Je viens offrir mon coeur
@--->--------------
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
