Work Text:
U
After three months, she regains consciousness.
A
In the first six months, she tries to find place for herself in a world that is greatly changed from how she understands it. While Otori was not completely divorced from modernity- she knows what a telephone is- it resisted social change. The anonymity of large cities is alien to her. Walking through a crowd was initially harrowing, but the experience of not being hated on sight is thrilling. Some days she travels by underground just so the crowds can jostle her.
U
After nine months, eighteen days, she completes her physical therapy. She can walk but she is much weaker than she is used to and tires easily.
U
After nine months, nineteen days, she starts to search. It is a thing that she can do that has unique value; understanding the things that went wrong at Otori is work for a large team of psychologists. Understanding the oddities of Otori itself though, can only be possible for her and those like her who have escaped. She has learnt at appalling cost not to hope to rescue another, but perhaps it would be possible to make escape easier.
A
After a year and fourteen days, she realises that, though the towers of Otori stand by her brother's will, those outside stand because of the spare, careful arrangement of girders and concrete. Anyone could make them, and they would stand the same. It is a exciting thought.
A
After two years eleven months and five days, she comes to a realisation: there are no special people out here, no ordinary girls. She stops dead in the street. It takes her a years to internalize the revelation.
A
After three years, two months and twenty-eight days, she decides that fitting in with the outside world and waiting for her inevitable reunion with Utena is not all she can aspire to, and she enrols to study engineering.
U
After five years, nine months and fifteen days, she starts her studies of psychology.
A
After six years, seven months, five days, she goes on her first site-visit. They inspect a concrete pour and check crack formation. She sees a short, rusted length of D10 rebar twined around with briar, and without really knowing why, takes it. She keeps it for years, propped up in corners and in dusty storage boxes, carefully not thinking about what it could be.
U
After eight years, ten months and four days, she starts a series of vocational courses, passes some stringent background checks - a number of largely blameless civil servants look rather dazed when they peruse her records - and becomes a social worker. She still searches for anyone who survived Otori, but she searches for other survivors too. She is good at it. Her natural impetuosity and desire to help has been tempered with a very good idea of what you can help people do and what they have to do for themselves. The formal teaching generalised and put in context a lot of things that she already knew the specifics of.
A
Ten years later, Anthy does not meet Utena for tea. They don't meet ten-years-and-a-day later either, the anniversary of them meeting for the very first time. They don't meet ten years after Anthy casts off her accoutrements and steps across the threshold into the world. Anthy watches the years and seasons turn and hope swells in her breast with each anniversary, and then is crushed.
U
Ten years later, Utena does not meet Anthy for tea. They don't have tea ten-years-and-a-day later either, the anniversary of them meeting for the very first time. Nor had they meet after 3544 days - ten lunar years.
Utena notes the dates coming and struggles not to hope. Meeting her by chance ten years to the day, after years of searching would make such a good story; if there is one thing that she learnt at Otori it was to deny fairy-tale roles and story-logic. She continues her search.
A
After Utena fails to fall into her lap on the tenth anniversary she is utterly heartbroken. She also realises that she still thinks like an inmate of Otori; in all the long slow years of her life, great expectations and significant moments have always been met with glory or despicable betrayal. Out here in the real world, forces and matter interact in complex, unpredictable ways, following inhuman imperatives with no regard for her desires. The world grinds on.
U
The search, she tells herself, is the point. Only at odd moments does she find her self fantasising about actually finding. After ten years, she has very nearly convinced herself that finding Anthy would not the culmination of her life.
A
Given that the world is not a story (and she knew it, she knew it all along, and why had she not known it well enough to start looking before now?), she shall start searching now. Not like a questing knight -the image flashes across her mind and is dismissed before it can form: herself, in dull red full plate riding through the world questioning everyone she finds: "have you seen the Grail?". No. She shall search in the way of the real world: files and paper work, official records and phone directories. And making herself very, very obvious, to anyone looking for her.
U
After fourteen years, three months and five days, she finds Nanami. After a few guarded exchanges they open up to each other; they have, after all, survived some completely ridiculous situations together. They keep in touch. Nanami does not see the point in the search. She has a life to live, and she sees the search as looking back at her worst years.
A
After seventeen years and four months, she witnesses a mugging in the street. Fumbling in her purse, her fingers close around the cold pitted surface of her lucky rebar, which could not possibly fit in the confines of her purse. It is one of those incredibly rare occasions that a prince could actually help in an effective manner, so she does not continue fumbling for her phone. Behaving like a prince, it turns out, is awfully hard on the palms.
U
After nineteen years eight months and five days, she suffers a breakdown. Social work is frequently harrowing and although Dios had taught her better than to try and save everyone, Utena had ran herself into the ground trying to help the ones in front of her, and then pushed herself to carry on with the search. Nanami came to visit, found her unconscious but breathing on the floor and dragged her home.
"You're staying in my spare room."
"Thank you."
"I am fantastic aren't I?"
She sleeps the clock around, wakes, eats, babbles incoherently about traumatic and occasionally innocuous cases, and the long-buried horrors of Otori, sleeps again. Nanami listens, feeds her, tells her mundane trivialities and occasionally makes her laugh.
"Sorry but I don't have a creepy upside down bed so you can gaze into my eyes."
After a week of this, she asks why. Nanami doesn't have an answer but has grown to the point that she doesn't try to brush it off.
"I don't know. I can't imagine doing anything else."
There is no spark. There is no romantic interest on either side. They are friends, but if anyone added "and nothing more" they would look at them with contempt. What more can there be than this?
They visit frequently.
Which is why, when Wakaba hammers on her door, she is surprised by Nanami answering it. It is thirty-five years and sixteen days since she promised to have tea with Anthy. The years have added pounds to Wakaba's angular frame, but done nothing to temper her exuberance.
"When I found you lived here, I wanted to crash through your gate on my bicycle and then make you carry me to the hospital."
"Ugh, you are such a show-off. I can't bear people who have to be the centre of attention all the time."
Wakaba laughs the same irrepressible laugh she always did, and Nanami joins in with an even faker version of the 'Oh hoho!' they remember from so long ago.
Alarmingly, the two of them hit it off, and are soon joking like friends "who survived a zombie apocalypse together."
"Get your nerd-germs off of me!"
A
After twenty-seven years, eight months and seventeen days, she realises that roses are blooming in her footsteps. She scowls at them. She avoids stepping on anything but stone or concrete for a week and the roses seem to lose interest. She adds an extra 50 mil of concrete to the foundations of her latest design, just in case.
U
After thirty-seven years, six months and four days, she finds Juri. They never rediscover the easy joy in each others company that they experienced playing badminton with Miki, but they maintain contact in case either of them meets a mutual friend.
A
After forty-two years, four months and two days, she finds her answer, at least her best answer so far, to being very, very obvious. She is quitting her current job to start her own practice. When she clears her desk, she finds her lucky bit of rebar in a long-unopened draw, with a desiccated rose stem still twined about it.
She lands a contract for a design for a tower and gardens. Making the the initial sketches is ... traumatic. She keeps her assistants working late on parts of the designs simply so she will not have to be alone, but once it is done she feels liberated. It is Otori tower, made in steel and concrete and finished in smooth limestone cladding. Getting the student council observation platform right and structurally sound and past the shin-taishin building code is a grinding task, and more-or-less quadruples the cost of the project on its own, but when it is done she has claimed something that she didn't know was hers.
A
After forty-four years, six months and nine days, she goes on her first visit to the rose tower construction site. She takes her lucky rebar and drops it into the foundations with a smile. If the sword of Dios wants to be reborn as a useful piece of construction material, she is happy to help with that ambition.
A
After forty-eight years, two months and sixteen days, her tower stands in reality as well as on her drawing board. It stands, not as illusion or as an imposition of will upon reality, but because, if you are skilled and knowledgeable and clever, you can pile structural elements together just so, and they hold together against the worst that the world will throw at them. When it survives its first force 5 earthquake without a dropped cosmetic element, she smiles. Her tower will stand when she is gone. His could not.
U
After fifty-six years, six months and eighteen days, she takes a holiday to celebrate her seventieth birthday. More accurately, she is made to retire, and then Nanami persuades her to go somewhere where she, Nanami, can sit by a pool and have handsome young men bring her elaborate pineapple drinks. At sixty-nine Nanami is tiny, delicate-looking and apparently indestructible. She has just buried her third husband. Utena is still long and lean and disgustingly healthy. She has kept her hair long and pink- being obvious is part of the search. She runs on the beach for half an hour before breakfast every day.
"Any regrets? You've practically wasted your life." These days when Nanami says things like that, it's something she's earnt.
"The search is meaning enough. I don't expect to find her, not after so long. If I did find her, I'd hope she hadn't waited for me. I search because it's what I want to do, not because finding her will suddenly be the fulfilment of my life."
A
After fifty-eight years, Miki finds her. Still polite and gallant to a fault, he is understandably upset at finding Otori tower unexpectedly leering at him while on holiday. They go out and get revoltingly drunk, much to the disgust of his partner. Miki had worked through his issues with a lot of therapy, not by designing eight-story high phallic symbols. Neither of them has had contact with anyone else from their school days.
A
After seventy-three years two months, she retires from architectural practice.
U
After seventy-eight years, nine months and two days, she dies, ran over by a car. Nanami insists that they write "I do not perceive my attention as wasted." on her grave marker. Initially, Juri has suspicions about the car, but it was a practical boxy electric model and the driver is a traumatised balding forty-something with a steady, unglamourous job, entirely unlike anyone she'd have suspicion of.
A
After eighty-six years, two months and two days, she dies. The air conditioning in her apartment failed and she succumbed to heat exhaustion.
T
After one hundred and sixty years, seven months, eight days, the rose tower is damaged by a more severe earthquake. It is condemned and eventually pulled down. For the brief few months before the site is redeveloped, wild roses grow in the ruins.