What happened to us?

▪︎Chapter 02▪︎

The helping hand
(Trigger warnings: dead body - in the criminal case -, cursing)

~

The tall male with brown-ish hair opened the door of his old house.
It has been a while, has it? Over five years now... The house looked exactly the same as it did on the day he left. Well, almost exactly the same if you don't count the spider webs all around the place and thick layer of dust. You could see the dust particles floating in the air, reflection of sun in it's golden hour reflecting on it.
The writer waved his hand slightly, unintentionally lifting even more dust. This mistake caused him to sneeze.
"Achoo!" he covered his mouth and nose with his palm quickly. This fast sudden movement clearly disturbed the fluffy animal that was sitting on Poe's shoulders.
The raccoon jumped down at the ground with a huff. The writer crouched and furrowed his eyebrows in apologetic way, patting raccoons head to try making up for his action, even if it should not be even considered all his fault. The raccoon leaned in the pat, forgiving his owner. Poe smiled at that.
"I'm sorry again Karl. The dust is annoying, isn't it?" the writer said with his silent voice. Karl gave him some kind of nod.
"We should get to cleaning up now, before movers arrive." Poe suggested. It was more of a mental note to himself than to the raccoon, but he noticed he thinks better out loud. Besides, it wouldn't feel so lonely that way. The Raccoon he named Karl was his only friend for past years, if there wasn't him, Poe would probably loose his mind in his thoughts he couldn't let out in form of writing short stories that started forming novels in progress.
Poe sight when he saw the van that belonged to upper mentioned movers.
It felt kinda weird when he thought about it. Moving his mostly new belongings that carried memories to a place that carried completely different and older ones felt kinda strange to him. But that was part of the change, right? The change he moved back here for. Or at least half-change.
The reason he moved back to Yokahama was to get rid of the bussy life he lived in America and was so terribly sick of. Yeah, he couldn't have this change in the first place if he didn't go through that harder lifetime before that, but it still didn't make his life in America less exhausting and opposite of what he wanted and always desired - peaceful and chill life in one place without too much social interactions that sometimes even terrified him -.

The amazing Edgar Allan Poe had moved to America in age of twenty two and decited to start studying architecture, since his hopes to become detective as he previously wanted left him. The architecture study was a great success, making him very famous, andmired and successful architect who's name knew basically almost everyone in America.
This job made tons of money, but also drained most of his motivation. At first it was enjoyable, but after some time, it started to feel dull and every design seemed the same. It felt like his imagination was fading away and he had no way to express himself the way he wanted.
He was never good in social interactions, so his only living company became the thrash panda with refined appetite. Even if he could tell Karl basically anything he wanted, he still wanted to express his thoughts in some kind of artistic way. In some way that could be seen. That's when he rediscovered his liking for writing from his past years. He used to write stories for his past friend, Ranpo, alot back in the day.
When he published his first novel, it felt amazing, but also made him feel even more burned out than ever before, because people were hungry for sequels and this hobby of writing started to feel like a second job.
This is the breaking point when Poe decided to turn the page once again.
His job as an architect made him lots of money and the writing made some too, it was enough to move to different country and have some nice life there for quite some time. So that's why he had decided co come back to his past, chill and relieving life in Japan. Even after the event of detective competition, he didn't want to lose hope that he and his rival could start over.