Work Text:
Utena awoke with a start, bolting upright as her hand instinctively covered her heart - where the white rose was once placed at the beginning of every duel. After a moment of panic, she sighed aloud, flopping back onto the stiff mattress provided to her at her new academy. Sometimes, she almost managed to convince herself that her last year at Ohtori was one long dream, that the duels and the castle and Akio and her were figments of her tortured imagination. The scars on her abdomen where she had been stabbed proved otherwise. Her months-long hospitalization paired with her continued flares of pain may have brought any potential sports career to a screeching halt, but at least it convinced the academy to give her a single room. No one needed to put up with Utena’s frequent nightmares of duels with former classmates wearing black roses other than her.
These nightmares, unlike the ones of her final duel or of being unable to save Anthy - forced to watch the millions of swords stabbing into her while Akio put a blade to her throat - had an air of mystery around them. They felt like something that somehow happened and yet didn’t happen at once - a Schrödinger’s Cat of memory—an impossibility. Surely, Wakaba would never hold a katana to her neck outside of the realm of nightmares, right? Wakaba… Wakaba was her friend. Utena had seen hide nor hair of Wakaba since she left Ohtori, but during those rose-scented years, Wakaba was her closest friend. Besides, of course, Anthy -
Utena shook herself out of that train of thought. It would do her no good to dwell on those she had lost, not when the matter of the mysterious dreams of duels had pressed at the back of her mind for the entire semester. That night’s dream was of Wakaba, of course, but Utena couldn’t get over the strangeness of the whole situation. That duel layout - with the desks and the outlines of bodies - was in her duel with Akio too, right? Her memory was so fogged, always had been, but she could have sworn that the layout was one and the same. She rolled to face her nightstand and fumbled with the lamp, finding the switch after an embarrassingly long period of what amounted to smacking the perimeter of the lightbulb. For some reason, even after months of being at the academy, she could never figure the damnable thing out. She was halfway convinced that someone came into her bedroom and rotated it every night out of spite. Regardless, she had work to do. Utena pulled out a pen and paper and began a sketch of the dueling arena - the chairman’s planetarium. She had never been one for the arts, but she felt a sudden urge to make a visual of the landscape that haunted her at night. Perhaps then, she could comprehend what really happened in the Black Rose Duels, if they even occurred at all.
The base arena was easy enough to replicate, and within half a minute the page was taken up by a large near-circle. It was slightly too long, taking the form of an oval made up of a cacophony of lines, but it would work for her purposes. The desks… how many of them were there, anyway? Enough to cover the arena, or at least most of it, and it was a number divisible by four based on how the desks grouped themselves after each duel. Utena pinched the bridge of her nose as she glared at the paper, trying to make sense of it all. This exercise didn’t matter much, she supposed, but it was one step closer to making sense of the black roses. After about a minute of deliberation featuring pressing the end of her pen against her forehead repeatedly, she decided that 48 was a fine enough number - able to be split into four rectangles that were close in length and width but not equal, like she remembered in her dreams - and got to work.
Ohtori Academy, Utena mused, was a strange place. Within its walls, fairytales could come to life, albeit in a twisted form. Part of her missed the magic of it all - the feeling of being important, the hero in the story. The rest of her was, to put it incredibly bluntly, sick of Ohtori Academy’s shit and glad to be the fuck out of dodge even if it took getting stabbed in the back by her… whatever Anthy was to her- if she was being completely honest she hadn’t the slightest clue how to categorize what they had in those days – to leave once and for all. That nightmare was finally over, and with its passing she could rest at last, pulled from her rose-filled coffin by fate itself even if it meant watching Anthy fall into the abyss and out of her reach and failing to save her while Akio or Dios or The Prince or whatever he was sipped on his fucking cocktail-
With each shoddily-drawn rectangle, Utena’s pen dug into the paper more and more. By the time her train of thought finally settled into quiet resignation, she had begun to draw a 49th desk, its two sides staring up at her mockingly. She scribbled it out. Somehow, the gaping abyss on the page was even worse - a reminder of the maw of darkness that Anthy had fallen into. Not that she could do anything about it now that it was there. She justified it to herself as being one of the red markings on the floor, adding stick arms and legs and a circle to it to make it look like the outline of a body. More followed, dotting the page with stick figures in various collapsed positions. One for each desk seemed reasonable, even if it meant more work for her than if she scattered a few across the arena and called it a day. Each duelist fell onto one of the red outlines after their loss, mimicking the position of what seemed almost like chalk outlines at a crime scene. That was where the dreams ended - Utena standing over the collapsed forms of friends, acquaintances, and people she barely recognized. 48 stick figures were on the page if Utena had counted correctly, under and around the desks with no particular rhyme or reason besides their proximity to their assigned desk.
The desks… they had something on them at some point, didn’t they? What was on them changed with each black rose dream and seemed nonsensical. Birds, for example, each sitting motionless on their perches as Utena and - well, she couldn’t remember who exactly - clashed. Maybe her subconscious was putting symbols in her dreams. Her literature teacher had waffled on about birds representing freedom a few weeks prior, so the association wasn’t unprecedented. Then again, if the dreams were real, wouldn’t that mean that the ornaments on the desks were real, too? It was certainly possible, what with the planetarium’s ability to project what seemed to be magic. Regardless, Utena drew a circle on each desk to represent the objects, though she felt no closer to making sense of the black roses than she had been before she started her impulsive nighttime project. It was infuriating, the way nothing made sense any more than it ever had - than it ever would - but there was catharsis in creating a physical representation of the place that haunted her. If Utena couldn’t understand her time at Ohtori, she would at least try to make what peace with it she could. After all, it was nothing more than a memory, and what worth was there in memories, anyway?