Utena, Revolutionary Girl Fan Fiction ❯ Sang Sur les Roses ❯ Chapter III ( Chapter 3 )

Under the late afternoon citrus and honey glare Utena looked down from the fencing hall tower window to watch elementary school children engaged in a game of soccer. The girls and boys rumbled hard dressed in their dusty white, yellow, and green uniforms. They appeared to be no older than 10 years. Already was a pair of boys rolling around the wind swept courtyard scrimmaging, clawing at each other's jerseys mussing their short, satiny cropped hair. Utena pushed back from the window that ran the length of the room, her pores gasping for oxygen constricted within the fencing whites. She heard the faint shouts and cursing from the kids and their peers that egged them on. Where in hell was the coach? In her old school one only dreamed about getting away with such things. Violence was something proscribed everywhere, here at this school it was the easiest way to alleviate tension and propagated competition. Every flash of the eye and sigh of breath conveyed the same subliminal message, who wanted it most.

 

 

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            ; That morning Utena made her entrance and was on the receiving end of the most venal glares from the women. The men ignored her. One girl a brunette with gregarious pigtails fixed Utena's back with such a stare that she felt the twin blast of lasers bore into her. Utena spun on the balls of her oxfords to confront the pigtailed girl's glare. A collective gasp rose from the crowd, the crackling of electricity jumped and snapped like a whiplash between them. `Try it!' Utena's sea blue eyes flashed refracting the sunlight. The girl stoically conceded and departed the field; two others joined her, a taller girl with long raven locks and a shorter one whose ginger hair feathered curling under her jaws. Utena released a tremulous breath entering the classroom collapsing at her desk, securing a wavy tress behind her ear her thin lobe felt weighted by the gold bauble. Her ears were pierced when she was an infant only just able to sit up on her own, Utena couldn't remember it but she knew she received a painless prick from prick from the sterilized puncture gun. Lifting a hand to touch it, the lettering on her left ear scored her fingertip. Gebo as in gift, to find or strengthen a relationship, for fertility or offering, and to bring luck. But its X-shape marked her father for certain death, positively inhumane and far crueler than any mere car wreck could produce.

            ; Blood, so much blood that it pumped and swelled in her olfactories that she was ready to retch, bile coating her esophagus hot forcing her to retreat to the shadow of a knot of lockers. Her senses activated on high alert as her physiognomy never experienced before striking zigzags on her hyper stimulated flesh screaming for the unknown. Lifting the back of her hand to her mouth she took yawning breaths ordering herself to calm down with no positive results. Ducking into the nearest girls' bathroom she threw her briefcase sliding it across the dust and grime roughened porcelain tile work under the radiators. Twisting the cold tap and filling the burnished white ceramic basin she splashed her face several times, lapping at the cool refreshing water. Voices just on the other side of the swinging door slashed the relative peace and Utena dove into the farthest steel teal toilet stall tucked in the corner. She gingerly perched on the toilet rim and listened. The intoxicatingly high feminine laughter denoted an older student the soles of her snakeskin pumps skinned the rose tiling like sandpaper inebriatedly. She was followed by the portentous solid tempo of a pair of polished black shoes under starched white uniform pant legs. They were getting closer. The couple passed every stall until the gentleman physically maneuvered the giddy girl into the stall right beside Utena's. A baritone voice sexy as sin murmured something unintelligible and meatily the girl's body thudded against the stall's wall, Utena backed into the freezing wall terrazzo feeling the reverberation in the trembling silver joints bolted to the wall. Her left leg was lifted vanishing from the high partition on the floor and down skated around her right foot was a pair of cranberry lace bikinis.

            ; Utena was crippled consigned to witness the partaking of lust in a common bathroom. The girl emitted choppy, wet sensual sighs and groans Utena could see that the couple's weight rest on their feet as the man heartlessly shoved in and out of her. The beat they created slamming on the metal was in sync with the pulse beat between Utena's legs. So tempted was she to let her fingers wander inside her wet panties and take some of the weight from her heavy sex, instead she balled her fists tighter. She was being well used, the girl's shrieks were louder and his hip actions gained speed, his cock slipping and slurping from her oiled orifice working her to a vengeful finish churning out streams of hot lust to mix in and coat her canal. He caught her dream-dazed body before it rumpled to the floor setting her down on the toilet, her thighs sliding apart. He zipped his fly and adjusted his uniform with a wicked efficacy and said, “Well now Tenjou-san, I trust I provided you with a better demonstration than in the garden.” Utena mortified cupped a hand over her stunned mouth. What in hell? How did he know about that? “I look forward to our first meeting,” he slid both hands into his pockets. “Have a nice day.” And out he went leaving behind his partner sated to the point of being rendered into a pseudo-coma and Utena curious and wanting. Several minutes crawled by when Utena crept from the safety of the stall. She pushed open the door with her finger wide enough for a single eye to see through. At the end of the hall waiting for the elevator was a graceful tower of white and red speaking dynamically into a cell phone. Kiryuu Touga. `I look forward to our first meeting.'

 

 

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            ; “Your parents didn't tell you anything, I presume?” Ruka stood at the far left of the hall, his frame crooked at a bow resting his hips against the wall. His face partially silhouetted from the setting sun dyeing half of his handsome features ocher. He tapped the blunt end of his foil on the parquet letting it fill the space between himself and Utena since he did not realistically expect an answer from her. Not even a shake of her head. “Do you really want to know what was going on in those woods? It's all right if you refuse, in fact it may be wiser. If you're frightened Tenjou I am glad you are. So many of us jump into this head first with no considerations for their personal safety or that of their loved ones.”

            ; “Which is sort of redundant in my case, don't you think?” She pointed out.

            ; “What do you know about Japanese wolves?” Ruka paused patiently and when Utena responded to him with a confounding expression he was convinced he had her full attention and interest. “I'll rephrase… what do you think you know about Japanese wolves? Aside from the fact that they have been extinct in the country for over a century, the old people and paranoid freaks have claimed sightings of wolves and hearing wolves baying. Just a few years ago 70 people swore they heard howling or seen a pack marauding. Insanity, I know,” he put his foil into one of the long glass cabinets on the adjacent wall from the window. “After the douran, the Americans and Europeans were settling into the Far East. They taught the serfs ranching and since the cowboys back home were having problems with coyotes and wolves invading prairies from the hills or forests on the hunt for their packs stole into their ranches and attacked their precious slabs of beef. And as the old saying goes, better safe than sorry. Strychnine was baited and quite successful. But as human nature can only persist we have to go that extra mile. Riflemen… archers… even swordsmen had a new, exciting contender. The inugari…”

            ; Ruka said this with such darkness in his tone, tendrils of black mist coiled hot around Utena's heart. Her throat closed up and she saw an angry swaying sea of green under a midnight sky, gnarled fingers and arms of sadistic white electrical pulses dug in their talons escaping from under a boiling black nebula. “Inugari…” The whisper whooshed from Utena's breath frosting the glass pane before her.

            ; “The inugari,” Ruka stood beside her. Utena stared at his reflection in the glass. “Bands of hunters who reveled in the pursuit and bloodbath of the wolf packs. Pelts, severed heads, carcasses, tongues, all for the taking and all trophies. But all of these brazen characters for got one thing.”

            ; “Which is?”

And Ruka's face cracked into an elated grin. “Just how dangerous the mountains are.” Okami. Utena harked back to Jiya's ramblings. As a child Utena planted herself on the carpet before her dozing grandfather, his senility mystified her. So frail was the Tenjou patriarch he seemed to sink into the deep leather armchair he rarely left towards the end of his life, only reaching over to the lamp table for the ceramic china tea pot and bamboo cup to fill with shuddering hands a steaming, aromatic green elixir that smelled nothing like green tea. He garbled to himself and anyone possessing a deity's patience and tolerance, and what Utena's infantile ears could decipher was that the mountains were frightening places the abodes of spirits and any potential of a mortal's infringement was provocative. Shrines and burial sites dotted the peak-filled landscape and there were countless tales of humans encountering malevolent forces out on the paths. Feral animals particularly wild dogs, vipers, and bears were a perceived source of that danger so the remote-dwelling creature and the yama no kami's borderlines were blurred merging together. The mountains formed a world with its own separate ways of thinking and ethics so distinguished from the outside world.

            ; She also knew that the underside of a mountain was never barren and that the woods were its gateway. Crossing through its barriers was only the first test to a greater danger on a higher plane, just as Utena did that night stepping over the rope sign watching the fog's ghastly sallow fists curl away withdrawing between the trees not to leave as much as a trace of mist sticking to the dirt. “So one day, a princess so consumed by guilt from her brother's actions, she went to the mountains to sacrifice herself as a gesture of repentance. A wolf came upon her, but instead of gorging on the princess it bade her to follow him. He was but a messenger for his master, the prince. The earth was diseased so fearful was the prince of being poisoned he no longer left his castle. There was no one worth salvaging since wantonness prevailed despite how humanity pulled itself up from the ashes only to fall into the maw. If the princess truly wanted to atone the only fitting punishment was to become one with the beast. The prince's messenger minced the golden filaments of the princess' soul, as they were made complete. And she was called Eve.”

            ; Ruka ended his story and there was a long reprieve before either ventured to open their mouths. “So the Seitokai…” Utena said.

Ruka intersected his arms over his chest crossly. “What do you think?”

 

 

            ; TSUZUKU