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Something’s wrong with Utena, ever since she had her would-be climactic battle with the magical girls. It’s a current under her skin, a writhing pulse beating out-of-tune with her brain, her body, and though she’s trying to accept that part of herself fully, well.
She has flowers in her lungs.
It’s not Hanahaki, that fictional illness that gives love a deadline – for one, the flowers come from lust, not love, not to mention she isn’t even sure who the feelings would be directed at. They also don’t hurt, don’t interrupt her breathing at all (except when she gets hit in the chest during her fights, but that would wind her anyway, so she’s not counting it). The flowers just . . . sit there. A reminder. A warning, maybe, but barring Venalita’s interference she shouldn’t be overwhelmed again.
She won’t let herself be overtaken by that sickly sweet desire, a desperate want unending and all-consuming. Utena’s practiced drawing back, letting her feelings fade slowly with each breath after she flees from the heroines like a good villain should, even when left unsatisfied. Stars dot her fingers, and they ran down her eyes like tear tracks once, when she knew she was going too far, when Imitatio’s tears threatened to become more than just set dressing for their battle, but she’s fine. She has a makeup kit in her bag now, just in case.
It doesn’t help with her current problem, something she certainly can’t go to the doctor for, or even her mom, when she scrapes her leg on the pavement from a bad fall.
Utena Hiiragi bleeds black now.
Well. It’s not true black, more the deep purple of the night sky without a single star to light it (and she can see the irony, how the stars tainted her skin when she went mad with lust yet her blood is absent of them despite being stained the same color). It is also really, really hard to explain. Thankfully Kiwi is more than willing to do a quick patch-up with some bandages she grabs from the nurse’s office, but she still worries.
She can’t keep this up forever.
And yeah, part of it is a villainess is destined to be defeated (though with how poorly the last incident went Utena’s planning to take a while before she retires), but she would like to be a normal girl when she’s not half-naked and fighting and making magical girls squirm. Normal girls don’t have black blood.
Normal girls also don’t lead a villain organization dedicated to harassing magical girls, or spend all of their allowance on hunting down every piece of magical girl paraphernalia they can get their hands on, or become so anxious talking to people they feel like they might throw up, so she might have to reconsider where she stands on the “normal girl” spectrum, but that’s a breakdown for another day. Right now, she’s sitting on her bed, rocking back and forth and clutching her Tres Magia plushies like her life depends on it. Her leg still stings, but it’s a far cry from when she first fell. And honestly, it’s nothing like the beatings Sulfur and the other magical girls give out. She’s surprised she hasn’t had to go to a doctor yet – Even after Sulfur beat her within an inch of her life when she gained her La Veritas and became even more a sparkling yellow star.
Utena takes a deep breath at the memory. She can’t be reminiscing on the past. Right now, she needs to find some way to fix her current predicament, the fact that her mom is going to have an aneurism when she finds out her daughter has been injured, and then another when she realizes her daughter’s body isn’t ordinary, and then probably a third one when she goes through Utena’s room and finds all the porn magazines she really should be keeping at Nacht base by now.
Sighing, Utena unfurls and lays back on her bed, turning her eyes down to where the bandages sit loosely on her leg. The wound tingles, and she winces as she brings a hand down to rest on it, before steeling herself. She’s only tried this once before, and while still transformed and able to freely access the magic within her.
She has to bite down on her tongue to keep from screaming as the magic coalesces under her palm, the slight pain rising to a fever pitch as she forcibly mends the wound, inky-black power filling up every crack before fading to match her skin tone. She’s breathing heavily as it finishes, and her arm goes limp as her energy leaves her all at once.
Thankfully, she’s in her bed, safe behind the perception-blocking device Vena gave her when she was first forced into this line of work. Her transformation didn’t flare up either, which she’s grateful for. Unintentional transformations are far harder to swap back from than intentional ones, and her mom is going to be home soon. She doesn’t have any more bad excuses to not let her inside at this point.
But now, it’ll be fine. At most her mom will come in and fret over how red-faced she is, and how hot she’s feeling. She might even be able to skip a few days of school due to a self-inflicted fever – not that she’ll tell her mom the cause.
Pulling her Magenta plushie close from where it nearly fell off the bed from her writhing in pain, Utena breathes a sigh of relief and exhaustion.
She supposes she can also use this time to come up with more ways to torment Tres Magia, but she drifts to sleep before those thoughts go much further than imagining their flustered faces.
A few hours later, Utena’s mother knocks on the door, opening it after a moment of no response to see her daughter asleep clutching her Tres Magia plushies to her chest. She smiles, and turns off the light.