Deus ex Machina

It only appears after she has withdrawn to the barn's loft. At this height Dios can't see her stop crying. "You can save him!" it says, although its mouth doesn't move, and she forces herself to still and peer into its beady red eyes instead of clasping her hands over her mouth, or falling to the ground in shock, or any of the thousand other things she wanted to do before she consciously shut their motivating emotion off. Its white fur stands out against the rotting hay like a lighthouse. Its paw beckons her forward. "You can form a contract with me and become a magical girl and save him!"

She reaches an unshaking finger out to confirm the creature is real, or at least as real as any of the monsters that brought her brother to death's door. It allows her petting. "You are very kind, but he won't allow himself to be saved."

"If you wish for the ability to save him, I can give it to you."

The luminous rings around its ears halo the gentle set of its mouth. The soft swishing of its tail offers a peace the tumult outside the barn would never allow her. She should have asked more of Kyubey, she will think later, but now her thoughts rotate around her brother's lungs, his feet, his torn throat. "I can wish for anything I want," she says, confirmatory.

"Yes!"

A montage of all the times she cowered away as her brother wielded his mortal body against the universe plays through her head in high resolution and slow motion. "I wish," she says, "to be able to stop everyone from hurting my brother."

Control of the Center

"Good night," she says, as she conjures her soul gem. It's a more firm goodbye than usual. Tonight she resets the world. Akio rummages through his papers as she transforms, casually not watching, for the shapes of the lights and ribbons that submerge her in this ritual would reveal too much about her wish; he had accepted her desire to keep one secret from him with a nod and the promise that he would only do the same. They hadn't talked much to one another even when he bore the mystical sword and she not an inkling of magic. Reversing the dynamic hasn't stopped Akio from speaking more through his movements—how he decorates cakes for her, how he strokes back her hair when she straddles him—than through the kind of confessional gabbling that the duelists resort to whenever Ohtori's notoriously sticky elevators strand them between floors.

The most talkative of the duelists sits cross-legged on the tower lawn when Anthy exits. On good nights she has dreamed of fate or a stork sending Utena to her and locking the girl in place. In reality Utena's another slab of kindling, raised in isolated woods, hacked from her family tree by untimely accident, consumed to cleanse Anthy's gem. "Hoy!" Utena says, grinning. "Why are you heading out so late? Doesn't the Chairman impose a curfew or something?"

"I need to set a few affairs in order, Tenjou-sama."

Something coils in Anthy's stomach when Utena tells her to enjoy herself and runs off to explore the rooftops (or something of the sort, Utena being Utena). It isn't regret—the weight of the duties Anthy chose precludes that—but she feels that she's done this unruly mop of a duelist more disservice than the other incidentals by thrusting her back into her history alongside Akio. Each cycle that Anthy tosses them through time, Utena's parents die earlier. By the time the world is to Akio's liking, Utena will probably spring into life like Athena, hounded by princes without a mother to be seen.

But I am a doll without a soul, Anthy says, where only Kyubey can hear her. She flips the gem in her hand. She wishes for the arena to empty, for the duelists to return to childhood unmarked by tragedies or rings, and for Akio to forget how many times she has been unable to restore him to Dios, and all these things pass.

Commencement

On first entrance, Utena's labyrinth is the simplest Anthy has ever breached: Utena's cathedral shoots straight up into stormclouds, unlike the duelists' staircase into the sky. Anthy plants her thorn-wand into the soft marrow of Utena's imagination and waits for the usual chimaera to pop into existence and frolic above. Nothing happens. Glass-stained light reddens the room and tanned pillars arch up around her like a ribcage, but they're unmoving. The structure holds its breath.

Anthy holds hers too, for a minute, and then she unwinds the alarms in her head and floats down the center aisle; she's in the labyrinth of a girl determined to align the world to her ideals instead of working the other way around, and boiled down those ideals are very simple—love, salvation, sanctuary, power to be used on another's behalf. These are not unfamiliar to Anthy. Had she not given Akio primacy in her own list, her gem would have blackened like Utena's.

"Utena, I'm home," Anthy says, one deferred witch to another.

A trapdoor opens at her feet. Long flights of stairs wind into the basement, and by the time Anthy takes the last step she is sweating, but were one step built for every cycle she has carried Utena through, she would yet be walking. Kyubey leaps off her shoulder and hunches, tail upright, on the banister. This is a terrible idea!

"From the patron god of terrible ideas," Anthy murmurs, and walks until she almost stumbles over the coffin on the ground.

You shouldn't spurn your wish like this. You'll give up what you received from your contract!

You have been as good as you can to me, Kyubey. But now I must go.

Kyubey could rip her from Utena's head without blinking, but curiosity has infiltrated his data-collecting routines over the cycles he's jumped at her side. He blinks. His tail lashes the banister at increasing frequency. His eyes lid over. You were a good investment, he says, his equivalent of good-bye, and Anthy's gem vibrates between her breasts as he retreats.

Utena's familiars materialize at last when Anthy touches the coffin's lid. Swords and crowns, at first, cartwheel around her in flutters of little white capes; then they slink around her in guises that curdle Anthy's stomach to see them; then they become silhouettes with the heads of dragons and the hearts of mice. Anthy knows she is close when she is surrounded by a ring of skirt-clad Utenas. They aren't grotesquely malformed—Utena was always so satisfied with her body, the absolute certainty that her tendons and joints served her even over gravity or science—but the words they speak are.

controlling selfish child

harlot

traded your flesh for cheap, for a shiny gem

weak to your emotions Kyubey would never have contracted with your brother

cold soulless traitor never cared about your family

if you had a soul I wouldn't want it, poisoned, poisoned, poisoned poisoned

—until, says Anthy, "I would never believe such things about you." Witch or no.

Steel briars wrap themselves around her wrists and drag her away from the coffin. I command you to stop with the power vested in me! she thinks, which freezes their thorns until she can hook her wand into the brambles and sever their hold. Stop! she thinks again, and the next would-be manacle halts inches from her wrist. She survives like this for a while, weaving her magic through the thorns, but at the rate her gem is fading she won't have enough left for what she means to do. Despair swims in the corners of her vision wherever she turns, and Kyubey's interest crests in the back of her head—

A Dios-like familiar swoops around her bound neck. "I've come to save you, first princess of the world!"

And Anthy understands, with a clarity she's never had before—not when Dios first asked her to be his princess, not when she realized she was not made to be saved, not when she agreed to the contract, not when she first met Utena and despised her selfish joy, not when she fulfilled a bitter vow to meet Utena again in ten years, not at any point until now, the uncountable cycle, when she can at last see her own foibles reflected in Utena's—that the briars are no more real than the illusions she herself creates for Akio. They cannot hurt her as the real Utena can, they cannot respond to her as the real Utena will. The briars dissolve. She digs her nails into the coffin lid and heaves without magic. The lid opens. She peels Utena's duelist uniform off her serene body, she cups her hands over Utena's breasts. Utena's grief seed stabs into the air.

"Thank you," Anthy says, "for waiting so long for us to shine," and she lets her own soul gem clink next to Utena's. She turns them until the clear glass tings against Utena's star-cross. Anthy watches rose bleed into white and white bleed into grey until, with a cough and an unselfconscious flick of her bangs, Utena opens her eyes.

A/N: All feedback deeply appreciated! Originally written for the Yuletide exchange, December 2014.