Work Text:
Another crumbled piece of paper hits the trashcan. By this point they’d become so good at aiming that the idea of becoming an international basketball player was starting to sound like something achievable. The young writer leans back against their chair and stares at yet another angrily scribbled-out paragraph.
Screw this.
For all their love for fiction, they had always been a laughably terrible writer. It's a trait that runs in the family. No wonder they own a shop selling texts from seemingly anyone but their bloodline. No wonder the shop would never lack employees. They look at their own ink-stained hands and crossed-out draft and sigh; maybe this is the path they were always meant to take. Inheriting the family shop doesn’t sound terrible. There are fates worse than looking after a place with generations' worth of history in it, no matter how small-scale said history may be. Sometimes it just felt like the compulsion to write, but the inability to do so would someday eat them from the inside out.
The future shop owner sighs once again, slides their chair a little further back and swings their feet onto the antique table in front of them. After all, their mother isn’t there to scold them for it today. What the slacking youngster unfortunately seems to forget is the still-open pot of ink they left at the edge of the table earlier. In their carelessness they accidentally knock it over and it goes flying off the table. The glass immediately shatters upon impact and pitch-black ink soaks the fragile bamboo floorboards. They follow the once inkpot – now ink puddle – to the floor, letting out a string of swearwords their mother definitely would scold them for. Their pants soak up some of the offending liquid immediately. The inexperienced shop owner doesn’t even seem to notice, busy saving stacks of yellowed paper from the ink’s destructive path. Once everything papery is moved out of harm’s way, they allow themselves to relax. Curse them and their clumsiness. Haven’t they wasted enough paper for a lifetime already?
After calming down from the shock and scolding themselves thoroughly in their head, they finally look at the stack of records they almost accidentally destroyed. It’s one of their older manuscripts; they could tell immediately by the way the papers’ edges are yellowed and crisp. They can’t remember ever seeing this particular document before though. Curiously, they skim over the messy writings. It seems like a diary of sorts, though they can’t read the original document, as it isn’t written in Japanese. The second half of the stack is less yellowed by age, a translation, the future shop owner realises quickly. It’s written in a handwriting they recognise, it haunts almost every corner of their family home. They should have realised sooner that the manuscript belonged to their late grandfather’s collection by how close to the floor it had been stored away. How ironic that a manuscript was almost lost to time in a shop that specialises in old documents.
Though, they suppose irony is one of the things that keeps life engaging. Still, it fills their heart with some melancholy. They never met their grandfather, but their mother used to rave about their similarities until she stopped when her child had turned into an angsty and easily annoyed teenager. For the third time today they sigh; how their mother had been able to put up with them during those years would always remain a mystery.
The sound of the doorbell chiming and a feminine voice calling out alerts the now young adult about the presence of a new customer. They scramble off the ground as quickly as they can, readjust their glasses and tuck a few especially askew copper strands of hair behind their ears to make themselves look at least a little bit more presentable. Nothing could be done about the ink-soaked pants now. It would most likely stain too; ink always clings to fabric quite stubbornly. Especially light fabric.
Well, they suppose this is also a way of leaving a mark on the world.