Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu


IX. Jete

Ever since the leaves began flaming on the trees, Fakir has felt knots of dread tying up his stomach. When the first few begin to flutter off branches and land like burning stars on the autumn-blue lake surface and the other waterfowl begin chattering about preparations and the warm southern lands and the long journey, he knows he cannot ignore the inevitable any longer.

Swimming had been difficult enough to master...if humans were meant to fly, he grumbles to himself, they would be born with wings. And then he realizes that he does in fact possess said appendages. Even after all these weeks, he thinks of himself as boy first and duck only after a moment of recollection. He wonders if this will ever change; he wonders if Duck too had felt such a disorientation the entire time she had been a girl.

He does not want to admit that he fears falling. What kind of dancer would he be, afraid of heights and their attendant dangers? And so, clamping down on fear, a grim look in his eyes, he asks Duck one crisp autumn morning, "When do you want to leave?"

"Leave? Leave where? To the other side of the lake?"

Fakir rolls his eyes and begins to question Duck's competence as a duck. "Migration," he responds in a clipped voice and at her still confused look, elaborates, "you know, f-flying south for the winter."

"Oh! This is my first time too!"

And then the true horror of the situation dawns on him. "You mean you don't know how to fly either." They are doomed. They will die terrible, grisly deaths, falling from incalculable heights and no one will find their twisted broken bodies—

"Of course I know how to fly!" she huffs, her voice dispelling the gruesome images his lurid imagination is setting before his eyes. But she admits, "I've never flown that distance though. But we'll figure it out as we go! I think it'll be fun!"

And he knows they are really and truly doomed.

His first attempt, in the middle of the night so he will not have the lovesick audience of ducks that trail him when they think he is not watching, is a failure. So is the next and the next and the next. He begins to wonder if he has written himself into a flightless bird and wouldn't that be the perfect irony?

Because of all his failed nighttime practicing, he becomes lethargic in the daytime and Duck begins to fret over him. One night, his rustling as he leaves the reed-nest they sleep in wakes her and she trails after him, filled with curiosity.

She sees him hop onto a fallen tree beside the lake, spread open his wings, and then, fall spectacularly into the water.

"You're doing it wrong."

His head snaps in her direction. "You think?" he asks sourly but bows, rather gracelessly, to her greater experience.

There are more failed attempts, but then one night, as Duck fights sleepiness and the full moon trails clouds, the stars twinkle in the sky at their reflections in the lake water, he realizes that somehow sky and water, they are all the same, and lets go of the fear of the impossible and the unknown that his landbound mind has held so dearly as it were the last vestige of who he once was.

And it is like the first time he performed a grande jete, flawless and exhilarating.

No, it is a leap that never ends. It is every dancer's dream. It is overcoming gravity, reality and he thinks—for he would never admit as much aloud—this is yet another gift she has given me.