Work Text:
I.
Long shadows loom over campus as Anthy sets off to visit girls made out of shade. The sun has begun its slow descent over this putrid place, obscuring its obscenities under its shining, golden glow. She caught a glimpse of Utena before coming this way, loitering beneath the porticos. She looked soft enveloped in incoming twilight, pretty and princess-like, and entirely unlike the girl Anthy has begrudgingly come to know.
Against a mural of red roses, the girls made out of shade practice their latest skit. Anthy can already tell that it won’t be among their best — the bowling metaphor they’re working with is clunky and outdated. It might have made poetic sense some days ago, but the world has since shifted. They seem to sense her disapproval, and so they stop running their lines, and turn their high-velocity attention her way.
“This is a treat.”
“Such a treat.”
“You never come to see us.”
“Never, never!”
Anthy refrains from rolling her eyes. The girls call themselves all sorts of things — holy diviners, mistresses of shadow — but it is the least of their fine titles which she finds suits them best. They claim at times to be a drama club, and they are certainly dramatic.
“I’ve come to commission a production.”
She presents them with a document. One of the girls takes it from her hands, flips through her script and sighs.
“We’ve done this one before.”
“Let me see!”
“It’s the Tale of the Rose.”
“Oh, not again!”
She cannot fault them their displeasure. The Tale of the Rose is closer to a fable than a proper story, and its moral is disheartening at best. It is the artistic equivalent to cod-liver oil: dull and bitter, and, in Utena’s case, something she must learn to swallow.
“What’s in it for us?”
“We don’t work for free, you know.”
“And we don’t come cheap!”
“I can offer you an auditorium and an audience of three.”
It makes perfect sense to Anthy that these strange creatures spend their days playing actresses, as everything about them is theatrical. They cast their strongest shadows in the waning light of day, and make use of the current light to register their buoyant excitement. They dance ballet against a rose painted wall, leaping high up in the air. Though they can cast shadows beneath artificial light, Anthy has surmised over the years that they are subject to certain rules in how they go about it. They are akin to vampires, she thinks, who need to be invited in.
II.
Akio strides across campus with the cocksure gait of a dog in heat. He could barely contain himself at breakfast, buttering his toast with a jocular smile. It has been three days since he travelled to the city and returned, triumphant, with Utena in his passenger seat.
Anthy’s brother has helped himself to her so-called fiancés for almost as long as they have played the dueling game. Beyond a first timer’s hurt feelings, she has rarely minded. She’s come to view his interests as a compliment: in seeking to conquer those she has beguiled, he is ultimately hunting for traces of her. This works best, she finds, when her intended has their wits about them and knows they should despise her. It is a thornier ordeal when some sad sap duelist grows attached.
Akio himself would never connect these seductions to his sister. He has too big an appetite to reflect critically on his trysts (and why on Earth would he want to, when doing so might bring him to confront the gaping hole within his heart?). If Anthy were to ask the question — if, on a good day she were to look up at him through her glasses with her placid smile and ask, sugary sweet, “why do you fuck my champions, Big Brother?” — she suspects he might bring up their princely qualities, however limited they might be.
It is a bad answer, she thinks, but she is in no mood to imagine a better version of her brother, as she sometimes does. Her fiancés are but half-bit princes, channeling scraps of Dios as they fight like trussed up cocks for a false prize. From the very moment Utena confided her desire to be a prince, Anthy knew that Akio would be unable to resist.
III.
Insatiable man: Akio never strays long from Anthy’s sheets. He takes her on the sofa, beneath his prized projector. He calls this place the summit of the world, as if the tallest mountain peaks and the towering skyscrapers that stand beyond this place do not exist. Sometimes, Anthy believes his claim; moments when her world is reduced to the base contact of rotting flesh.
Akio groans and dislodges himself from her. Anthy pins her hair back into place and retrieves her discarded clothes.
“I recently discovered a star,” he says, “it’s new.”
Anthy’s head is still a little fuzzy, and so at first she does not catch his meaning. She thinks of the star he once promised to find for Kanae; a star he claimed would bear her name. How ironic that he should discover it now, after his pretty fiancée has permanently left the stage. Akio continues his long monologue.
“You feel that since you’ve found it, it’s your personal property. But the stars are the stars — they belong to no one.”
He’s talking about Utena. How silly she was to believe Akio had actually achieved something of note. He has no interest in the stars. He only means to wrap himself within their luminous shine. She thinks of anglerfish, who dwell deep beneath the sea and draw unthinking prey towards them with their light.
She is dressed and standing by the elevator. The doors open at her command, promising to whisk Anthy away from this wretched summit of the world, but Akio has not yet said his piece.
“They belong to no one.”
He is angry with her, she thinks. Angry that she is upset with him. How dare she judge him for his debauchery, when she is just a vile and lewd as he is? He hardly means it when he says the stars belong to no one, he only means that they do not belong to Anthy. Utena, in his telling, is a celestial being whose proximity to his sister he graciously allows. She is above Anthy in a way, but mostly she is a prize for Akio to claim and then subject to his violence.
IV.
SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!
Utena has requested a picture, and Akio, by virtue of owning a couple cameras, has forced his way into it. He is enthralled by this small project: the act of making memory tangible. Photographs are frozen moments, and deceptive in their realism. As time goes on, they act as stand-ins for fading memories; representations of half-truths. Nobody remembers they were hungry when they posed for their school pictures.
Anthy was surprised when Utena first broached the topic, as she had never shown much interest in photography. Anthy has lived with her for months now and she has yet to see a single photo of her roommate’s parents. Unlike some of her predecessors, Utena isn’t the type of rich kid who resents their family — quite the opposite. She holds her parents’ memory so dearly that it is the closest thing she has to a secret. That said, Utena isn’t entirely averse to mementos. She is quite fond of her rose crest ring, as Akio remarks.
He has been angling himself into centre frame throughout their little photoshoot. His right hand has wandered, looking to plant itself on Utena’s unsuspecting shoulder. He keeps drawing close to her, positioning himself as the dominant force in this artificial memory. Anthy recognized his ire when Utena first asked that he take a picture of the two of them, and rather enjoyed watching how neatly she had managed to wound his pride by so blithely excluding him from her proposed venture.
The camera whirrs, warning of its next click. Anthy slides herself in between Utena and Akio.
SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!
They take a few more photos arranged like this. Utena stands with her hands behind her back, but when Akio steps out of position to adjust the camera, she loosens up a bit. Hesitantly, her fingers brush up against Anthy’s. It is the slightest touch, innocent compared to what they have both known this past week, and yet it fills Anthy with unspeakable delight. It is a risk for her to feel these things: pleasure at the gentle grazing of skin, and a secret, fervent glee at being picked over her brother to pose for a keepsake photo. It is to stand before a crossroads and choose the path leading towards disappointment. Anthy knows this, and still she reaches out to grab Utena’s hand and intertwine their fingers.
SNAP!
V.
The Tale of the Rose remains an ordeal to sit through. It isn’t the actresses’ fault. The Kashira Shadow Players, as they have decided to call themselves for this production, do the best they can to entertain their audience with miserable material. But there is only so much creative staging can do to brighten up the bitter facts of life.
After the play, Utena is unaffected. She is at her worst in moments like these, stubbornly naive and deaf to Anthy’s frantic warnings. Beware, beware, declaimed the shadow actresses, performing for an audience of three: a prince, his understudy and his little sister. The metaphor seemed obvious to Anthy, almost obnoxious. But Utena gave it no thought at all, shrugging off a strange student play as she ignores most of the oddities of Ohtori Academy.
Outfoxed not by her brother, but by the very girl she is trying to protect, Anthy retreats to bed early that evening. Sleep evades her, as it always does after The Tale of the Rose. She wrote the play ages ago, as the story started to slowly seep out of collective memory. It lives on now in a manner similar to the photos Akio attempted to stage earlier: an imperfect image meant to impart a biased message. The bias here is Anthy’s. She wrote the play as a reminder of her sin. It is a paper wound that she can pick at whenever she feels herself forgetting the past. Perhaps that was the point in staging it; it did not serve Utena, and so Anthy will absorb its lesson in her stead.
She pretends to be asleep when Utena comes up to bed. They used to talk at length beneath the quiet dark, but their flowing conversations have stilled in recent weeks. Utena has begun retreating inwards ever since Akio began openly pursuing her, and now she ends most of her days rendered mute by her confusion. Tonight, she changes into her pyjamas and quickly falls asleep. Her face grows creased as she slumbers, overtaken by a dream.
“You’ve met before,” said Akio, some time ago, “when you were children. It was Dios who arranged it all.”
He refused to say anything more. He does not like speaking of Dios and the strange existence that they sometimes share. He does not like admitting that he is not always in control.
Anthy has racked her memories for a trace of that encounter, but she cannot find the slightest scrap of a child Utena. She wanders through her mind (so much of it, and at all hours of the day) in a far more precarious form: that of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Who are you?” she asks Utena, newly awoken from rough slumber, “really?”
Utena is a girl who wants to be a prince. She strides across the campus in her boy’s uniform with confidence, attracting easy notice. She has fought nearly twenty duels, losing only once. She can channel the spirit of Dios when wielding a sword (and sometimes even without one), and this is as close as the world will ever let her get to achieving her stated goal. See The Tale of the Rose. A girl has only two choices: fall back into the role of princess, or grow up to become a witch.
Anthy knows this about Utena, but what’s still unclear is this: how does she fit into the tale of her doomed girl-prince?
VI.
Late afternoon and the sun is burning out. Anthy retraces the steps she took two weeks ago, and comes upon the drama club preparing their newest production. She has no tattered script tucked into her skirt pocket. She has simply come to watch. Her presence in the audience (as the audience) will settle what remains of her accrued debt.
Today’s play is aimed at Touga. Its central character, a playboy fisherman, boasts about his prowess with the creatures of the ocean to a nonplussed bystander. The bystander reads a book and pays him little mind. She wears glasses that Anthy finds familiar.
“Ah, another bite!”
The fisherman struggles to reel in his prey. He panics as their positions are suddenly reversed. He has lost all control of his fishing rod and finds himself being dragged towards the sea.
“Can it be — a fish I don’t know about? What are you?”
The fish emerges from the deep, revealing herself to be a beautiful mermaid.
“I am amore.”
“There are no moray eels around here!”
Six months ago, Anthy would have enjoyed the pun, but now she bristles as girls made out of shade turn their shadowed faces towards her and ask with mirth —
“Do you know? Do you know? Do you know the answer?”
She claps politely as they bow, and rises without saying a word. She can hear them hold their breath as she walks away and she can hear them erupt into peels of mocking laughter once she turns a corner. They laugh so loud and for so long that Anthy can still hear them once she’s reached the chairman’s tower. She can still hear them as she slips into bed, and she hears them even as she dreams.