Chapter Text
Nanami leaves with the season's ending.
She does not leave first; that honor goes to Utena, whose disappearance is frankly frightening in its totality. She completed the revolution of revolutions; not in the sense of blood and change and rebuilding, but in the sense that the circle has gone back to the beginning. So the cycle is reset; the duels will begin again. Nanami knows this; they are all only waiting for someone to decide to duel.
Nanami thinks maybe she was supposed to forget; some certainly have. Keiko, when asked, does not seem to remember that pink-haired girl that she might have been jealous of, once, for her proximity to Touga; many of her other classmates seem to have forgotten, too. But not all of them.
Anthy follows soon after Utena, of course, and the world seems to fracture in terms of memory; the rest of the student body goes on much in the same way they always had. But it creates a rift in the Student Council. There is nothing left to duel over, not anymore; will there be again? Perhaps there is a backup Rose Bride, Nanami thinks, and her stomach lurches unsteadily with something she cannot look at head-on.
Her dreams do not give her such luxuries. Meat, red and wet and unwilling, spilling out from her dresses and leaving awful puddles on the floor. Her brother's arms, and a hand round her ankle pulling up and up and up until her leg simply... pops off. The dress covers up absence. Elephants. Had they really been here? They couldn't have been, she thinks, and yet she can feel the texture beneath her hands when she wakes, the rumbling of the ground thrumming in the rhythm of a reckoning.
They all dance around the subject, carefully poking at maybe-memories. Do you remember that one girl Saionji was so obsessed with? As if they can't ask it out loud for fear of the bluntness of a No; the suddenness of realizing that they might be completely alone in memory, like reaching out in the dark for something no longer there. They can't bear the possibility of being alone in their memories, but they cannot bear the possibility of knowing they are alone in them, either.
Touga begins to go very quietly insane.
Nanami knows it when she sees it. He paces more, gets sloppy in his spars with Saionji, sleeps less. His once perfect coiffure frays, tangles, knots. He goes out at night, but she does not know where. She has a guess- she can still remember the car. She can remember sitting in the backseat. She can remember saying no.
In Nanami's dreams, she can remember what came after that. In Nanami's dreams, she can look at the face above her head-on.
She requests a copy of her transcript from the school's office. Out of curiosity, she tells herself. She isn't going anywhere. But she thinks about it, more and more. In these halls she remembers the worst things constantly. Her words sticky and fumbled against car seat leather. Her arm pinned against the side door. A couch in the night and a girl naked and staring back at her, bruised thighs and shredded torso; a girl who might have been mistaken for a boy if Nanami had not known her. Hands in places that Nanami had not known they could go. The evidence: this is what will happen to you. Nanami had wanted to scream.
Nanami spends more time with Touga. Once that would have been all she ever wanted; to walk to and from her classes with him as an escort, for him to walk her home as they spoke very prettily and very emptily of nothing at all. She would have delighted in this perfect matched synchronicity between them as they make bland comments about the weather and ask politely about how the other's day went and did not speak of Keiko, or Utena, or Anthy, or any of the other million things that she had once considered obstacles between them. Now she does not look at him.
Now she wishes nothing more than for him to leave her alone.
Fall begins to come to Ohtori. A leaf falls in Nanami's hair, as golden as she is; she plucks it out and holds it. It is not a flower, and she does not crush it under her shoe. She thinks of petals falling. She thinks of what wonderful things might die in the coming frost.
Touga gets worse as the sunlight hours begin to chill. He mutters under his breath, leaves practically every night. She makes note of the words, for her own protection: talks of replacements and steel, of dresses, of new yellow roses. It makes her throat go dry and scared. She thinks she might know of what he is thinking. There is no Rose Bride anymore, but Touga speaks of eternity. There must always be a Rose Bride.
On a day near the end of it all, Nanami finds him looking at her strangely; curious, he touches her hip and she freezes in place, both stiff and limp at once. Like a cow speared through with a bullet in the slaughterhouse. She can't move.
"I wonder what your size is," Touga murmurs, soft. He smoothes his hand up her waist as if to gauge it. She is small and boneless in his hands, trembling; she is thinking of the car. She is thinking of what he did in the car, of how he touched her against the door as she finally realized what, exactly, it meant to be in love with your brother. What Anthy had been trying, always, to show her.
He moves away, finally, nodding to himself, and she does not relax for hours afterward. She can't- every time she tries to stand, she thinks of his hands on her waist and the doll-like feeling of ownership she'd never expected. She keeps trembling.
When she does finally get up, she goes to her closet and finds a duffel bag- it's old and desperately out of style, but Nanami can't bring herself to care. She stuffs everything she can think of in it; her wallet, her school ID, her transcript, clothes, toiletries. Her hands keep shaking, and she keeps packing things in there. No clothes Touga bought her. Nothing he liked to see her wear.
When the white dress finally shows up in her closet two days later, Nanami feels her breath catch. It is so familiar, the only difference is the color; the little teal-green accents around the hips and the sleeves are a creamy yellow the same shade as her hair, and the golden buttons shine brazenly in the early evening light. The sun is setting through the window; the dress is beautiful. She knows it would be beautiful on her, too.
Nanami feels sickness rise in her. If anything was right in the world it would drip out of her- her mouth, between her legs, out from her nose and her ears. Instead it rots and it sits in her stomach, growing and growing the more she looks at it, her heart pounding in her throat, her eyes wet and thrumming with regret.
She takes the bag, then, and slips out of the room before Touga can find her and try to force her into putting it on. She wonders what Anthy was told; she wonders if her brother was kind about it. She wonders if he had been kind, once, the way Touga was before he came here; he used to be sweet to her. He used to be gentle and occasionally cruel in the way that big brothers were, or maybe that was wrong, too; she was not sure.
But once upon a time, very long ago, he had been a good brother to her, the only source of light in a world where everything felt dull and gray. He had been good, once. She knows this as fiercely as she knows herself.
He is not anymore. He has not been for a very long time; before the car, before the duels, before she started attending Ohtori. And though she has tried, these past few weeks since Utena's disappearance, to bring the good in him back, it's gone now. When he- did what he did, in the car, he lost any fucking chance of being good again.
Nanami walks through the halls of Ohtori Academy until she reaches the gates. The sun has finally set; the world is dark and very quiet. The winds are silent. The night is not laughing- it watches, contemplative. It is waiting for her.
The heiress to the Rose Bride steps across the threshold of Ohtori Academy and renounces her place in the line of succession. Let the rest of them fight over that rotten crown. She doesn't want it anymore.
Nanami breathes deep, and feels the air sing in her lungs-and then she turns toward the world and begins to cry.