Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu
III. Hands
He wonders if she misses having fingers. His own close around the inkstand, unstopping it and dipping the quill with the ease of long practice, not a single wasted drop of ink, and he looks at his hand as if belongs to someone else. If having had fingers once, she learns absence, loss. Lessons that cannot be unlearned, he knows.
For the love of a prince she left behind the only life she had ever known, became a human girl, and made her clumsy way through a strange world she in time grew to love as much as well. But no matter how much she loved the prince, it was only because of the promise he made her that she could bring herself to relinquish that world, her prince, and even herself.
I promise to stay by your side forever. The words weigh on his heart. Was the promise already broken before he could keep it? Is this love? He does not know.
He snorts inelegantly, and brutally honest even when it means cutting himself against his own bitter cynicism, he admits he is worrying more about himself than about Duck. Would he miss having fingers, he wonders, having known nothing else.
Stories can only be written as you wish, honestly. Drosselmeyer's words haunt him now that he has learned the truth of them. For all he despises the man, vows never to be his descendant in anything beyond blood, the words are true. But what does he wish? He does not know. He does not know anything anymore.
The page rests before him, blank, unmarred, a question.