Shoujo Kakumei Utena ARSENAL by Alan Harnum Utena and its characters belongs to Be-PaPas, Chiho Saito, Shogakukan, Shokaku Iinkai and TV Tokyo. E-mail : harnums@thekeep.org Transpacific Fanfiction: http://www.thekeep.org/~mike/transp.html Utena Fanfiction Repository: http://www.thekeep.org/~harnums/UFR/ Spoilers for the whole series, some more direct than others. * * * Juri-san. Scratched that out: a single horizontal line, straight as though drawn with a ruler. Dear Juri. That would not do either: up, down, peaks and valleys of elimination. Beloved Juri fell to a swirl of pen strokes, a tangled cumuli of ink that erased it completely. His arm had already begun to grow tired. "The pen is mightier than the sword"--but soon enough, he would not have the strength to wield either. White: white walls, white ceiling, white tiles, white curtains, white sheets, white gown, white tubes, white flesh, and beyond the windows, white clouds in a blue sky, drifting. The soft, soft white fluorescence of the rectangles of light observing from overhead. If he closed his eyes and squinted, they seemed to merge and blur into one another, a long pale road. A nurse came and brought him a meal he could not eat. He hid pad and pen beneath his pillow so that she would not see it. If they knew he was trying to write, they would take it away from him; he did not know this for certain, but he feared the possibility. The thought occurred to him that even if he could complete the letter (and so far he could not even find the right means of address) he had no means of delivering it to her. He dismissed it. "Love finds a way." Man in his dying comforts himself with trite platitudes. Outside in the hallway there was the familiar sound: footsteps, then a pause to check a room number, then footsteps, then pause again. They would pass his room by. They always passed his room by. They did not. The doorknob of his room began to turn. He hid the pad and pen again. The Rose Bride entered and closed the door behind her--he lacked the strength to show surprise. She bowed, and greeted him formally: "Tsuchiya-sempai." "What do you want?" She came to stand beside his bed; he turned his head away and solemnly regarded the wall. A small dark girl in a white- and-teal uniform. He wondered if anyone else felt the same chills he did; her demure menace. "I was very sorry to hear that you had been forced to return to the hospital," she said after a moment. "It's unfortunate that you had a relapse." "Don't." He addressed the wall rather than her. "Don't?" "Don't play games with me. I'm not interested. I won't play them." "Games?" With some effort, he turned over onto his side and regarded her evenly. "I am well aware of what you are. I understand that you've chosen her as your champion, whatever your brother's desires in the matter may be. So why bother with this deception?" Behind her spectacles, the bride's glassy eyes closed, and she raised a hand to her mouth as though to--unsuccessfully-- contain the escaping giggle. "Oh, sempai," she said between titters, "you understand nothing at all." "Don't I?" he said; he tried to snarl the words, imagined them coming away from his lips menacing and cold. They emerged like the plaintive mewling of a hungry kitten. "What were you writing, sempai?" she asked. "A letter? A diary entry? A suicide note? Which one was it this time?" Her eyes were open again, and regarded him, thorn-coloured. "This time?" She reached up with both hands and removed her glasses. The arms made small sharp clicks as she folded them against the frames. Carefully, precisely, she placed the glasses on his bedside table, turning away from him as she did. When she turned back, she seemed taller. "I've seen it all before," she said quietly, staring over his bed and out the window at the tangled skeins of the clouds. "I'll see it all again. It's perfectly understandable. Of course you want her to believe your interpretation of the matter, that you knew what you were doing right from the very beginning, and were willing to make her hate you to set her free, that all you did was intended to lead inevitably to Dios's sword slicing that locket from her neck." "I knew what I was doing," he hissed. She nodded, slowly. Her hands pulled the pins from her hair, and it dropped down her back in a long dark wave. "Perhaps you did," she agreed. "But you see, Tsuchiya-sempai, in this world, that isn't as important as what others think you were doing. There are so many other ways to see it. Someone else, for example, someone who isn't you--perhaps someone like her-- might think about it in hindsight, and see the actions of a selfish, petty, jealous boy, willing to hurt anyone in his path in the hopes of seizing the power that he hoped would grant him the love she'd deny him in this world. Really, to talk about 'love' can be so misleading, because there's so many different meanings to the word; who was at the centre of your love's world, Tsuchiya-sempai? Was it you, or her?" "I was willing to die for her." "And you would have died anyway," she said calmly. "Why not risk everything, manipulate anyone, if the chance existed that you could reach the world you desire?" "She's free now, isn't she?" "By her own strength, and certainly not by your hands. You would have removed her chains and replaced them with new ones; you didn't want the locket broken, you simply wanted your picture in it. It was never about her, Tsuchiya-sempai; it was all about you. What you desired, what you despised. Isn't that true?" He searched for words, and could not find them. "Do you understand now?" she asked softly, after his silence had filled the room to the point where it seemed the walls might crack and fall away. He might almost have dared to call her voice kind. She expertly loosened a knot, and the red-and-yellow scarf of her uniform blouse fluttered to the broad white tiles of the floor. "In this world, truth is made; it isn't something that just is, something that someone can pick up and look at and say 'so that's what it is!'. Do you understand my meaning?" "Of course I do," he said. He turned his head and laid it on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. "But I don't care to speak to you any more of this, Bride of the Rose. Have you some business of your brother's to discuss with me?" "I have come on my own business." He heard the rustle of cloth, saw flesh and dark curves out of the corner of his eye; the pout of a nipple. "You are a special case. I see that you're still wearing your ring." He tried to raise his left hand so that he might regard it, and could not manage even that. His entire body felt numb, as though he floated in iced water. "Do you know what happens to the ring of a Duellist when they die?" His tongue was a fat, sluggish thing, alien in his mouth, terrifying; he tried to spit it out, had not the strength. "I came to offer a choice, as is my right as Bride of the Rose; as is my duty and burden. How do you want her to remember you, Tsuchiya-sempai? How do you want to be remembered? Modern medicine is remarkable; it can keep someone alive long after they should have died. Perhaps she'll come to visit you, and she'll read your letters, remember you with pity, with remorse for what you became because you loved her; she'll tell herself she understands how you became twisted from the man she admired and respected, but never loved, never could have loved. And you'll waste away, the years piling up like grains of sand falling into the bottom of an hourglass, passing by like the ticks of a clock, and eventually, eventually you'll die, and she'll want to believe all the self-justifying letters and diary entries and suicide notes, but she's too intelligent to ever bring herself to really believe them." She fell silent, and seemed to be waiting for something. He struggled. There were tears in his eyes, salty, stinging. Damn her, damn him, damn her strength and his weakness. "No," he managed finally; hardly even a whisper. He was amazed when she nodded and appeared to have heard him, or perhaps she had simply known exactly how he would respond, had known from the very beginning. "There is another choice," she said, standing naked and terrible at his bedside, her hair moving of its own volition like a nest of snakes. "I can offer it, but you must take it freely. It will be exactly how you want it to be: you'll be the one who wanted to give the Power of Miracles to the one you loved, and set her free." Somehow, he managed to string together the right words: "But will it be that way, or will that just be the way she sees it?" She inclined her head to one side and regarded him for a moment. "I suppose whether or not that matters depends on what you think truth is," she said finally. Saying nothing more, she raised the index finger of her left hand to the valley between her breasts, dimpling the flesh with a long nail. As he watched, she calmly drew it downwards, slitting herself open from breastbone to navel, before taking her hands and peeling the skin back so that it hung in wrinkles about the gaping opening into her body. Within she was a tangle of light and dark, from which the clangourous sounds of metal shifting on metal emanated like a vapour. "The offer is made," she said quietly. "The offer is taken." There were tears in her eyes, though perhaps merely ones of pain. The tingling numbness in his entire body became, instantly, stabbing fires. He arched, stiffened, screamed; the fires ran through his bones and veins, gathering towards a single point in his breast. Indescribable agony. His limbs flopped and flailed, then lay still. A mountain lay upon his chest; moments later, every part of his body except his heart was nonexistent. He was merely a beating heart, his universe defined by its chambers. Then he saw again, as he was thrust through a long soundless tunnel, utterly black, and at the end of it, radiant, was the face of the Rose Bride, smiling and beckoning to him. As he approached, it became other faces, passed through its changes like the changings of the moon: the determined face of the Engaged One, Tenjou Utena; the cruel sneer of Kiryuu Nanami; the slight pretty face of the girl Juri loved, twisted by weeping; then, finally, inevitably, Juri's face. Juri's beloved face, regarding him with pity and contempt. "Witch!" he cried, realizing that he was lost. "Damnable witch--" Her hell-mouth gaped, and he fell within. * * * When it was finished, she rose up from the floor and calmly dressed herself. She pinned her hair back up and put her glasses back on. On the bed, the body lay, calm except for the left arm flopped over the railing. After removing the blackened Rose Signet from the ring finger, she arranged it so that it was symmetrical with the other limb, and stepped back. The Signet went into the pocket of her blouse. Turning to the bedside table, she lifted the handset of the phone and dialled. Two rings, and then the other end picked up. "It's me." "Is it done?" "It's done." "Did you get his ring?" "I have his ring." "Good. You'll be home soon?" "Soon." She hung up and turned to the wall, where her shadow lay. "Go," she said, gesturing towards the closed door of the room. A second shadow detached itself from hers, pirouetted with joy at its freedom, then slid beneath the door and into the hallway beyond; another, near-identical, followed it moments later. She regarded her own shadow for a moment, then turned from it and walked to the window to stare down upon the tree- lined path below. After some time, a girl emerged from the hospital, proceeded down the path, then paused once to look back before walking on. Another girl hurried out from behind a tree and walked slightly behind her. Neither of them spoke. "Truth," she pronounced, with contempt and pain, as she watched the two of them walk away. In her belly and breast, something stirred, and steel screamed on steel. "Hush," she said gently; and drew the curtains closed before she left. "Hush." END Notes: A small odd story, written because an idea wouldn't leave me alone, heavily inspired by many discussions I've had about Ruka and the motivations behind his actions with many different people. As usual, story improvement of the first draft by members of the Fanfic Revolution.