Under the soft breath of spring, the petals had once scattered across the cracked wooden floor of a forgotten corridor. The wind carried the scent of the past like old smoke, curling around shackled wrists and dreams too small to be noticed. Satsuki remembered the way the floorboards creaked under each careful step, and how silence had always followed behind, like a cautious sibling too afraid to speak.

But that moment had long since fluttered away.

Now, in the present hush of a quiet afternoon, Satsuki sat at a low table in a sunlit corner of the teahouse. The rays filtered through the paper screens like melted gold, painting faint lines across her apron. Her fingertips were dusted with ink, smudging slightly as she straightened the thin stack of papers in her lap. Each page trembled lightly—not from the breeze, but from the weight of being shown.

“I, um… I wasn’t gonna show anyone, really,” she murmured, keeping her gaze lowered, the corner of her mouth pulling into something unsure. “But… I guess I kinda wanted you to see it.”

The manuscript was stitched from scraps—torn wrappers, tea order sheets, napkins from the back drawer. They weren’t things meant to last, but she'd written on them anyway, curling her careful letters between printed lines, where orders of jasmine and sakura blend once rested.

The story was simple. A rabbit—small, soft, and made of cloth—had escaped a burning drawer and wandered into a garden it wasn’t supposed to find. It didn’t know what it wanted, only that the garden was warm and had gentle shadows. It met other things along the way: a cat who had forgotten how to meow, a moth made of salt, a song that had no sound. But the rabbit kept walking, its threadbare paws tracing the lines of a path not drawn on any map.

Satsuki turned to the second page, voice lowering further. “I wrote this one night after we closed. I had that bellflower candle burning—the one you said smelled like rain on glass? Kinda made the words come out easier.”

She looked up, then away again, brushing an invisible wrinkle from her sleeve. “It's dumb, I know. Just… a buncha silly ideas stitched together. I didn’t even spell everything right.”

But the words were lovely in their fragility, each line teetering between dream and confession. There was no grand plot—just fragments of moments, like fallen blossoms pressed between pages. The rabbit never found the end of the garden. It simply stopped in a clearing and sat beside a quiet figure who brewed tea in a house made of wind.

Satsuki smiled faintly. “That part… that’s you. I mean, I didn’t say it was you, but it kinda is.”

Her thumb traced the edge of the page, then stilled.

“I just thought… maybe if I wrote something soft, something where nothing gets stolen or broken… then maybe I could feel it for real. Even just a little.”

Her voice, though small, held no shake now—only that ever-present gentleness, like the hush after a lullaby.

“I dunno if it’s any good. Probably not. I still get confused with punctuation. But writing feels kinda like sweeping the floor, y’know? You just keep doing it, over and over, and sometimes the dust makes patterns without meaning to.”

She exhaled slowly, eyes unfocused as if she could see the words dancing in the air between them.

“I think… if you weren’t around, I wouldn’t’ve had the guts to even hold a pen this long. So, thanks. Not just for this, but like… for being there when I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to be here.”

Her fingers toyed with the rabbit charm on her apron, turning it so its stitched face looked up.

“Oh, and um—don’t laugh at the part where the cat sings to the moon. I couldn’t think of a better ending, and I kinda liked the way it sounded in my head. Even if cats aren’t supposed to sing.”

The room had no music, but the silence between them was soft, not empty.

Satsuki lowered the manuscript between them, her hands folded like petals at rest.

“If you don’t like it, that’s okay. I’ll still keep writing. Not for anyone else. Just… maybe for that rabbit, y’know?”