It was a hot night. Utena had built a fan from lace and toothpicks she was using, alternately, to bat crumbs across the table and wave over Anthy's soul. "Lazy glutton," she said, with fondness—it was not surprising, Anthy supposed, that Utena had taken to him, and then started taking him food. She liked the small and endearingly capricious. Bees, marmosets, slinkies. Wakaba.

"He is my better half," Anthy said. She went to the window.

In response she heard a snort and "Chuu~uu!". There was something unnervingly intimate about Utena's toing and froing with Chu-chu, even with the sight distorted by glassy reflection; they didn't touch in the way Utena's outfit didn't break Ohtori rules. So Anthy pressed her face up against the pane until her view of the room gave way to Nanami in the courtyard. Nanami could be relied upon to do things like stop sluicing her warthog to make a ward-against-evil gesture at Anthy, a simpler pleasure than... whatever she felt about Utena bopping Chu-chu on the nose.

Thus soothed, she stepped back. She ventured, "Have you thought about what yours will be like?"

It wasn't as though Utena's reasons for not materializing her soul were shameful, after all. With her background a late onset was understood. And look how well she had been recovering from her tragedy! In general opinion, it would eventually emerge in some impractical but magnificent form, like an elephant or the last evolutionary link before man. More baffling, and with onlookers mutually violating, to materialize one's soul all the time. Utena was the only duelist Anthy could believe had never wondered why. "Athletic. Clawed," Utena said. Remembering, perhaps, the barbed shape of the light she'd pulled out of Anthy's chest before it had solidified into her sword. With her organic casualness, the kind Anthy had to work for, she added, "I hope he's as friendly as Chu-chu is with me. I wouldn't mind if he ate as much, he can snack on the boy who keeps coming to the dorm with the camera. Say, Himemiya?"

"Yes?"

"The story we read in class," Utena said, gesturing at the book she'd abandoned in their mail slot with one hand and scratching her forehead with the other. "The princess grew up with the mice, and they taught her to follow any path and escape through the tiniest hole, and the form her soul took reminded everyone how she had bested the witch... What did the prince's soul become? Was he just very private?"

"Sorry, I can't recall. Maybe it had scales. I think it shone."

"So brightly it couldn't be seen. The author couldn't write it down." A smile in Utena's voice.

"Ah, Utena-sama has such good ideas," Anthy said, and thought, oh. She couldn't imagine the figure next to the prince, the scales/fur/feathers/watery membrane she'd suspend her fingertips over; but the light poured all through her mind's eye, and spilled over into the room and evening.

She turned. She had successfully set the unfathomable emotion Utena—to be precise, Utena's laugh an armsbreadth from and because of the antics of her soul—had stirred up to Simmer, then Off, so Utena could get back on with evaluating her cheeks and lips. Whatever it was that unfailingly distracted Utena every time she looked at Anthy. And she could look at Utena: the comical wideness of her eyes when Chu-chu jumped onto her epaulet and began dropping sweat onto her shoulder.


A/N: All feedback deeply appreciated.