Utena, Revolutionary Girl Fan Fiction ❯ Kagayaku Means to Shine ❯ Omoidasu: To Remember ( Chapter 4 )

Chapter Three

Written: 30 June 2005

Re-written: 14 June 2007

 

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Anshii had ambivalent feelings about the dark. On one hand, the night was so peaceful, so calm and pure and . . . silky. On the other, in the artificial night-dark of the planetarium was where her brother had taken off her glasses and. . . but that didn't bear thinking about, not anymore. She'd escaped him and now she could lay in the dark, seeing the real stars through the window, feeling the warmth of another body and hearing the slow, steady movement of air that was her champion's sweet breath.

 

She looked down at Utena's slumbering form, her face so delicate and child-like in the dark. Like this, in the unguarded moments of the night, she could imagine that none of it had happened. That if she were to embrace Utena, she wouldn't feel the scar. That if those eyes were to open right then, they would be as bright, naive, and pure as they used to be. But one of the twins chose that moment to make a little noise in her sleep, and Anshii knew that nothing could be taken back. Honestly, she wasn't sure if she would want to, anyway.

 

She decided that she liked the natural darkness, the kind that came after the sun had finished its daily journey, the kind speckled with stars that twinkled and moved so slowly that it was impossible to see them doing it, because they moved with the seasons and not at her brother's bidding.

 

That train of thought having come to completion, she lay quietly, staring up at the swirls of plaster on the ceiling, and wondered to herself why she wasn't asleep.

 

After several moments of contemplation, she frowned. Oh. That.

 

She'd had a dream, and the thing keeping her awake was simple confusion as to why she'd dreamed what she had.

 

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She placed her glasses on her brother's desk and left the office, ignoring his increasingly desperate pleas with the same emotionless mask she used to ignore desperate duelists' calls. She mused that she saw a lot of desperate people. Even Utena had been desperate, once, when Touga defeated her. Anshii wandered, then, her mind full of visions of the pink-haired prince she'd decided to seek out.

 

Suddenly she looked up and realized that her feet had brought her to her bedroom. She stared at the door contemplatively for a moment. Bedrooms were usually considered to be private places, belonging only to the people who lived there. Anshii had no such beliefs. Everything in this school, every single stone in every wall, every room and all the people, too, they all belonged to her brother. And mostly, she thought, they were happy enough to remain that way because they didn't know any better. The sheep.

 

Anshii didn't like most of the students very much. They were tools like her, but too stupid and self-centered to know it.

 

She reached for the doorknob, then stopped, staring at her hand as if she'd never seen it before. She turned her hand over, flexing it experimentally, then in wonder. It was her hand, her limb. If she told it to reach out and turn the knob, it would do so. If she told it to...to...

 

To stab Utena in the back.

 

Now she stared at the hand in horror. This hand had held the sword that she pushed into Utena's back. She held up the other hand. This one had held her shoulder as she slumped to the ground, her strength failing after the steel pierced her slim body.

 

There was something wet on her cheek, and without thinking about it, one of her hands went up to wipe it away. A drop of moisture wet her knuckle, and she stared at it. A tear. She'd cried before, she was sure she had, but she'd never felt it this way. She'd never felt things like this, like this tightening of her chest that she distantly identified as guilt mingled with regret and something else, something that it took her several moments to identify.

 

She'd known, in the abstract way that she knew most things about herself, that she loved Utena. Strange, that. Knowing what would happen if Utena made it to the final duel, Anshii had worked hard to distance herself from the other girl, so much so that she hadn't realized what she'd felt until the night she'd had Utena deliver the roses to her brother. She'd stood in front of the window for hours, staring at the stars and the ferris wheel and letting the tears make tracks down her face, knowing in the deepest part of her what was happening at that very moment.

 

She'd felt something snap inside of her at the same time as she just knew, in the way that only she could know, that her pure, perfect Utena . . . wasn't. Not anymore. And that was her fault too.

 

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She stood outside her room for a long time before finally going inside, her every nerve end feeling unbelievably sensitive. Everything was so . . . so sharp, so clear and defined and real, for once in her life. The sensations, once dulled and now so immediate, nearly overwhelmed her. Her skin felt almost too small to hold everything swelling up inside of her, but somehow the pliant organ held and she stayed in one piece.

 

She wandered the room in a daze, only vaguely aware of the suitcase sitting open on her bed, more concerned with touching all the old familiar things with these new extended senses, with re-experiencing everything that she'd known before. She opened drawers that she knew, logically, had always been there, but whose contents she could not recall ever seeing. There were clothes in there, clothes of different cuts and colours and styles. Casual clothes: t-shirts, jeans. Underclothes that weren't plain, serviceable white.

 

She opened the closet, and there was more of it. Clothes in colours she had never worn, in cuts and styles she'd never dreamed of. Skirts, blouses, dresses. Pants. Scarves and hats and shoes. Almost without her knowledge, things began placing themselves in the suitcase with the meticulous neatness she had always used.

 

She stopped suddenly, looking at the neatly arranged things in the suitcase, and frowned. She didn't like it. Stepping forward, she reached and moved things around, messed things up, until nothing looked the same. Much better.

 

She picked up oldest and most familiar thing in the room then. It was a package of hairpins, pins that had been on her dresser just so for as long as she could remember. There were twelve pins missing, she knew that. Eleven in her hair and one that Chu-chu had carried off . . . sometime in the past.

 

Her hands moved deftly, and then there were ten pins missing. Nine. Eight, seven, six. Eventually just one. It wasn't perfect, and Anshii smiled. She liked it that way. There, beside the pins was her hairbrush. She used it to brush her hair out, looking into a mirror that she didn't remember having. But something was off. She stared into the mirror for a long time before realizing what it was. Her hair, this way. It didn't match her clothing, the same school uniform she'd worn for as long as she could recall, except when performing her duties as the Rose Bride.

 

Or in her brother's planetarium, but she avoided that thought.

 

It didn't take long for the uniform to hit the floor, where she left it, her lips tightening in a small, defiant smile. She stood nude for a minute, trying to think of what they'd all seen in her small, thin body. She touched her own stomach lightly, and the skin there was soft and smooth, the same rich milk-chocolate colour as the rest of her. She'd have stood there longer, but her newly-sensitized skin felt the chill in the room.

 

Opening drawers, she found the one containing all those new undergarments again, and with a thrill of pleasure slipped into a satiny-soft, slightly shiny powder blue bra and panty set. Then to the closet, where she browsed for a moment before picking an outfit that would remind her of what she sought. A pink skirt - she'd always preferred skirts - and a white blouse, over which went a pink jacket. A pair of white shoes caught her eye, so she slipped them on. Just as she was about to turn away, one last thing made her smile. A small hat. She picked it up and turned it over and over in her hands, then carelessly placed it atop her hair. Looking at her reflection, she smiled, experimentally.

 

She liked it. The smile, and the outfit. She closed the suitcase and latched it, then picked it up, hefting it experimentally. She might have to carry it a long way. It was light enough, so she took it up and left the now-bare room, only the crumpled uniform and the package of hairpins to mark her existence. She never looked back.

 

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Back in the bedroom that she shared with Utena, Anshii rolled over onto her side and traced the lines of Utena's face with one fingertip, as if trying to memorize them. It was pointless, of course, since she'd long since imprinted every shape of the expressive young face into her mind. She knew every expression that had ever graced her prince's face.

 

She touched the skin between Utena's eyebrows lightly, recalling the little furrow that appeared there whenever the girl was puzzled, upset, or just thinking, and smiled as an image of Utena's face scrunched up in concentration appeared in her mind's eye.

 

Suddenly she had to fight to keep a giggle from escaping. Utena's nose had wrinkled in her sleep, and she made a little face, unconsciously taking a lazy swat at whatever was tickling her face. Anshii took her hand away, not wanting to wake Utena when she so needed her sleep.

 

Instead, she slipped out of the bed and, wrapped in a warm robe, went to stand on the tiny screened-in porch that was a part of Utena's apartment, staring up at the stars. She let her thoughts wander as they would, and smiled wryly to herself as they came to a place that she should have expected. Utena was incredibly attractive, after all, and Anshii wasn't dead. Her expression turned into a frown quickly, though. She knew she'd been freed, that she'd recovered everything that she had lost in Ohtori, but Utena didn't.

 

Leaning against the wall, she bit her lip, then sighed. She could put it off until Utena had sufficiently recovered from giving birth, but that wouldn't be long. It might not have occurred to Utena to use the power of Dios for this, but Anshii knew that the power would heal any damage to her body, even without her consciously using it. And then they'd have to discuss this, because Anshii knew she couldn't hide it indefinitely.

 

Running her fingers through her hair, she began pacing the porch, five steps each way, trying to formulate an argument that Utena couldn't refute. Sometimes all these new emotions were so inconvenient. In Ohtori, she would have been able to do it easily, without them clouding up her logic.

 

'Well, I want to, if it's with her. She won't believe that. She'll think that I'm still stuck in my Ohtori mindset, and that I'm offering the same thing I gave to the other victors. How do I explain that I want to be with her because I love her, and not out of obligation? Oh, I don't know how long I can sleep next to her without doing anything! How can I make it obvious enough to that hard-headed girl?'

 

Utena had always been oblivious to anyone's interest in her, almost to the point of deliberate blindness. It would take, Anshii thought, sitting the pink-haired girl down and spelling out in graphic detail what she wanted to do before the dense young woman understood. And that, she decided, was exactly what she would do.

 

Carefully climbing back into bed, she dropped off to sleep with a smile on her face, and had no more confusing dreams. Dreams, yes. But these dreams had nothing to do with Ohtori, and quite a lot to do with a certain princely young woman, a four-poster featherbed, and a few spare hours.

 

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Utena was awakened shortly after Anshii returned to sleep, by the tiny, barely audible sounds of fussing infants. With a tortured sigh, she climbed out of bed and scooped up the noisier of the two children. As she changed and then fed the new additions, she looked up at the stars with a faint sense of nostalgia.

 

She smiled to remember her first breath of air outside of Ohtori. It was fresh and clean, devoid of the smell of roses which had always hung like a fog over the school. She'd been immersed in it for so long that she'd ceased even to notice it. After that, things had been...interesting, to say the least.

 

She'd gone to her aunt and the woman's new husband, demanding that control of her trust fund be turned over. It had taken nearly two months, in which time she had been legally declared a free adult and subsequently a quite well-off free adult. She'd had no inkling of the amount of money in the trust fund, and had resolved to spend this money as carefully as possible. It wouldn't last forever, no matter how it seemed. Thus the modest apartment, the simple and often secondhand furniture, and so forth.

 

It was also during this time that, following a week of daily breakfast-tossings, a home pregnancy test proved Dios right. Her first thought had been, as it is for many young women who find themselves pregnant out-of-wedlock, an abortion. Her family had concurred. After two agonizing weeks of weighing pros and cons, then flushing them in favour of purely emotional responses, she had decided to raise the population of unmarried teenaged mothers. Her family had promptly kicked her out and, feelings hurt, she had fled nearly to the other side of the world.

 

America had seemed like a good idea at the time, an exotic and special place where anything was possible if you tried hard enough. An eternity of being stared at, insulted, and snubbed at her new school had cured her of that notion quite thoroughly. English was also, to her consternation, the hardest thing she'd ever studied in her life. It was enough to make her willing to return even to her unforgiving family. With Anshii now in her life, though, it seemed she wouldn't have to.

 

As soon as both babies were clean, fed, and nodding off once more, Utena climbed back into bed, sighing happily as she wrapped herself around the warm body already under the covers. January, even in Los Angeles, was still chilly.

 

And so she returned to sleep, with no inkling of what her Bride had planned.

 

END CH. 4