Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In this part that was never supposed to be, where her brother and his world were just the things of the stories in her head, where there were Utena and a little apartment above a teashop and a neighboring greenhouse of plastic and tin to tend to and a bank account to put her wages in each month; in this part that felt like the afterword or even later than that, there were many things Anthy had never expected and wasn’t familiar with, and many things that weren't easy to accept.

The hardest thing, she might've thought, would be allowing Utena such boundless power over her, such an incredible advantage. After all, loving is one thing, and sometimes quite manageable; but caring is much fuller a surrender.

She might've thought that, yes, and maybe she had, but the truth was that caring about Utena was the easiest, smoothest, most natural thing Anthy had ever done.

She cared about her in small and silly ways, and in big and cloying ones, and even in unconscious, spontaneous ones that compelled her to do such things as push Utena out of the way of a juicy lump of dog shit on the sidewalk. She cared enough to listen to little gripes about overly loud bosses and mosquito bites between the toes where you rarely get the chance to scratch. She cared enough to not mind caring.

And it wasn't hard. It was just a little bit wonderful, and a little bit terrifying.

.

There were the roses to worry about.

"They're not dying of metaphysical causes, Himemiya," Utena told her, slipping her hand into Anthy's. "You can't mean them back to health anymore."

Anthy had been grazing petals lightly with her fingertips and bowing her head contemplatively for the better part of an hour. She tried pesticides first, of course.

"I wonder," she murmured.

Utena laughed. It seemed to Anthy her laughter was coarsening with time. For some reason, that thought made her happy.

"Please don't," Utena said. "Your wondering always gives me a headache."

Anthy tugged the hand she was holding and pulled Utena into a slightly awkward twirl, on the tail end of which the beautiful coarse laughter made a reappearance. "It's fortunate I've recently discovered the existence of aspirin, then," she said.

"There was aspirin in Ohtori," Utena stated and laid a hand on Anthy's shoulder while Anthy wrapped an arm around her waist.

Anthy almost managed to avoid stepping on Utena's toes. Leading was still a struggle. "I don't really care about that."

Utena gallantly refrained from wincing. "I'm glad."

They danced silently, the scuff of Utena's shoes on the floor and the rustle of the folds of Anthy's skirt accentuating the lack of music in the greenhouse. In the teashop the old surround system was probably playing something classical at an unobtrusive volume, but that would be far too crass.

Fallen rose heads shriveled from disease bruised under Anthy's bare toes as she danced, her feet gathering dirt and scrapes and dancing experience. She thought that must be what control truly feels like.

.

There was Chu-Chu to worry about.

"Do you think he's still real?"

Chu-Chu was munching himself happily to oblivion, just as he had been continuously doing for the past several months. He had gotten very, very good at seven-card stud, and they always played for crackers.

They watched him finish up the last of the crumbs, cheeks puffed out and tail sticking straight up, curling perfectly at the end. Anthy tickled his swollen belly, and he made a sound that was just slightly too precise.

"No," she replied. "I don't particularly think that."

Later she found the entire pack of crackers he'd eaten, plastic wrapping still sealed, in the corner of the cupboard near the stove.

.

There were Utena's phantoms to worry about.

When she was hunched over like this, lips twisted in a grimace so askew it could be mistaken for a smile, forehead nearly kissing the floor, ten fingers digging painfully, deliberately into her abdomen, Anthy knew there was nothing to do but sit somewhere close by (but not too close) and do something insignificant, like knit or read or play a video game.

There was no point in noticing things like the convulsions of the muscles in Utena's back, or the low, horrible noise of her teeth grinding into each other, or the smell of fear and pain that clung to the air around her. There was no point in noticing those things at all, and Anthy certainly wouldn’t if she could help it. But pointlessness was too often unavoidable.  

Eventually Utena's shoulders would sag and her breath would stop being audible and the tears that stuck to the surface of her eyeballs like a shimmering shield would fall, and she would join Anthy on the couch; close, but not too close.

"I don't think the places in me where the swords had been ever really existed," Utena said quietly.

"I –" Anthy began and quickly cut herself off. She had a feeling Utena didn't want to hear what wise response she might have had.

Sensitivity was an odd thing.

"How much do you think we both remember?" Utena asked her, and maybe expected a reply this time. "I mean, how much do you think our memories match?"

It's just that, this time, it was Anthy who didn't quite want to hear the answer. "Would you like to find out?"

A drop of sweat trailed a salty path from Utena's hairline to the curve of her nostril. She sniffed. "I don't know."

Anthy looked at Utena's sweat-slicked face and still-trembling lips, and debated whether or not any contact would be welcome.

She decided it probably wouldn’t.

"Never mind it, then."

She tossed her a joystick, and tried to imagine not imagining Utena's blood all over the floor.

.

There was Anthy's voiceless anger to worry about.

"Himemiya." Utena returned Anthy's impassive gaze with one of her own. It didn't look quite as silly on her as Anthy would've expected. "I won't apologize if you don't tell me to."

It was a habit born of necessity and conceit and vulnerability and spite, but more importantly, it was an old habit, and those weren't often known to die easily. Once, a long, long time ago, it had taken tremendous effort for Anthy to smile instead of snarl; now, it took tremendous effort not to.

Of course, it was an effort she wanted to make – only, remembering the things she wanted was a thing that took effort, too.

Anthy gritted her teeth and willed her heart not to race and the cold sweat not to soak into her dress or drip down her forehead.

"Apologize," she commanded.

Utena's smile was slow to form but entirely unapologetic. Relief and irritation alternately colored Anthy's mood as she watched it grow.

"Himemiya-sama," Utena said, her grin threatening to tear the skin of her cheeks, and bent down on one knee. "Please accept my apology."

Anthy's hand was only shaking a little when she placed it in Utena's to kiss.

"Next time," Anthy started, and stopped.

"Next time," Utena said instead, "I'm hoping for at least a glare."

.

There was tomorrow's breakfast to worry about.

Anthy rolled around and right into Utena's chest, her nose pressing into the underside of one of her breasts. She needed only twist her neck a little to kiss Utena's nipple good morning, and so she did.

Utena's fingers twitched against Anthy's back in response, sending a little shiver down her spine.

Anthy tried to stretch her legs and found her feet hanging over the edge of the bed. She leaned her head back to assess the situation. Utena was lying diagonally across the bed, her hair sprawled behind her like a majestic cape, holding Anthy and confining her to a small triangle of mattress.

Huh.

When they'd fallen asleep the night before, Anthy had had an arm slung across Utena's stomach and a leg on each side of the bed. Trust Utena to turn the tables and snuggle her into submission so that she can reclaim all the space for herself. She'd stolen the quilt, too.

Anthy played idly with Utena's nipple until the twitching turned to twisting and the soft snores turned to soft grumbles. Utena's eyes opened slowly and only halfway, but her lips were quick to form a customary morning grimace-smile. Anthy answered with a smile of her own and a vigorous shove, rolling Utena over and pushing her back several good inches.

Nevertheless, Anthy didn't resist when Utena pulled her closer, opting instead to lean further in.

Utena's mouth had the stale taste of sleep and the slowness of having just woken up, and the familiarity of its shape was so, so comforting.

By the time Anthy stopped kissing her and pulled back, Utena had lost all residual grumpiness. She propped herself up by her elbows, leaned her head on a fist, and licked her lips. Her breath was as thick as her kisses had been, and Anthy loved it just as much.

"I'm thinking pancakes," she said.

So that morning they had overdone pancakes with too much syrup and yesterday's mint tea. Neither of them had ever ended up learning to cook, really.

Chapter Text

"I'm going to make some kind of cake today," Utena announced.

There was giddiness in her voice, which was by no means a new thing, but still noteworthy. Giddiness suited Utena's voice just so very well.

She started lacing her fingers in Anthy's and then seemed to change her mind and went over to the desk to pull free a piece of paper instead. Anthy watched her and thought of other things.

Anthy remembered baking birthday cakes for her brother. She remembered the dull, smeary taste of the colorful sprinkles and the way they felt on the tip her tongue and between her front teeth and just how much pressure it took to crumble them that way. She remembered the sweet and painful mixture of childishness and inaccessibility the tiny smear of chocolate frosting at the corner of her brother's mouth had invoked.

And Akio had no birthday. Akio was gone. There was no need and no reason to remember him on a periodic basis.

But,

"I really think I'm gonna make a cake. Do you think that's weird?"

Not that she really knew how to bake, or that she had a real reason for it, but Utena had been cultivating an odd desire for domesticity. Those times when she would slip a broom handle gently out of Anthy's grasp with playfulness and a bit of a hesitation were becoming increasingly common. It was no longer even enough to make Anthy anxious.

She asked, "Why do you want to make a cake?"

Utena winked and wrote something down. "To celebrate."

"What are we celebrating?"

"I have no idea how old either of us is," Utena said cheerfully. "We're celebrating that."

It wasn't a good enough reason for a celebration, Anthy thought. But her inability to express her discomfort maybe was.

Or maybe not everything was about the inner workings of her own personal brain, really. She should have been trying harder not to forget that.  

.

There were all sorts of things about her brother that weren’t quite regular. Some things that should have been concrete but weren’t, and some things that shouldn't have been tangible but were. His wishes, for one, were obviously much more powerful than was the human due, and his borders much less clearly defined. His age and his voice and his face and his gender were, much like Anthy's, very much dependent on the circumstances, but not as strictly bound by any kind of linearity.

By these rules and lack of them, there was a lot about him and her (and them, in particular) that didn’t leave as much of an impression on as many things as it rightfully should. Memory was one of those things, of course, and flesh was another.

So all of Anthy's scars were invisible and none of her accents were permanent.

But Akio's cock had always been really rather real.

.

Their grocery store had a dairy aisle edged with mirrors and a slightly sticky linoleum floor. It had small children throwing tantrums near the cereal stands and old ladies leaning on their shopping carts like walking aids. It had things made of meat and things made of tofu and even things with wrappings that boasted a kosher certification, which Utena explained had to do with minorities.

Utena had told Anthy it was a quite regular grocery store. Exceptionally regular, even.

Anthy rather liked it, actually.

"I made you a list," Utena informed her while helpfully flapping said item under Anthy's nose. "Try not to go too off topic. We need things that at least share a common general theme with the stuff I've written, okay?"

.

Utena wanted to bake a cake – presumably so that it can be admired, complimented and eaten, which are very reasonable and mundane goals, and shouldn’t have made Anthy remember things that so insistently weren’t.

But,

"Welcome to Dalieli. Have a pleasant shopping experience."

She spared a quick glance at the greeter's tacked-on smile; its curves and edges looked so achingly familiar. And yet it wasn’t quite as painful, not quite as practiced, not quite as perfect. Not quite hers.

Inside the lights were politely white and impersonal, yet seemed to have the special ability to exaggerate every facial flaw or harsh angle, so that the statement they appeared to make conflicted with their actual function. If anyone noticed this, they feigned ignorance. Or simply didn’t choose to share their concerns with Anthy, of course. And why would they.

Anthy stared at all the things standing in rows, slick and lettered and identical. None of it really felt alien, though. It was all very simple and had a purpose, and went about it in the most conspicuous manner imaginable. That was probably the way everything should work. That was probably the way Utena's head did.

She picked up eggs and butter and the kind of flour that comes in a blue and white paper bag and whose brand tag is large and obvious. She thought it would be actually impossible to spite Utena through brand name choices, especially since she hadn’t been warned and wouldn’t be expecting subtle gestures of dismay in response to cake.

And that was a rather good thing. Anthy's mind stepped in all sorts of stupid directions around the sort of company she knew would be able to anticipate it.

.

A kid on a bike rang his little aluminum bell as he breezed by her, ruffling her hair. Anthy adjusted her paper bags so she could tuck the hair away from her face. She knew she shouldn’t have worn it down; comfort should always take precedence over symbolism. Some distance ahead the kid was ringing the bell again at a pair of well-fed street cats. Either the bike was new or the kid was just very irritating.

Her flats picked up a rhythm against the evenly paved sidewalk, the crunch of the brown grocery bags a constant if slightly less predictable background. Around that, everything just sounded tired.

She realized she'd forgotten the sound of the bells that had once been so important.

Here bells were an artifact of probably a different time, a time that was never hers and wasn’t the current people of this world's either. They were scattered about, like payphones and wooden street benches, in irregular intervals and mostly around the old-fashioned, the religious and the peripheral. None of them had quite the right sound; but now when she thought of the duels, the only sound she could hear was the small, flat tinkle of fucking bicycle bells.

The taste of personality-switching curry; the scent of blue and green and black roses; the feeling of solid metal hilts made out of the softest parts of people; the exact shape of the folds around her brother's eyes –

Some things were possible to forget, after all.

.

The cake was not a birthday one and therefore had neither chocolate frosting nor artificially colorful sprinkles, and Anthy ate two slices and watched Utena polish off three.

It didn’t actually feel very celebratory. They were both quiet and used two mismatched yet somehow similarly chipped plates, and Utena laid her feet in Anthy's lap in a way that was casual rather than designed. Anthy stared at the little hole in Utena's sock through which a tiny circle of pinkish toe peeked out, and felt a sudden rush of unreasonable affection.

"Utena," she said levelly and looked away from the little circle of toe. "Don't ever let me use you."

She didn't say "again". It wasn’t necessary.

Utena said, "Mm."

It was unusual for her to be so noncommittal. Anthy supposed she wasn’t ready to gloss over her forgiveness yet, as if it was a thing to be taken for granted and forgotten. Anthy supposed that was unusually sensible of her.

Or maybe it was just that Utena was preoccupied with important decisions such as whether to opt for a fourth helping of not-all-that-momentous cheesecake, after all.

Chapter Text

Anthy liked heavy metal.

Waking up to alarm clocks every morning had been foreign and ridiculous and exhilarating from the start, but now that she'd set hers to Orange Machinegun and an obnoxious decibel level she was even likelier to wake up with a genuine smile. Utena somewhat less so, but she was in general much more cheerful in the mornings (as well as at any other time of the day, really), so it evened out.

"I never asked you," Utena said one morning, waving her toothbrush around, mouth full of minty white foam. "Did you really like playing the piano?"

Anthy felt her hand tremble against her hairbrush, and tightened her hold. "I don't know. It didn’t matter."

Anthy's alarm started blaring then. She must've forgotten to deactivate the snooze function. She caught Utena watching her tap her fingers to the beat, and immediately stopped. Utena snorted.

"No," Utena said through a toothpaste-filled smirk. "I guess it didn’t."

.

For the first time existing on the same plane, the same sequence as everyone else, (brushing the world with her fingertips like it was made of things too simple and endless for patterns, a spectrum of softness and solidity that can only be perceived and never articulated), Anthy was starting to think maybe all people were a little admirable, a little grotesque. Possibly because her story should have ended, and when it didn’t she realized there'd been no story at all. Everyone who lives has a life. Everyone who's alive has lived.

Outside herself there was a world, and it was interesting.

.

Noons at the teashop were the most unpredictable. Too late for before work and too early for after school, these kinds of customers had a different rhythm, slightly easier or more disquiet than was customary. Anthy liked them the most, naturally, and put extra intention into their tea. Undoubtedly, it made the tea no better; but, she was rather good at it regardless.

This noon was chilly and dry, and Anthy had spilled a little ground cinnamon in the kitchen and it bothered her somewhat. It hadn't made a visible mess, puffing instead in a brown little haze and disappearing in the air. Cinnamon now clung to her hair like cigarette smoke, and it made her feel disingenuous. Anthy had nothing about her that particularly resembled or complemented cinnamon.

There were five people in the shop. At the single table near the exit sat the woman who liked to feed the street cats. She'd buy them fancy wet food every weekend and always kept their water bowls full, even though kids liked to spill them. She drank pu'er.

At the table almost exactly in the middle of the shop sat two women drinking coffee and saying very little to one another. One was slumped over the back of her chair, and the other on her elbows on the table. Every so often they glared at each other, but their feet always remained almost touching.  

Under the table closest to the wall furthest from the door, the man who ordered yellow and the man who ordered green with honey were holding hands, smiles comfortable and loose. Nobody looked; nobody would. Anthy saw, still. They were unremarkable, manly black shoes and conservative haircuts and hands held in secret under tables in teashops. They were unremarkable and commonplace and perfectly compelling.

They did not tip well, however.

.

As with everything else, no matter how fantastical and unknowable, a routine eventually took hold. Even in this strange and intimidating reality full of people and devoid of heroes, there was normalcy to be found. Maybe it was even unavoidable.

So Anthy had days filled with tea and revelations and nights of idleness and old socks, mornings too loud to be morose and afternoons too languid to even recall. There was trimming plants with a pronounced lack of any significance and talking about useless things (sometimes with other people), and using public transportation with some regularity and making love until her fingertips wrinkled. And it was utterly wonderful, but sometimes it seemed to Anthy, especially in comparison with their previous roles, almost intolerably small.

.

"Do you have any dreams?"

It was well past dawn and the alarm had already gone off for the first time, but the light was still somewhat moody and Utena was still at least halfway asleep. She spared a single half-lidded eye for a questioning glance, and Anthy felt suddenly soft and unsure. This was very frivolous timing, she realized.

Still. "Dreams?" she repeated. "For the future?"

"Mmm?"

"Do you have any?"

"Dunno."

"Do you want them?"

Utena successfully shifted very noisily without opening her other eye. It was probably still sticky with sleep. "Himemiya," she said.

"Yes."

"Are you trying to make me say something sappy."

It didn't sound like a question, so Anthy didn’t bother answering.

"I don't care about futures," Utena stated plainly. "Come back to bed now please."

It wasn’t until she was wrapped snugly in Utena, legs hooked around knees and forearms snaked inside shirts and hair mingling pink and purple that Anthy remembered she'd set the alarm on snooze and therefore had less than five minutes before Okomura Kaori started tearing up her eardrums again.

Better savor it, then, she thought, and cupped Utena's ass and kissed her collarbone and breathed in the scent of her skin, warm and waxy and very much human.