ARSENAL
by
Alan Harnum
Utena and its characters belongs to Be-PaPas, Chiho Saito,
Shogakukan, Shokaku Iinkai and TV Tokyo.
E-mail : harnums@thekeep.org
Transpacific Fanfiction: http://www.thekeep.org/~mike/transp.html
Utena Fanfiction Repository: http://www.thekeep.org/~harnums/UFR/
Spoilers for the whole series, some more direct than others.
* * *
Juri-san. Scratched that out: a single horizontal line, straight
as though drawn with a ruler. Dear Juri. That would not
do
either: up, down, peaks and valleys of elimination. Beloved Juri
fell to a swirl of pen strokes, a tangled cumuli of ink that
erased it completely. His arm had already begun to grow tired.
"The pen is mightier than the sword"--but soon enough, he would
not have the strength to wield either.
White: white walls, white ceiling, white tiles,
white
curtains, white sheets, white gown, white tubes, white flesh, and
beyond the windows, white clouds in a blue sky, drifting. The
soft, soft white fluorescence of the rectangles of light
observing from overhead. If he closed his eyes and squinted,
they seemed to merge and blur into one another, a long pale road.
A nurse came and brought him a meal he could
not eat. He
hid pad and pen beneath his pillow so that she would not see it.
If they knew he was trying to write, they would take it away from
him; he did not know this for certain, but he feared the
possibility. The thought occurred to him that even if he could
complete the letter (and so far he could not even find the right
means of address) he had no means of delivering it to her. He
dismissed it. "Love finds a way." Man in his dying comforts
himself with trite platitudes.
Outside in the hallway there was the familiar
sound:
footsteps, then a pause to check a room number, then footsteps,
then pause again. They would pass his room by. They always
passed his room by.
They did not. The doorknob of his room
began to turn. He
hid the pad and pen again. The Rose Bride entered and closed
the
door behind her--he lacked the strength to show surprise. She
bowed, and greeted him formally: "Tsuchiya-sempai."
"What do you want?"
She came to stand beside his bed; he turned
his head away
and solemnly regarded the wall. A small dark girl in a white-
and-teal uniform. He wondered if anyone else felt the same
chills he did; her demure menace.
"I was very sorry to hear that you had been
forced to
return to the hospital," she said after a moment. "It's
unfortunate that you had a relapse."
"Don't." He addressed the wall rather
than her.
"Don't?"
"Don't play games with me. I'm not interested.
I won't
play them."
"Games?"
With some effort, he turned over onto his
side and regarded
her evenly. "I am well aware of what you are. I understand
that
you've chosen her as your champion, whatever your brother's
desires in the matter may be. So why bother with this
deception?"
Behind her spectacles, the bride's glassy eyes
closed, and
she raised a hand to her mouth as though to--unsuccessfully--
contain the escaping giggle.
"Oh, sempai," she said between titters, "you
understand
nothing at all."
"Don't I?" he said; he tried to snarl the words,
imagined
them coming away from his lips menacing and cold. They emerged
like the plaintive mewling of a hungry kitten.
"What were you writing, sempai?" she asked.
"A letter? A
diary entry? A suicide note? Which one was it this time?"
Her eyes were open again, and regarded him,
thorn-coloured.
"This time?"
She reached up with both hands and removed
her glasses. The
arms made small sharp clicks as she folded them against the
frames. Carefully, precisely, she placed the glasses on his
bedside table, turning away from him as she did. When she turned
back, she seemed taller.
"I've seen it all before," she said quietly,
staring over
his bed and out the window at the tangled skeins of the clouds.
"I'll see it all again. It's perfectly understandable.
Of
course you want her to believe your interpretation of the
matter, that you knew what you were doing right from the very
beginning, and were willing to make her hate you to set her
free, that all you did was intended to lead inevitably to Dios's
sword slicing that locket from her neck."
"I knew what I was doing," he hissed.
She nodded, slowly. Her hands pulled
the pins from her
hair, and it dropped down her back in a long dark wave. "Perhaps
you did," she agreed. "But you see, Tsuchiya-sempai, in this
world, that isn't as important as what others think you were
doing. There are so many other ways to see it. Someone
else,
for example, someone who isn't you--perhaps someone like her--
might think about it in hindsight, and see the actions of a
selfish, petty, jealous boy, willing to hurt anyone in his path
in the hopes of seizing the power that he hoped would grant him
the love she'd deny him in this world. Really, to talk about
'love' can be so misleading, because there's so many different
meanings to the word; who was at the centre of your love's world,
Tsuchiya-sempai? Was it you, or her?"
"I was willing to die for her."
"And you would have died anyway," she said
calmly. "Why not
risk everything, manipulate anyone, if the chance existed that
you could reach the world you desire?"
"She's free now, isn't she?"
"By her own strength, and certainly not by
your hands. You
would have removed her chains and replaced them with new ones;
you didn't want the locket broken, you simply wanted your picture
in it. It was never about her, Tsuchiya-sempai; it was all about
you. What you desired, what you despised. Isn't that true?"
He searched for words, and could not find them.
"Do you understand now?" she asked softly,
after his silence
had filled the room to the point where it seemed the walls might
crack and fall away. He might almost have dared to call her
voice kind. She expertly loosened a knot, and the red-and-yellow
scarf of her uniform blouse fluttered to the broad white tiles of
the floor. "In this world, truth is made; it isn't something
that just is, something that someone can pick up and look at and
say 'so that's what it is!'. Do you understand my meaning?"
"Of course I do," he said. He turned
his head and laid it
on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. "But I don't care to
speak to you any more of this, Bride of the Rose. Have you some
business of your brother's to discuss with me?"
"I have come on my own business." He
heard the rustle of
cloth, saw flesh and dark curves out of the corner of his eye;
the pout of a nipple. "You are a special case. I see that
you're still wearing your ring."
He tried to raise his left hand so that he
might regard it,
and could not manage even that. His entire body felt numb, as
though he floated in iced water.
"Do you know what happens to the ring of a
Duellist when
they die?"
His tongue was a fat, sluggish thing, alien
in his mouth,
terrifying; he tried to spit it out, had not the strength.
"I came to offer a choice, as is my right as
Bride of the
Rose; as is my duty and burden. How do you want her to remember
you, Tsuchiya-sempai? How do you want to be remembered?
Modern
medicine is remarkable; it can keep someone alive long after they
should have died. Perhaps she'll come to visit you, and she'll
read your letters, remember you with pity, with remorse for what
you became because you loved her; she'll tell herself she
understands how you became twisted from the man she admired and
respected, but never loved, never could have loved. And you'll
waste away, the years piling up like grains of sand falling into
the bottom of an hourglass, passing by like the ticks of a clock,
and eventually, eventually you'll die, and she'll want to believe
all the self-justifying letters and diary entries and suicide
notes, but she's too intelligent to ever bring herself to really
believe them."
She fell silent, and seemed to be waiting for
something. He
struggled. There were tears in his eyes, salty, stinging.
Damn
her, damn him, damn her strength and his weakness.
"No," he managed finally; hardly even a whisper.
He was
amazed when she nodded and appeared to have heard him, or perhaps
she had simply known exactly how he would respond, had known from
the very beginning.
"There is another choice," she said, standing
naked and
terrible at his bedside, her hair moving of its own volition like
a nest of snakes. "I can offer it, but you must take it freely.
It will be exactly how you want it to be: you'll be the one who
wanted to give the Power of Miracles to the one you loved, and
set her free."
Somehow, he managed to string together the
right words: "But
will it be that way, or will that just be the way she sees it?"
She inclined her head to one side and regarded
him for a
moment. "I suppose whether or not that matters depends on what
you think truth is," she said finally.
Saying nothing more, she raised the index
finger of her left
hand to the valley between her breasts, dimpling the flesh with a
long nail. As he watched, she calmly drew it downwards, slitting
herself open from breastbone to navel, before taking her hands
and peeling the skin back so that it hung in wrinkles about the
gaping opening into her body. Within she was a tangle of light
and dark, from which the clangourous sounds of metal shifting on
metal emanated like a vapour.
"The offer is made," she said quietly.
"The offer is
taken." There were tears in her eyes, though perhaps merely ones
of pain.
The tingling numbness in his entire body became,
instantly,
stabbing fires. He arched, stiffened, screamed; the fires ran
through his bones and veins, gathering towards a single point
in his breast. Indescribable agony. His limbs flopped and
flailed, then lay still. A mountain lay upon his chest; moments
later, every part of his body except his heart was nonexistent.
He was merely a beating heart, his universe defined by its
chambers. Then he saw again, as he was thrust through a long
soundless tunnel, utterly black, and at the end of it, radiant,
was the face of the Rose Bride, smiling and beckoning to him.
As he approached, it became other faces, passed
through its
changes like the changings of the moon: the determined face of
the Engaged One, Tenjou Utena; the cruel sneer of Kiryuu Nanami;
the slight pretty face of the girl Juri loved, twisted by
weeping; then, finally, inevitably, Juri's face. Juri's beloved
face, regarding him with pity and contempt.
"Witch!" he cried, realizing that he was lost.
"Damnable
witch--"
Her hell-mouth gaped, and he fell within.
* * *
When it was finished, she rose up from the floor and calmly
dressed herself. She pinned her hair back up and put her glasses
back on. On the bed, the body lay, calm except for the left arm
flopped over the railing. After removing the blackened Rose
Signet from the ring finger, she arranged it so that it was
symmetrical with the other limb, and stepped back. The Signet
went into the pocket of her blouse.
Turning to the bedside table, she lifted the
handset of the
phone and dialled. Two rings, and then the other end picked up.
"It's me."
"Is it done?"
"It's done."
"Did you get his ring?"
"I have his ring."
"Good. You'll be home soon?"
"Soon."
She hung up and turned to the wall, where
her shadow lay.
"Go," she said, gesturing towards the closed
door of the
room. A second shadow detached itself from hers, pirouetted with
joy at its freedom, then slid beneath the door and into the
hallway beyond; another, near-identical, followed it moments
later. She regarded her own shadow for a moment, then turned
from it and walked to the window to stare down upon the tree-
lined path below.
After some time, a girl emerged from the hospital,
proceeded
down the path, then paused once to look back before walking on.
Another girl hurried out from behind a tree and walked slightly
behind her. Neither of them spoke.
"Truth," she pronounced, with contempt and
pain, as she
watched the two of them walk away. In her belly and breast,
something stirred, and steel screamed on steel. "Hush," she
said gently; and drew the curtains closed before she left.
"Hush."
END
Notes:
A small odd story, written because an idea wouldn't leave me
alone, heavily inspired by many discussions I've had about Ruka
and the motivations behind his actions with many different
people.
As usual, story improvement of the first draft by members of the
Fanfic Revolution.