"Holy shit."

- Rod Serling

Everything was peaceful now that everyone was dead. The HiME Festival had been a success—the first one in nearly 200,000 years. All that remained were the single surviving HiME and the person she cherished the most.

Akane leaned into Kazuya Kurauchi (who she lovingly called "Obsidian Kazu-kun") with her ear against his chest. The intergalactic sweetheart was tired after releasing the HiME Star's energy in the desperate final act. Exhausted. Practically on the verge of death herself, but she could rest as long as she needed now that there were no other greedy HiMEs left who could attack her. Only another HiME would have been able breach the small anti-weapon, anti-magic, anti-radiation barrier her body naturally generated. The same barrier would make Kazuya invincible for as long as he remained in her close proximity.

The wind and lightning had finally died down. Everything was silent except for the slow dull throbbing of two human hearts beating against one another. Akane and Kazuya were standing with their arms wrapped around each other in a fading pink wasteland that was ready to be transformed into a new world once Akane's powers recuperated. It gave the sky a strange but beautiful hue that looked like early twilight or early morning in a dream realm.

Kazuya was grateful he followed the advice of the pile of red sacrificial ashes that used to be Nagi. His keen-eyed acolyte was the one who suggested maybe Akane wasn't so weak: Maybe her powers simply manifested in a way that was more creation-oriented than combat-oriented. Kazuya only needed to follow what his inner heart was pleading him to do from the start. Talk to her! Back her up! Tell her you love her! Whatever you do, just don't let her lose! It was wrong for him to ever overlook the quiet one who could run around balancing eight banana smoothies on a single plate at the same time.

"Kazu…" Akane sighed weakly and peacefully in his arms. Her drowsy eyes opened partially as she looked up at him. She was so tired and he was holding her so firmly she could easily fall asleep standing up. She was especially relaxed because the effects of gravity seemed to be lighter than she was used to.

"Akane." Kazuya chuckled softly with his lips kissing the top of her head. Maybe he was under the control of a malevolent alien presence, or maybe he was just intoxicated by all of her cheerful affections. "I'm here for you, my love. Is there anything you desire?"

Akane purred with a muffled giggle as her fingers kneaded the buttons on his shirt. She felt immense guilt for the devastation she'd caused, but her joy overwhelmed her sorrow. And there wasn't much left of the old world to remind her what she had done. Everything she really cared about was still right in front of her.

To Akane, Kazuya represented the happy ending she'd worked so hard to earn after everyone had tried to do such awful, nasty, mean things to her. To Kazuya, Akane was his sacred gateway to interplanetary conquest that he'd spent eons searching for. And she was pretty good at volleyball.

"Let me rest for a few more hours, Kazu. Just don't disappear on me, okay?" The universe's only living HiME closed her eyes and tucked her head against his chest again. Such a rare and delicate creature she was. She offered him only love and admiration, without the smallest hint of the anger or rebelliousness that had turned so many previous HiME victors against him.

Kazuya nodded, playfully brushing his chin against her forehead as he pet the back of her hair. He wanted nothing but for her to be happy and safe. And what were a few measly hours to someone who'd already waited millennia for this moment?

"I'm a sceptre with no queen to wield me without you, Akane. I wouldn't trade you for the world."

Author's notes:

Redid the ending to "Doubts" (an old 2011 story) so now Akane isn't all mushy-brained when she delivers her lines. I like to call this variation of her character Apocalyptic Akane. Apocakane.

Kazuya might be the mushy-brained one here depending on what percentage of him you interpret to be Kazu-kun and what percentage is Obsidian Lord. I tried to keep it relatively ambiguous.

I went with "she's okay at volleyball" as the mundane thing his Kazuya half finds appealing about her. This is because: 1. It builds off of the "Mai Otome is Top Gun" theme I've been using in a lot of Otome fanfics lately. 2. It's a reference to Mai and Akane being depicted as volleyball rivals in the old Mai Hime pre-series trailer. The one where you can tell the plot wasn't completely finalized yet because Miyu's narration says stuff like "This is the third chapter of Fuuka Gakuen history" that never made it into the aired series, and Haruka and Yukino have weird hair colors. Other options I was considering were "She has such a sweet singing voice" (that's more of Alyssa's thing) and "She can make a mean strawberry sundae" (She doesn't make the food at the café. She just serves it).

Can Akane tell Obsidian Lord and Kazu-kun apart? Yes. Does she care or think about it too hard? Not in the slightest!

It's unintentional, but I feel like there's a little Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell creeping into the background design for this story.

I am the Statue of Liberty. Mai HiME is my slime. Mai Otome is my "Higher and Higher."

Stop. HUH. Bridge. HIT IT.

Yes, I'm aware (based on what the original 2004 anime very weakly implies and what the EXA remake manga slows down to tell you) the historical purpose of the Carnival was to turn the "winner" into a Crystal HiME so she would perform the vaguely defined task of "Blessing Japan for 300 years," and the Obsidian Dude only recently changed his mind to "I want to marry the Final Girl for realsies so we can catastrophically reset the planet together." And this particular concept in Mai HiME canon is something I like to describe with phrases including:

- "That's stupid."

- "That doesn't make sense even in its own setting."

- "The writers really needed to work through a couple more drafts to sort that idea out."

- "In my opinion, the whole story arc covering the last nine episodes is hauntingly beautiful in concept, but criminally idiotic with how it's executed. Once episode 17 hits, the show alternates between ridiculously forced and outright character-assassinating so it can rush through a chain of unearned 'Oh that's so sad play the Yuki Kajiura music again' emotional scenes, and it's especially bad in the middle of a show that's already struggling with a bunch of we're-trying-to-be-so-mysterious-even-when-there's-no-reason-to creative issues. The entire animated draft should be trashed and started over from scratch to do this storyline justice. I don't get people who only complain about the final episode as if the rest of the show wasn't already mindnumbing." (side note: Mai HiME EXA absolutely trashes the TV show's continuity and re-covers the Festival arc from scratch using only the most basic concepts from the plot. And it does, in fact, pay the storyline great justice.)

- "I used to think the lowest point in this narrative mess was when Miyu became a Terminator for exactly one episode, for no reason, with essentially zero explanation beyond 'Akane randomly saw me standing by the road not doing anything that one time,' totally off-screen to everything else happening in the show so a mindless Hot Babes on The Beach episode can be the immediate follow-up, with Nagi never even mentioning it again after he makes his initial Surprised Pikachu face, and then Miyu actively refuses to be a Terminator when the evil priest Greer guy directly orders her to do it to Natsuki like four episodes later, and the priest guy is just perfectly fine with her refusal despite Natsuki being an INFINTELY LARGER threat who's actively trying to take down the Searrs operations, because one of these scenes involves a director-appointed 'cool character' with absurd plot armor where the writers aren't even trying make it work organically, and the other scene involves Who Gives A Fuck About Her. And then the show actually expects you to feel SORRY for Miyu when she's having her panicked humanized reactions to Alyssa being drugged to death with a syringe gun. It's like: No, you pieces of shit. I'm not feeling sorry for you. This should NOT be a sad scene for you! This is KARMA coming back to you! Akane is drooling in an insane asylum having endless repeating mental episodes because of YOU after what you did to her FOR NO REASON, while you and Alyssa won't even ACKNOWLEDGE what you did to her, when you could've just NOT DONE THAT to her and NOT expose yourselves to Mashiro and Nagi, and you could have come up with ANY shitbrained on-the-spot reason to spare her EXACTLY LIKE YOU DID FOR NATSUKI! But WOOO did I underestimate how aggravating the rest of this show was going to get!"

- "Does this goading Rau Le Creuset-voiced doofus not realize he's totally defeating his own master plan by frantically brute-forcing this final battle between Mai and Mikoto where it DOES NOT MATTER who wins because the rules of his own ceremonial death tournament will just end up killing the other girl anyway? We JUST demonstrated this on Natsuki and Shizuru in the PREVIOUS EPISODE! Why is this guy not immediately HORRIFIED that he worked himself into a corner that's going to leave him with a Zero Bitches outcome? And don't even try telling me 'Well, maybe that's what he secretly wants! Maybe he's trying to take all of the HiME Star's energy for himself!' Because if that was the case, what was with all the convoluted schemes to manipulate the other HiMEs to act like a bunch of paranoid psychos so they murder each other's loved ones? Why did they go through all the trouble of setting up the First District to protect certain HiMEs so they made it to the final round of the Festival, but not others? Why did Reito and Nagi go through all of their desperate secretive mustache-twirling to RIG the winner to be Mai? What is the point to ANY of this? Like, GUY, even BEFORE we introduce Mashiro's lazy last-minute shenanigans into the script when she could have just PREVENTED THE FESTIVAL by simply EXPLAINING HOW EVERYTHING WORKED at ANY earlier point in the show and completely undermined Nagi before the HiME Star was charged into an emotion-fueled doomsday weapon, this scene with you cackling about your plans to make Mai and Mikoto fight, and everything else leading into the scene, isn't adding up AT ALL. This is a show, this is a festering trainwreck of vomited story ideas that COULD work, but the way they're done here requires every single character involved to urgently act in the stupidest way possible at all times to ensure the antagonist's tragic dark sadistic plan succeeds, and then MIRACULOUSLY he turns out to be stupider than all of them combined, so the heroines still end up winning by default. Do the writers even realize how dumb and ineffective their 'charismatic dangerous villain' sounds? Because it comes off like they never had a clue!"

- "I'm not here to talk about me. I want to know how he thinks."

I always just kinda do my own thing with the HiME lore. I use the canon stuff less like a concrete backstory and more like Play-Doh. My version of the Festival is "NOPE. He's been looking for his one perfect waifu since the onset of modern humans so he can use her to harness the emotional energy of the other defeated HiMEs. The marriage proposal has ALWAYS been what the Festival is really about. The reason the Festivals keep happening recurrently is because the winners keep rejecting him and he has to wait several hundred years before he can try again. The only thing that's changed over the centuries is he initially wanted a HiME wife to help him rule the planet, and he eventually shifted his focus to resetting the entire world's ecosystem after losing his patience from repeated failed attempts at securing a mate. He just came up with that gimmicky cover story about the Crystal HiME (and he actually used it on Mashiro that one time as a form of punishment) because he doesn't want to instantly turn off all his potential future brides by telling them there were previous brides who resisted his seductions and he froze/killed them out of rage."

One of these days, I really wish they would just make an animated adaptation of EXA and call it Mai HiME: Sisterhood or something.

Went a little overboard in this notes section. I think I made it about twice as long as the actual fanfic. Just kinda happens like that sometimes.

You're wasting my time. slams murder suspect folder. leaves asylum looking noticeably unsettled.