[Leslie doesn’t have enough experience with being asked to sit to prepare for bad news to recognize the reason. Is this going to be a long discussion, perhaps? Should she find him a seat, too?]
[But she hasn’t been sitting in her desk chair, turned to face outward, for very long before she receives the paper. She looks at him in a wordless question, unsure if she’s supposed to open it right now. Upon receiving permission, she unfolds it.]
[She only makes it about halfway into the first paragraph. There isn’t really a reaction at all on her face as she stops reading.]
[She’s thought of the possibility of Edelgard and Byleth returning to Fódlan before. Not deeply: it’s the kind of thought she wants to retreat from. But she knows it could happen to any of them.]
[Even so, now that it’s in front of her, her mind is refusing to understand it. The only real change from her already somewhat worried expression is a slightly more visible level of confusion.]
...Where did you find this?
[How could a letter know if Edelgard was gone? It isn’t like Edelgard could have written it after that happened, so it must have been somewhere in the house before this. The existence of the letter itself doesn’t mean anything, right?]
[(There’s no way someone as meticulous as Hubert would have given her this letter if he wasn’t certain what had happened to Edelgard. Certainly not in a matter that concerned Edelgard, the most important person in his life. She knows this, but she asks anyway.)]
no subject
[But she hasn’t been sitting in her desk chair, turned to face outward, for very long before she receives the paper. She looks at him in a wordless question, unsure if she’s supposed to open it right now. Upon receiving permission, she unfolds it.]
[She only makes it about halfway into the first paragraph. There isn’t really a reaction at all on her face as she stops reading.]
[She’s thought of the possibility of Edelgard and Byleth returning to Fódlan before. Not deeply: it’s the kind of thought she wants to retreat from. But she knows it could happen to any of them.]
[Even so, now that it’s in front of her, her mind is refusing to understand it. The only real change from her already somewhat worried expression is a slightly more visible level of confusion.]
...Where did you find this?
[How could a letter know if Edelgard was gone? It isn’t like Edelgard could have written it after that happened, so it must have been somewhere in the house before this. The existence of the letter itself doesn’t mean anything, right?]
[(There’s no way someone as meticulous as Hubert would have given her this letter if he wasn’t certain what had happened to Edelgard. Certainly not in a matter that concerned Edelgard, the most important person in his life. She knows this, but she asks anyway.)]