sneaking out some crumbs from that amnesiac retsu au so i can convince myself to work on it again. in first person pov bc i was trying something different here
Alone again, a restlessness grips me, and I find myself scouring the house for clues. The Prince may have promised to help, but well… if he’s really a Prince, he can’t possibly have the time to be bothering with a random knight.
Come to think of it, how did he get in?
After a brief moment of panic, I manage to re-unlock my front door. The lock was definitely functional. Do Princes just have masterkeys to every house in the Kingdom? That doesn’t seem fair.
To distract myself from further unkind speculations about the Prince (such as him carrying lockpicking equipment, or stealing a spare key) I turn my sights on the house itself. It’s minimally decorated. Having seen the kitchen and bedroom already, I wander through the other doors, of which there are far too many for a house so barely lived-in, until I find myself in a room outfitted with a set of bookshelves and a desk overflowing with paper.
It seems I was in the middle of writing several letters. All of them bear the same handwriting—presumably mine, as one of them is signed with the name I’d been called.
Another name I don’t recognise.
The one with the signature is the only one that’s been finished. Addressed to a Madame Setsuna Sion, it carries brief greetings and lists off a few unrelated sentiments, likely responding to questions asked in a prior letter. Indeed, there’s a paper beneath it bearing a different, more elegant handwriting. It reads far more naturally than “my” response.
But it is at least finished. The same can’t be said for the rest of the letters littered on the desk. They all address the same person, and they all whittle away after the first few lines.
In some, the name is scratched out and replaced with ‘Lady Arleon’. Those don’t get past the first line.
There’s something about the display that feels deeply embarrassing to look at. I push the papers to one side, keeping the exchange with Setsuna Sion aside with a mental note to have it mailed. Unlike that one, there’s no corresponding pair for the letters addressed to Haki Arleon in sight.
Surely someone who writes letters filled with nothing but notarised responses to prior correspondence wouldn’t be drowning in a sea of unfinished letters at her own discretion…
My instinct proves true when I tentatively tug at the drawer built into the desk. It opens easily; the key was already sitting in the keyhole, unturned. A mountain of letters to rival the one on the desk emerges.
The ones at the bottom are placed neatly in bundles, some even tied together with string. But there’s a handful at the top scattered messily, half-in the envelopes they came in, as if “I” just couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.
