Disclaimer: I own nothing. The characters of _Shoujo Kakumei Utena_ are
copyright (C) Be-PaPas, Chiho Saito / Shogakukan, Shokaku Iinkai, TV
Tokyo. The various songs quoted within are copyright by their owners,
which are usually their record companies, not the people who wrote it, but
that's a rant for another afternoon.
SPOILER WARNING: Heavy spoilers for up to episode #29 (Azure Paler Than
The Sky); light spoilers for everything that happens through to the end of
the series. Extended author's notes at end.
All C&C welcome, public or private.
Jamais Vu
jamais vu, n.: The illusion or impression of never having experienced
something that has actually been experienced many times before (cf. deja
vu)
"You're listening to 88.5, WSPR. This is Tsuchiya Ruka with
Shadows of the Underground. In the last hour, we've heard The Cure,
Siouxie and the Banshees, and Radiohead; coming up we've got, unless I
change my mind, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Bush, Blue Oyster Cult, and
Concrete Blonde. Keep that email coming. Now I'd like to play you one of
my favorite songs; here's Soul Coughing, with 'Sleepless'."
The drums of the track came up behind his voice, rumbling into the
guitar and the vocals, as he took his headphones off and rested them on
the control board. The station was deserted; he didn't need an engineer,
and no one else really felt like being at the station in the middle of the
night. He liked it that way. He thought.
He could hear the lead singer chanting the lyrics to the song on
the speakers as he checked out the readouts. Four minutes and thirty
seconds to go and pick up a cup of coffee; no problem. He'd done it a
thousand times before. Miki had translated the lyrics to this song for him
at some point; Ruka didn't speak enough English to know what it said, but
he remembered Miki's soft words and matched them to the sound of the
track.
"I got the will to drive myself sleepless. I got the will to drive
myself sleepless. So much time is cashed. So much smoke is wasted. Sudden
disappearance in the air is thick and cool. I can't approach myself
skidding over this perdition and now I'm out on the veranda when I should
have gone to school."
Yeah. Sleepless. Every now and then, he wondered if it had all
been a dream, if everything he remembered had been a dream. If dying had
been a dream. If it had been a dream, he almost wished he'd stayed asleep,
some of the time. The coffee was hot and bitter and someone on the
10PM-2AM show had stolen all the sugar. It didn't matter. The coffee was
real: the kind of real that burned your tongue and left it feeling numb
and scalded for the next few hours. He didn't mind. He was used to it.
A hand run through black hair that stood on end behind it, through
hair that he remembered being blue. Nights like this ... He wasn't sure
about nights like this. Nights like this it made him feel like there had
been thousands of nights like this before, and like this was the first
time he'd ever sat here, at the control panel with his cup of coffee,
watching the phone lines dark and quiet and waiting to cue up the next
song.
"Well I call for sleep, but sleep it won't come to me. Shuffling
in the hallway, I can hear him on the stairs. I hear his lighter
flicking. I hear the soft sigh of his inhale and the whole width of my
intentions he exhales into the air. I got the will to drive myself
sleepless."
/It's been a year/, said one half of his brain to the other; /it's
been a year since you were killed in the shadow world and woke up in the
real world, it's been a year since they all followed you and set up shop
in the real world without all the magic and the metaphor and the
weirdness. It's been a year without that Ohtori, and that world doesn't
seem real to you at all, but you /died/, and so you're going to remember
it./
/I don't know what you're talking about,/ said the other half of
his brain, the half of his brain that had been created in the real world
with real issues and real history.
"I got the will to drive myself sleepless."
This song made him twitch.
"I got the will to drive myself sleepless."
He reached for a cigarette and lit it, rested it on the side of an
already-overflowing ashtray. "You shouldn't smoke," he could hear his
housemate chiding him, "not with your condition." He ignored the
memory. Again, two sets of conflicting memories warred within him; one, a
life-destroying illness that hospitalized him early and kept him out of
school, the other a simple nagging and persistent heart condition that
slowed him down but could be easily managed with medicine and rest. Two
sets of memories. He was used to it.
Besides, he hadn't had the illness in the other world until he'd
become inconvenient for the plot. That much, he knew.
/"Do I have to lecture you on the nicotinic acetylcholine
receptors on your heart? _Directly_ on the heart muscle
itself?" "No." "Just checking."/
The track ended, and he hit the crossfade without bringing up his
mike; this one he only vaguely knew the words to. Something about beds and
burning. Sometimes he wished he knew a little more English.
"Out where the river broke, the bloodwood and the desert oak,
holden wrecks and boiling diesels, steam in forty five degrees. The time
has come to say fair's fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share."
He'd thought he was going mad, at first, with his memory playing
tricks on him. He'd been close to deciding that he simply was mad, when
he'd met one of the others, one of the ones who also remembered the shadow
world. He wasn't sure how he'd known. He just had. He lived with one of
them now, one of the others who'd left that universe instead of been
removed from it. He remembered too. Ruka knew that much. They didn't talk
about it, but it colored their entire interaction, just the simple fact
that /someone else remembered/. It was easier, somehow, knowing that you
weren't the only one keeping an entire universe in your head.
Even though that's where they'd come from. A universe in someone's
head.
But no; he wasn't mad. These were the facts: he had not been born
but created, in a world inside someone's head, rewritten and re-cast until
he'd fit the role that the director needed him to play. He'd been one of
the lead roles, until something had happened and he'd been taken off the
board. And then he'd been brought back for a time, to serve as a foil --
no pun intended, he thought wryly -- to the ones who were the new main
characters. It was that last appearance that he remembered most, that
colored his "real" self the most strongly. And he'd managed, in that
walk-on part, to hold on to a little bit of his previous self --
something, from what he gathered, that just didn't happen all that
frequently. Maybe that had been why he'd seen what he was being used to
do; maybe that was why he'd seen that he had to get himself out of there,
by any means necessary.
"The time has come, a fact's a fact. It belongs to them, let's
give it back. How can we dance when our earth is turning? How do we sleep
while our beds are burning?"
Maybe that was why the director had written him out with finality
that time, X-ing through his lines in indelible ink and leaving the
memories in everyone else's mind.
Ruka understood the rules, he thought. Or at least as much as
anyone could. Getting written out of the production was one thing; your
character wasn't destroyed, just sent to some kind of cosmic holding area,
where your very self could be recycled and re-used later if it became
necessary. And in the meantime, the other actors didn't even remember
you. If you were killed, if your death was written into the story, it
became a measure of dramatic necessity.
Everyone knows that you can't mess with dramatic necessity.
And so, if you were killed -- as he had been, in a later draft --
if you were given a wasting disease with little time to live and worse if
it had been made so that it had /always been that way/ and anything that
you thought you remembered was just smoke and mirrors and a figment of
your imagination --
You woke up.
This song made him twitch too.
"That was Midnight Oil with "Beds Are Burning", here on Shadows of
the Underground. I'm Tsuchiya Ruka, your host until Soryuu Akane comes in
at 6AM. That means you're stuck with me, folks."
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, talking to the microphone
was easier. People heard him; that much he knew. His spot was somehow
amazingly the top-rated show in his time slot, despite the fact that he
played very little that you'd hear on any other Nihongo radio
station. Apparently there were enough insomniac fans of American culture
to keep his eclectic little enterprise on the air.
"Sometimes I wonder," he said, out loud, to his microphone, to the
thousands of people listening to him, to no one in particular. "I wonder
who it is who's out there listening to me. Kinda makes you feel as if
you're not real, when you're sitting here in the DJ booth and your own
voice is on the speakers coming back at you. I know you're out there, all
of you. Sometimes you call in. Sometimes I meet someone on the street who
knows who I am. But right about now, it feels like I'm the only one awake
in the world."
Sometimes his listeners tuned in for the bits of philosophy in
between the songs. His producers let him get away with a great deal,
particularly since it seemed to boost the ratings.
"I got this CD from someone I met in Tokyo a few months ago; an
American serviceman stationed overseas for a few months who missed America
terribly and thanked me for playing the kind of thing he would have heard
at home. This one goes out to all the ones out there who've ever felt like
they were a little too far away from home. You all know who you are."
Touga had translated this one for him, when they'd all been lying
around one evening and playing video games. Touga didn't remember anything
-- mercifully, Ruka supposed; who would have wanted to remember being what
Touga had been in the other world? No, in the real world, Touga was just
that -- real. A bit too real, in places -- like a stereo with the gain
turned up to max, like a computer screen with the contrast turned up until
it made your eyes squint and strain to follow along. But in its own
strange way, that was comforting.
"There is nowhere left to hide, there is nothing to be done. No
people to be saved, no pets we've never named, forty miles from the sun."
Touga didn't remember. Neither did Saionji, or Miki, or /She/, the
one that he'd wished at the time he could take with him. Looking back at
it, he was glad that he hadn't, that she'd made the transition herself
after the duel named Revolution. It was kinder that way. Gentler. She
didn't remember anything, didn't remember being tall and pale and aloof
and riding an elevator that never seemed to go anywhere and dueling for a
prize that no one ever needed to win, didn't remember anything except in
dreams that could be easily dismissed as too much wasabi with dinner.
You remembered when you died. When the world around you died, you
just went with it, and the only things you took with you were one or two
of your own character traits, one or two of your own opposites, and a
lingering resentment for the stars.
And you woke up. And you didn't remember anything, or anyone,
except for a vague lingering hint that you /should know/ someone, a vague
hint that you knew each other at some point but never knew how, a vague
familiarity and a sense that somehow, long ago, you both participated in
the murder of something small and beautiful that left you feeling tiny and
dirty and ashamed.
He was used to it.
"As darkness craves the mind, we come undone without our pride. No
time on the earth to come, all the pleasures just begun, forty miles from
the sun."
The phone rang. The call-in lines weren't open, which meant that
it was someone he knew, someone who had the direct line to the station. It
wasn't odd for the phone to ring, not really; most of his friends had the
number, and two or three times a night one of them would check
in. Sometimes when you were awake at 3AM you needed another voice to
listen to, another voice that was talking directly and only to you. He
checked the readout. Another two minutes left on this
song. "WSPR. Tsuchiya desu."
"Feeling dark and melancholy tonight?" The voice was
familiar; Ruka could picture the man standing out on his balcony, watching
the stars, with the radio on softly in the background and the cordless
phone held to his ear.
"Usually. What are you still doing up, Souji?"
"Listening to your show. You know, you do play the most godawful
selection of music."
"The listeners seem to like it."
"Yeah, well." The man who answered now to Mikage Souji chuckled,
softly. "I was listening to your philosophizing. Feeling like you're not
real tonight?"
"Remembering." That was enough; that had always been enough. Souji
remembered too. Ruka hadn't known him in the inner world, had never ridden
his elevator or worn his black rose. But they'd known each other, when
they met in the real world. It had been enough.
Mikage made a little soft noise, one that perhaps could have been
sympathy. "Will you be all right?"
"I always am. I'm used to it."
/"In our coats beneath the layers, wash my skin of all the
hate. We should sleep late. Everything just kind of grates, forty miles
from the sun."/
"Play something a little bit less broody. It'll make you feel
better. And, since I seem to be stuck awake, and yours is the best music
on at this time of evening -- which isn't saying much -- it will make me
less distressed."
Ruka had to laugh at that. "All right. Just for you. When this
song is over."
/"I need to lose to make it right. I'll confront the stars tonight
I will babble, I will bite. You will never know how much you shine, 40
miles from the sun."/
"Which," he continued, "is right about now. I have to run. Try not
to stay up too late, Souji."
"I'll try. Try not to kill yourself with those noxious cigarettes
you smoke. Ja na."
The phone clicked.
"Forty miles from the sun..."
Mikage remembered. That alone made it all right.
"That was "Forty Miles from the Sun" by Bush. I'm Tsuchiya Ruka,
this is WSPR, and you're listening to Shadows of the Underground. Seems
like I'm gettting a little bit too morbid for some of you out there." He
got up and wandered over to the CD racks; his headphones included a
wireless microphone, one thing he'd insisted upon. He could do the show
from the kitchen, if he needed to, or the bathroom, or the
elevator. Except he never took the elevator. He, like so many of his
fellow universe refugees, took the stairs.
"It's not really morbid, though. I guess. It's tough for me to
explain. Did you ever wonder, any of you? Did you ever get the feeling
like you /should/ know something, like you should have some kind of
information at your fingertips that you don't, that you don't ever
remember. Like you've forgotten something that was terribly, horribly
important."
Head turned sideways to scan the CDs. "I was talking to a friend
of mine about that the other day. We agreed that there are times when you
just do feel like you're not real, and it's something that -- at least for
us -- is pretty common. I don't know if it's common for everyone
else. Okay, you smartass out there in Kyoto, I can hear you thinking,
'Tsuchiya-san has been smoking just a little bit too much weed lately.'
But I'm sober. It's just that sometimes 'sober' is a painful state to be
in. Especially at this time of night, when there isn't much out there
except what you remember and what you remember remembering."
He found the CD, brought it over to the console. "But enough of
that. Time for something a little more perky, just for the one of you out
there who's standing on his balcony and telling me that my music taste
sucks. Here's Men Without Hats with 'Pop Goes The World'."
Bright synthesizer music filled the studio. This one, he didn't
know the words to at all; Mikage refused to listen to it, Miki claimed
that the main singer mumbled, and Touga just listened to it and frowned
about the American pop culture references he didn't know.
"Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass. Name of the band is The
Human Race. Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop goes the world."
Time for a stretch; the headphones hit the desk again, and he
stood up, rocking his neck back and forth. He could imagine Mikage shaking
his head at the music selection. The man listened to opera voluntarily,
though; not much hope there.
Getting out of the shadow world wasn't easy. There were only a few
ways. You could die. Ruka knew that; knew it intimately. You could
graduate. Or be graduated, really. That was what had happened to
Mikage. Ruka hadn't known the man on the inside; their paths had never
crossed. But he knew. He knew that Mikage had once been being groomed for
the position of Victor of the Duels, as Ruka himself had once been the
secretary of the Seitokai. They'd both been written into different parts.
A hundred pairs of shoes. An elevator that led down into the
basement of a building that didn't exist. Black roses and empty
desks. Ruka knew about all of them, just as he knew about the last duel,
the last phone call.
Universe familiarity.
"Johnny and Jenny had a crazy dream, see their pictures in a
magazine. Every little boy needs a girl. Pop goes the world."
Mikage set the fire. Mikage didn't set the fire. No one set the
fire. Nemuro Memorial Hall never burned. The hundred duellists never
died. Mikage never existed. It all happened, all at once, and as soon as
it happened, it had /always been that way/.
"One two three and four is five, everybody here is a friend of
mine. Whatever happened to the Duke of Earl? Pop goes the world."
Sometimes it made Ruka's head hurt.
Mikage hadn't been a good man in that world. At least, not the
last time. He'd been a shade too obsessed, a shade too easily
manipulated. He'd been /used/, in the way that they all had been used, in
the way that somehow it was more painful for Mikage to be used. He'd been
used to keep the universe running. He opened the way to the arena. He
plotted out the course that the stars took in the sky. Maybe that had been
why the director had always been watching them, to see if his creature --
his creation -- had done a good job.
Maybe that was why Mikage stood up at night, standing on his
balcony, watching the stars. He'd gotten them wrong, in the inner world,
just a little. A shade too bright, a shade too far, a shade too close
together. Ruka knew that Mikage watched the stars to reassure himself that
they were real.
"...Say, what planet are we on? The third! Pop goes the world."
Mikage shared that sense of unreality with him, that sense of
remembering two entirely different and contradictory realities. Sometimes
Ruka looked back at what he remembered of the shadow world and had to
laugh. The two people they'd been back then would never have connected at
all; the two people they found themselves being in the real world were
mutual moral support.
Necessity, he reflected, was a mother.
"And every time I wonder where the world went wrong, end up lying
on my face going ringy dingy ding dong. And every time I wonder if the
world is right, end up in some disco dancin' all night & day..."
The way before them, he reflected, a bit sourly, had been
prepared. Except the way turned out to be the way to a world that was
unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. It was healthier, he supposed,
but equally as uncomfortable.
"Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass. Name of the band is The
Human Race. Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop goes the world. Johnny
played guitar, Jenny played bass, ain't nobody couldn't take their
place. Everybody tell me, have you heard? Pop goes the world."
If he had it all to do over again, would he have wanted to
remember? He didn't know. He supposed that knowing was better than not
knowing, but sometimes he looked at the other people, the ones who didn't
remember, the ones who had taken the third way out, and he /envied/
them. All they suffered was a little bit of insomnia now and again.
Down on channel one as the song finished, and up on channel two.
"Welcome to your life, there's no turning back. Even while we
sleep, we will find you acting on your best behavior. Turn your back on
mother nature. Everybody wants to rule the world."
Was it all a curse or a blessing? He didn't know.
The phone rang again. "Tsuchiya desu."
"This is not an improvement, you know."
Ruka laughed. "You again? Don't you have better things to do than
to sit around and nag me over the telephone? You wanted perkier. You got
it."
"I'd hardly call these perky. Have you listened to the lyrics?"
"You know I don't speak enough English."
"Trust me, this is not perky. I'll look up the lyrics and
translate them for you." There was a bit of a smile in Mikage's voice; he
could hear it, by now. Long familiarity, the kind built step-by-step, not
the backstage camaraderie built during a production and broken down when
the sets are struck. "Later. I'm busy."
"Busy?"
/"It's my own design, it's my own remorse. Help me to decide, help
me make the most of freedom and of pleasure. Nothing ever lasts
forever. Everybody wants to rule the world."/
"Making sure all the stars are in place. I think I've found
another one."
They all had their own little obsessions. Mikage counted
stars. Touga always wanted to drive. Saionji never ventured into the kendo
room alone at night, and never let Touga quite out of his sight. (Though
that was usually for fear of where he would find Touga, doing what; /this/
Touga, far from being the cool and distant manipulator and manipulated,
was a rather charming, puppyish young man full of far too much
energy.) Tenjou said things and then didn't know why she'd said them, and
called Himemiya her princess, and spoke with male inflection. They all
avoided roses, and elevators.
/She/ reached up a hand to her chest, hand clasping for something
that was not there, fingers closing around a necklace that did not exist.
/"There's a room where the light won't find you, holding hands
while the walls come tumbling down. When they do I'll be right behind
you. So glad we've almost made it, so sad they had to fade it. Everybody
wants to rule the world."/
"Well, you can take your time. I'm not going anywhere. And
apparently, neither are you. I'll play something more upbeat next, I
promise. Just for you."
Mikage rolled his eyes; Ruka could hear that too. "I fear." A
click as he turned off the phone.
Ruka rolled his own eyes and hung up the phone. Occasionally, his
friends didn't call him up just for the friendly voice. Occasionally, they
called him up to bitch about the music choice.
He wondered what /She/ was doing right now; asleep, probably. In
this world, she never knew how he felt about her; she called him
"'niisan" jokingly, teased him about the way he seemed a bit protective of
her, and rested her feet in his lap when they were all playing video
games. She twined her hand in Shiori's and smiled at her, the kind of
smile that Ruka wished that he could be on the receiving end of, just
once. But that wasn't how it worked in this world. Not for him.
If you took the third door out, you got the thing you had wanted
most in the inner world. If you took door one or door two, you just got
memories and insomnia.
"I can't stand this indecision married with a lack of
vision. Everybody wants to rule the world. Say that you'll never never
never never need it. One headline, why believe it? Everybody wants to rule
the world."
He could remember, as a distinct memory -- or perhaps a memory of
a memory -- a time when he did not love her. It had been a long time ago,
the first time that he'd been written into the script. He remembered
admiring her determination and her spirit, and gradually realizing that he
was falling in love with her -- or at least, the kind of schoolboy crush
that you got when you were sixteen and stupid.
He'd been sixteen for a very, very long time.
And it had been okay that he'd been in love with her. Nothing had
ever come of it, but that was because nothing ever came of anything that
wasn't expressly pre-scripted. Or at least, nothing that didn't seem to
offer some kind of possibility for mischief, some kind of core that could
be exploited and used and rearranged to fit the director's plans for the
universe. Maybe it was his awareness of that fact that had caused him to
be removed, the first time; maybe it was just the idea that the very fact
he could develop those feelings was a sign that he was too strong, too
willful.
He wondered, every now and then -- usually when it was 3AM, and
there was nothing but his own voice in his ears and an occasional phone
call and the music that was too dark and yet somehow never dark enough --
if she'd missed him, when he'd been written out the first time. When all
of a sudden he'd gotten sick (but he had always been sick) and had to
leave school (but had he ever been there?) and wound up shivering in the
cold and the empty and the /nothingness.../
He turned up the heat a little more. It was cold in here. He was
always cold, these days.
"All for freedom and for pleasure, nothing ever lasts forever,
everybody wants to rule the world."
Down went the track; up came the microphone. "That was Tears for
Fears with "Everybody Wants to Rule The World". This is Shadows from the
Underground on 88.5 WSPR, and I'm about to completely disregard the name
of this show and play something a little perkier. Why? Because I can. And
just to annoy a few people who deserve to be annoyed out there. This is
Shinohara Tomoe, with the opening theme from Kodomo no Omocha."
He could almost hear the teeth grinding from Mikage's
direction; it made him smile. Say what you will about the song, it
certainly was more upbeat. He sang along, making sure his mike was dead
first.
"Kyou mo ashita mo himakkusu, gokazoku yonin de goippaku, ejiputo
kidori de suphinkusu, amerika kibun de tekisasu! Yoyuu shakushaku de
itsumo, funyafunya de iruto, nigamushi hara no mushi mo henahena to tettai
shichau yo! Watashi wa urutora rirakkusu, suteki ni muteki na rirakkusu,
hitoaji chigau ze derakkusu, tocchirakattemo, yobarerya papapapaaa-n!"
/This/ one, he understood.
He lit another cigarette and took a deep drag off of it, nudging
the burned-down, forgotten remnants of the previous one to one side in the
ashtray. It was a habit he seemed to have always had, even though he knew
that he hadn't possessed that particular vice in the shadow
world; universe hiccup, he supposed. Track change. If he really felt like
being deep and meaningful, he could have interpreted it as the physical
manifestation, the real-world manifestation, of the destructive wish that
had displayed itself in his actions in the last days of the inner world.
It wasn't really all that much of a good idea to be deep and
meaningful when one was dealing with the universe -- universes -- he was
dealing with, though. The universe did enough of that on its own.
He hadn't gotten much time, the second time he'd been put on
stage. And he hadn't gotten much of a role, really. He'd been dragged back
on to press at a few sore spots, tug at a few loose strings. But he'd
remembered. Oh, had he remembered. And he'd used what he'd remembered, the
barest little hints and bits that he'd pieced together when he'd been
floating in that endless spaceless /void/, to have a little more influence
than he should have been able to take.
He wasn't proud of what he'd done. He wasn't proud of what he'd
/been/. But it had been necessary and it had almost been sufficient and in
the end, she'd known. He'd woken her up and he'd made her see and he had
once, just once, been able to feel the taste of her lips on his.
Lost in thought, he just hit the crossfade again, not even caring
what was queued up next on track 2.
"All our times have come, here but now they're gone. Seasons don't
fear the reaper, nor do the wind, the sun or the rain. We can be like they
are, come on baby. Don't fear the reaper. Baby, take my hand. Don't fear
the reaper. We'll be able to fly. Baby, I'm your man."
/"Juri, don't worry. Don't worry, Juri."/ A car in the fountain. A
rose in the hand. A ride in the car. He'd been to the Ends of the World
and been back again, but it hadn't been a life-changing experience,
because at that point he hadn't had a life. He'd just had what the End of
the World had wanted to give him.
He'd been used. But he'd done some using of his own, and that had
been some comfort. He hadn't been a nice man either; sometimes, he
reflected, it wasn't possible to be a nice person. Nice people, in that
world, had been targets. But he'd done what he could in the middle of his
scripted appearance: he'd woken her up.
He still remembered, in one of his tracks of memory, trying to
kill himself to keep himself from being used again. To keep himself from
being sent back out into the nothingness, the /void/. He remembered
succeeding, blood like rose-petals trailing over his naked body in the
bath, watching it all with a detached mastery. Even then, he'd known, or
thought he knew, that dying was one of the ways out.
What he hadn't known was that you couldn't die without the
director's approval. You couldn't die unless the director took you off the
stage; free will only took you so far.
"Valentine is done, here but now they're gone. Romeo and Juliet
are together in eternity. Romeo and Juliet. 40,000 men and women every
day, like Romeo and Juliet, 40,000 men and women every day. Redefine
happiness, another 40,000 coming every day. We can be like they are, come
on baby. Don't fear the reaper. Baby, take my hand. Don't fear the
reaper. We'll be able to fly. Don't fear the reaper. Baby, I'm your man."
/Footsteps. A light chuckle. A hand picking up a limp and bloody
wrist, a voice tsking. "Don't you know that it's not that easy? But you
_are_ becoming troublesome. Maybe I should just let you go after all. But
my way."/
Ruka shivered a little, and nudged the heat up a little more. And
then decided, abruptly, that (sugar be damned) he needed another cup of
coffee. He fit in a tape of commercials to run after the song ended and
dropped his headset on the console again. Coffee. Coffee was real.
Dying, his mind whispered softly, had been real too, and had not
been all that unpleasant after all. What had been unpleasant was the
thought that after he had died, the world around him would have simply
gone on. He still wasn't sure what had happened after he'd died. There
wasn't really anyone he could ask. He could ask Himemiya. Himemiya
remembered too. But Himemiya wouldn't talk about it.
What had happened to /Her/, after he had died? What had happened
to them all? The only thing he had been left with was a slow and steady
conviction that the duel called Revolution would happen soon, and that
Tenjou would be the one to win it. He'd tried to maneuver the pieces a
little more, tried to arrange it so that /She/ could have been the one to
fight that duel. That had been his own goal all along, to give her the
ability to for once realize what the director was doing, what had been
done to her. The ability to realize that her own abilities, locked away
behind her heart, were at least an equal match for Tenjou's. But in the
end, she'd been too wedded to her cynicism to win. She'd dropped the
locket, but she'd dropped her rose, too, forfeiting the duel.
He'd /tried/. But at least she'd woken up enough to realize a
little bit of what had been going on.
"Love of two is one, here but now they're gone. Came the last
night of sadness, and it was clear she couldn't go on. Then the door was
open and the wind appeared. The candles blew, then disappeared, the
curtains flew, then he appeared, saying 'don't be afraid, come on baby.'
And she had no fear, and she ran to him, then they started to fly. They
looked backward and said goodbye. She had become like they are, she had
taken his hand. She had become like they are. Come on baby. Don't fear the
reaper..."
And at least in this world, Shiori was a much better
person. Almost worthy of /Her/ after all.
He needed to let go. He needed to let go of the person he'd been,
and become the person who had been scripted into /this/ world, the world
where if there was a director he was letting the actors figure it all out
by themselves. He needed to give up and become /this/ Tsuchiya Ruka, the
one with the pack-a-day habit he had to hide from his housemate and the
friends who didn't know how they knew him and the coffee cup in his hand
and the roommate who understood and the black hair that should have been
blue and the completely platonic friend who once in another world had been
his reason for living and the late-night radio show where he played music
he didn't understand just because he liked the sound of it --
Oh, fuck, the radio show.
He made it back to the control booth just in time to bring up the
mike as the commercials ended. "Good evening, and welcome once again to
Shadows from the Underground. Before the break, we heard Blue Oyster Cult
with "Don't Fear the Reaper". Coming up, we've got The Jesus And Mary
Chain and Dead Can Dance. Unless I change my mind, which you should all be
used to by now. It wouldn't be one of my shows unless I did. In the
meantime, I've got my cup of coffee, I've got my pack of cigarettes, and
I've got hundreds of CDs to which I don't know the words. I don't know why
I like this kind of stuff so much. There's just a certain something in
listening to a song and only being able to pick out one word in about ten,
if that, and having to figure out what it's about just by how it sounds."
He swiveled in his chair, put his feet up on a bare spot of the
console. "It's not just me being morbid, either. That much is for
sure. Some of the stuff I play sounds bright and perky, and some of it
doesn't. I guess one of these days I'll get one of my friends who speak a
lot more English than I do to translate my entire music library over here,
and then I can match the song to the mood I'm in. In the meantime, I just
play the stuff that sounds good. Like this one. Here's a band called
Concrete Blonde, with a song called "Dance Along The Edge"."
Down on the mike; up on the music. He rubbed a hand over his face
and lit another cigarette. (/"You have a _congenital heart condition_. Do
you really want to wind back up in the hospital?" "The nurses are cute and
they miss me if I'm gone for too long."/) It was getting along to the
middle of his show; better yet, the middle of his last show for the
week. He didn't know what the plans for the weekend were; probably getting
together with the crew that was still going to Ohtori, at the Kiryuu
mansion or back at Ruka's own tiny house, for video games and takeout.
"Sometimes we laugh like children, go running hand in hand. I
never felt like this before. I never will again. Sometimes we cry like
babies; I hold you to my heart. I just can't stand to see you sad. It
tears me all apart."
He'd woken up in the real world, as a student at Ohtori Academy in
his last few months of high school. Graduation had passed before he really
understood what had happened to him, but for some reason, the refugees
from the shadow universe had grouped together, had found some reason to be
friends. Had found that they /were/ friends, that it had been written into
the script for this real world as one last bit of manipulation done by
/someone/ before they were left on their own to figure it all out by
themselves.
/"Tsuchiya-san wanted to give up his spot as secretary of the
student council for his last year at the school, you know, to have more
time to concentrate on fencing. I don't think he's been feeling well
lately."/ And so Miki had been the secretary, as Miki had followed him in
the shadow-world -- though for a much less sinister reason. Nothing else
had changed; everything else had changed. Miki showed him the minutes
sometimes, for old time's sake. 4:22, Kiryuu-san and Saionji-san get into
argument about who can kick whose ass at Super Puzzle Fighter. 4:24,
Arisugawa-san makes pointed comment about little boys and ego wars. 4:25,
Kiryuu-san and Saionji-san engage in tickle war with Arisugawa-san. 4:30,
dignity is restored. 4:35, Arisugawa-san launches sneak tickle attack.
Much better than knives and apples and balloons and trains.
Watching them sometimes was painful. They were so different than
how they had been, and yet so alike at times. Miki was relaxed. Saionji
was good-natured. Touga was -- well, goofy; that was the only word for
it. And /She/ believed in miracles. Why shouldn't she?
"And we're so afraid and it's such a shame. There is no reason we
should doubt it. And the things we want to say we've never said, and we
look away and it's all okay and never really talk about it. It's a shame
the way we dance along the edge."
It showed, now and again, though. Around the edges. Saionji and
Touga were a bit too close, as though their relationship in this world
made up for all the pain and confusion in the other one, or as though
something had happened in the universe shuffle and they had gotten pieces
of each other and therefore could never be whole apart again. Miki's
pocket watch was a normal pocket watch, not a stopwatch, but he sometimes
took it out and looked at the time when he'd just checked it a few moments
before and then frowned, as if he couldn't tell why he was looking at
it. Tenjou -- Miki's friend, in this world, and not connected to the
student council in any way other than that and enjoying their company --
watched Touga out of the corner of her eye when she wasn't aware of it,
and stayed just a little too close to Himemiya, as though she were scared
that Himemiya might disappear again. Touga, the consumate puppet in the
inner world, suffered from what the doctors called Attention Deficit
Disorder but what Ruka suspected really be an overdose of reality, all the
reality and personality that should have been his in the other world as
well as what he would have had in this reality.
"We always seem so careful. We're always so unsure. Our past
mistakes, they make us shaky. Eyes on the door, when do we stop searching
for what we're searching for? Then when it comes, we question love and try
for more."
Sometimes Ruka thought that whatever power had brought them here
-- the power of miracles, perhaps? -- had made them their own
opposites. Sometimes he thought that they were simply who they were
supposed to have been, without the manipulation they'd experienced in the
inner world.
Sometimes he thought he was simply going mad.
"And we're happy here but we live in fear. We've seen a lot of
temples crumble. Some of flesh and blood and love under glass. Will we
come undone? Will we turn and run? And will we know it when we find
it? It's a game the way we dance along the edge."
Ring. "WSPR. Tsuchiya desu."
"I can hear you brooding all the way over here. I emailed you the
lyrics to those songs. Stop thinking about it; it's not good for you."
"I'm not brooding. I'm just ... thinking. It's been a year,
Souji. Ever think about that? A whole year in the real world."
"Using a particular narrow and unchanging definition of the word
"real", yes. But you aren't particularly interested in a discussion of
eschatology at four AM. I called you up to let you know that your choice
of random music is, as usual, disturbingly sentient and coherent. I'm
going to sleep. Play music without words for the next several songs so
that I don't have to worry that the universe is trying to tell me
something."
Ruka laughed. "Just for you. Since you ask so nicely. Are you
going to be able to be up for work in time?"
"Yes. Don't forget to stop and pick up coffee and filters on your
way home. And sugar, too; we're out."
"You got it. Sleep well, Souji."
"If your music doesn't give me nightmares. Ja na."
Maybe it didn't matter, in the end. Maybe the memories would
fade. Maybe sooner or later he would be able to forget. Maybe he'd slip
into believing that he'd always been here; maybe the shadows would all
start to feel like a dream. It had only been a year, after all. A year
wasn't all that long, in retrospect. Except when it was.
"And we'll walk the line and we'll do our time for just as long as
we've been given, and pretend like we don't hear the things they've
said. Can we promise love? Is it all too much? And do our old souls still
believe it? It's insane the way we dance along the edge."
Dead Can Dance went on the other track; he changed songs with a
flip of the switch, and sat back. Thinking the old familiar 4AM thoughts.
Maybe he'd dye his hair violet this weekend. Violet was a nice
color. He didn't think his hair had ever been violet before.
Someone else's had been.
But that didn't matter anymore.
- 30 -
Author's Notes: Well, that was odd, wasn't it? I had two other Utena
fanfics in my head, both of which took place in anime continuity, and
every time I tried to work on one of them, I got distracted by the thought
of the "real world" and how it would be different. I wrote this story in
about 36 hours. I suppose you'd have to call it an extended songfic, but
it's working to set up a whole story arc that my writing group is working
on.
I like Ruka an awful lot, in case you can't tell. He was a great character
in the anime; almost altruistic, or at least as altruistic as you can get
in the Utenaverse. If he'd been one whit less selfish, he might have even
succeeded. Which, of course, was why Akio had to take him off the playing
field....
If anyone knows how radio stations are named in Japan, I'd appreciate the
information. That was the one bit of information I couldn't find. ^_^