Sanja Sinai

Dear dad,

She felt awkward dictating the letter to him. She fidgeted in her seat and hardly met his eyes, which was fine. He had to pretend it was a different dad; a different Tano’sae she was writing to, wandering somewhere in the Shroud. A dad who may have returned to another family when his favoured one could not be found.

Sanja wasn’t especially good at this pretense. His lips formed a thin line as he wrote; a cool unhappiness settled in his eyes that he hoped looked like regular old indifference. But the way she wiggled and fumbled over her words suggested otherwise.

Her family was dead, she said. He crossed out gruesome details at her request, either to spare herself or their father or both. Just dead. Something about the Coeurlclaws, who’d been a smaller nuisance when Sanja was a boy but not by much. A few lines about hunting down their killer and a few more about her travels and how she missed him, and how sorry she was she hadn’t written earlier. Sanja could hear the fear in her voice and hoped, like his irritation, it didn’t show.

She gushed about the ship she found herself on and everything that changed for her, and how hard she was trying. About the new friends she’d made, and a morbol seedling, and a gaelicat, and her half-brother and sister who looked so much like her. 

“You can say you’re the one who wrote it, if you want.” He didn’t. And he didn’t.

He hadn’t written to his mother in years. Twenty of them, actually. His decision to make a life in Gridania was unpopular for reasons he didn’t understand until he was already there, and letters home went answered sparsely, then not at all. Eventually he stopped.

Sinna knew where to send it, though the moogle post was unlikely to get lost with even the most cursory information. She wrote a letter of her own to their mother, undoubtedly to explain the situation in part and tell her every little detail about Sanjura’s estranged and only son.

The envelope was thick in his hand. Letters from grown children, folded safely inside and sealed with a simple stamp in lilac wax. One with hesitation, one with love, and the third, a ghost, unwanted and unwritten, clinging to them like a lost boy despite its author’s best attempts.