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Anthy found the mouse sometime in the spring of the twelfth year after Ohtori Academy’s founding. It had been caught in a trap she had no memory of setting — the cage type, of course, she would never allow a killing machine in her garden. She gazed at it impassively as it huddled in the corner with cheese crumbs still speckling its trembling whiskers.
She was used to the swords by that point. The school had only existed a short time, just one round of children taken from first grade to graduation (at least in theory), and the college hadn’t even appeared yet, but she’d been a witch for all eternity. Most of the time she didn’t even notice them. Only once in a while, as when her brother looked at her with suffering in his eyes, when he touched her with shaking fingers, then the pain staggered her.
And again, just now, while she was very busy pretending to be a girl in a newly-built rose garden sitting and looking at a mouse in a wire cage, a tiny thing with beady little eyes and soft gray fur, yes. Just now she could feel them pierce her again and she clutched her chest, still new enough to this world not to conceal her gasps. The creature stilled, and she fantasized that it could somehow perceive the blades.
Then she laughed, a fragment of sound that barely disturbed the air.
Well, of course it could. She was a witch, wasn’t she? Witches were supposed to be able to communicate with animals. She settled herself and told it to wait, a finger pressed gently to her lips, and went to get a cardboard box and another bit of cheese. Naturally, the items were on the garden bench, just where they needed to be.
She opened the trap, carefully, and it crept out onto her hand with a tiny sound. Chu-Chu, it said, squeaking in probable gratitude. That would be a good name, she thought. Chu-Chu. She smiled and set it in the box. It sat and began eating the cheese, holding it carefully in tiny paws. She peered down at it, eyes soft, and it stared back at her, cheeks bulging comically. She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“Will you be my pet, Chu-Chu?” she asked, more out of a sense of duty than with any intent to ask its permission, because, after all, it hadn’t really any choice, not here and now. It was only a rodent caught in where it oughtn’t have been. Provided, of course, that it was a mouse. And now that she thought of it, didn’t it look a little like something else?
She stopped herself — better to let these things run their course as they would. She would allow it that much choice. She scooped up the box, and the mouse-creature swayed gently. She hadn’t ever had a pet. It might make a nice change. She took it to the tower to show her brother.
Akio approved and told her that he thought it was very cute. And if its fur took on a lavender cast soon after, then Anthy thought nothing of it. It made her laugh, and that was enough.
Years passed and together she and her brother developed the dueling arena, the forest surrounding it, the rules of the roses and rings and the legend of the Rose Bride. Everything was in the name of regaining his former power as the Prince On A White Horse, and she agreed. His hands on her took on a crueler cast, and her love for him sometimes cut at her heart. He gave her glasses to wear and told her she should tie up her hair to match the styles worn by girls who have been recently engaged. The mouse, Chu-Chu, remained with her, slowly altering to suit her unspoken expectations.
The soft ears expanded, though they remained velvet to the touch and pink-lined, and the tail became prehensile, capable wrapping gently around her fingers and the handles of teacups. The pointed, buck-toothed face rounded and squashed and soon became more monkey than mouse, though, really it depended on who was looking. At times it – he – still scurried about looking for cheese, but it also happily dined on toast, dry or buttered, or jam, or tea, or scones. Bananas, sometimes, or curry when she made it. Takoyaki. He made her smile, and in time he became the only thing that did.
She had begun as a being apart, slipping in and out of time and a full partner in the creation of the rules of the world, but as the ageless early autumn wore on, she became a member of the student body. She wore the uniform, she attended classes, though she mostly doodled on the pages of her schoolbooks and never turned in homework. She forgot parts of her self, left them scattered in the garden and on the endless staircases like so many wilting petals. She sold her body to duelist after duelist, cutting her feelings away one by one, leaving herself an empty doll to be filled with their impressions of what she represented, of the potential to awaken the sleeping power of Dios.
Akio gave Chu-Chu a tie, an earring, and she thought little of it. He was her friend, her companion. If the creature himself refused to speak directly to her brother, well, that was a reflection of her own magic.
Faces paraded by her marked only by differences in desires. There was one boy, a yearning creature with silver hair and eyes as blue as drowning pools, who dreamed of obtaining the power of revolution for reasons that appealed to her. He had a sister who was ill, nothing unusual, but it made the swords shiver in her chest. It made her clutch Chu-Chu a little too tight, so he squeaked and wriggled, suddenly all whiskers and fur. The boy lost his heroism and his life to Mikage’s convoluted plans, though, too intent on the power of eternity to consider her feelings.
She might have let him touch her, if he’d asked. But he never asked.
Only her brother asked for her permission, and then only perfunctorily. Only Akio, her star of morning and prince fallen low. She realized one morning that she valued the little mouse. Monkey. Creature. That the color of his fur and the shade of his tie, the shape of his earring, reflected the old version of her brother, not the beast he had become. He was no longer merely her jester, but her comfort.
Time extended and both she and Chu-Chu evolved, becoming stranger and more alien. He became her friend in truth, she talked to him, told him secrets that she could never tell another person. He did not age, and never reverted to his former shape. She perfected her garden, the roses blooming eternally in shades that surprised her each morning. Silver, blue, red, white, gold, red, cream, pink shading to yellow. They shifted with school years, each new generation of students that appeared without any apparent genesis, parents mentioned but never apparent, only siblings and the tangled bonds of childhood friends.
In time there was Saionji, hands burning on her, desires so clear and so irrelevant, an inversion of a prince. He hated Chu-Chu, called him a rat, vermin, tried to throw him out a window. If she had not been so exhausted from the endless iterations of “She is mine!” and “I possess the power of Dios!”, she might have hated him. As it was, he would have passed without comment like all the rest, but suddenly there was Utena, springing fully formed from the ether like a prince from a fairytale (Anthy no longer believed in fairytales, despite herself), pink hair flying as she fought selflessly, yet somehow fraught with nobility. Anthy felt the swords stirring and reached for Chu-Chu, stroking his head in wonderment. A girl?
She had been engaged to girls before, but they’d all been afraid of Chu-Chu, or ignored him. Utena was something else, a wholly different being who accepted Anthy’s relationship with him, took it almost as a given. She liked Chu-Chu, spoke to him kindly, cooked him his own supper and fed him from her own dishes. Anthy felt a tiny flicker of hope kindle, the first in so many years.
It nearly went out when she saw her brother lean down to press his mouth to Utena’s rosebud lips. Chu-Chu clung to her fingertips and cried because she could not, and she made a sound like the wind blowing through a crack in the glass.
“Huu, huu.”
Things changed, as they never had, not in all the time she’d spent, as she thought they never would, never could. Utena fought the duel called Revolution and won. She fell out of the world that Anthy and her brother had built as suddenly as she had fallen in, but this time, Anthy knew the difference, and understood that she had a choice.
She gave the choice to Chu-Chu, too, leaning down to explain to him that he could stay, if he liked, if he preferred this land of perpetual warmth and youth and beauty to the outside world. He shook his head vigorously, a clear indication that he preferred to follow her wherever she would go, and that he would like to find Utena again, no matter how long it took.
She felt a dim point of pride as he set his tie and earring next to her glasses on Akio’s desk, as he said his goodbyes to his friends and rivals and leaped to her shoulder.
Their bags were packed and they were ready to leave. She trusted in her own magic to keep his shape secure, to not let him revert to a mouse once they were truly in the outside world. She needed him by her side, and wanted to see his face light up in joy once they finally found her.
“Wait for us, Utena. We’re coming for you.”