Chapter 406 - 398. Only With You
Bassena also stared at the swarm of children playing on the ground; the healthy visitors and some of the patients who were well enough to still play outside. If someone were to ask, Bassena would say he didn’t hate children. In fact, he quite liked them. They were cute, they were little devils that needed to be guided, and they were people who he had to protect the most.
But liking children and having them was a separate matter.
"We can be a family without children," Bassena muttered. He didn’t sound dry or bitter; he was just stating the fact.
"That’s true," Zein agreed.
After all, there were couples that had no means of having children, or had no intention of having them. Would that mean they couldn’t be called families? There were people who came together for a cause and called each other family without involving children, and in Zein’s eyes, it was still an eligible bond.
Bassena leaned back and tilted himself slightly so his shoulder touched Zein’s. He shifted his gaze from the playing children to the blue sky, to memories rooted in his soul. Slowly, he opened his mouth to speak his mind.
"While I was growing up, I always thought that I wouldn’t have any children," he confessed. The hardened eyes reflected all the bitter things he had to endure during his childhood. "I don’t want to sire a child that would only live in misery."
That’s why Bassena said he didn’t care about Zein not having a womb, and honestly, Zein thought the same. From the moment he held the twins’ tiny toddler hands, he cursed the people who let their children be born into a harsh reality that even adults had a hard time enduring. A lot of children were left without ever knowing their parents, and died before they could question it.
But that was why Zein decided to build the orphanage. He couldn’t care less about the adults, but children shouldn’t bear the responsibility of the life their parents shoved into them. As one of the children who had to suffer since birth, Zein understood well the sentiment of not wishing for a child to suffer the same way he did.
"With time, that thought only grew," Bassena continued. "I realized that blood could be toxic, and that bonds could be made outside what people called family."
It was a justified view from someone who had to annihilate his own family because that so-called family had killed his mother and tried to kill him too. Someone whose semblance of familial bond was only found through two strangers who were forced to subdue him in the academy.