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Once upon a time in the village of Kinkan Town, a swan princess who usually was an ordinary girl - and also, a duck - reached out her hand in an invitation to dance.
But the story doesn’t begin there; it begins much earlier, or later (or perhaps isn’t at all the kind of story with a beginning and an end).
We start over. Once upon a time in Kinkan Town, a mother gave her toddler girl a pair of bright red shoes in soft leather. They were just right for little feet that crawled and tottered and danced, for a little girl who laughed at bright colours. Much later, when she couldn’t even remember that she’d had a mother once, she’d somehow still remember the feeling of soft red leather, a glimpse of bright red at her feet filling her with joy.
[Once upon a time this was how a fairytale began, the kind that was told and retold in many ways around fireplaces and at bedsides, details added and falling away, characters changing, different endings overlapping and melting together. Once upon a time, in many places and in many ways... Now it’s being written, fixed down on thick yellowing paper with dripping ink, one author jerking the strings with his pen. Dance puppet, dance!]
*
In a dormitory at the ballet academy in Kinkan Town, a package appears one night outside of Rue’s door. It’s a shoe box done up with a scarlet ribbon, which falls open when tugged on to reveal layers upon layers of tissue paper. Rue’s hand find the shoes before she sees them, fingertips sliding over smooth silk among the rustling paper. It’s a pair of bright red pointe shoes, silk ribbons spilling like blood over the shoe box and her hands. They look perfect, the stitches in the fabric neat and almost invisible, the ribbons fastened just where she would sew them on herself; like they would fit her like a second skin. The illusion of painless beauty. She yearns to try them out, break them in, to see if they do pivot as perfectly as a dream. But Rue is almost late for class. She wraps the red shoes up in their paper, carefully places them in her bag and runs.
*
Once upon a time in Kinkan Town, a hidden prince who had lost his heart was the heart-throb of many youngsters in the town. He had a young lady friend, a ballerina, who had hair as dark as ebony and lips as red as blood (perfectly painted), and together they danced a picture-perfect pas de deux. Some of the watchers found it cold, like ice, all symmetry and no emotion, and some of them blamed her. She had a prince and did not treat him right; she had a prince to look at and looked the other way. Hubris and neglect, they whispered. The girl who was a duck only wished that the prince’s lady friend would smile more often. When she did you could almost forget how something looked shattered deep in her eyes.
*
The shoes weigh on Rue during class like an unscratched itch, a distraction, images of them twisting and turning and landing perfectly after a jump flit through her mind when she should be thinking about her turn-out and counting battements.
She stays after class to practice, alone in the late afternoon light falling sideways over the floor. She has a date with Mytho, really, but he won't mind. He probably won't notice if she's late - maybe he wouldn't even think about it if she never shows up at all. She takes out the shoes, turns them over in her hands. It's as if the waiting has turned them even more beautiful, intensified the colour for this, silk surface looking deceptively soft. She sits down, leaning against the window. Her legs ache and her feet are blistered, it’s been a long day. Down below girls in school uniform are running around - she recognises Ahiru, stumbling over her own feet and getting her cheeks pinched by her friend - and is surprised by a sudden wave of affection. Satisfaction, too, at the memory of making her dance, how she’d tapped into Ahiru’s enthusiasm under the clumsiness and made her fly.
The shoes roll out of Rue’s hands, landing next to her feet with an impatient thunk that rips her from her reverie. She sits still a little while longer, back against the chilly window, looking at the shoes, resisting their pull, taking a strange pleasure in drawing out the waiting just a few moments more. When she slips her feet in, left, right, lacing them up goes oh so quickly, ribbons feeling like they're slipping out of her grasp but ending up perfectly tied and much harder than she'd ever usually do them. She stands, takes a step, two, feeling the floor. Suddenly she's on tiptoes, en pointe, stepping and pivoting, dancing like all the tiredness has left her. Her feet are like magnets against the floorboards, steady and sure, then pushing away into grander and higher jumps than ever. Rue feels like flying, like an all-powerful bird.
It's only that she cannot land. When she wants to slow down she pivots faster, wanting to lean against the wall she leaps into the centre of the floor, and when she tries a step towards the window (seeing Fakir’s familiar silhouette down on the grass, wanting his attention) she taps right the other way, out through the door and down the corridor.
This time there is no magical transformation, no inexhaustible ballerina taking over. There is only Rue in the red shoes, dancing. Fairy tales were never meant to be painless.
She dances down the stairs, over the yard - abandoned, now - down the uneven cobblestone streets of the town, across the square and past the library. It’s a lonely sort of evening, store signs and lamps swinging slowly in the wind as Rue twirls by. The last houses are behind her and on she goes, over the bridge (leaping dangerously high, heart in her throat) and into the forest. The shoes find steady ground wherever she wants to hesitate. She reaches for something, anything, to hold onto but lampposts and railings and trees alike seem to shy away from her grasp like willows bending in the wind.
The sun sinks, colouring the forest golden and red, dusk growing ever darker, and still she dances. The red shoes get dusty, torn by the dirt and the uneven ground but still their colour shines bright, still they hold to her feet like moulded iron, and she dances.
Bare tree branches reach towards her like gnarly arms in the gloom, and she flees the other way, but the rustling in the bushes is no better. The wind is picking up, harshly. A storm of crows take flight from the treetops, hiding the first moonlight from sight. She pivots until she falls, turning round and round on herself in fright, but the moment before her hands hit the ground she’s jerked upright again, every muscle in her body protesting.
Meanwhile, the girl who was also a duck could not sleep. She had been looking for Rue, to ask her what sort of tea a proper ballerina ought to drink (to figure out what to give her as a present, but that part was a secret). Rue was not to be found anywhere. She had stood up her date with Mytho, said Lillie, sounding outraged and thrilled.
*
Finally giving up on sleep, the duck-girl rolled out of her cozy bed in the middle of the night and went out into the night to search for the dancing princess. The night was dark and storm clouds were gathering, but the girl bravely went across the bridge and into the forest. She was a duck, and not afraid of water.
And so it was, that in the darkest hour of that night, when a cry of exhaustion and fright rung out in the forest, the duck-girl stumbled over her own feet and the crystal she wore around her neck lit up and a strange and fantastical transformation took place.
*
When she sees the light behind the trees, Rue thinks Run as hard as she can, so that the shoes dance her closer to it. It isn’t any late night wanderer. A swan princess, en pointe, dancing towards her just above the treacherous forest ground. When she reaches out a hand in an invitation to dance, Rue grasps on to it without thinking, even though she can hardly lift her arms. Princess Tutu’s smile is frightfully kind.
They dance in the moonlight that seems to shine stronger around Tutu, even when the crows come circling back screeching around them. Tutu dances with perfect serene strength, effortless. Rue strains, every step and lifted arm hurting, and Tutu brings all of the pain and fear into their pas de deux, turning it hauntingly beautiful. Slowly the exhaustion leaves Rue. She lifts her head higher, catches their reflection in a pool of water. Dancing with Tutu is a black swan or perhaps a raven princess, dark feathers snarled in her hair and dress.
“Kraehe,” says Tutu, spinning her partner around to face her, “dance with me. Let’s break those shoes for Rue and give this story a better ending.”
Rue hears as if from a distance as Kraehe laughs, a harsh laugh that is her own and yet very different, just as Kraehe herself. But she keeps dancing with Tutu, never letting go, and the red shoes start blackening and cracking apart at the seams. One final explosive jump - she lifts Tutu high in the air on strong arms, forcefully reminded of doing the same to Ahiru, feeling her joy in flight. Then they slow, coming to rest with arms entwined and faces inches apart. Tutu’s grin is exuberant, real and irresistible and Rue closes the gap to press her own mouth to it, wanting to own it. Tutu’s grin softens into the kiss, meeting her with a surprised little sigh.
The ribbons around her ankles unravel and the red shoes fall apart like scraps of fabric. When Rue steps out of them, closer into Tutu’s embrace, they take flight like bleeding rag doll ravens. Around them the storm clouds disperse and the wind dies down, leaving an fragile silence. Rue’s hands go exploring down Tutu’s bare back, thrilled with the feeling of warm and smooth skin under her fingertips. She tilts her head, wanting to deepen the kiss, to be ever closer.
Princess Tutu starts waving her arms around, her shape flickering strangely, and Rue pulls back to see freckles appearing across her nose. The swan princess crown gets replaced by Ahiru’s wild hair above the grin that looks increasingly panicky. Rue grabs hold of her hands, kissing her again because - well, just because. Stranger things have happened in Kinkan Town than ballerinas deciding that they would rather kiss a half-forgotten fairytale princess than a prince, even if said princess was also a clumsy beginner.
One of those stranger things happens right now, as - QUACK - Ahiru disappears and Rue is left alone in the forest with a small duck flapping its wings wildly and quacking incessantly. It still wears a crystal on a chain around its neck. It’s almost dawn and the stars are fading out. The ravens have all moved on.
*
And so, once upon a time in a forest outside Kinkan Town, a young ballerina gathered up a little duck in her arms and went walking back into town as the day broke. The duck, who was also sometimes a girl and sometimes a half-forgotten fairytale princess, was content. When she looked up, she could see a small smile quirking the corners of the ballerina’s mouth, and nothing in her eyes looked quite as broken as before.
*
[Somewhere else in the story machinery, a writer breaks his pen in frustration, deprived of his satisfying tragedy. The story laughs at him and moves merrily on to its own winding unconclusions.]