nobody loves you, rated pg-13. anthy-centric (garbage challenge). series-set. 670 words.

(i cracked a piece of broken glass)

I pity him as much as I pity myself, sometimes. Pity him even as I lie against him in the darkness of this illusory building of memory just waiting to return to its true charred self. You don't see with your eyes here, after all, you only perceive with your mind…and all that's in one's head in this place is what my brother wants to be there, including what this man sees of me.

He doesn't love this girl, after all (this girl that Tenjou Utena is so convinced is the pawn of everybody else, the girl nobody ever cares about until she can be used as a bartering tool in some farcical transaction with the universe!). No, he loves the boy who doesn't even look the slightest bit like the boy he once knew, when they were both different people in a place that doesn't really change at all. I am just an illusion in this form, the shadow of a rose long since withered and dead. He can't tell the difference with the scent of roses clogging even his scientific senses against the true smell of smoke and rot and the end of everything that they used to be.

The illusion won't last much longer, of course. The gauntlet of duellists is running down like a wind-up clock eventually does, and there will be only Mikage left for the One Engaged to release from this make-believe world. He won't understand why until he is gone, of course, but he is the lucky one here. He'll leave this place, finally let the hall stand forever as a Memorial without the man of that memory still haunting its halls in this acquired form, and he'll be more free than someone like me can ever imagine.

Perhaps he'll miss this person I pretend to be, wish that he could have held onto this illusion for a little while longer…and more fool him. Better not to be loved, after all, than to be loved by a false shadow that never really existed in the first place.

It's coming to an end, this little farce…and I, for one, am more relieved than anyone will ever know.

I never knew him the way he used to be, but even I can see the change that this school has wrought in his very being. He's still so cool, so collected…but there's a passion burning just under his skin that deepens his laugh, twists his smiles, darkens his eyes. The professor was never that way. He was clumsy in his dealings with people, while Mikage is as smooth as glass and yet nowhere near as transparent. You could see through the professor, for he had no graces and no foibles to wear as a cloak against the world. He simply did not care…and now Mikage, ah, he cares too much.

Sometimes I feel glad that I am going to free the professor at last, strip away this mask and give him to my brother to graduate him from this place of cracked dreams and broken spirits. I can only hope he'll have enough of himself left to be able to rebuild his spirit again…because while he is no prince, while the action of digging under his skin and hollowing out his heart does not break my heart as does performing  the same act with Tenjou Utena, I still regret that I am the one who is doing this to him now.

I can comfort myself sometimes with the thought that I didn't break him first. It's hollow comfort when I see how many cracks I've added to the broken glass of his mind, ever knowing that I will be the straw that shatters the camel's back...

…and it will shatter him to know that nobody loves him after all. That knowledge is almost enough to make me change my mind, but I know I won't. Better to have nobody love you, after all, that have someone like my brother love you as much as he loves me.