Free Web NovelChapter 690: Humans Make Mistakes
Alex drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, his eyes moving across his two brothers, both of them sitting with the same lost, unfocused look on their faces. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
Venedikt was better at hiding his turmoil than Andrei was, the difference between them as clear as it had always been. Andrei never tried to hide anything. He never had, not once in all the years Alex had known him.
It was obvious what was tearing at both of them. Neither could decide whether they wanted their father back in their lives, walking into an unknown future alongside them, or whether they wanted to keep things exactly as they were, the life they had carved out for themselves without him.
Alex felt the weight of that choice too, and he had no clean answer for it either. It wasn’t simply a question of what their father deserved after everything. It was a question of what their family actually wanted now, after the years and the distance and the grief that had calcified into something resembling peace.
Right now, this wasn’t shaping up to be the joyful reunion with a father they had long believed dead and had long made their peace with losing him.
It was already something close to a blessing that both brothers had set aside their resentment toward him, that they understood, somewhere past the years of grief, that their father had never truly been the one at fault. The world itself had simply been cruel enough to force that reality onto all of them without asking, without warning, without offering any of them a say in the matter.
Alex couldn’t tell either of them what was right, because he didn’t know himself, not with any real certainty. But maybe he could offer them a different way of seeing the shape of it, something that might make the impossible choice in front of them feel a little less impossible to carry alone.
"You know," Alex said, breaking the silence that had settled heavily over the room for the better part of the last hour.
Both brothers turned toward him at once, something almost eager flickering behind their eyes, as if they had been quietly waiting for exactly this, for him, anyone to be the one to say something first.
"Before I entered the Ancient World. Before I got lucky enough to land opportunities that freed me from most ordinary problems... Earning money and influence, the kind of things that quietly solve nearly anything a middle-class life throws at you without you ever needing to think twice about them." He paused, letting the thought settle before he continued.
"Before all that, my family was in deep, deep trouble. Deeper than either of you probably ever imagined, given everything you see now."
He said it with something close to a chuckle, an exhale carrying real and unguarded relief in it, the particular relief of someone speaking about a danger that had already passed and could finally be looked at directly instead of around.
Just picturing the hell his family had lived through in his previous life was enough to make his heart stutter, even now, even with all the distance time and fortune had put between him and it.
The financial strain had been one thing on its own, ugly and constant. But Sophia’s death had been the blow that finally broke them completely, the one wound neither of his parents had ever fully recovered from, no matter how much time passed.
Alex had hated his father for a long time after that, quietly and without ever quite saying it aloud. His mother and father hadn’t been able to look at each other without the same unspoken accusation sitting between them, the quiet, corrosive certainty that if only they had possessed the means, their little girl would have received the treatment she needed and would still be alive today.
"Our house was about to be taken from us," Alex continued, his voice steady despite what it carried. "My father’s accounts were dry, completely dry, nothing left to draw on. Even the car would have gone, leaving us with almost nothing to our name and still drowning under debt that wasn’t going anywhere."
"It happened because my father trusted people he shouldn’t have trusted, and they went into a business which put everything at stake, even though it was not his intention, and yet it still happened because of Zero’s arrival made entire industries obsolete within a few years, the kind of shift no one could have planned around."
"My father’s business was one of the countless ones standing right in the path of that, about to be wiped out along with everything he had spent his life building."
"If I hadn’t gotten lucky," Alex asked, his voice carrying the same even calm it had held through all of it, "what do you think would have happened to my family?"
It was Andrei who answered, his voice quieter than usual, stripped of its usual bluntness.
"Your life would have turned to hell."
"Now," Alex said, holding both their gazes in turn, "what do you think would have happened if, in that exact same situation, with nothing left and no way to find more, Sophia had been diagnosed with an illness that needed close to half a million dollars in treatment every single year just to keep her alive?"
Andrei didn’t answer right away. His eyes had gone wide, the kind of wide that came not from surprise but from realizing he had never thought that far down the road.
He knew Sophie wasn’t truly ill, not in the conventional sense. Her body was simply reacting to the newly introduced mana, absorbing it, adjusting to something it had never been built to hold. She was fine only because Alex had acquired life pod technology in time, capable of repairing the damage her unique growth was quietly doing to her from the inside.
Without it, there would have been no adjusting.
"She would have died," Alex said, after a short silence. Just the truth, placed plainly between them. "And who do you think everyone would have blamed?"
He paused.
"I would have blamed myself, certainly, but alongside that, my mother and my father would have blamed him. For destroying the very means that could have saved his own daughter, even though it was not truly his fault."
Neither brother spoke.
"I would have hated him for it," Alex continued, his voice carrying no heat, just the calm of someone who had already sat with this long enough to see all the sides of it. "Even though his only real mistake was trusting the wrong person. Being caught in a business that became obsolete the moment technology arrived from the galactic shop, which no one ever saw happening."
He let that sit for a moment.
"One could argue it never came to that, so I don’t truly know how I feel about it," he said. "But we only survived because I managed to find a way through, through luck and through sheer will to be successful." He wasn’t lying. "Still, I don’t put my focus on what happened, or what could have happened."
A small pause.
"I’ve made peace with the fact that my father, as much as he is an example to me, as much as he is responsible for holding this family together, at the end of the day, he is just a human," Alex said simply, without judgment.
"Humans make mistakes. And we can either learn from them, forget them entirely, or decide to carry them for the rest of our lives. It doesn’t matter much which we choose, because in every scenario, life goes on."
He looked at his brothers.
"I’m not giving you advice on what to do. I genuinely have no idea what’s right for you." A small smile, a small shrug. "What I can tell you is that it’s your decision, and you will have to live with it for the rest of your lives."
Andrei let out a long breath and dropped his head back against the sofa, staring at the ceiling with the look of a man whose mind had been working hard for a very long time and had nothing to show for it.
"Well, this doesn’t make the choice any easier," he muttered. "Or clearer."
"We still have to decide," Venedikt said. His voice was composed as always, but something at the very edges of it wasn’t quite steady. "And this helps."
A beat of quiet.
"So." He turned to his brother. "What do you think we should do?"
Andrei didn’t look at him. "I don’t know. Just decide something. I’ll go along with whatever you pick."
"No." Venedikt’s tone didn’t rise, but it didn’t bend either. "We decide this together."
"Then go ask Mother. I don’t care what you choose."
"Stop being a child about it." There was a rare edge in Ven’s voice now, thin but real. "This affects you as much as it affects Mother and me. Your opinion on this matter."
Andrei didn’t respond, but he turned his head slowly and looked at his brother, and whatever was in his eyes said more than anything he might have put into words.
Venedikt held his gaze for a moment, not backing down.
"I’ll share mine," he said, his expression settling back into its usual calm. "I say we free him from his chains, but we let him find a new life for himself. His presence here would change this family, for better or for worse, and I don’t think we need that now."
Andrei’s eyes went wide.
It was the stillness of someone who had braced for one thing and been handed something entirely different. He turned his head slowly, staring at nothing, at the floor, at his own lap, his expression doing something private and complicated in the silence that followed.
"I thought you would..." He didn’t finish it.
He went quiet for nearly three full minutes.
His face moved through things in that time, shock giving way to calm, calm giving way to something that looked like anger, anger softening into grief, grief settling finally into something still and unreadable, a mask drawn not out of coldness but out of necessity, because some decisions required a steady face just to get the words out.
"I say we allow him back into the family," Andrei said slowly. The weight it had taken to say it was written clearly in every word. "Whether we choose to build a life with him or not, that’s a problem for the future. At least Mother will have her life back."
Venedikt was quiet for a moment.
"That’s assuming," Ven he said calmly, not missing a beat, "that Mother wishes to have that life back."
Andrei blinked.
Something shifted in his expression, not quite relief, but close to it. The particular loosening that came from realizing that it was happening. freewēbnoveℓ.com
"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes. I hadn’t thought of that."
"Then it’s decided, Mother will make the deciding choice," Venedikt said.
He rose from his seat, crossed to the freezer with the unhurried ease of a man who had just closed a very heavy book and was ready to think about something else entirely, and pulled out a chilled can of soda. Cracked it open. Like it was just another afternoon. Just another quiet holiday he happened to get to enjoy.
