𝐑𝐄𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐃 / bungō stray dogs x reader anthology

𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐢𝐧 ✧ 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐞𝐭

March 10th 2020 / Requested by langour___ / 700 Words

✧ ｡ﾟ✐.*ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* ✎｡:*ﾟ

My Dearest [Name],

I am no poet. Between the two of us, it was you who bore that talent of putting pen to paper in such an elegant manner I could never hope to replicate. But if I might try, I beg your pardon in doing so if it offends you, but I wish to be able to see you once more, even if only in the concept of ink and ideas.

The Guild is no longer, well, it is, but it isn't for me. I have left it and behind in the dark corners of my mind, it will continue to occupy as I suppress a soldier's guilt. For if you are a poet, then I am a soldier and we both know how different they are. The poet crafts worlds with weapons of mass destruction in the forms of words, the soldier fights the unless battles on the order of men who have never seen war; tiring slowly as he wonders of his family and lost love, they're weapons do not create the only destruction.

Maybe I'm simply tired but I miss you. I miss your smile, I miss your words, I miss your warm embrace, I miss the nights in which we indulged in each other, I miss you in ways I cannot describe.

I met two other poets here, so unlike you yet so similar; you who filled up the room with your confident cheerfulness, ever the naive but ever wise. And how foolish I must seem, both for writing a letter I will never send, and both for wishing that it would be read.

To be read and understood by you, you who could have created something more original, more beautiful without such failures. Yes, failures, because I don't know how many times I've attempted to write these words, the pile by the waste-paper-basket grows ever larger as my frustration.

After all, I am a soldier, a foolish boy attempting to pass off as a man, a foolish boy who simply wishes for the embrace of an old friend, an old love, an old partner. Of you who will never read this simply because I will never finish it.

The words faded off the paper with the harsh sound ripping paper as the pen both ran out of ink and tore through the page. Cursing Mark frowned, crumpling it up and tossing it towards the garbage where it ricocheted off the ever-growing pile of torn and crumpled letters onto the floor.

The hotel room was cheap, the walls stained, the bed unmade prior to his arrival, a smell he could only describe as putrid hung in the air. How he longed for home, he wished to enter your embrace once more, to hear the laughter of his siblings, to face the disapproving glare of your brother as it softened into exasperation as he pressed a kiss to your cheek.

But here he was, the foolish soldier wishing for a love that he could never see again. A love he wished he could reach. Someone who's talents he longed to recreate as he tried and tried again his hand at crafting words into the beauty of poetry he could never hope to recreate.

Running a hand through his messy hair he sighed, allowing his gaze to turn to the ceiling. You had once shown him a manuscript, a series of stories told through letters that would never reach their intended target because the lives of those still here and the deaths of those who had left were so close but so far.

You had never finished that story. You had never published that story. You were never able to have your existence realized as true as it was engraved into paper with ink proving that you were here and you were real.

And thus it left the soldier to finish the final letter to the other side in some hope it might just reach you.