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Delhi is a city where things happen undercover. A city where the horizon is blanketed with particulate pollution and the days are hot. A city with no romance but a lot of passion. You ask how passion without romance is possible? The same way sex without a nightlife is possible. Delhi churns slowly, secretively. What emerges is urgency.
—Abha Dawesar, Babyji
The years pass. Anthy grows roses and never grows up. Ohtori Academy continues as it always does: a city-state full of twisting shapes, elaborate games, unfulfilled desire. Ohtori is like a young girl sleeping in shrouds. A beast yet to emerge from its egg. It is less an academy than it is an ugly blemish upon the land: blinding white stone, vast arches, vaulted windows, fluted pillars casting long shadows across a landscape like the surface of the moon. The air is fragrant with roses and rot. A pattern spiralling out into infinity. Anthy, a permanent fixture, has long since stopped pretending to care about school. She spends her time in her garden, playing bride, playing tricks, kicking her feet in the back seats of Mikage’s seminar. She thinks she might be a little fond of the poor fool; certainly she pities him. Most of the characters of Ohtori are as real and fleeting to Anthy as shadows on the wall. But the boy genius has somehow also become frozen in time. Professor Nemuro. Young and old. He’s not as long in the tooth as Anthy or her brother, but he’s certainly more mature than the pretty young things he surrounds himself with.
Akio doesn’t tell her why he still wants Mikage, after the boys all died and the professor failed to reach eternity, and Anthy doesn’t ask.
The newest girl is Ohtori Kanae, the chairman’s daughter. The idea is a little funny; Anthy and Akio built this awful place lifetimes ago, out of magic and death and the blinding glint of so many swords in sunlight, but it is this random child, generations removed from the truth, who carries its name. Anthy wants to laugh every time she sees Kanae, and she is pretty sure Kanae can tell.
Akio woos Kanae like all the others: with roses, with his apple-red car, with a gallant manner and lowered lashes and a lazy mouth. He takes Kanae out on long dates to the city, to the picturesque forest outside the school. He takes her to the movies and to empty classrooms and clearings and churches and in the car and against a tree. Kanae, wide-eyed and dazed, trembles through it all. And at night Akio comes back to Anthy.
“This is the one,” he tells Anthy as she pours tea for both of them in the living room. “I’m close. I think I’ll propose soon.”
A new rise to power. Akio has played many characters before — a fencing instructor, a visiting teacher — but chairman, no, not yet. He’ll become Ohtori Akio; this cycle could be interesting.
“She’s sixteen,” Anthy says in response, and wonders why she says it. It’s never stopped him before. Akio is probably thinking the same thing, because he gives her an odd look before continuing as if Anthy hadn’t spoken.
“Her father is an issue, but we’ll take care of it soon, won’t we?”
Anthy should probably feel bad for Ohtori Kanae and her soon-to-be-dead father. But mostly she feels sorry for herself. Her older brother never concerns himself with the logistics of his plans. It is Anthy’s duty to pick the poison, implement the seduction, wipe the slate clean in the aftermath. Under the thickets of roses, the bodies continue to rot. Nothing ever changes. The witch will always draw the princess into a terrible trap. The prince will always save the princess. And everyone will live happily ever after, except for Anthy, because the prince is tugging her closer, arranging her body so her thighs are braced around him and her skirt rides all the way up. At the awkward angle of the straddle, Anthy can see through the rose-shaped window. The dueling arena glows.
“You’re distracted today,” Akio says. Before Anthy can respond, he casually leans forward and pours his tea over her blouse. Anthy forgets herself and shudders violently at the pain: first shocking and blinding before it dulls into a throbbing heat. It seems like a glaring oversight that for all of Anthy’s magic, for all that she is the Rose Bride, invulnerable and inhuman, she is still physically vulnerable to the most mundane of attacks. Not a single nerve dulled. The tea has completely soaked through her white blouse, staining it almost as dark as her skin. Anthy stumbles out of Akio’s lap and stares at him, betrayed. When he only laughs in response, she knows it’s going to be one of those nights.
“Everything is visible,” he remarks. By everything, he means her nipples, the curve of her breasts. Akio is so childish sometimes. But no one else ever seems to notice.
Anthy feels too irritated and raw to play the role of demure sister, passionate wife, passive to his senselessness; she only swallows once before placing his now empty cup and the teapot onto a tray so she can take it back to the kitchen. That’s allowed, isn’t it? She’s not doing anything. She’s not saying anything. She is only cleaning up the mess.
But Akio grabs her wrist before she can leave. “Anthy,” he says, almost pouting. “Don’t be like that.”
His eyes are warm and, astoundingly, a little playful. Looking at him makes Anthy want to throw up. There’s something young and stupid in his face, his tone a reminder of their childhood. But Anthy isn’t that brave, starry-eyed little girl anymore, untouched and fearless, and Akio isn’t a prince.
“Like what, brother?” asks Anthy. By default she uses her Rose Bride voice, vapid and airy, and she realizes it’s a mistake almost immediately when Akio’s expression flattens.
“Anthy,” he says again: a reprimand. Save it for the sucker who’d believe it. Unfortunately, of all the people in the world, it is Akio who knows Anthy best.
Her jaw twitches. The mask falls. She no longer knows exactly what her expression is doing, but she says acidly: “Can I at least change my blouse first?”
“No,” Akio says, and kisses her.
Lukewarm liquid sloshes out through the spout of the pot; this time, they both ignore it. Somehow the tray makes it back to the table. Anthy is back in his lap. He’s squeezing her chest like he’s trying to wring out the stupid tea. The indignity and ache is nothing more than what Anthy has been experiencing for what feels like her entire life, and then some, but when he tries to capture her mouth again she turns away. Akio considers her while Anthy closes her eyes and tries to breathe.
“Don’t be jealous of Kanae,” he says. “I’m doing this for both of us.”
There’s some kind of agitated tremor in her limbs. She wishes Akio would pull his hair out from where it’s tied back. “I don’t care about Kanae.” It’s a true statement. Kanae is sheltered and naive, and she seems to sincerely like Akio’s little pantomimes, even if her eyes often stray to Anthy’s figure. Kanae will pass, just like all the other girls. Only Anthy is permanent. You can’t break up with your sister. It’s going to be Anthy and Akio, together for eternity…
“The tea, then?” Akio asks. “I’ve been too rude with you, I suppose.”
That’s not—
“Well,” Akio is saying, unbuttoning her blouse, exposing her shoulders, “if my little sister wants the princess treatment, who am I to say no?” His mouth is warm against her skin, a relief against her skin still raw from the scalding liquid. His hands have become gentle, his movements unhurried. When he lowers his head to suckle at her breast, Anthy finally feels her mind float away.
She’ll never be his princess. She knows the castle in the sky isn’t for her. Still: sometimes, Anthy pretends. Often it hurts. This is better, she tells herself, but mostly she doesn’t want to feel anything at all. She wants to be beyond it. Anthy is beyond it. She’s better than the girls who cry and cry and cry after Akio’s done with them. Only Anthy knows how to take it; how to endure.
When she lowers herself onto his cock, her head tips back, her mouth falling open helplessly. The swords push through her chest.
Akio’s gaze is rapturous and worshipping as he rolls his hips into her. A goddess, he used to call her. Before he grew up, learned better, made her dirty. They’ve been playing this game for too long. “You did this,” he says hoarsely, his hands bruising against her skin. “You claimed me first. You said I belonged to you alone. You did this.”
Anthy knows he’s right. But sometimes she wonders why she’s still being punished for it. She presses her face into his neck. Akio smooths a hand over the knobs of her spine.
The stars wheel over them in new constellations. The night wears on. Akio is covering her body now, his long hair falling like a lavender curtain. What would Kanae say, if she could see them now? If Anthy reached down to touch herself, she thinks she could probably come. But she doesn’t. And anyway, it’s coming to an end. Akio grunts as he reaches his release, burying himself inside of her. The sensation is disgusting and warm. Anthy misses being soaked with tea and not with semen. She feels very tired tonight, even though they’re so early into this cycle.
When Akio pulls out of her, some of his seed spills out. He pushes it back in. “Do you want to have a baby, Anthy?”
She knows better than to react. Akio’s hair is pale like an old man’s. There is a sensation inside of her like a black hole. Her brother looks like a stranger in the moonlight. After a long silence, he smirks and pats her flat stomach indulgently. “Just kidding.”
He falls asleep quickly and painlessly not long after. It is always Anthy who has sleepless nights, who rocks herself into hysterical fits, her fist shoved into her mouth. But before she returns to her bed, she touches Akio’s face lightly. When he’s sleeping like this, and if she closes her eyes, Anthy can almost pretend that Dios is still here. She just wants to know that her kind and gentle brother is here, with her, safe and unharmed, not saving princesses and risking his life and getting hurt. The world is cruel: Anthy knows this better than anyone. The cruel world needed a prince to save it. It needed a prince to use and spit back up. But even back then, Anthy had known her own power. She had defied every natural law to save him. Anthy belongs to Akio, but he belongs to her, too.
She kisses her brother’s forehead before she leaves. If she had been wearing lipstick, it would have left the impression of a rose.