Title: End of the World
Genre: Drama/Angst
Originally Published: March 4, 2003
Summary: Fifteen years after the anime ends, Touga is dying. He muses on all he went through.
End of the World
So I haven't lived the greatest life. At least I'm not being pretentious about it. Nor am I whining and trying to make excuses for myself. The fact is, I did some pretty jack-assed stuff at Ohtori, stuff that I don't like to remember.
But it's hard not to remember when you're lying in a hospital bed with a tube down your throat, knowing that you only have a few more hours to live.
Yeah. Go ahead and laugh. Me. The infallible Kiryuu Touga, student council president of Ohtori Academy, is dying of cancer. Testicular cancer, to add to the irony. Laugh all you want.
We were very naive, then, at Ohtori. We thought we could change the world. End it, perhaps. I was the worst. I gave up my entire future, convinced that End of the World would provide for me, for all of us. I gave up school and never got an education. Maybe I could have made it in athletics, but that wound Saionji dealt me never really healed, so that too was ruled out.
We were stupid, you know that? All our dueling, and our idiotic desperation to change the world...it destroyed our lives. Saionji killed himself a few years back. I saw everyone at the funeral. Even Anthy. She and Tenjou showed up together. Tenjou...was Tenjou. She still hates me. Surprisingly, Miki showed up with his wife, and Kozue with a boyfriend. I never expected to see that. Juri had Shiori, I suppose they finally made up. All of them put their lives back together. And me? I left Japan. I went to America, only to be devastated by the diagnosis of inoperable cancer.
I only went back to Ohtori once after we finished there. It was after I found out I only had six months to live. It was all boarded up and falling apart, but surprisingly, the dueling groundswere still unlocked. I went up the steps, to the place our lives had practically revolved around. The Castle wasn't there, of course. None of the spirit of Dios remained. I lay on the dueling field until night, but nothing remained. It was empty and dead. We had failed to revolutionize the world. If we had? Who knows. Maybe a new generation of Duelists would be fighting there even as I write this.
Strangely enough, though, it is not my time at Ohtori that I keep coming back to. It is the time before that, when I should have died. Arisugawa Juri fell or jumped or something. Somehow she ended up in the water. Trying to be chivalrous, like a prince, I jumped in to save her - forgetting on the spur of the moment that I didn't know how to swim. I should have drowned, I shouldn't have lived that day. But I did. Why? I have no idea. Dios, maybe. Or maybe it's true what they say about the human body, that in times of great need it can do anything. All I remember is losing consciousness underwater and waking up on the shore, spitting up water. Who knows what happened in between. I shouldn't have woken up. I shouldn't have lived to go on and do what I did at Ohtori. Maybe it was Dios, he knew that he still needed me. Or maybe not. Maybe if I really had died, the student council would have revolutionized the world. Or maybe not.
I don't remember much about before school. I don't like to, so I don't. Maybe what happened then affected me later on. Maybe not. I never knew then, and I suppose I'll never know. I don't care, really. It was trivial then, and it is now.
The hour is growing late. Just as I am powerless to stop the cancer from eating me, I am powerless to stop time. Just as I was powerless to revolutionize the world.
I don't care. I don't care anymore. All our failures and shortcomings mean nothing to me now. In a few hours I'll be dead. I would have gone earlier, but I wanted to annoy the nurses a little longer. They keep coming in to see if I've kicked it yet. I think they need the bed.
I have no regrets except that I won't get to see Nanami get married. I wish I could be there, but the wedding is months from now, so of course, I don't think I need to say that I will not be attending. I didn't even get to see her graduate - too caught up in my own matters and affairs to make it. So maybe that is one regret - but I never said that I was perfect. Far from it.
It is dawn, and the shadow of death hanging over me all night has at last come to claim me. What should have happened years ago has caught up to me. I'm not going to fight. I have nothing left to live for. We failed to crack the world's shell, so like the chick trapped inside the egg, we will all die without ever being born.
We failed.
All right, I'll go.