Millennium Actress is copyright Satoshi Kon and Studio Madhouse. No infringement or distrespect of the copyright holders is intended by this non-commercial work of fanfiction.

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Yuletide 2013 treat written for gramarye.

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Gold, Red, Black, White
by silverr

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Genya

He had loved her before he even met her, he liked to say, and it was the truth. When he was a boy he'd had a picture book showing Amaterasu emerging from her cave and gilding the universe with light and warmth. He'd lie in the sun and stare at this picture for hours, imagining that the sunlight that warmed his shoulders was being placed there by the goddess herself.

It was the same the first time he saw Chiyoko, the first time he saw the scene where she comes out of the prison and turns her face up to the sun. At that moment she and the picture book goddess became one and the same. Forever after, whenever winter took his heart, whenever the world became gray, she always brought him into her world, where she enfolded him in her compassion and courage, and took away his sorrow and loneliness with her tears.

The most important thing is to give your all for the one you love.

The Man with the Key

In his desperation to get away from his pursuers he hadn't even seen her at first, had run her down. She'd glared, indignant, but as he helped her up her face had changed, softened, become a revelation. The pastel pinks and yellows of a lotus sunset behind her, she had become in an instant the embodiment of the spirit of the nation. Purity, compassion, innocence: everything he was fighting for, everything selfishness and cynicism and greed and war destroy.

A year or two later, while he was hiding in a abandoned house waiting for the sun to set, he glanced at a stack of dusty magazines and a cover photo caught his eye. The actress on the cover was costumed as a Heian princess, but despite the heavy makeup something about her went beyond mere conventions of beauty; something in her eyes was familiar ... and so he flipped through the pages until her found the article. He skimmed the first paragraph: as these articles always are, it was fatuous and boring. He'd lost interest, had been about to toss the magazine aside, when he saw a quote from the article that had been set in a box with larger letters: "She wears always a rusty key on a worn leather cord, but turns aside all questions as to what it opens." He found the line in the article, which went on to say The key is rumored to be from a mysterious love she had met while still in her girlhood town of ...

She — she had fallen in love with him? Just from those few moments when they'd talked of the moon and hooked fingers in a child's pinkie promise? It's true that she has never sought him in Hokkaido, but perhaps she has interpreted his silence as evidence that the war took him, as it has so many others. No — if she still keeps the key he gave her, she must still hope to see him again.

And with this realization he had fallen in love with her. By becoming the canvas on which others paint their lives, that tender-hearted girl who hid him in her family's storeroom had, in her own way, become his greatest work. He must not leave her in uncertainty and despair! He must let her know, somehow, what she did for him, what she means to him! He made his way to the firebombed town, found the remains of her family's sweetshop storeroom in the rubble, and painted her as he has always remembered her, a girl blooming into a young woman, glowing with potential.

And even as the heavy hands fall on his shoulders, even as they drag him away to his death, he is certain that the most important thing is hope. With hope we move toward tomorrow: without hope, we are entombed in the present by the past.

Ida

Tachibana, the softie, was missing the point. Getting all worked up over what she'd been through... Sure, she'd had it rough. A lot of people had it rough. But didn't the boss see that all that trouble had made Chiyoko-san tough, right from the start? When her mother'd said she was too timid to be an actress — what had she done right after that? Put on an act for the policemen, lying about where her mystery man had gone, that's what she'd done! Eiko's malicious acts, the war, arrests... all that had given her depth, made her tenacious. The boss acted as if she was as delicate as her teacups, but Ida knew better: frail grannies could be scarier than gangsters.

You'd think that with all the thousands of movies he'd watched the boss would understand by now that if the ninja didn't attack the princess, if the princess could just ride right up to the castle and rescue her lord, the movie would be over in five minutes. Nobody wanted to see that! Without the bad guy there was no story.

It was like photography. Most people didn't understand that photography and "the art of film" were really the art of light and shadow. Didn't matter if you were taking pictures of a plate of food, or Mount Fuji, or a sexy naked woman — or a sexy naked woman covered in food with Mt. Fuji in the background — everything was about light and shadow. Especially shadow. You had to know how to manipulate shadows, subtract them, sometimes even create them, in order to bring out the true nature of what you were photographing.

The most important thing? How was he supposed to know? It was the old lady's story, after all.

Chiyoko

Three times it had come to her, this key. The first had marked the end of her childhood; the second had tolled the end of her marriage; and the last signaled the end of her waiting.

She knew her friends wondered why she had stopped searching for him. She was relieved that they had never asked, because it would have been too much to explain without sounding silly.

So many years ago...

She had been paging through a stack of books, tinting her mind with science's angles and precision in preparation for her astronaut role, when an unexpected word had caught her eye: neighborhood. Curious, she had taken the book to the technology consultant and pointed to the sentence — Like the random walk, this process is recurrent in one or two dimensions (meaning that it returns almost surely to any fixed neighborhood of the origin infinitely often) — and asked what it meant. He had explained a thing called Brownian motion, and although she did not follow all of his terminology she quickly understood enough to see that If two particles were both constantly in motion, it would take them longer to bump into each other than if one stayed still.

Funny, how clearly she still remembers that day: the consultant's tiny office piled with books and papers and unemptied ashtrays, his earnest, curious face staring up at her as she'd gasped aloud, buoyant with the realization that one could either travel the earth searching and searching for the fleetest glimpse of one's treasure... or one could wait for the earth to bring it to one's hand.

And so she had stayed still, and waited.

And now, once again, the earth had brought the key to her, as cold in her palm as the day she rescued it from the snow. When she curls her fingers around it she no longer sees the sad faces and the hospital ceiling above her, but a snowy alley, and drops of blood in the snow. She sees the moon through a small barred window, and a battered leather case, and herself, running and falling and begging for time to stop, just for just a single heartbeat, so that she can finally catch up.

Just as she had been the screen on which millions had projected their lives, reaching for him had given her the canvases, the pigments, and the brushes on which she had painted hers.

The most important thing is to move ahead, toward the vast, luminous canvas and her next great work.

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~ The end of one story, and the beginning of another. ~

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Notes: Sincere thanks to my beta RedYuletideRanger.

(03) 14 February 2014