
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12025260.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/F, F/M
  Fandom:
      Shoujo_Kakumei_Utena_|_Revolutionary_Girl_Utena
  Relationship:
      Himemiya_Anthy/Tenjou_Utena, Himemiya_Anthy/Ohtori_Akio
  Character:
      Himemiya_Anthy, Tenjou_Utena, Ohtori_Akio
  Additional Tags:
      Canon-Typical_Violence, Sibling_Incest
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-09-07 Words: 3462
****** The Time of Monsters ******
by SouthSideStory
Summary
     This is the key: orphans want to be nurtured, the friendless crave an
     audience of peers, and all lonely creatures desire intimacy. Utena
     may be the loneliest creature at Ohtori, after Anthy herself. And the
     thing about loneliness is, no matter how you try to outrun it, it
     always catches up to you.
                                       .
                                       .
 this is a story about the monsters and lovers and the gory pawns in between.
             this is a story about how they become the same thing.
how my ribs break themselves to let her scrape her way between the flesh of my
   lungs. how I bleed. how she screams. how mouths only know how to bruise.
                                       .
                                       .
They all know she’s used, that she’s given herself to countless suitors. They
know, and yet each of the duelists―her captors, her playthings―treats Anthy
like she’s theirs alone. An untouched land, just waiting to be claimed by the
right conqueror.
It’s strange, Anthy thinks. Humans have the most fascinating ability for self-
deception.
                                       .
                                       .
Saionji is both the most difficult and the easiest to deal with. He’s a petty,
jealous creature driven by childish wants, and like a child, he’s thoughtless,
selfish, fearful. He strikes her and enjoys her suffering, and when he takes
her it’s always as rough as he can make it. It hurts Anthy’s pride to serve a
boy so weak and needy, but Saionji is nothing if not predictable, and there’s
some relief in that. He never surprises her.
Juri is such a disdainful girl, so cynical and distant to look at her, but
that’s a mask. Anthy can see straight through it, because she’s been wearing a
mask of her own for centuries, for ages, for time immemorial. Juri wants to
appear aloof, to be strong, but she’s the most vulnerable of them all, poisoned
by love. That love works to Anthy’s benefit, though, so she doesn’t mind. Juri
doesn’t want her, and she only bothers to exercise her rights as a victor once.
Her passion is driven by such a desperate, hopeless need to be touched by any
girl’s hands that Anthy can only pity her for it.
Poor Miki is confused. He isn’t made of stern enough stuff to keep pace with
the rest of the council. Much too naive for the game he’s caught up in, but
when you get right down to it, he’s as ambitious as the others. He wants the
power that owning her will bring, and that desire pushes the limits of his
kindness.
Touga is something else altogether. He’s far and away the cleverest, the
cruelest, the most cunning. When it’s his turn to possess the Rose Bride, Touga
spends every moment of their engagement weighing her worth, trying to pry loose
her secrets. He asks sharp questions veiled by charm, whispered in her ear or
against her throat when they’re caught in the heat between his bedsheets. Even
if Anthy couldn’t read every thought going through his head, she’d know his
intentions. Having her isn’t enough for a boy like Touga; he wants to
understand her power, to take it and harness it for his own. He wants to be
free of this wretched place, to escape from the noose her brother has fitted
around his neck.
Because Akio―well, the less she thinks of Akio, the better.
                                       .
                                       .
Tenjou Utena is an oddity. No one ever leaves Ohtori, and it’s rare for anyone
new to arrive. The whole school (as much as Ohtori is a school at all) fusses
over her, admiring her beauty, her strength, her unapologetic rebellion against
the staff’s stuffy restrictions. She’s lovely and fearless in a place that’s
ugly and terrifying, but that isn’t why the student body is so taken with her.
Even though their classmates can’t understand the truth, they must sense that
Utena does not belong. That people don’t just wander from the outside world
onto this campus.
“What do you think of her?” Akio asks.
They’re lying on the couch in the observatory. The vast windows are shuttered,
so that no one can look out and no one can look in. Akio is feeling generous
tonight, and his touch is almost tender when he pulls her close.
“Think of who?” Anthy asks.
Akio runs his hand down her side and settles it on her hip. He squeezes hard
enough to mark.
“Don’t play at ignorance with me,” he says. “I know better.”
He does. Still, sometimes Anthy likes to test him, to remind herself that
someone sees her as she really is.
“Tenjou Utena,” Anthy says. It’s the first time she’s said the girl’s name, and
it leaves a bitter taste on the back of her tongue. “She seems stupid. Brave,
but stupid.”
Akio hums, tilts his head back, and says, “You’re not wrong about that, but
there’s much more to her. I wouldn’t have brought Utena here if she had no part
to play.”
His grasp on her hip has softened to a caress, and Anthy resigns herself to the
fact that he’ll have her again tonight. He’s restless for some reason, maybe
because of this girl.
She closes her eyes so that she doesn’t have to look at him. Akio’s true form
shows itself clearest at night, and without sunlight to hide it, she can see
the darkness within him, surrounding him, wrapping around them both.
“So what’s her part?” Anthy asks.
Akio cups the curve where her thigh meets her bottom, fingers pushing between
her legs. He presses his lips to her forehead as he does it, his kiss chaste
and brotherly. It’s off-putting when he gets like this, tangling their public
personas and private lives together.
Anthy buries her face against his chest. She can smell herself on his skin. It
once repulsed her, but she’s so used to it now that almost nothing can repulse
her.
He tells her to ride him, to cry, to smile. So Anthy rides him and cries and
smiles.
He talks about Tenjou Utena throughout all of it. He has plans for Ohtori, for
the two of them, for the world they’ve going to transform, and Utena is the
key. When he gets close, Akio sits up, wraps his arms around her, and tucks his
face into her hair.
“She’s the answer,” he whispers. His breathing has grown labored, but it
doesn’t unsteady his voice. “We’re going to use her to tear this place to the
ground, to take back what’s ours. You understand?”
Anthy nods. She moves the way he wants her to, loses herself in the
mindlessness of obedience until she feels him shudder and gasp.
She can tell that something in Akio isn’t quite sated, even if his body is
spent, and sure enough, he only gives her a moment of rest before he says,
“You’ll have to be very careful with this one. She’s naive, so that will make
ensnaring her easy enough, but keeping her will be harder. Utena isn’t the sort
to be kept by anyone.”
Akio sounds almost fond, and it sends a spike of red-hot resentment to the pit
in her chest where compassion once lived.
“Well then why don’t you deal with her?” Anthy asks.
He laughs. “Oh, I’ll have my turn, but things will go more smoothly if you
soften her up first.”
She should probably say something agreeable, like of course, or as you wish, or
whatever you want. It will save her pain if she swallows her pride, but Anthy
says nothing.
Akio grabs her hair and yanks her head back, so that she has to look up at him.
His eyes are green and empty, a mirror image of her own.
“Don’t be jealous,” he says. “Utena is only a tool, and unless I’m very wrong,
she’ll be more of a challenge than the others. You can’t tell me that that
doesn’t excite you at least a little.”
It does excite her. Immortality has taught Anthy a great deal, but more than
anything else, she’s learned that eternity is boring.
Akio pushes her away, and she falls against the couch cushions (white, white
couch cushions that never dirty, no matter how often she is dirtied here). He
stands up and starts pulling on his clothes while she lies there, sprawled and
exposed. Anthy knows better than to get dressed without his permission.
“You should be grateful,” Akio says, as he buttons his jacket. “I’m letting you
have her first.”
So what? She’s been the first for others before. It didn’t change anything.
Nothing ever changes here, Anthy’s lot least of all.
She says, “Thank you.”
                                       .
                                       .
Utena steals her from Saionji without even meaning to. She challenges him on
behalf of her vapid friend, Wakaba, and walks away with much more than she
bargained for.
Anthy has never been engaged to someone who didn’t want something from her. The
others lust after her body, her power, the perfected submission that she
provides. But not Utena. All she wants is to be left out of the council’s
machinations, to be a normal school girl. That, Anthy would like to tell her,
is never going to happen. A thousand lifetimes have given her an excellent eye
for the extraordinary, and Utena, more than anyone Anthy has seen since Akio in
his glory days (before he was Akio, before he fell from grace), has the air of
the extraordinary. She’s the sort whose fate is threaded through the fabric of
revolution without even trying.
No wonder the rest of the council hates her so much. Utena stumbles on and
refuses everything they fight for.
“Please stop saying we’re engaged,” Utena says, in the middle of the night, a
few short weeks after her first duel.
Anthy plays with the ends of her hair, idly thinking about dying it a hideous
color, cutting it short, shaving it off. She won’t, of course, but sometimes
it’s nice to fantasize about such things.
“Are you listening?” Utena asks.
She’s too kind to shout, but not so weak that she’ll keep quiet when she wants
Anthy’s full attention and isn’t getting it. If Anthy is honest with herself,
she can admit that this is half the reason she so often refuses to answer Utena
right away.
“Hmm?” Anthy asks. “Sorry, Miss Utena. I was dozing off. What did I miss?”
Utena groans, flops over onto her stomach, and covers her head with a pillow.
“Nothing,” she says, the sound muffled by her melodrama.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Utena is just a girl, the same age as Anthy,
but infinitely younger.
She’s careful to keep her voice as neutrally apologetic as possible when she
says, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t listening. I’m not being a very good bride
tonight.”
Utena sits up and puts her head in her hands. Her hair falls around her
shoulders, long and luxuriously feminine even when sleep-tousled. It’s the only
thing about her that’s deliberately girlish, and Anthy wonders if Utena might
keep styling her hair this way so that her prince will recognize her.
Utena climbs out of her bed, strides over to Anthy’s, and stands there with her
hands on her hips. Slim hips, almost narrow enough to be a boy’s, but so
pretty, just like the rest of her. When she gives in, Utena will be the most
beautiful of Anthy’s conquests; the most beautiful of her possessors.
“You’re not my bride,” Utena says. “I don’t care what kind of games the stupid
student council plays. It isn’t right to treat you like property. It doesn’t
matter if I win a hundred duels; the only way you should belong to me, or
anyone else, is if you want to.”
She’s such a foolish girl. Her idealism might be admirable if it wasn’t so
terribly trite and fruitless.
“But if I want to belong to you, would you accept me then, Miss Utena?” Anthy
asks.
Utena gapes, blushes, then says, “No! I mean, I do accept you, as a friend. But
if you mean something else―or more, or―that’s not what I’m trying to get from
you, okay?”
Yet, Anthy thinks. That isn’t what you want yet.
“As you say, Miss Utena.”
                                       .
                                       .
Anthy keeps as much distance as she can, and she takes care to avert her eyes
when Utena would prefer not to be scrutinized, but she’s watching all the same.
For such a popular, gregarious girl, Utena is awfully isolated and friendless.
Her only consistent companion is Wakaba, and the difference in their regard for
each other is so profound it’s laughable. Wakaba looks at Utena like she’s the
sun in her sky; Utena looks at Wakaba like a hapless damsel in need of constant
rescue.
She has no real family. An only child with dead parents and a neglectful aunt
who shipped her off to Ohtori without a second thought―although, to be fair,
Akio summoned Utena here, and poor Auntie Whatshername could never have
resisted that magic.
This is the key: orphans want to be nurtured, the friendless crave an audience
of peers, and all lonely creatures desire intimacy. Utena may be the loneliest
creature at Ohtori, after Anthy herself. And the thing about loneliness is, no
matter how you try to outrun it, it always catches up to you.
                                       .
                                       .
Utena’s greatest weakness is her obsession with an illusory, fairytale prince.
That’s an affliction of the heart that Anthy can understand, because the thing
she yearns for most―above power, above peace, above freedom―is to regain the
pure love of her prince. The ache of his absence feels like swords in her side,
through her chest, between her legs, down her throat. She’s silenced and
crippled by her need for him.
In the twilight gloom of the garden, Utena could almost be Dios. They look
nothing alike, but bodies are only shells for the spirits within, and Anthy
catches glimpses of the prince Utena could someday be.
“Roses are so thorny,” Utena says. “Don’t you ever hurt your fingers?”
Anthy plucks a stray weed from the earth. It’s trying to strangle her flowers
from the roots, and that simply won’t do.
“Of course not. My roses are unfailingly agreeable. Why would they hurt me?”
Anthy asks.
“Uh, right.”
Utena has a very particular tone of voice that comes out when she thinks Anthy
is acting strangely but doesn’t want to acknowledge it. Making Utena squirm
like this is a petty entertainment, but the last millennium has been very short
on amusements, so Anthy forgives herself for it.
She tends to her garden and watches Utena struggle with math homework. She sits
in the dirt with a battered textbook balanced on her knees, worrying a pencil
eraser between her teeth.
“How’s algebra?” Anthy asks.
Utena closes the book and jumps to her feet, smiling. “Boring and impossible.
Wanna get out of here?”
Anthy sits up, shakes the black soil from her fingers, and says, “Oh yes, but
I’m afraid I can’t. New rosebuds require extra care. If I don’t take my time
with them, they won’t enjoy blooming as much as they should.”
Utena stands up a little straighter, the way she does when she’s nervous. Good,
because that flirtation was about as subtle as a hammer, and Anthy might rip
her hair out if one more innuendo goes straight over Utena’s pretty pink head.
Virgins are so endlessly tiresome.
“Okay!” Utena says, all false, bright cheer. “I’ll catch you later then.”
“See you at bedtime,” Anthy says.
Utena runs from the greenhouse, cheeks flaming red, and Anthy thinks, Finally.
It will happen soon, and she’s thankful for an end to the dread, the
anticipation.
But another week passes, then two, then more. Utena fights her way through the
student council, cutting down opponents with skill and luck and the grace of
Dios. All this time, and Utena never makes a single demand of Anthy, except for
her to be herself.
Like she has a self to be anymore. Like it wasn’t stripped away long ago.
Utena wins and wins, until she doesn’t. Touga, that wretch, is as underhanded
as he is clever. He knew he could never beat Utena outright, so he employed the
lowest of methods to defeat her.
Utena loses, and Anthy ends up under the president’s thumb again. Touga doesn’t
even want her, but he uses her anyway, simply to spite Utena.
Afterward, he plays with her hair and says, “Tell me about her.”
“She’s just a girl,” Anthy says. “Nothing compared to you.”
Touga laughs. “You really are a false little thing. Could you even be true if
you tried?”
Something withers within Anthy when she smiles. “I could be whatever you want,
Master Touga.”
                                       .
                                       .
Utena seems crushed by the weight of her failure, brought low by a boy, and
Anthy thinks, You weren’t so special after all. Why would Akio put so much
stock in this girl’s resilience when one loss could disarm her so completely?
But then she faces Touga again, and that’s when Anthy sees what Akio has seen:
Utena’s will may be fractured, but only a miracle could break it.
When Touga falls and Utena rises, the rose on her breast intact, Anthy has to
blink away tears. She’s being rescued. Someone came back for her, and in the
quietest corner of Anthy’s heart, she feels hope for the first time in forever.
She returns to Utena’s room and promises herself that tonight will be the
night.
It’s bright for the late hour, the dorm illuminated by silver moonlight, and
Anthy can make out the shape of Utena across the room, tossing and turning in
bed.
“Can’t sleep?” Anthy asks.
Utena sighs, then says, “I’m so sorry that I lost. That you had to go back to
him because of me.”
Anthy gets up, walks across the room, and sits on Utena’s bed. She knows how
she looks: dark curls loose and wild, the hemline of her nightgown riding high
on her thighs. Higher still, as she moves so that she’s straddling Utena’s lap.
There’s a blanket and pajamas separating them, but Utena still startles and
sits up, saying, “Anthy!”
“Yes?”
Utena grips the sheets, and she looks fit to burst from embarrassment. It’s
endearing in the most annoying way.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
Anthy ignores that question, because Utena knows very well what’s happening
here.
Her knees are shaking, knuckles white, hips shifting―so minutely that Utena
probably doesn’t even notice, but Anthy does. Anthy notices everything about
her.
“I’m glad to be with you again,” she whispers, and it’s true. It’s the most
honest thing she’s ever said to a duelist, and no, no, no, that’s not
acceptable. Akio will rip that kind of dangerous thinking right out of her if
he discovers it.
“I’m glad too,” Utena says. Her fingers twitch like she’s trying not to touch,
not to take.
Go ahead.Anthy almost wants to pray, to beseech any god listening for Utena to
claim what’s hers.
Instead, Utena sits up, wraps her arms around Anthy’s waist, and says, “You
don’t have to do this. Not with me.”
It’s a sweet thought, but if she keeps failing to make headway in Utena’s
seduction it will infuriate Akio. When Akio is angry, he makes Anthy suffer in
every way he can think of, and he’s such a creative man, her brother.
“I know,” Anthy lies. “You’re not like the others. You’re different.”
Everyone likes to hear that, no matter how noble they are.
Utena is so tall for a girl that, even sitting in her lap, Anthy will have to
lean up a bit for their lips to touch.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks.
Utena’s hands slide down to her waist and her hold tightens, but not enough to
hurt. She’s gentle, so gentle, and Anthy draws closer, tilts her chin up. She
waits, but the kiss never comes.
Anthy leans into Utena’s embrace, allows herself be held up instead of held
down for once. “Is something wrong?”
“No, but I thought youwere going to kiss me,” Utena says. She’s smiling,
playful, and so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her.
Anthy closes the breath of space between them and takes the kiss that Utena
should have taken from her. It’s chaste, the barest press of lips, innocent
need without lust. Utena gives herself over to it, the tension in her body
melting away, mouth soft and pliant under Anthy’s. She means to tease, to wrap
her legs around Utena’s waist and offer up her body slowly, piece by piece, but
Anthy finds that she can’t. Not with Utena cradling her like she’s made of
glass, tasting her so sweetly, without expectation. As if this kiss is an end
unto itself.
                                       .
                                       .
    how the moonlight bathes us in the brightest kind of light. how nerves
 electrify. how hearts terrify. how she shows her teeth and the spine quivers.
              how she is the most tender lover I have ever known.
                    gently, we howl at the stars together.
                     gently, we swallow each other whole.
                               - Emily Palermo -
                        “Love in the Time of Monsters”
                                       .
                                       .
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