Chapter Text
It's been only a year no it hasn't, it's been five minutes, it's been a decade, three millennia, an eternity, but Utena sits down for tea anyway.
She pours in a packet of sugar and stirs it in gently with a spoon, taking care to never let the cold metal clink against the delicate ceramic.
(The sound grates harshly on her ears, whenever she inevitably slips up, like a sword scraping against her bones.)
She's alone in her bedroom, except for the candelabra precariously balanced on a textbook on the other side of the bed, dripping melted wax onto the cover's portrait of a hummingbird visiting a white lily. The door is locked tightly. Even though her roommate is out, she didn't want to take the risk of them walking in on this.
There's another teacup in front of the candelabra. It contains nothing but a single oleander blossom.
Utena lifts her teacup, then sets it back down. She takes a deep breath and tries to speak. "So, Himemiya-" her breath hitches. "Hime- Himemi-" she tries again, "Hi-" she gives up.
"I miss you," she says, her voice hovering in that awful, uncertain place between a whisper and a murmur. "I know I have no right to, not after what I did. Not after how I failed you. But I do."
She tries to sip the tea. It burns her tongue, hot enough that she can't even taste it. She blows on the tea to cool it off, grateful for the excuse not to speak. What flavor did she make, anyway...? Utena can't remember, she'd just grabbed the first thing she saw, and the only thing she can smell is roses, which is a flavor of tea she knows she doesn't have.
Her roommate knows by now to not bring anything even resembling that plant into their dorm room.
"...I'm sorry, Himemiya," Utena says, and then the tears bubble out of her chest and her hands are shaking. They're covered in scalding tea, now, and it's spilling onto the bed. She wants to get up, wants to set the tea down, wants to find a towel to clean up, but she's paralyzed by the horrible, heaving sobs that wrack her body just as the swords did, so long ago, just as the swords never stopped.
"I'm so, so sorry."
The tea smells like roses.