Riza never anticipated just how empty her tiny apartment could look. She hardly moved-in, only spreading a thin layer of familiarity over the sterile space to remind her that she was falling into the right bed at the end of every day. A house plant in one corner. Black Hayate's bed tucked away neatly in another. She preferred to keep what she knew best trapped beneath the confines of her skin.
Yet, as she pulled the few pieces of herself away from the space in the weeks leading up to her transfer to Briggs, she was surprised by how much it destabilized her. Distracted by a mounting list of to do's piling up her head, Riza balanced on her tiptoes to reach the last box (one she had never unpacked) from a shelf in the top of her bedroom closet.
Suddenly, she recognized the unmistakable sound of the failing of yellowing tape, and was met head-on with a mini avalanche of white envelopes. Riza sighed and tossed the box unceremoniously onto her bed.
'One more thing to do,' she thought as she bent down to gather them up.
She settled in the floor. A gentle smile crept its way across her lips as she allowed her curiosity to rediscover the secrets entombed in each one; incoherent doodles, wobbly notes asking her father to tea, cheery letters sent by Rebecca when she went on leave to see her family after training.
As Riza stood up to place the staling memories back into the box, a smaller, grayer envelope floated back to the floor. The outdated stamp pasted in its upper right corner wasn't postmarked. Her own, cautious handwriting stared up in the form of an address she didn't recall.
Riza retrieved it from the floor and gingerly pried it open. The first two words made her gasp.
"Dear Roy…"
As she read, she couldn't help but laugh as her younger self attempted and fumbled to tell him how much his mission inspired her, how much she missed the time they spent together. How much he meant… to her, and wondering what her thought of her.
An insistent whine from Black Hayate brought Riza back to the present. He pawed nervously at the door.
"I suppose it's time to take you out," she said with a smile.
Before she made her way towards the door, she balled up the letter and tossed it into the bin in the nearly barren kitchen.
'At least I wasn't enough of a fool to send it,' she thought as she shepherded an excited Black Hayate out the door, 'There was never a need to ask.'