On Unions Civil and Otherwise

by Kita-Ysabell

Ten years have passed- ten years to the day- and when Utena and Anthy's engagement party goes somewhat awry, Saionji finds that some things are not so easily forgotten, and faces the bitter possibility that to make good his escape from Ohtori, he must rescue his oldest and closest friend- whether that friend wants to be rescued or not.

4. Fate

There was a space of time when I wouldn't have been able to endure knowing what I did after the engagement party. Five years ago, the guilt of it would have pushed me over the edge that I had been fast approaching.

I joined the military almost directly out of school. That was a mistake.

I stuck with it and stuck with it, and it was like a dull, pounding ache. It fed the worst of me; the harshest, the cruelest, the most unforgiving. The fact that I didn't mind, that I relished in the strict discipline and oppressive control; that was the most dangerous part. That was why I would spend hours staring at my hands, wondering what it was that I had done, who it was that I had hurt.

Five years. Five years, and I knew that if I did not change something, I was bound to end my own life. So, in a last act of desperation, I fled. I didn't tell anyone, didn't make any preparations, just got on a train and left.

I was lucky. I didn't know what I was doing, or why, but by chance, I did the single best thing I could have done. Even though it left a mess behind, a mess that still comes back to me from time to time.

Discipline is not a single body. There is the discipline of control and the discipline of order. The discipline of locking things in place and the discipline of knowing the places of things. The discipline of the concrete and the discipline of the sublime. The discipline of war and the discipline of peace.

I won't pretend to know that one is right or the other wrong. I can't even say that making the choice that I did wasn't a kind of failure. All I know is that one almost killed me, and the other saved my life.

I hadn't known where I was going until I got there. Something, some memory, must have prompted me to leave the train when that stop was called. Something must have led my feet down the sidewalk to that place. But it was something that was alien to me. Perhaps it was the thing called "fate."

I found myself at the gate of the shrine that had once been very familiar to me. When I was born, my name was written on a scroll that still rests somewhere within that shrine. When I was five, my well being had been dedicated to that shrine. Later, that shrine had been one of the places I would go when I wasn't going home. And now, out of gratitude, if nothing else, it is that shrine to which I am once more dedicating my fate.