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From the hallway, Anthy gasps.
“What is it?” Utena calls. She is staring at the two cups of freshly brewed coffee on the kitchen counter. She is staring at the milk carton, which she’s just discovered is empty. She is trying to figure out how to make it so that it’s full again. They’ve been taking coffee with their breakfast, lately, instead of tea. She likes it, kind of. She doesn’t think she wants it black.
“Come see for yourself!”
Mournfully, Utena tosses the milk carton out and comes sees.
Anthy is standing in front of the small mirror tucked in between the photos they’d hung up—a couple they’d taken of themselves on trips (Anthy looking quietly awed under the towering topiaries of the Versailles Orangerie, a full-body shot of Utena with her eyes squeezed shut from grinning and the hems of her pants soaked with seawater in Okinawa), an ever-increasing number of Polaroid pictures of Chu-Chu, and one single black-and-white photograph Utena had found folded up and tucked away in a shirt pocket.
She hadn’t left it there. She hadn’t been the one to take the photo, didn’t know where it had been taken at all. It was of what looked to be a school of some kind: a grand gate before tall white buildings speckled with windows and turrets. An arresting sight—almost unsettling, dreamlike. Sometimes Utena thought if she squeezed her eyes shut she could picture what it looked like inside, the winding hallways, the dusty, echoing ballroom, balconies, a well-trodden path that led to a magnificent greenhouse.
Which was silly, of course.
Here in their apartment, Anthy’s face is pressed almost to the mirror. Her expression brightens when she sees Utena. She whips around and her hair smacks at her turning reflection. She’s been letting it grow out lately, tumble down her shoulders; Utena’s been chopping hers shorter and shorter. They look right, Utena thinks, peering at herself into the mirror. They look like how they were always meant to look.
“See!” Anthy says, lifting up her bangs ever so slightly. “My first gray hair...” She says this in a dreamy voice other people might use to say things like What a beautiful sunset or I think I’m in love with you, but that she reserves mostly for things like Isn’t this such a darling snail, Utena or pointing out her first gray hair.
And when Utena looks, there it is, a thread of silver almost imperceptible against its backdrop of violet: some proof that she’s growing older, that life has changed her a little, that Utena gets to be at her side to see it. She reaches out to smooth Anthy’s bangs back into place, tuck an errant bit of hair neatly behind her ear. Anthy lowers her head a little, making it easier, and when she looks up at Utena through her glasses her expression goes all… all—
Utena’s breath catches in her throat. She gets the impression Anthy’s looked at her like this before, but she can’t quite place it. She casts around in her mind, reaching for a thought, a memory. Bitter smiles, the sound of metal upon metal, and bruised knees. Fear a chorus buzzing in her ears. No, not fear. Adrenaline? Anthy, younger than she is now, locking eyes with Utena from across the ring, and suddenly something in her feels so ancient, worn down, a princess in her threadbare red gown—
And then Utena gasps—she hadn’t realized she’d stopped breathing in, out—and the moment is broken. Anthy’s bangs fall back into place; the grayness vanishes. They are only standing in the hallway of their shared home.
It is a blessing to age, thinks Utena, slightly unsettled. There is something about the framed photo on the wall, the school neither of them ever attended. Something about the fact Utena can picture Anthy’s smile warped by a resignation she’s certain she has never seen in her before. It is a blessing to age together. She thinks they will speak about it someday.
For now, though, Utena takes Anthy’s hand in hers, curls their fingers around each other. She is in love. There are two cups of coffee—black, milkless—with plumes of steam curling out of them still on the counter. The entire rest of the morning stretches out before them, and all the rest of the mornings to come, too.