Chapter 192. An Unexpected Relationship. (3/7)
“Haaaaaah. What else do you get called by the people in the academy?”
“The Black-Pink Killer Lady. Slut. Bitch. Whore. Prostitute. Girl who gives amazing head. Girl I want to have sex with.” She innocently recited the names she was called at the academy while she counted them off on her fingers one by one. I was ready to kick her a few names in.
“Those aren’t names, you idiot! Don’t let them bully you like that either, damn it!”
“Ah. But they are names I’m commonly called. Should I try signing with those to see if any of them work?”
“Hell no. I’m not going to go around calling you by those names in front of others. Screw it, I’ll give you a proper name myself if that’s what it takes. From now on your surname will be Sozen. The same as mine. As for your first name… let me think about it a bit. I need to do some research for something that fits you.”
When I said that, she was wide-eyed. It looked like she didn’t know what to say.
I pulled out my phone and searched online. My first thought was to name her based on her eyes. Heterochromia. Maybe Chromia? I thought it wasn’t bad, but I still tried to think of something better.
I was an author who often had to come up with names for characters. It was typically my weakest area though. I’d often just take a word and translate it to another language. I’d end up with some awful names. I tried searching for pink in other languages, but the best ones came back as Rosa, Roza, and Rose. I cursed my girlfriend for already being given that name and for the others sounding so similar. I’d look like an awful piece of shit if I named this pitiful nameless girl after my girlfriend.
It would just show how little thought I put into it. There was no way I could do that.
What about pink flowers? I’d used flowers in the past to name characters. And wasn’t the origin of the Owner’s last name also a flower?
Yeah, flowers were no doubt the way to go for a girl’s name. Surely. They smelt nice like flowers unlike guys after all.
I looked through the flowers one by one in a list someone wrote up and eventually stopped when I read the name Wisteria. It caught my eyes. I liked the sound of it. When I read up about them I found that such a flower might even fit her too well.
Satisfied with the name I opened my mouth and muttered it to hear how it rolled off the tongue, “Wisteria Sozen.”
I looked up and the girl in front of me looked panicked.
“Huh? Wha- Uh… Wisteria? Is that what you came up with?”
“Yeah, do you dislike it?”
“Uh… it sounds… a bit nice… I guess.”
I explained my line of reasoning, “They grow up to thirty feet long, similar to your thirty years of life. The ‘ia’ at the end of Wisteria acts as a reminder of your heterochromia eyes. It is a flower that comes in a variety of colors ranging from white, lavender-blue, lilac, pink, mauve, purple, lilac, to rich pink. If you ever change the color of your hair dye, it will still be a name that matches you. Though there aren’t any black-colored Wisteria, I think its variation in colors fits your differently colored eyes and hair. However, there is a purple variant called Black Dragon Wisteria. So though it seems there are no black-colored ones, black is still there in the name. Kind of like your hair as well, even if you dye it, your original hair color is still black.”
“Black Dragon Wisteria? There is actually a flower called that?”
“Yeah. Do you like it? It sounds kind of cool for an assassin if you ask me. Screw the ‘Man Killer’ nonsense for your code name while you’re at the academy from now on. The person who gave you that codename has no imagination.”
“Wisteria Sozen? That’s my name?”
“Yes.”
“But… you said Sozen is your own last name. Are you really fine with me having the same last name as you?”
I got to work on writing up the contract one more time while I talked to her and thought about various things.
“Wisteria, we are two people who don’t have families. As far as I’m concerned, my so-called blood relatives are all as good as dead. Us two loners without blood ties to anyone in this world should stick together. I’ve also found through experience that the best kinds of families are the ones not tied to you by blood. Blood-related families just turn against each other at some point when generations grow too distant. Their sense of unity is a mess and things become ugly at the drop of a hat when the word inheritance is mentioned. When people say blood runs thick, they definitely never met the people who were supposedly related to me by blood.”
I wasn’t pulling shit out of my ass. Everything my mother was ever supposed to inherit was snatched and stolen by her own mother, brothers, and their children. She was the unloved one in her family, betrayed by almost everyone around her at every turn.
When her father worked hard to come up to this country as a teacher bringing his family with him, he was repaid with betrayal. His wife divorced him soon after and took almost everything he had. His wife then used deceptive methods, going so far as having my mother’s teachers convince her daughter to stay with her rather than her father. His wife only came to this country with him to divorce where it would work out most beneficial to her.
Her plan was to take custody of all their children and return to her home country. She would then be legally entitled to child support because of the laws in this country. This was why I had no positive feelings toward child support. I’d seen both sides of the story. It wasn’t as great a thing as it seemed. It could be used in awful manipulative ways like this to turn a pitiful man into a slave. My mother also never viewed child support as anything that great for this very reason, she didn’t want to become like her own mother. At least, that was what I inferred.
After that, her mother brought her children back to her home country. She later manipulated her parents into giving her land that was intended for my mother in the future. She ended up selling off that land and used the money to construct a large residence. With her home above, living like a queen, she had two office spaces available beneath her that she rented out. One was rented out to an insurance company while the other was rented out of a pharmacy.
Truly, if someone was ever interested in making money, these were exactly the two types of businesses one would look to.
She’d lied to my mother during the construction and told her that these areas were where she would stay. What she didn’t say was that she meant the small cramped area behind the two office spaces that could only be accessed from the back of the building.
Her mother aside, my mother’s father found himself betrayed and abandoned in this country. He didn’t return to his home country like the snake who divorced him, he’d already taken out a mortgage on a house in this country by that point in his life. He was trapped and cornered. He remained in this country and lived out a lonely life all by himself.
All the while, the pigs in my mother’s home country got to live lavish easy lives filled with luxury. When my mother finished high school, she returned to the country where her father was abandoned and stayed with him. It was only thanks to my mother’s father who sponsored her that she had even a slim chance to come back to this country to work and receive a university-level education.
He wasn’t a shit father like that man turned out to be in the end. It was a shame he was already dead and no longer a part of this world. He was the only family member that had ever done anything for my forsaken mother.
In the end, the firstborn son took the majority of everything while my mother lived with her father in this country. The second-born took the leftovers.