Summary: Ten years later, two ex-princes reunited under harshly-realistic circumstances.
Utena characters belong to their various owners.
Notes: This fic is meant to fulfill a prompt by the talented Slant AO3 to put Utena and Anthy in this really depressing post-series situation. Either way Slant, a late Merry X'mas, and this one's for you
Once, instead of a princess to be protected, I wanted to become a strong, noble prince.
Silly as that may sound now, I really did used to think like that, back when I still was naive enough to believe in the existence of princes bearing both strength and nobility.
I've since learned the hard way that strength and nobility are often (if not always) mutually-exclusive qualities for any individual to harbor simultaneously; yes even for the impossible ideal as attributed to princes.
A prince is, in the end, quite-simply someone who is admired by others for their ability to exercise power.
Even the likes of me had a period in my life when I was something of the sort. A decade ago, my fourteen-year-old self - a girl made outstanding and popular by her (frankly, only above-average) athletic prowess - was, to many of my adolescent schoolmates, a prince. Only way afterwards, when looking back, do I truly realized that hey, I too used to possess them rare qualities that made me noticeable, clamored-upon, "special".
Once.
Fool that I was, I never even knew just what I've lost till it's gone.
Now that I'm a child no more, I know also how there are marked differences between qualifications of a school prince, and those of an adult, real-world prince. After all, the prince's power must be one that their world – the social setting they're situated within – deem as being important.
That's right; a prince isn't something you can just say you are or aren't on your own - you need your world to label you as being one.
To school-bound children whose problems can still be solved by physical strength, jock status is seen as this glorious, flaunt-worthy sign of strength. In the world beyond school, where everyone actually has to earn their pay to survive, money -important even to schoolchildren - then becomes the main currency of power. Simply put, only those who possessed the right qualities, in the right world, get to be princes.
To stay a prince, through changing times and places, one needs to constantly acquire new qualities –- often at the cost of discarding old ones.
I myself have not managed to shine past my prime, prince-scale wise.
Nor could this ex-prince of mine from my troubled youth, apparently.
Thought the qualifications vary as per the setting, one must have at least the appearance of being somewhat noble to be called a prince.
Prince-no-more, this man, whom I remember (correctly?) to be so good at appearing classy and noble back in my school years, now is running what could only be described as a den of blatant ill-repute.
It's a den I'm just about to set foot upon.
Yes, I am going to him, now, not because it so happens to be ten exact years ago to this day that I last saw him face to face. No, I'm going to him only because I've got this demand to make on him.
I'm counting him not being able to refuse me out of fear - not of me, of course, but rather, what I've been harboring painfully within my husk for this past decade.
Back straight, I clasp my hand around the golden handle of the establishment's flamboyantly designed front door, and pull.
To be Continued . . . ?