The Road That She Was Never Able to Take

After trying her best to comfort her master, Fei finally got the boy to stop crying.

He then told her with a smile that he needed some time alone and instructed her to guard outside.

But that smile was unnatural as if he forced himself to smile.

Despite her reluctance, Fei decided to follow her master's orders.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried to get him to stop crying… She thought in dismay.

She urged the boy to stop crying because it meant that a person was sad. She didn't want him to be sad. So she told him to smile and cheer up, the words that he always said to her.

As the mutant sunk herself into her thoughts, she didn't forget to pay attention to her surroundings, especially inside her master's room.

Suddenly, the door beside her opened, and a young woman with tied back blond hair stepped out in front of her.

She had green eyes similar to her master's, but the depth within was completely different.

"Feixin…" She wore a mixed expression.

"Miss Carol. Do you need anything?" Fei asked out of politeness. Even after five years, their relationship hadn't grown closer at all.

"Is…" Carol's voice drifted off as she searched for the right words to say, "my brother alright?"

The bodyguard slightly frowned and answered succinctly, "No. He is not."

"Huh?" This wasn't the answer the second miss was expecting. She knew that Fei wasn't the type of bodyguard to do nothing while her beloved master suffered, so why did she say that Carlos was not alright?

"What happened?" Carol's voice was solemn. Her hands were beaded with sweat.

Don't you know what happened? Fei wanted to say, but in the end, she replied dutifully, "He wanted some time alone. I'll inform him you wanted to see him once he comes out."

Hearing these words, Carol silently sighed a breath of relief that her brother was alright. Then, she suddenly realized something.

"… No… I- The person I wanted to see was you." The young woman stumbled over her words.

Fei looked at her, waiting for her to continue, but after thinking for a while, Carol found that she didn't know how to get her message across properly.

The atmosphere gradually turned awkward, and the mutant looked away, coming to the conclusion that Carol had no intention of speaking.

Fei finally broke the silence. She wanted to get this over with. "What?"

Carol was jolted out of her thoughts, and her hands fiddled with the corner of her blouse as she reluctantly squeezed out, "I… I wanted to t-thank you for protecting Carlos."

"T-Thank you. Not just for this incident, but for being his loyal bodyguard… and friend…" Her voice drifted off.

Before Fei could think of a reply, the young woman backed away into her room and slammed it.

At a loss for the second time in a day, the mutant looked blankly at the door the girl disappeared into.

…

Ugh.

Carol buried her burning face into her hands and lunged onto her bed. It's been a while since she last came home from university, but it felt like nothing had changed. The scent of her pillow was just as she remembered it.

I stuttered. Oh god… why did I stutter?

It was the first time the young woman had said 'thank you' for as long as she could remember, but she didn't think she would do so poorly…

She thought that she could've just said 'thank you' in a calm tone and be done with it, but her mind had completely blanked out when the time came.

Maybe I shouldn't have done it in the first place… Carol thought with dismay. Now, her dignity as an esteemed miss of the Rochester family was utterly destroyed.

She curled up in her bed, enjoying the soft comfort, as she continued to think about what happened today.

It wasn't the first time that Carol saw her father lose his temper – nor the first time he hit Carlos –, but it was the first time that he shamed his son in front of everyone in the family.

Previously, her father had never called Eyrie and her over to spectate. What had gotten into him?

But Carol sort of understood.

All of Mr. Rochester's children knew that the man valued academics very highly, and although he allowed you to have other hobbies, you had to have supreme grades first.

So finding out that his heir cheated on his midyears – one of the most important tests in the school year, especially to students who were about to graduate – and heavily focused his attention to art, which was utterly useless in his opinion, it was inevitable that Mr. Rochester would be in a bad mood.

But Carol also understood her brother's viewpoint.

As an eighth-grader, his grades were even more critical than usual. But the boy wasn't good at academics – this was a fact everyone knew.

It wasn't about the amount of effort he put in; he was just unfit for academic topics like math or science (these were his worst subjects).

Ever since he started school, no matter how much he studied and crammed, Carlos's best result was barely passing. As the years passed, he got better, and his highest grade on tests went up to the lower 80s.

So when he got 100 on his exams, Carol was suspicious but didn't overthink it.

The boy probably thought that he HAD TO do well on the midyear, both to please Father and to get in a good high school to please Father. Because if he didn't please Father, he would be getting Father upset, which would mean hell for him.

While Carol didn't know that her brother had cheated on his exams, she did know about his love for art.

In truth, the fact that the young master liked to draw wasn't actually a secret. Almost everyone except his father, Mr. Rochester, knew of it.

Among the people that knew, Carol was one of the few that massively supported her younger brother.

To her, whatever Carlos did was cute, and although he might not have taken the 'correct' path of action, he took the path that he wanted to take, the path that she was never able to take herself.

Carol was guilty of pushing all of her crushed dreams and hopes onto her younger brother, and she knew it. She wanted him to live freely, without any useless restrictions.

She didn't want him to ever mature and become sophisticated, 'fake,' like everyone else around her.

She wanted to protect him with the minuscule power that she had to preserve the boy's purity.

Yet, she couldn't do a thing when the perpetrator was her father.