Chapter Text
Letters in the Attic:
The house felt cold alongside the strong winds coming from the sea. Claude landed a job as a work-from-home book editor for a publishing company. He decided to return to his family's aging mansion at the seaside after graduating from his university located in the city.
Currently standing in front of the attic door, he could see the lights were turned on inside through the gap. He could hear movement from inside. Someone was moving the wooden cases around.
He pushed open the attic door, coughing as the dust flying around hit his face. He saw his brother moving around the old, vintage-looking chest cases that had been sitting there for the longest time.
"Hey!" Claude's brother greets him. "One of our aunts dropped by. Said we could finally go through this stuff. Remember how they always told us not to touch anything in here? Well, turns out there's inheritance inside these cases, especially for you."
Claude raised a brow. "What would we even inherit from what... the 1700s? These cases are probably older than the house itself. The Kuga family owned this place before us, didn't they?"
"Yeah, our family apparently inherited it centuries ago before the owner died in his 50s. Can you imagine how much this would cost now?" His brother chuckled thinking about the amount. "Anyways, she said your stuff is in the ones labelled with a 'C'."
By the time Claude found the case marked with his initial, his brother had already gone to bed early. The attic was silent now. He hadn't expected anything to be worthwhile. Maybe books or some old clothing but certainly nothing intact.
Something was compelling him to open it tonight especially after reading the note that his Aunt left on the case.
I hope that you see everything that we protected. When you were born, I felt the pull. I knew that you were the one. From the painting, from the silent agreement.
"What painting? What agreement?" And so, he brought the huge case down to his room after removing the dusty plastic covers and to satisfy his curiosity.
He wasn't sure what he was going to receive since his aunt had already given him and his family's shares of money as an inheritance from their great-grandparents passing away. What more was there to receive if those were given about 3 years ago while he was at university and he received a notification that the money was wired into his account?
He opened the huge case and saw stacks of what looked like diaries. Labelled with Claude's name and a hashtag of numbers beside each one.
The cover of each diary was cracked, dark orange like the glow of a sunset. Each diary tied up with a red string. It was damaged but still intact enough to keep the diary closed.
Claude frowned. Something in his chest felt uneasy but he untied the string anyway.
He looked at the first page. Cursive handwriting that was old-fashioned but elegant and neat.
To my dearest Claude,
You once told me that people are just like the stars, always waiting for someone to see them but only the moon notices them at night. I wonder if you ever knew that I was staring at you the whole time, whether it was morning or night. Even when the sky turned bright and the stars faded, my eyes still saw you.
His heartbeat fast and eager to see what was next.
I held you tight as you died in my arms. I never got to say that I loved you. I was afraid of ruining the only thing that ever connected us, 'dearest friends'.
Claude had to pause reading for days before continuing. Trying to understand why his name was on these entries.
As he read entry after entry, what the diaries filled with letters were slowly unfolding. His emotions were a mess, not knowing how to feel after each letter that he read.
He thought he would find a journal. No, it was a series of letters and every page was addressed to him.
He was in denial at first. "This couldn't possibly be about me." These were written centuries ago. And yet somewhere deep in his heart, unconsciously he hoped that they were written for him.
—Weeks passed—
As he kept reading the stacks of diaries, pages filled with letters written to him.
Claude began to dream. Not just fragments but full scenes.
Blood splattered everywhere, a battlefield during the war.
The same home he lived in now but with candlelit corridors instead.
A boy with this soft laugh and ink-stained hands whispering his name.
In the mirror, Claude is dressed in armour, soaked in blood and smiling beside someone that he doesn't recognize.
A red string wrapped around their fingers, barely visible in every dream that he had.
On every page that Claude read, it was the same name signed at the end. Kuga Leo.
After each dream that he had at night and every page that he finished reading from Leo who wrote a letter each day for 30 years straight. Claude began to realize that he didn't just stumble onto someone else's tragedy. He lived in it before the letters even existed.
After binge-reading all the letters, Claude took note that if Leo wrote for 30 years straight, one letter per day then he would have written 10,950 letters in total.
Months have passed since the dreams began, flashbacks that he shouldn't even remember yet he felt that they were once his. Pieces of the past life that are now crawling back into his mind.
At the end of the last letter that Leo wrote,
"There's a painting hidden inside the house. Someone should be preserving and maintaining it, even after I died."
What Claude didn't realise was that when the house was given to his family, centuries ago. It was the same family, the same bloodline as his past life. Before Leo's final days, he tried to give the house to his own siblings and their children. But they moved on with their own lives, far away from the seaside mansion.
Leo turned to the Clawmark family who willingly bought the house after seeing how much Claude meant to Leo. Leo entrusted the house and the painting to them.
To the Clawmark family, the house and painting were not just an inheritance. They felt that it was a vow for them to keep. They had a silent agreement passed down through generations to preserve the memories and love of Leo for Claude.
As if Leo's quiet pleas had settled into the house and the hearts of those who lived in it. A request to keep his story with Claude alive, Leo's love alive.
And for generations, they did. The eldest child of each generation was told about this painting of a man who once lived in the house and the boy that he had loved. Claude's past life siblings knew even if Leo never told them. They knew that Leo loved Claude, even if it was forbidden at that time.
They saw it in the way he looked at Claude. And they regret not urging Leo to tell Claude, to speak up. But it was too late.
Each generation made sure to guard it, to never let the house fall no matter what happened.
But it wasn't only Claude who didn't know things. Leo couldn't have predicted the future. He wrote thousands of letters for 30 years and he couldn't have possibly imagined that Claude. His Claude would ever be alive again to read of it.
And he especially couldn't have known that the house he left behind would be passed down through the same bloodline as the current Claude would be reborn in.
Claude kept note of his favourite lines from the letters. Reading them again and again even as he worked at his desk.
Some parts of Leo's letters:
If you found this diary then maybe I've finally come home to you.
Before I lost you, you once asked me if a soul could remember its memories from a past life. Now I sit here writing these letters, hoping that maybe one day you'll find me again.
They all said that I was going crazy for writing to a ghost. However, they didn't see what I saw, they didn't experience you the way that I did. They didn't dream of your smiling face for thirty years straight after you died. Your eyes that were always watching me in my dreams like you were waiting for me to follow you.
And so I must write to you, across centuries or even millennia if it takes that long for me to find you. I think I loved you before I knew what love was, a forbidden love. It started when I was ten, and I didn't even realize it until I got older. I loved you for ten years before you died when we were twenty.
We knew each other since we were kids. I loved you for ten years before you died at 21. And I loved you for thirty years more. I wish I had more time to love you. I would rather stain these pages with ink of your name on every letter that I write and stain my soul with the proof that you once existed in my life than forget you.
It rained yesterday. I remembered how much you loved to dance in the rain, just the two of us. I could hear your voice calling my name under the rain, Leo as if you hadn't forgotten about me.
Tell me you haven't forgotten about me.
- Yours, in all the years that we missed,
Leo
Claude grabbed a pen and opened his diary. Writing as if Leo would read it, just like Leo thought he would read it.
You could have told me, Leo. I would have asked you to run away with me so we didn't have to go fight in the war. I would have said yes to you, as long as you're with me.
Some nights, Claude spoke to the letters. "I loved you too, I think I did. I just didn't know it then."
There were nights when he just stood in front of the painting hidden inside the secret room of the house. A painting that Leo painted of himself with Claude and what they looked like centuries ago, identical to the Claude that stood before it now. The hidden room behind a shelf in the home library. The room where Leo loved to paint in and hide away with Claude.
Claude slowly accepted it, just like his love for Leo. Centuries late but now he knew... who he really is now and not just who he once was.
One night, as the rain fell against the windowpanes. He reached for the last diary and read the last letter before the note about the painting again and again.
If reincarnation was real.
If there is any way possible, I hope that you find this.
And if you do, please remember me. Even for just a second or in a dream.
Claude held the diary close to his chest. " I do... I remember you." He whispered.
But Leo was gone. The ink dried up centuries ago and the red string barely hung on.
He was too late. Just like Leo was, in telling him the truth.