WHISPERED FAREWELL Scott Woodward Nothri@aol.com As a disclaimer: This is a song called "Funeral in his Heart" written by October Porject and can be found in their CD "Falling Farther In", a 1995 release. Like the Utena characters themselves, I have gotten no permission to use these lyrics, and like the Utena characters I am not profiting from using them. * * * She's gone. The light is fading now, its gotten dark. I've been watching it fade, watching the slow lengthening of the shadows. I've been sitting in my office since early this morning, unmoving for hours just watching the dying of the light. The sun is sinking, and all the warmth and light the day knew is leaving with it. I suppose it is an appropriate enough image for the man who has allowed his own humanity to fade just as completely into nothingness. Yes, that is an apt metaphor. A better one might be how my beloved simply turned around and walked away from me...taking with her the last comfort I have known in this cold life of mine. Anthy... I turn from the sun, and as I do my eyes fall upon her glasses. There they rest upon my desk, unmoved from where she set them. Such a simple gesture, but it spoke volumes nonetheless. For her they were a symbol of her servitude, her time and devotion to the duels...and to me. As I look into the rosy surface of the lenses, I can almost see her eyes looking back at me in those final moments. There was something different in those eyes. It was a gaze that was free of the confusion, the innocence, and the sadness they often held. Those eyes where clear and bright, filled with a determination and purpose I had never seen before. I knew that she was seeing me for the first time, seeing me without the haze her love and my manipulations had caused. And when all was finally said and done, when she finally saw the truth, she surprised me. I saw no anger, no hatred, nor even pain in her eyes. I no longer mattered enough to warrant such emotions. No, what I saw in her eyes was pity....pity for me, pity for what I had become. Pity. After all the years I've spent preparing to harness the power of revolution...after all the power I had garnished (both material and magical), all the sacrifices and pain I had endured to gain it, and all the sins I had committed while wielding it, all I warranted in her eyes was pity. Do not mistake me. I do not truly feel any anger at her for what she has done. Nor do I feel anything that approximates remorse. I no longer feel anything so close to human emotions. Oh, I feel regrets, certainly. I even feel some amount of joy from watching the fruits of my manipulations come to fruition. But such petty amusements do not change the fact that to find any shred of emotion in my soul from day to day is like getting water from a stone. All my posturing and tears are mostly play acting, going through the emotions of how I think I should feel. Perhaps I thought that if I did it long enough I would somehow conjure myself back from the dead. It was not always like this, you know. There was a time when I was something different than this hollow shell. Where there are ashes there must have once been a flame, after all. And my god did I burn. I knew I could turn the world on its head by just wanting it to happen. The power of Dios would be mine. I believed I could save all of it single-handedly, conquer the world in one single sweep. It seems so pathetically naive now, but it was alive then. All consuming. Like a moth drawn to a flame. I was close I could smell it, feel it, taste it. I tried to control it, bend it to my will. I failed, and everyone paid the price for my failure. He had a dream Haunting him at night. It would fly into his hands So he tried to cage it But he only made it fly away. He heard a song It was running through his mind. It was singing from the past. So he tried to sing it But he found he could not make it last. I couldn't harness it, and I was consumed. Everything I was, everything I had been, and everything I would have become died in a very real way that day. What was left over was nothing at all. I tried to fill the void as best I could, replace it with the joys of my new power and station, but it was a poor substitute. The void was all consuming. All that was left over was a bitterness of who I had been. Perhaps that is why I play so with people's lives, manipulating and mocking them from the shadows. They reminded me of who I had been. Especially Utena Tenjou. Perhaps I have merely been mocking myself all this time. I continued to organize the duels, to claim the power of Dios. The reason I gave them as "End of the World" was to save the world before it destroyed itself. I could see it dying all around us, I knew what would happen. But I no longer cared about that, just like I no longer cared that Anthy had sacrificed her freedom for me. All I wanted was the glory...the power. That was the one true desire I had left, and I pursued it with all the fervor of a drowning man seeking a lifeline. These are the conclusions I have drawn sitting in the fading light of this lonely office. They are truths I have known all along, truths that have hung in my heart like gargoyles in a cathedral, staring at me from the shadows. I have ignored them so long I had forgotten they where there. I have known them since the moment I saw the first duels fail to release the power, and I knew them as I watched the Hundred Swords pierce the flesh of my sister. I am as much a ghost as Mikage, forever mourning a humanity I lost a long time ago... Of course, such realizations mean little to me now. If I were any other man, I might feel something like despair or horror at these epiphanies. But again, I no longer feel such things. All that is left is a dull ache, an acknowledgement that my fate has been sealed, and the weight of that knowledge bears down on me with a finality like death. The world is falling apart He's getting older And there's a funeral in his heart. He was alone With a picture of his life. On the outside looking in So he tried to change it But he lost the person he had been. The world is falling apart He's getting older And there's a funeral in his heart. Now night has come at last, and the darkness has descended upon my Academy like a blanket. I can see the beginnings of the moon peeking at the corner of the horizon, a thin sliver of silver. Somewhere in the distance a storm is brewing. I can already tell that it will be a fierce thunderer. I need to go. I can't stay here all night like I did all day. I move from my chair, mechanically move to the door. Before I leave I pause, then return to the desk to pick up Anthy's ring. I stare at it another moment before putting it in my pocket and exiting the dean's room. The first drops hit me as I exit. The air carries a stark chill on it this night. I pause a moment and close my eyes, my face upturned to the heavens. I savor the feel of the rain. It lets me know I'm still alive. Physically, in any case. I wonder what my supposed friends would say right now. Touga and Siouji would be amused to no end to see the great Akio Ohtori like this, I have no doubt. Well, the mood will pass. It always does. Sometimes lamentations of who I was get the better of me. It will pass. Anthy was wrong. She had to have been. I have spent my entire life accumulating power, strength, stability. And she simply turned her nose up at all of it. What I have made has meaning. Purpose. It is more than a house of cards. So what if she is gone? This path still has still has meaning. So what if I no longer know what that is? Thunder moving in the mountains Thunder in his dreams Hoping that there must be a word for Everything he means. I move down the cobblestoned streets of my grand academy. The rain is coming down now. I barely notice the water on me, though. My thoughts remain distant. A brief flash of headlights is all that keeps me from moving straight past my car. Glancing up I spy the red convertible as it opens the door for me. I walk without drive into the warm folds of the interior (naturally the roof is up). I had hope, once. It was a distant hope, but it kept something in me alive. It was the vision of a little girl I had met when I was still a man. It was a child of a woman I knew I could have loved once upon a time. I thought that someway, somehow I WOULD love her. She would be what Anthy could not be. She would save me, be my bride. She would allow me to be what I had been before, to recapture my lost soul. Instead I lost them both. Anthy and Utena. Utena became what I could not be, and Anthy turned away from me. Utena was what Anthy remembered in me. She had held on for so long, enduring being a virtual slave, based on the slim chance I would return to her. She had said I was living in a fairy tale, holding onto a dream of Utena that belied reality. Maybe she had as well, holding on to me as I held onto Utena. Until that moment when Utena took on the swords for herself. Then Anthy woke up....I never did. He had a love It was keeping him alive It was someone else ago So he tried to hide it But he knew he'd never let it go. I drive through the rain, no expression on my face. I know this mood won't last. They never do. Whenever I find some shred of humanity inside me I always lose it in the end. It is just the way things go. In the morning I will dismiss all this as foolish ramblings. No doubt I'll try to find some way of finding another bride, of continuing the duels. Eventually I'll have buried these truths once more in my heart. Anthy escaped the fiction we had created for ourselves. I thank dios she could. I've lived it too long to ever truly do the same. I've lost too much of myself already. I close my eyes as I pull up in my driveway. The rain beats down on the car, creating a steady drumbeat. I climb out, and begin to trudge to my home. Then I stop in midstep, and turn slowly around to face the night. Well, if this is the last chance I'm ever going to have, I have to take it. I don't know if I'll ever have the courage to again. "Anthy," I whisper softly into the night, my head bowed. "I don't know if you can hear me, and I don't know if it matters anymore. But I want you to know, somewhere, somehow, that whatever part of your brother is still alive in me....is sorry for what I've done to you....and to Utena. It won't ever make anything right...but I'm sorry." The world is falling apart He's getting older And there's a funeral in his heart. I raise my arms high and I cry aloud. I scream the words again, let them fly out into the night, let them ring until they echo back at me from the rafter and the streets. And somewhere in those lonely echoes I think I can hear Anthy...telling me its all right, that she'll always love me somewhere in her heart, that she forgives me. I stare into the night, and slowly clutch my hand over my heart. The winds howl around me, burying me under sheets of rain. I move raggedly to my home, the wetness upon my face not entirely the fault of the rain. I pause at the threshold to glance one final time at darkness. Before I disappear within, I speak one final phrase into the night. "Goodbye, Anthy."