Moonshadows

            The power to revolutionize the world hurts.

            That’s something he never told them, I bet.

            None of them knew. None of them cared. None of them would have shed even a single tear for the witch who stole the Prince away from the world and slowly strangled its dreams. She was always something more to them – and something less. Validation. Redemption. Comfort. Power. I wonder how often they passed her around amongst themselves, wonder if each of them had drawn that sword from her chest.

            I wonder if he ever drew that sword from her, if it felt as good as it did when he drew mine. That might explain why she submitted to him, let him use her like that. I can’t blame her – I was ready to do the same.

            I almost drowned beneath my own dream

            I almost became the next Rose Bride.

            So much betrayal happened in that room. She betrayed me, he betrayed her, I betrayed myself. Even Dios, my Prince, betrayed me in the end by doing nothing.

            But I never betrayed her. I merely failed her – or at least, that’s what I thought.

            A million times I felt the sting of that betrayal by someone I loved, and a million times I apologized for having failed her. A million tears as the shattered dreams of a million people sliced into me. The swords of hatred aimed at the Prince for abandoning them, betraying them. With no Rose Bride to crucify, they came for me. And I welcomed them. This pain I would bear for Himemiya. I would spare her that much. Isn’t that what a Prince would do? Maybe, when they’d drunk of my blood and tears, they would return sated to their masters.

            I’m sorry, I said to each one as it pierced my heart, violated my soul. I’m sorry I couldn’t be your Prince. Maybe you can do a better job of it and save your Princess.

            I don’t think I even noticed when the last one had ravaged me and vanished. I was too lost in the pain of changing the world, shredded and bleeding, drowning inside myself.

I can’t remember what happened after that, nor how long it took to come back. The memories are flickering, ephemeral, like something seen out of the corner of your eye. Hospital. Asylum. White-gowned nurses and green-clad doctors shaking their heads and making sounds of pity over me, mutters of blood loss and oxygen starvation, reduced faculties and vegetative states.

I don’t even remember when she came for me, or how she got me out.

What I do remember is a house made of golden wood, and a window with white curtains and sunflowers. A bed that was more like a box, and plain linen sheets under a faded patchwork quilt. Tea in a rose-shaped cup, cool hands stroking my hair and warm eyes watching with faith. Cool cucumber sandwiches and sugared roses, warm cookies and cold lemonade. And always, her smile. The kind of smile my mother wears, in the dark and tangled dreams that end in heavy bells, darkness, and the scent of roses as I hide from the world.

Once, there was a voice. It cut the air like a sword, slender and strong, demanding to see me. Another voice, soft as rose petals, chased him away.

I remember looking at the slanted wood over my bed, following the slope down to the top of the window. The sky was blue and a few clouds drifted by. The sunflowers outside nodded and swayed in the breeze, looking like girls gossiping. There were footsteps to my left and I turned to watch her enter the empty room, a tray in her hands and a yellow scarf holding her hair back. She smiled when she saw me looking, like she’d been waiting for me to look at her and not through her.

“Oh,” she said, pleasantly surprised. “You’re awake.”

Her voice was as soft as rose petals.

I wanted to ask her where I was, who she was, why I was here and how long I’d been…but somehow, I couldn’t make words form. I think I’d forgotten how.

She didn’t say much. Short, gentle sentences that seemed somehow abrupt, like she was ending them prematurely. “Lunch is ready,” or “Why don’t you sit here, by the window?” No idle chatter, nothing to hint at where we were or why I was there. Nothing to tell me who she was or why she cared.

No names. Not the slightest hint as to who I had been.

Words came back to me slowly. “Thank you” and “Yes, please.” I learned how to perform the simple acts of living as though remembering the motions but not where I had learned them. I became less passive, not content to just sit at the window and watch her toil with the plants outside. I explored the little house, wandering and stretching my mind as I absently stretched my body, the motions so familiar and yet…I couldn’t remember why.

The memories came back as surprisingly as the words did, slipping into my mind like thieves, slipping out of my mouth like tiny fish. I gathered them in my mind, polished and arranged them like tiles in a mosaic, every day adding a handful more, waiting and watching to see what picture would reveal itself.

“How is she? Can I see her?”

The man with the katana voice was back. I was by the window across from the little room I slept in, wearing plain white linen. It didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t yet remember what did.

“She’s not-“

The rose-petal protest never got further than that, because suddenly he was in the room, looking at me with eyes that flinched away from mine.

“She still-“ He gestured at me, frustrated and helpless.

“These things take time,” she told him, taking his hands in hers. “She’s coming along very well for what she went through. I’m sure-“

He ripped his hands out of hers, a frustrated snarl twisting his face. His right hand pulled back – and went to his hair. When they both turned to look at me, I realized I’d said ‘don’t’ and was halfway to him, one hand out to grab his wrist before he- what? I didn’t quite remember but I felt it stirring inside me.

He looked at me in surprise, bitterness and frustration, and then he laughed.

“Well well, it seems she truly is a Prince.”

She gave him a look of exasperation and amusement, rolling her eyes and smiling, and then she stiffened – and so did he. Again, they looked at me, but now with fear. As though that one word were one I shouldn’t hear. I backed away, curled up on my window seat and turned my gaze to the garden, pretending they weren’t there. After a hushed moment, they left.

Prince. It stirred up memories, emotions. Red with black, a silver ring with a rose. Lilac and white, soft lips and darkness and a quiet cry of pain without hope. Swords and hard eyes and a red car, red fabric that fluttered in the breeze and the knowledge that there was something I had to do.

My dreams that night were a tangle. Faces, motions that had once been so familiar to me. Rose vines and a stone door, tears and hope and the hot shock of betrayal. I woke up filled with determination, although what my goal was, I couldn’t remember. I just knew there was something I had to do, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t remember what it was.

“I am a Prince.” The words felt right, brought with them the sense that they had been said many times, images flashing by like cards being shuffled. Girls in white shirts, red ties, green skirts. Boys in green jackets, green pants. The stylized image of a rose. Slapping his hand away from my hair-

Who?

Whose hand had I slapped like that?

She watched me intently after the fateful word had been uttered, remote and poised as though holding her breath in anticipation. I was remote in turn, all my attention on the blank spaces within my mind, mental fingers scrabbling at them like they had once scratched at the rose-covered stone, seeking what was within with desperation that burned away all other thoughts.

The earlier memories gave way first. Childhood. My parents. Despair and darkness, the coffin full of roses and two voices arguing over me. Determination to not be a helpless girl – there was something I had to do. I’d promised…somebody. But my mind shied away from who or what, the memories sealed behind the rose-covered door of white marble.

Elementary school. Middle school. Transferring to an academy containing all levels of education, from preschool to college, the school crest matching the one on my ring-

My ring? But my fingers were bare now. I studied my left hand, my ring finger, looking for what wasn’t there. Had there been a ring? Was there a band of flesh there that was just a bit lighter than the rest of my skin? Absently, thumb caressed the underside of my finger, but there was no band there to feel. Pinky and middle finger rubbed against their neighbor, but no metal pressed back. That, too, remained behind the rose-sealed door.

Black and red – my uniform. Neither boy nor girl, but something else. Prince. A girl with big eyes and a bigger forehead shrieking my name, launching herself at me. Rolling my eyes, carrying her because it was easier than trying to get her off, the protest as instinctual as breathing. Wakaba, you’re heavy.

Wakaba. I rolled the name around in my mind, the only name I knew. I remembered her now, the name unlocking memories. Not getting the same dorm. Making me lunch. Declaring her love for me because it was safer than chasing her dream of the man with the katana voice, confronting him for her sake over the love letter-

The rose gate stopped me. I stepped around it and pressed on.

-her admiration that I’d fought for her honor, continued devotions, always cheerful. Always firmly convinced that I was a Prince. The arrival of her true Prince, the rose gate again, Wakaba and her Prince Onion tentatively reconnecting.

“I remembered Wakaba today.”

She looked up, eyes like deep pools, green and mysterious. I didn’t usually talk at dinner, and we never spoke of the memories I didn’t have. The statement hung in the air. I wanted to ask her for names, names I could use as swords to batter against the gate in my mind, but then I remembered a man doing just that. His hand, skin as dark as hers, holding a sword with a rose-crested hilt. The blade snapping, flying over the edge, hilt tossed away like yesterday’s garbage.

I stared into her eyes as everything trembled around me. She stared back, uncertainty and fear, cried out for me to get away, the swords-

-I was back in the kitchen, at the table, my dinner cold and forgotten before me. For that instant, I’d almost remembered her name.

Almost remembered mine.

I’d still gained something, however. I knew now that whatever was sealed behind the memory of rose-covered stone, she was a part of it. She knew what I did not, and she was waiting patiently for me to remember. She nodded when I looked up at her, reassuring me with her eyes that it would come back eventually. I nodded back.

Other names returned to me, classmates and teachers, little harmless memories that had nothing to do with roses. The mosaic was half-complete, but it was all background.

I was in the window seat again, looking at the roses, when there was a knock at the door. I waited for her to answer, but she was in the basement and didn’t hear. The knock came again, and I opened the door.

The man with the katana voice stared at me in shock. “Are you…?”

“Am I what?”

He looked away, awkward and angry. “Nothing.”

“Am I what?” His anger sparked mine. “Answer me! Am I what, Saionji?”

He jerked and turned back to face me, but his shock was nothing compared to mine.

Saionji. Kendo club. Angry and arrogant, treating her whatever way he wanted just because she was-

Rose-covered stone. Push it out of the way, damnit, let me remember what I can!

-never forgave me for beating him, never lost his arrogance in his white Student Council uniform, green hair long and luxurious and he knew it, although he never cut as wide a swath through the girls as-

Red hair on the white uniform, a curious mix of yearning and pushing away. Him. It was his hand I’d slapped, his voice Saionji had argued with about leaving me in the coffin. Who-

Saionji looked at me in shock, my fists clutching knots of his shirt.

“Who is he, Saionji?” I couldn’t impose myself this way on her, but it would be expected of me by him.

“Let go of me! Who is who?” For all his anger, he was holding his hands well away from me.

“The man with red hair. The one who was with you in the church. Who is he?”

For just an instant, his eyes flickered sane and calculating under the angry confusion, like he knew what he was about to do but would claim it was an accident if called on it. “…you mean Touga?”

Touga. The memories shook me, battering at white stone and pink roses. They ripped through me like a school of swords, silvery sides glinting with menace as they swarmed down at me. Dimly, I could hear Saionji yelling for Anthy, vaguely see that I was lying in the window seat with the roses nodding at me through the window, but the memories came harder, faster. Anthy now as well as Touga, Miki and Juri and Nanami, rose crest and dueling and milkshakes and butterflies and piano music. The sword-sharp memories burst against my mind, hurling themselves into the mosaic, pain as they cut into me, but still the memory of white stone held – until I heard her voice, her rose-petal voice screaming my name just as she had when the swords turned towards me, fear that she had caused the doom of her only friend-

“Utena!!!”

-and the gate shattered, the coffin opened and there I was, there she was, both of us staring into each other’s eyes as the swords held her pinned, Dios standing helpless behind me, and I knew that if I didn’t find a way to help her, no one would-

-don’t you see, Touga, I have to save her, I have to be her Prince, I can’t be your Princess-

-even a Prince can only do one thing at a time, the rest of us will be waiting when you get back-

-just let me have this moment-

-Akio holding me, my Prince, my sword-

The mosaic was complete. I remembered everything, but it hurt-

-couldn’t stay in my coffin, not after he’d opened it. I had to get up, had to save him because no one else would-

-him?

I was crying. Where was he? He should be kissing away my tears, the way he did in the garden – but I wasn’t crying then. That was the church, and Dios. I wiped my own tears away, feeling something crystallize inside me.

I was a Prince. Even though I was a girl, I was a Prince. Would that make him the Princess that needed saving? Could a boy be a Princess?

Well, if a girl could be a Prince, why not?

They were looking at me, Anthy and Saionji. Green eyes and purple both worried, afraid that I was lost again, identical relieved smiles when I looked back at them, myself once more.

“Is she-“

“-she is.”

“I am.”

I remembered now, what it was I had to do. Wait for me, Touga, my sweet Princess. Your Prince is coming to save you.