The States

wrote a hundred letters just for me

1953

"God, moving stuff from one house to another is a pain," Cordelia huffs, dropping a trunk rather than setting it down. 

Scott winces at the loud thump, glad the trunk isn't old enough to have fallen apart when she dropped it. 

"How did we all just forget that there was a statehouse in that part of Pennsylvania?" Cordelia continues, trying to brush of the dust that had rubbed on to her shirt. 

"Well, it wasn't exactly a time period anyone wanted to remember," Scott answered. Which was the problem. The house wasn't really livable at the moment, having been practically abandoned since reconstruction ended, and they couldn't sell it to the people who wanted to buy and remodel it without clearing out all the miscellaneous crap. 

Cordelia sighed, accepting his point. "Remind me never to owe Sera a favor again."

Scott snorts. "Yeah, good luck with that."

Cordelia rolls her eyes. "Alright, you start sorting and I'll go and make sure that's the last of it and get my idiots to stop destroying things."

"I can't believe Alfred told them they could just cut the murals out of the walls." 

Cordelia raised an eyebrow.

"Alright, you know, I actually can, but we should at least pretend we have faith in his common sense every once and awhile."

Cordelia laughs before she leaves. 

ꤠ

Scott tries to sort things, but he realizes after he finds a box of Helena's old dolls that he isn't sure what should or shouldn't be kept, so he just starts writing it down in a messy sort of inventory. There's boxes of books, of old clothes that would have been kept around for new states or scrap fabric, an almost complete set of Christmas china that Scott vaguely remembers from the year Callie threw a plate at Sam. Some of it will end up in museums across the country, but Scott's sure that one of the girls would like their jewelry box back. 

He writes down the jewelry box, adding Del or Scarlett? as a note, before he moves to the next trunk. 

"Please don't be quilts," Scott mutters under his breath. He'd already opened one box of them and they had been unsalvageable- mice and moths and mildew had gotten to them, and they had stunk.

He flips the catches. 

It isn't quilts, but he almost wishes it was, because he recognizes that gray uniform, the flag pinned to the lapel.

Scott swallows and tears his eyes away from Elizabeth's confederate uniform. He glances around at the other contents of the trunk. A collection of confederate money including a single piece of confederate gold some museum would kill to have. A revolver. The broken handle of a rapier. Five different flags, folded into triangles- both flags of the Army of Northern Virginia, Elizabeth's state flag from during the war, the bonnie blue, the first flag of the confederate navy. 

He supposes he should be pleased, that they were left to rot in that house in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, but seeing all that again just hurts. Reconstruction had been painful for him and Elizabeth, a time period when they just argued all the time, when he blamed Liz for things out her control and she was just angry all the time. 

Scott goes to shut the trunk on the memories of the war when he sees his name.

There's stacks of letters neatly bound in ribbon in a little metal box, addressed to him in Elizabeth's cursive.