Chapter Text
She was so fucking tired.
Every day was the same. She got up, got dressed, and went to work. Worked at Joja for eight hours, with one legally-mandated fifteen-minute break in the middle for lunch, then went home. She’d dodge her coworkers’ attempts to get her to come to a bar with them in favor of laying on the floor of her tiny little apartment balcony, staring at the sky clouded with light pollution and smog and smoke from the many munitions factories in Zuzu, and she’d imagine that there was a sky full of stars instead.
Anne was exhausted.
She’d tried all the self-care techniques she’d heard. Working out? Not a chance. She was lucky if she woke up with enough energy to microwave herself canned ravioli before work. Most days she just grabbed one of those protein bars that tasted awful and chalky and sticky but filled her up enough that she would be satisfied until lunch. Eating healthier? In this economy? Almost her entire paycheck went to rent and food prices were sky-high, especially fresh food, what with the war and all. Therapy? She’d been before. It hadn’t done much. No, whatever Anne tried, she couldn’t stop feeling empty. Like she had a second stomach, one that no amount of food could ever fill. Like that second stomach was screaming at her, wailing and sobbing, telling her that she was starving. But what could be done? So she resigned herself to the feeling, resigned herself to a lifetime of emptiness and warped vinyl apartment floors and Joja, and went to work, and opened one of her desk drawers to find an eraser.
Instead of an eraser, she found a letter. A long-forgotten letter, with a wax seal (wax!), and her name on the front in her grandfather’s handwriting. And Anne remembered words clouded from memory. To open the letter only once she felt crushed by the burden of modern life.
With shaky hands, she popped the wax seal open and pulled out the letter.