#( epilogu.e )

[crcasey-blog]

Wednesday morning brings a fresh layer of snow over thin bare branches, a return to weekly routines and a letter.

It's only out of habit when she looks up as winged shadow flies over the expanse of the table; the expectation for something—anything—to arrive is minimal, not anything more than the Daily Prophet to thumb through over breakfast. That is, until said shadow drops a rolled slip right next to her plate.

She doesn't spare it so much as another glance; the spidery scrawl of her name, the silk lilac ribbon with a silver trim—it's these details that have her deem it as far from urgent, far from necessary to open and see what's inside. With one hand curled around a hot mug, she's quick to return to the paper as she was to pull away from it, skimming over the block-arrangement of headlines. A Quidditch match in Wales. An economic crisis in the Balkan states. Weather in Morocco.

Morrocco, that's where he'd been last. Or so that's what he'd told. Over letters, over the few that she's had the heart to open; half legible, all streaked and blotted, as though it'd been pushed till the last minute, written for it to arrive just barely in time. This one's earlier for once—an improvement to be lauded, surely. But Casey finds nothing more but that familiar sense of contempt seeping deep into her bones, the very sight of the parchment an insult all on its own. A pattern she's come to figure out—a commitment to muscle memory above all else, every line penned down nearly identical from the last, and the one before the last. An effort of pure, undetermined obligation that reads (always, always, always reads) something like:

Saehee,

It's beautiful here in ________. You'd love it, I just know it. Work's been keeping me busy, but not so busy that I can't wish you a ________. You've grown up so much, and so fast! Feels like only yesterday since you were ________!

Study hard and take care.

Appa

Close the gap, fill in the blanks, read the spaces between those tiny, tiny lines: 

(“It’s only because I have to.”) 

“Are you done with that?" 

It'd be so easy to say it like it is. I'm done. I've been done. This is something that belongs somewhere deep in the ground and not here, not rooted this deep, and most certainly not within her reach.

She pushes over the paper to the girl who’d asked. Pauses, considers offering the letter along with it, a bonus, free of charge. "Be my guest."

Wednesday morning brings an hour to kill before the first rung of classes, age-old realizations and the start of the third day of the month.

Happy birthday, Casey Yoon. Happy fucking birthday.