"So the both of us haven"t seen our family in a while, huh?"
"Yeah, but Cole. It"s technically been twenty years since you last saw them right? So, for the you right now..."
Felicia reminded Cole of the giant valley that now stretched between him and his relatives. Although she didn"t say it like that, he knew what she was trying to say. He also knew that she was worried on how he would react if he ever saw them again.
Cole just faced Felicia took a sip of a gla.s.s of water and said...
"...That"s just something in the past."