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Fandom: Revolutionary Girl Utena
Rating: Teen & Up, Chose Not To Use Warnings
Characters: Kiryuu Touga (centric, POV), the Student Council, Ohtori Akio, OC, Mentioned Himemiya Anthy, Mentioned Tenjou Utena, Mentioned Shinohara Wakaba
Relationships: Kiryuu Touga & Student Council Members, Kiryuu Touga & Ohtori Akio, Kiryuu Touga/Ohtori Akio, Implied Saionji/Wakaba
Summary: One by one, the Duelists leave. Touga is the last to go, but go he does--go he must.
Himemiya Anthy is, of course, the first to leave.
Touga doesn’t see her, but Nanami does, and when he and Saionji ask her about it she describes it like the event was something wonderful. Touga does not agree. The Rose Bride is the cornerstone of the dueling system, the linchpin that keeps everything at Ohtori working smoothly—her leaving means this is all going to fall apart. The world is going to fall apart and it’s all her fault.
(Touga is going to fall apart and it’s all her fault.)
“Damn,” Saionji says beside him. “Good for her, I guess.” Traitor.
“I wonder if I could do that,” Nanami murmurs, low enough that Touga only hears because he’s paying attention. “Just walk away.”
Don’t, he wants to warn her. Going beyond the ends of the world isn’t worth it. Stay here with me.
But he doesn’t warn her. It would reveal too much.
Nanami is the second to leave.
One evening she’s there, saying goodnight to Touga like always, and the next morning she’s gone—closet emptied, bed made, not even a note to tell him where she’s gone. Touga can guess, though. She’s gone the same place that Anthy has, out past the end of the world.
His first reaction is a perverse relief. No Nanami means no one to hound the girls he woos, no one to pitch fits over him being a normal teenage boy—but she hasn’t hounded anyone or pitched any fits in a long while, since before she gave up being a Student Council member—since she “found out” that she and Touga weren’t blood related. This relief means nothing. So of course it almost instantly gives way to anger—how dare she leave! How dare she give no warning, just to flee into the night! How dare she choose the unknown over her own brother! Doesn’t she know what Touga has done for her? How he’s protected her all this time from all the things she couldn’t see? How he grew up young so that she didn’t have to? Does she really think she can face their parents—
Oh god. Their parents.
And there’s the fear underneath it all—what kind of big brother, what kind of prince is he if he can’t even protect his little sister? Their parents are going to eat her alive if he’s not there to divert their attention. At least he would have been considerate enough to make sure it didn’t hurt. He had been considerate enough to make sure it wouldn’t hurt—but Nanami had outright refused him, fought like a witch to keep her purity, and that’s not going to work when it’s their parents or her boss or if she’s in the wrong environment or—
(Goddamnit, why did she have to leave? She needed him! She was supposed to be just a helpless princess! He was supposed to be her prince!)
He gasps through the fear, alone in Nanami’s room, and then forces his mind to more important things: namely, how the social structure of Ohtori is going to change with her absence. Himemiya’s absence has shaken things up, but not by much—the Chairman hasn’t yet found a new Rose Bride, but the student body has found new underdogs to pick on, new targets for their hatred. As soon as they get the dueling cycles back up everything can go back to normal. Because it will go back to normal. The Chairman is too clever and smart and influential and charismatic and powerful for it to not go back to normal. Even with Nanami gone. Right?
Right?
Saionji surprises Touga by being the third to leave.
Unlike Nanami, he has the grace to say goodbye in person. He knocks at the door to Touga’s room with a hesitance unlike him, a nervousness about him that Touga hasn’t seen since childhood. He’s wearing the outfit he wore when he was expelled, the jean-jacket-with-jeans combo that Touga and Akio had made fun of in private.
“Touga,” he almost-whispers. “I need to tell you something.”
“Are you leaving,” Touga whispers back. There’s no emotion in his voice. He doesn’t have the strength to put it there.
“Yes,” Saionji says, voice stronger now. “I’m sorry but—I have to.”
He reaches forward and touches Touga with an awkward gentleness, as if he’s just trying it out for the first time, laying his hand on his shoulder before tugging him upwards into a full embrace. There are hands on Touga’s back, laying there with an incredible gentleness, wanting nothing, expecting nothing, there only to touch him in the most innocent way possible and—and Saionji has always been innocent, but all of a sudden Touga wants nothing more than to drag him to the bed, to destroy that innocence, to close the gap that has been between them since forever, to open his eyes and finally, finally put Saionji on equal ground with him if only to make him stay—
“What’s this?” is what he says instead of doing all that.
“I just—I just wanted to make sure that your last memory of me was of affection rather than violence,” Saionji replies.
Saionji’s a fool. He doesn’t know that affection and violence are the same thing.
Touga almost grabs onto Saionji’s hand when he pulls back. Almost. Again, he almost grabs Saionji when he walks out the door—almost. But he doesn’t grab Saionji when Saionji pulls back, or when Saionji leaves the room, and so Touga ends up alone, staring at the almost-closed door that separates them, almost-listening to the footsteps that make their way down the hall and out of hearing range.
That’s what Saionji is now, Touga supposes. Out of range.
Just an hour later Touga sees Saionji again—through the window overlooking the gate to the school. He’s with a girl—the girl he’s been hanging out with these past few months, the one who was the previous Victor’s friend, the Black Rose Duelist who had hidden him after he was expelled—Touga has a vague memory of that girl yelling and shouting as he caressed—he think it was the previous Victor’s hand. He thinks that girl doesn’t like him very much. But she sure likes Saionji, he realizes as he watches the two intertwine hands and step through the gate past the end of the world together, and the realization that he’s been replaced sours in his throat, his chest, his gut.
At least Saionji had the misplaced decency not to tell him outright.
Good for him was all Juri had said when Touga had informed her and Miki about Saionji’s disappearance, so it’s no shock when she’s the fourth to leave.
What is a shock is how badly it affects him. He and Juri were hardly friends, but Juri’s departure feels like an omen. The Chairman (Acting Chairman, really, but) has been mentioning that some of the random, unspecial students have started to disappear or transfer away, and Touga can only see the trickle increasing now that their fencing captain is gone. He wonders if the start of the trickle ha d anything to do with Saionji leaving.
(He still hasn’t told the Chairman about Saionji visiting him before he left. It’s not—it wouldn’t be good for the Chairman to hear. )
Touga and Miki are the only ones left on the Council, now. He can tell it’s going to be a struggle to keep the Chairman away from Miki. He wonders if the Chairman is going to find any replacements for the missing Council members. Privately, he hopes so—the Chairman is becoming stressed and anxious, and he’s starting to take it out on Touga. Touga doesn’t much like being a punching bag.
(Is this what Anthy felt like all the time?)
“What are we going to do?” Miki asks him, voice shaking. It brings him out of his darker thoughts. “We’re going to need new Council members—we can’t do all of the work. We’re just two people.”
The work isn’t actually what it’s about. The Duels are what it’s about. Touga’s starting to lose confidence in his ability to read people, and he hates it, especially hates it when it fails him around people he’s known for months (years?). But he can’t show it.
“I’m sure the Chairman will find suitable replacements in time for the next cycle,” he soothes, sounding perfectly confident. He’s always been a good liar.
Miki narrows his eyes at him. “Really?” he says, voice tinged with disbelief.
…shit.
“I must admit, it may take a while to get things under control.” He sighs and leans back in his chair. “But have faith. I’m sure we’ll all go back to normal soon enough.”
(Touga isn’t sure if he’s trying to comfort Miki or himself.)
Miki is the fifth to leave, putting in a transfer request to some arts college and walking out the door with Kozue’s arm slung around his shoulder. With him gone Touga’s all alone.
He’s not the first to leave that week. He’s not even the first to leave that day. Touga’s instincts had been right: Juri’s disappearance had heralded an opening of the floodgates, and Ohtori’s hemorrhaging students by the hundreds. But Miki leaving—especially leaving alongside Kozue—surprises him in a way that it shouldn’t, given that it’s become a pattern now. Miki must have been swept up in the sea of people leaving, or perhaps swept up in specifically Kozue’s departure.
I t doesn’t matter. What matters is that Miki is gone now, just like Juri, just like Saionji with that girl, just like Nanami gone in the night, just like Anthy and the last Victor (not even the previous Victor. The last. Touga can no longer deny the sense of finality to this whole thing.). What matters is that Touga is alone and the Chairman is growing worse by the day. What matters is that his popularity is waning, his appeal drying up, his power slipping away from him despite his best efforts. What matters is that his carefully-controlled environment is spiraling out of his control, and he has no idea what he’s going to do when he loses his power, when everything has changed and become strange and impossible.
(What matters is: he’s scared.)
Touga wants to say he’s the last special one left, but the distinction between special and not is losing meaning day by day, and nothing drives that home more than walking into an assembly of everyone remaining at Ohtori and realizing he knows all of their names. Or thinking about how he used to get dozens of love letters daily and how now people give him the stinkeye in the hall.
He wanders the halls of the Kiryuu residence sometimes, like it’s an unfamiliar maze rather than his home. It’s empty without any girls to play with him inside, without Saionji charging through the halls, without even Nanami to complain about every little thing. The only other living thing in the entire house is Tabby. It’s empty, and that emptiness is reflected in Touga. He is not enough to fill it. He is not even enough to fill himself.
The Chairman has been getting even worse, growing careless. He’s started to leave bruises during their altercations. Touga no longer visits of his own volition, and dread pools in his stomach at every summons. When he gets out the other students stare at him with pity in their eyes. (Would it be so bad if he just…refused to go?)
It’s rare that he goes to class, and people notice that too. So much so that when the math teacher dismisses the few students left to work on their assignments he gets a care package dumped on his desk.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” Ichika (dark green hair, brilliant purple eyes, so much like Saionji it hurts) says. “This isn’t me being flirty. I don’t want to go out with a heartbreaker. But the rest of us have been talking and you’re clearly not doing well, and it feels like it’d be mean to just ignore you. So we made this. Group effort. Not flirting.”
“Not flirting,” he repeats dumbly. “Got it.”
“Good. Now make sure you take care of yourself, cuz god knows the teachers aren’t gonna do it.” She stomps off, but pauses a few steps away. “We can all see the bruises on your neck, you know.”
Touga grimaces. “I, uh, I guessed.”
“If it’s one of the students let someone know and we’ll stop them. If it’s one of the teachers then—tell us anyway. We’ll cover for you.”
There’s a lump in his throat. “I will,” he lies.
He really isn’t special anymore, he thinks as he watches Ichika’s back. But maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.
The Chairman’s next summons shakes in Touga’s hand. He doesn’t want to go, but the Chairman will likely simply hunt him down if he doesn’t show. So he walks through the ghost halls of the school, feeling for all the world like the last person in the entire world, and enters the tower feeling like nothing more than an obedient dog. Through the hall, up the elevator, out into the tip of the tower.
Akio beckons him closer. He doesn’t move.
“Touga,” Akio says. There’s a warning in his voice.
Touga still doesn’t move.
“Touga,” Akio snaps. “Come here.”
“No.”
The room is silent. Kiryuu Touga never says no—he’s struggled sometimes, as of late, but he never turns down power, never turns down an opportunity to make his body work for him.
“Touga, dear,” Akio says, sickly sweet and smiling like a threat display. “What’s this about?”
He has to gather his thoughts, but what comes out of his mouth is: “You have nothing to offer me anymore.”
“I make you special. I give you power.”
“There are less than one hundred students left at Ohtori, and none of them listen to me. Special is meaningless and you have no power to offer.”
“Come here, Touga,” he insists.
“No.” Only now does he move. In one swift motion, he tosses the ring from his finger and steps back into the elevator. “I’m leaving like the rest of the Duelists did. I should have left when they did.”
That makes Akio very, very angry, but Touga, to be crass, simply has no more fucks to give. If Akio lays a hand on him he’ll fight like Nanami fought him. But the elevator doors close before Akio reaches him, so he doesn’t have to do that.
The elevator shudders downward, and for half a terrifying second he thinks it’s going to trap him inside forever, but it opens on the ground floor like normal. He doesn’t let himself think about it too much. He has work to do.
First, he goes home, finds scissors in the kitchen, positions himself in front of the bathroom mirror, and cuts off his hair.
He’s startled by his own laughter. He looks like a maniac with this new sloppy haircut, and he sounds like one too, but he practically runs down the hallways to pull out his travel suitcase and stuff it full of clothes that he likes, toiletries, soap, Tabby’s cat food, shampoo, conditioner, everything he can think of to pack. Tabby darts between his legs, meowing and purring in response to her owner’s mad joy. When he’s changed into new clothes, leaving his Student Council uniform crumpled on the floor as an almost-deliberate fuck you, he kneels and Tabby claws her way up his arm to curl around his shoulders and purr even louder. God he loves this cat.
His strides are confident as he walks to the gate and it isn’t even a lie. A younger black-haired boy (Tanama, he thinks his name is) spots him and waves before running off, likely to tell the other students. He wishes them all the best. But he has to go now.
What is it like out there, he wonders. Will the world be full of Victors—of Tenjous—of Utenas? Has Nanami found another group of friends, one who like her for her and not for her fame? Will Saionji be out there, just beyond the gates, living happily with Shinohara, waiting for him? Has Anthy found peace and health beyond the ends of the world? Has Juri found her miracles, Miki his music?
What will Touga find?
Only one way to find out, he thinks, and steps over the edge into the new world.
