A/N: After a period of trying to work out which of my short stories to put into 'Royal Tutor Collection' and which to publish as one-shots and how to write them accordingly, I've decided to use 'RTC' specifically for seasonal stories and reupload everything else as one-shots. So the ten non-seasonal stories from 'RTC' will be uploaded as one-shots over the next couple of months, some of which I've revised and expanded based on popularity — so enjoy!

Diaries

'Prince Leonhard…'

The prince looked up from his diary and fountain pen, filling in time while waiting for Heine to finish grading his quizzes. 'Hm?'

Heine sighed and set his own pen down. 'Just how many diaries do you actually have?'

Leonhard tilted his head. 'Hrmmm…' He counted on his fingers, lost track, then gave up and scratched out the figures in a messy sprawl on a piece of paper.

'If it's that much of a bother, then don't — '

'Fifty-three?'

Heine stared for a moment, then adjusted his glasses. 'I think perhaps you better count again. That number sounds a tad large…'

'No, I — wait a sec — ' he scans over the sums and checks the figures, ' — no, that's right, I swear!'

Heine dropped his pen, and it rolled unsteadily to the edge of the table and hit the floor. He pulled himself together and tried to come up with a response. 'Fifty… three?'

'Why are you looking at me like that?!'

'Forgive me, I meant nothing by it. It's just that that's a terribly large quantity…'

Leonhard huffed, and turned in his chair to better be able to glare at Heine. 'I've been writing them ever since I was a kid! That's like… ten years!'

Heine rapidly did the maths in his head. Fifty-three diaries, ten years… that was five diaries a year.

'My word…' Heine stammered. 'But… it's not as though you've written in all of them — '

Leonhard frowned. 'Of course I have. Well, except for the ones I'm currently writing in, because I usually have several going at once.'

That fact distracted Heine from the sheer ridiculousness of the conversation, and he asked, 'Several? Why several?'

Leonhard checked them off on his fingers, thinking between each. 'Cause there's different types. There's reflection diaries… and disaster diaries, very important… and hate diaries — ' he gave Heine a look, and Heine gave him an unimpressed one in return, ' — and travel diaries. And come to think of it, Licht had doctor that made him keep a medical diary once when he was younger, so that the doctor didn't have to do any actual work. Licht got so sick of it that he pushed it onto me to fill in for him.'

'How did that go for the two of you?'

'It was actually kind of fun; we both worked together to come up with the most ridiculous things — once we said that he managed to come down with sunspots and bubonic plague and and twenty-four-hour Ahfrikan sleeping sickness all in the space of one day.' Leonhard cracked up, and laughed. 'The palace physician nearly quit, and our father had to give us a terrific telling off and beg him to give us another chance. But after we told him why we had done, it…' Leonhard smirked at Heine. '…he didn't beg particularly hard.'

Heine shook his head. 'My word… You lot are incorrigible.'

As Leonhard turned back to his diary-writing, Heine asked one last question. 'How did you actually get into keeping a diary, anyway, Prince?'

Leonhard paused, then turned back to Heine with a smile. 'Because my mom used to keep a diary, and she was the one who started me on it.'

Oh, Prince… How sweet.

Heine adjusted his glasses and returned to grading the prince's quizzes again. 'She probably didn't envision what an obsessive diary-writer you were going to become, or she would have taught you how to play cat's cradle instead.'

'Excuse me?!'

'Nothing at all, Prince.'

'Hmph…'

The End

A/N: Reviews welcome, and thanks for reading!