At least Kanae hadn't contracted the same illness that had felled her father. Akio, as generous as he was with his time and energy, could do no more than add milk to her father's tea and kiss his pale forehead. Kanae could let him strap her into her heels and escort her through the boutiques, and meet others' eyes on her behalf. "Ice cream for the sun?" he'd say.
"Yes," she'd say, "it's good weather."
He would leave her on a secluded bench to dimple at passersby from a safe distance, and he would take care of the purchase. Some vestige of the ardor she'd once felt for him would stir upon watching him lick the cone and wrap it in napkins to protect her fingers from sudden chill.
If anyone in the world, she would have loved Akio. Her illness stopped her. Akio too seemed to feel its drain. He spent so much of himself sweeping protectively about her like a benevolent ghost, bringing her figs, silks, physicians, news of the world beyond Ohtori Academy and the Sakai districts she still dared walk, that his hair seemed to be losing its color. When she had first opened her eyes, after a long sleep that left her without even a dream to show for it, he had been the one to support her to the vanity and sooth her as she screamed. The beaked nose, the flat brows, the thin eyelids: she had been muzzy on painkillers and the features in the mirror resembled those of the framed portraits on her mantel, but—"You were born beautiful," Akio said. "You will always be." His knuckles skimmed the cheek she found herself despising.
"I don't look like this," Kanae said. "Please, would it be too much trouble to replace our pictures, darling? It's not me, I feel trapped in this face, I can't be seen like this."
He placed one hand on her shoulder and felt her pulse with the other. Even the gentle pressure of his touch dizzied her, his movements flash-swift compared to her own as she tried to align her feet enough to stand by herself, stag to starfish. His arm slid naturally under her back. "The doctors were quite certain you would recover." The sides of his mouth rose. It was kind of him, Kanae thought, to be so visibly pleased with her recovery, to set an example for her and her mother. "It's very like you to develop new opinions as you get better."
"It isn't only an opinion," Kanae said, almost glad that she felt too unfamiliar with her hands to set them to pick at her skin. "The keys are all in the wrong places in my head, it's as if someone else has gone in and upended the sky and the ground in my head and rearranged my face to match—isn't there something we can do? Akio-san?"
The next week Akio introduced her to a plastic surgeon.
Not once did she have to leave their shared room. Kanae dragged a sofa into a corner, where she could catch sunshine and the goings-on of the students stories below them, but avoid being seen herself, while Akio convinced the surgeon to slip Kanae into her schedule. Akio suggested that Kanae had become agoraphobic after her long bedrest; the surgeon said something Kanae couldn't hear from her sofa; Akio said more, much more, in the offhandedly reassuring tone he used to charm everyone from guidance counselor to kangaroos alike; the surgeon nodded and produced a clay model from her coat to make it easier for Kanae to describe her true face. Akio had reclined at her side and occasionally interposed with the words she wanted but couldn't dredge out of her mind herself. By early summer her bandages were pronounced removable and she was staring into the vertiginous heights of the ceiling, its trompe l'oeil of arches and constellations. A sewing machine clacked on her nightstand as she came back to herself. "How are you?" Akio asked. A half-finished dress spilled across his lap.
"Is that for me? You're really unbelievable, this is a much finer gift—" and it was, sleek tiered pleats in cream and gold under a narrow waist and orange petticoat, and the gigot sleeves she loved—"than the naming rights you've always promised. Did you come from the stars just for me, Akio-san?"
He smiled. "You can choose whether to compliment or slander me after I'm done sewing this for you."
She didn't see the dress again until the opening day of the second trimester. Not that she could have mapped out how time was passing, especially now that she had put the party schedule and regulated calligraphy hours of her unmarried adolescence behind her: she slid through her days in the smooth stream Akio left for her. "Would you like to come with me to an event this Saturday, Kanae? You haven't appeared in so long, your friends must be worried about you."
She was curled comfortably in her bed, book half-read on her pillow, but this was enough to rouse her. "Do you think I'm—fit for company? Will many people go?"
"Only those you knew," Akio said. "You should be presented to them anew, don't you think? A transformed audience for your own transformation."
"Akio-san..."
"You'll be fine, I'll be by you every moment, my heart," he said, and lay a line of kisses, light as a sunbeam, down the span of her ribs. "I've had an idea—we could hold it here. Would that be better for you?"
She could not demur in the face of such kindness. So it was on Saturday—she'd slept for the rest of the week in the rebuilt Memorial Hall while Akio summoned an army of redecorators into the tower—that she stepped, elbows interlinked with his, into the elevator and counted the floors as they spun past them, a habit she'd maintained since childhood. Five and seven and ten and sixteen. After that her eyes blurred and she had to lean against Akio to stay upright while the elevator headed up and up. She'd never understood how tall the tower was before: it continued to fall away below her through minute after minute of her clutching Akio's shoulder. She wished she had accepted his offer to cook for her that afternoon after all. Instead he had fashioned bracelets for her to match the accents on her dress, and he had basked in her gratitude for these new clothes on which sunlight glittered and caught and lingered, warming her from the outside in, unlike the cold ribs of support she was accustomed to. "Your entrance," he said at last.
The minimalist echoing hall she had grown up in was now so richly draped and ornamented that she could not believe its construction unchanged. Gold or white velvet greeted her from every wall that last week had been severe and plain. She stumbled at the threshold. Only rehearsal took her forward. The walls seemed to press in on her, folds of cloth fluttering in her path, as she made her way to the stage wings and imagined blinkers around her eyes to hide herself from the shadows of the audience, and a muted whispering like beetles followed her through the hall: she had the distinct impression she walked through the chambers of a beating heart.
"Ladies and gentlemen and all else living," he began, once she was standing behind his microphone and had fixed a smile upon her face. "We gather to celebrate the next era of Ohtori..."
His phrases came through the air without finding anything in her to stir. There were more people than she had anticipated, and fewer eyes; she had feared a hundred sightlines meeting hers, but heads and elbows in the audience dipped and lifted without apparent direction. She knew no one. She shivered, and felt Akio's warm hip fit against her waist, and his arm come possessively around her shoulders. One. She knew one, and in another spell of dizziness could not tell if it was Akio or herself. More shadows straggled into the back of the room. She knew one of them as well, she thought. She shook her head and tried to listen. Dissociated sentences fought toward her over the rustling of the audience. Akio was reshaping her weak and disoriented body into the spirit of elegance and influence that she had always hungered to become, he was self-deprecatingly discussing his choice to marry her, he blamed himself for the divorce but force majeure made it necessary to kindle her true power—
"As the Rose Bride," said Akio.
From somewhere in the audience: "I'm the one with the honey voice! The broadcast rights are mine!" and "Well then. Lies, lies, lies! Send in the dragon slayer!" and "Shhh!"
Kanae had no idea who the Rose Bride was. She caved in to confusion and gravity, sinking into a heap in her dress. From the very back, where the shadows clustered so thickly they blocked out the white blinds, "What a poor choice of career, brother."
Kanae turned her head. Himemiya Anthy! Once she had wanted to kill the girl. She lacked the strength to even touch her, now, with her limbs slow as stone and her skin clammy, a clay shell over the jumble of her organs and mind. She rocked back and forth. She thought, difficult as it was. Anthy had—what had Anthy done that brought the cold sear of rage through her now, when she was too muddled to stand or speak—she'd poisoned her father, wasn't it? The canny dark eyes only glanced over her before dismissing her for Akio: the cool efficiency of a doctor choosing the greater tumor on which to operate.
"You always fancied yourself a thespian," Anthy said. "I hadn't thought you could so invest yourself in your little theatre, though. Are you so desperate for a Lilith that you would rather pin her her mask on a child than come out of your play-world?" She waved and the sea of shadows amassed before her. The unbroken dark line stretching between us, Kanae thought, almost deliriously. The black string of will. She tried to put out her hands to steady herself, overbalanced, and teetered off the stage.
She expected Akio to leap down and embrace her. He straightened up, instead, and tossed his hair to his nape with a shake of his head. "Ohtori will always be our home," he said.
"Yours, perhaps."
"It's the home you made for us."
"I will live here when I die," Anthy said. Kanae had never heard her syllables so precisely enunciated nor her voice so pitched to carry, clear as a jewel over the restless swooshes of the shadows shifting around her. "Which I have already done, and I do not mean to go back. All I wonder is, Akio, will you wither here as well?"
"You might be surprised at how strong she is, how capable of... restoration," Akio said. Finally he alighted at Kanae's side and stroked her hair. The afternoon's glossy waves had matted over with her sweat, but she was beyond courtesy, and she pressed back against his hot hand before he took it from her and hefted her up by her arms. "Lucifer and the witch are strongest together, Anthy. You remember it, do you not? The worst we can do is lie to ourselves when the world already buzzes in our ears—telling us what we can and should and will do..."
"I remember," said Anthy, softer. "But she won't restore you to Dios."
"You sound very certain," he said, even though it was only the tautness of his arm that held Kanae off the floor.
Anthy's laugh hollowed as it left her throat, unlike the simpering Kanae had steeled herself to face in past years in the tower. "Yes, I am," said Anthy. "I loved you. Even when you hurt me I loved you, and even when I hurt you I loved you, and if I had not known that in every part of my soul I could not have loved you for such an eternity. But can you say the same of Ohtori Kanae?"
Kanae said, "What claim do you have to love? I did my best to love you as my husband's sister deserved, and you drove me to tears for even trying it!"
"Tell her how you've poisoned her," said Anthy.
"You—you—" But if she had not been raised an Ohtori she would not be here, and raised an Ohtori she could not voice any of the names that cut her through her dizziness. "Akio cared for me while I was sick, he fed me, he took me everywhere with him—"
"Bother," Akio interrupted. "If you want to carve more out of me so badly, Anthy, I'll let you." He gave her the sketch of a bow. "Shouldn't you do the honors?"
"We were always careful to strike in the right place," Anthy said. "He took great care in choosing what to feed you. I don't know exactly what the compounds were, he didn't brew the same mix for you that I used on your father. But in stories they would have called it acacia and parsley and witchbane, and—" her chin lifted, and her full attention anchored on Kanae at last—"the mantle of the Rose Bride, by any name, should not rest on your or anyone's shoulders, by force or misfortune."
The shadows had formed into a crowd of spindly young girls. Their gazes too locked on Kanae like a hundred stabs of a sword, and she flinched from the gloom Anthy had gathered around her, backed up against the stage. Akio at her right watched her with pity and some small measure of hope. At first it was easier to look at him alone. A flick of a shadow and the stage lights rotated toward her. The light bathed her in tender warmth, at first; then the heat appeared amidst the comfort as though she lay in a tanning bed; then the last light had concentrated its beam upon her, laser-keen. The chill Anthy had imparted to her dissolved under her skin. "Did... did you really have to take everything from him, Anthy?" she said, in the final throes of affection. "I've seen, he's so lonely, he was kinder to me than to you..."
"It isn't about what he owes to me or what I owe to you," said Anthy. She had put her glasses back on. Kanae was struck by the sudden thought that this Anthy who spoke so easily of poisons might too be afraid. "I came because I owe it to another."
Kanae wrenched herself from Akio's grip and crawled forward. The shadow girls surrounded her, blessedly cool. Through the gilded hall she passed as though through a low tunnel, with sense of only the dark around her and the grime on the ground and the light she had left behind, until Anthy was near enough to nudge her with a foot. "Stand up, please." Anthy offered no arm to help her, but presently Kanae found enough strength to pull herself up with liberal use of the wall, and Anthy stepped with her into the elevator.
Kanae waited for an epitaph for the evening, or something to express You just broke up my marriage and now you're kidnapping me to who knows what end of the earth, but all Anthy said was "It's a better way to go, isn't it, sister?"
They went.
Anthy was so weird. Even after they'd talked about the duels, for a definition of talk that included Nanami barraging Anthy with questions Anthy only smiled at, guarded as ever, and Anthy drinking staggering quantities of tea, Nanami still couldn't get over her suspicion. Paranoia, Touga called it. You're jealous I'm the only one who warned you all to stay away, Nanami called it. And she'd been right. Who but Anthy would leave a full-grown human woman on her doorstep?
Kiryuu Nanami's hospitality! She had pinched Kanae's cheek, looked her over—not even covertly, Kanae had the breeding to require caution but was obviously missing a few beads in her bracelet—and offered it. It grew from a blind response to stimuli to the centerpiece of Nanami's apartment like a chicken. Kanae put up no resistance to being bullied; Nanami therefore bullied her into taking one of Nanami's five spare bedrooms, a wardrobe worth wearing (she had showed up in some horrible parody of Anthy's old costume, what?!), and an afternoon-and-evenings job with ease. Kanae had just returned from the latter and was halfway to the first when the doorbell rang, one winter night.
Kanae froze, turned back. Nanami went like the sensible high schooler she was to open the door and found Akio lurking behind it. Kanae parted her lips. "Sit down," Nanami said to her, bracing her hands at her waist and—accidentally, of course—replacing Kanae's view of Akio with her much more attractive magnolia-cream poncho in its majestic full spread. To Akio, she said, "I just can't understand you! Even creepers like you Himemiyas should know that a girl who moves to another country doesn't want to see you any more."
(Yeah, she'd left Touga in Osaka and flounced off to Montpellier. What of it, huh? Her brother didn't belong in the same galaxy as the garden-variety mysterious rich puppeteer genus Akio represented.)
Akio opened his mouth too. Enough, Nanami thought, you've never cared for anything he says anyway, and she tried to close the door in his face.
"Mmph!" he said over his jammed foot. Hoarfrost had transferred from her door to his lips and chest.
"Oh, please," said Nanami, "do I have to take care of you, too," and she tossed her least favorite umbrella and a tissue box out the door before slamming it again.
A/N: All feedback deeply appreciated! Originally written for the Yuletide exchange, December 2014.