Je viens offrir mon coeur - Part 1: Continuity

Je viens offrir mon coeur
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Continuity

Qui a dit que tout était perdu?
Je viens offrir mon coeur
Tant de sang emporté par la rivière
Je viens offrir mon coeur

Ce ne sera pas si facile, je sais ce qui se passe
Ce ne sera pas aussi simple que je le croyais
Comme ouvrir ma poitrine et en sortir l'âme
Un coup de couteau d'amour

F. Cabrel
Je viens offrir mon coeur [1]

The castle floor lurched under her feet and she struggled for balance. With an ominous roar, cracks started to snake down the marble walls. Something terrible had happened. Something momentuous. And somehow, she felt it was all her fault.

The ceiling began to sag at one end of the room. The supporting wall buckled under its weight. The whole structure seemed to shudder and the wall gave, the ceiling falling apart, a piece of it hurtling towards her.

She felt something fall against her.
Throw her to the ground.
A scream died in her throat, then all went black.

Utena coughed, bits of plaster and dust stuck in her throat. Her first realization was that, against all odds, she was still alive. The second, almost instantaneous, that the ground had stopped shaking. Everything was still. Eerily still.
So she just lay there, breathing in and out slowly. She shouldn't try moving. She could be in shock, she could be hurt, crushed under that debris. She remembered, vaguely, seeing on television that people in trauma should not be moved. Was someone as lucid when they were in trauma?
Could she be... dying? Crushed under debris from the castle she had dreamt of seeing. Crushed under... debris?
She attempted a slow movement, to free her hand. The rest of her body was trapped, that she could tell, but when had a piece of marble broken from a ceiling ever felt so... warm. Not hard... Soft and yielding. Warm and soft anf yielding and... alive?

Utena scrubbed at her eyes, gummed shut by dried tears and sticky plaster dust, then opened them, blinking in the light that filtered through the broken wall.

If she could see, then she was not in trauma, was she?
She moved carefully under the weight that pinned her to the ground and stopped short as she heard a low groan. Twisting towards the sound, her free hand moved of its own volition to cover her mouth.
_ "Touga..."
He was lying over her, his usually pristine white uniform dirtied and stained with blood.
_ "You... you've protected me?"

_ "Utena-sama?"
Anthy. Utena could see her, from her vantage point on the floor. She was surprisingly unharmed, her rose bride dress as fresh and crisp as always, a bewildered look on her features.
Anthy groped for her glasses, put them on, and with the index of each hand, wiped the grime off the lenses.
_ "Anthy, you're all right! Touga..."
Utena stopped fighting and let her exhausted head reast on the ground. Touga was eerily still above her.
She closed her eyes, overwhelmed with the certainty...

She had been so cold to him, so cutting, she had thought that he was nothing more than a calculating playboy without feelings.
And yet, he had proved her wrong, twice, at the cost of his own well-being. He had taken unto himself the pain meant for her.
First Sayonji, then, after she had told him that she loved Akio, and not him, this.

_ "Touga?"
A soft moan, then the weight on her grew less as he struggled to raise himself on his elbows.
_ "Touga.. don't move... you're hurt. Anthy! Please! We're trapped!"

Her friend drug herself closer, not even bothering to get up, her dress tearing as it caught jagged edges of scattered debris.

_ "Utena-sama... Are you unharmed?"
_ "I'm all right, Anthy, I'm all right. Can you move the boulder? Only a few inches..."

Utena twisted under Touga, until her back was pressed securely on the floor. She wrapped her arms around Touga's shoulders. As Anthy struggled against the boulder, her nails digging in the rock, Utena rolled away, pulling Touga after her with difficulty.

He groaned as his back his the floor, and Utena scrambled off of him as quickly as her cramped muscles would let her.

All her attentions focussed on Touga as his face contorted, then settled in an ominous stillness. She herself to her knees, scraping the soft skin on the rubble, and gathered him in her arms.

_ "Touga... please!"

His blue eyes opened, clouded in pain, but he smiled, the skin tight around the edges of his mouth.

_ "I am sorry..."
_ "Sorry? Why? You saved me..."
_ "I won't be able to be much use to you now."

Utena blinked back tears. This was not supposed to happen. They were all supposed to come out alive, after they found Dios. No one was supposed to die...

_ "How touching."

This voice, so mocking.

_ "AKIO!"

[1] French for

Who said that everything was lost?
I came to offer my heart
So much blood flowing in the river
I came to offer my heart

It will not be that easy, I know what is happening
It will not be as simple as I thought it would be
Like tearing open my chest and pulling out my soul
A stab of a knife called love