World Enough, and Time

Chapter 1: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

A/N: Still in the rough stages, grammar and story-wise. Playing with a story that's been kicking around in my head for a while. Very much a work in progress.

Summary: Because time does not stand still.

Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu

"But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near"

-Andrew Marvell

You grow old. You do not believe in fairy tales anymore, even if you know them to be true. Fairytales like true love, like hope that conquers despair, fairytales that are too painful to hold on to as anything more than childishness. And the fairytales, they know. The mysterious birds had long ago stopped appearing at Fakir's window. Their plumage too colorful, their eyes too bright for his world, they can no longer fly his letters to the prince he had dedicated his childhood to. His words, like his thoughts, no longer knew how to travel there.

Duck was there, by his side, but what did that mean, Fakir wondered, tracing the gray in his hair with his fingertips as he looked at his reflection in the mirror. She was a duck. Years ago, the ever stoic Charon had burst out once, "Who has broken your heart? I don't want to see you ending up alone like me!"

While a younger Fakir would have denied everything with a stutter and a blush—his heart wasn't broken, he didn't even have a heart!—an older, more resigned, more honest Fakir had sighed, petting the duck perched on his desk. And at last answered, "No one really. Fate." He was too old to lie to himself anymore. His heart had broken long ago, shattered beyond repair, before he had even understood what was happening.

He was there, by her side, but what did that even mean, he wondered, more wistfully each year as he watched young families grow around him while he stood still, frozen in time, alone. How do you love a duck? How do you give up dreams you were too young to dream when you gave them up?

Before he can even brave such questions, let alone begin to answer them, he loses her. Like a half-forgotten dream that vanishes in that moment between sleeping and waking, Duck faded from his life. The little golden shadow always at his side somehow was not there anymore. There is no one he can even share his grief with, just as for so long there had been no one to share his love with. There is no closure, for there had never really been a beginning, had there? Only loss. How do you hold on to a memory that your heart alone cherishes?

Some desperate part of him hopes that she is not dead at all, that she was never a duck at all. That really she has somehow found her way to the fairytale kingdom at last as the princess he always knew she was in his heart. But he doubts now that there ever was a fairytale kingdom to begin with. That all of this—his memories of a Duck who was more than a duck, of a Prince, of a story— was anything more than a piece of youthful madness. How could it have ever been real? For if it had, how could he have ever let such love slip away?

He ages. He loses those few he had, Charon, and decades later, Rastel too. There are days he goes without talking. There is no one to talk to. He wonders if he is losing his mind, one small piece at a time, and there is no one there to tell him. His body slowly and inevitably shuts down.

Everything hurts too much. He remembers back to that time when he had a prince to serve and a princess to love, a prince and princess whose absence he would ache for the rest of his life. But he had been too foolish to realize it back when he could have changed his fate, changed hers. And now, it is all too late.

Everything hurts too much. Every part of his body aches. The simplest tasks require more and more than he feels capable of. He does not want to die like this, but he knows he will.

He does not know if he really believes it ever happened anymore, but he spends more and more of his time daydreaming back to when the story ended, when they had all been so triumphant, so hopeful. Sure, Duck was a duck, but it was the beginning of their story, he had thought back then naively. And now time had passed, and in its passing had unraveled the meaning of his life entirely. His life has been a series of questions, barely asked. Asked too late, and never answered.