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smashcon Title: to those who succumb to fate
Rating: PG
Prompt: Orenda (n.) – A mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
Fandom: Princess Tutu
Words: 6900
Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Summary:
Or: there are some fates that you can’t accept. Especially not fates where you fail to protect anyone.
to those who succumb to fate
orenda (noun) – a mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
---
To those who succumb to fate.
Or: there are some fates that you can’t accept. Especially not fates where you fail to protect anyone.
---
penult
This is how the greatest story ever told, courtesy of D. D. Drosselmeyer, ended: Fakir standing knee deep in the lake named Despair, the body of that duck-like girl from the beginner ballet class pale and lifeless in his arms. In death, Drosselmeyer had left her—lovely, was Fakir’s word for it. Far lovelier than a drowned corpse should look. Not waterlogged and bloated with gas, but… as delicate as Duck had been in life, she was also in death.
He pulled her up with him as Uzura watched from the shore of the lake, banging on her drum steadily. Each beat, perfect and measured like a heartbeat, like what he could hear thundering in his own ears. He dropped his ear to her chest and heard—nothing.
Fakir held her like that for a very, very long time, until he thought the noise of the crows of Gold Crown Town faded to nothing. And then something clapped him on the shoulder, a quick blow that pulled him from his daze and brought him back to the world. When he looked up in panic, it was Autor at his back, frowning down at him.
Autor said nothing, which was good, because Fakir thought he had no words left in him to ask Autor to leave him to his grief.
“I was too late,” Fakir said finally, like the words were being dragged from his mouth. His voice caught on a sob and he felt like he was a child again, standing in the mess of crow’s feathers and blood before his parents’ bodies. “I was too late, I should have stopped him—”
Autor, who had earlier been gleeful beyond words to hear that Drosselmeyer himself had appeared inside the hallowed replica study room, looked at Duck’s still form and seemed to silently understand the nature of the creature he worshipped.
“No—this? This was beyond you, Fakir,” Autor started, but those were the last things Fakir wanted to hear.
“This isn’t how things were meant to go!” Fakir howled. He clutched Duck closer to him, mindless as her head flopped with his shaking. “I was meant to do something this time! I wasn’t meant to be afraid anymore, but when Drosselmeyer appeared and made me start writing, and then—when he was done—”
When Drosselmeyer was done narrating and Fakir’s quill dry of ink, Duck had walked into the lake called Despair, as dark and deep as her eyes, descending into its murk in order to lay down her own life so that her guilt would be absolved. And in doing so, the final heart shard lying in Princess Tutu’s necklace would be returned to Prince Mytho, waiting for dawn to strike the Raven down. With the knowledge that this death would release her from the selfishness of her own desires, Duck returned to whence she had come, Drosselmeyer concluded, and walked away with the swish of his cloak.
Fakir swallowed. He touched her cold face and wondered if Drosselmeyer’s power had made it true: that Duck had died guilt-ridden and alone, when he should have been there with her to protect Mytho. It was the detail that left him empty – that he had sworn to protect Mytho together with her and to never give up, and that he had failed.
“There’s still something else,” Autor said, which made Fakir realise he had been talking aloud. He knelt beside him and steadied Fakir with a hand to his shoulder.
“Princess Tutu’s necklace has the last heart shard,” he continued. “And… the Prince is still waiting.”
“The Raven’s waiting,” Fakir corrected, “but Mytho needs this final heart shard and then he’ll…”
Fight. The last word, which he couldn’t bear to say, and the one thing Fakir had never wanted Mytho to do – not when Fakir was a child watching out for Mytho, not when he raised himself to be a false Knight trying to avoid an inevitable future, not now and not ever.
“He’ll need to battle the Raven,” Autor said, as though he couldn’t see how much Fakir had dreaded it for all these years, “now, or the story of the Prince and the Raven will never end.”
He snuck a look over to Fakir. “And you know what’ll happen if it never ends.”
Yes, he wanted to say. This happens all over again.
In the end, it was Autor who unclasped the necklace from Duck’s neck, because Fakir was shaking too hard to manage it himself. With the final piece of Drosselmeyer’s sorcery lifted from her body, she vanished into a red cloud of sparkling dust, and when that cleared, it was a small yellow duck that Fakir held in his cupped hands.
Can ducks even drown? was what Fakir had thought once, deep below the town cathedral when he and Duck had descended into Rue’s trap so very long ago.
He almost cried.
---
finale
It turned out that he had been wrong. That was not how the greatest story told by D. D. Drosselmeyer ended – that had merely been the sorrowful yet beautifully tragic tale of Duck, as Drosselmeyer himself had crooned in the replica office and Fakir’s hand cramped and his eyes streamed with tears.
How the story of the Prince and the Raven ended was like this: Uzura was returned to the study with instructions not to leave; and then, with heavy hearts, Fakir and Autor took the body of Duck and the final heart shard she had unknowingly carried to Mytho. In his briar and thorn cage, Mytho stared at them bewildered, until Autor touched the necklace to the stem of his cage and watched it dissolve to ash.
“Where is Princess Tutu?” he asked softly, looking between the two of them. “What has happened?”
Autor presented him with the necklace. Fakir presented him with Duck’s small body. He hoped it would not need to come to him putting the necklace on her and watching her change from a dead duck to a dead girl, and back again.
But Mytho seemed to understand. He reached forward, past Autor’s proffered necklace, and cupped his hands around Fakir’s, not daring to take her from him but holding her all the same. Tears welled in his eyes as he looked down at her.
“I know this duck,” he said, hushed, more to himself than for Fakir or Autor’s benefit. “Even when I was in darkest despair, this duck came to me when all the birds sensed the raven’s blood and fled.”
Mytho lifted his eyes to them, his face stricken. “This duck is… Princess Tutu?”
His throat tight, Fakir nodded.
The prince who loved all and was loved by all bowed his head over her in respect. He wept openly as the booming laugh of the Raven sounded behind them.
“That something so small and fragile accomplished this…” Mytho said, tightening his hands over Fakir’s. His voice trailed away as he dipped his head, bestowed a solemn, funereal kiss to her beak and drew away. It was a kiss Duck had decided she was so selfish to want before she had died, and the unfairness of it choked at Fakir.
When Mytho lifted his head, his eyes were hard, like the topazes they mimicked; and by the time he turned around to face the Raven, he had wiped aside his tears.
“In my name as Prince Siegfried, I honour the acts of the one named Princess Tutu,” he announced.
“For Tutu! ” he cried, thrusting an open hand towards Autor, who frantically dropped the necklace in. With that said, he slapped the necklace over his open shirt, shoulders pushing back in strain as the last of the heart shards finally slid home. And when it did, it was no longer Mytho standing before Autor and himself, but the Prince from the story, perfect and regal, with the golden crown resting on his brow, the swan feather-hemmed doublet trimmed in gold and royal blue, and the long snow white cape at his back.
“So you’ve finally been restored, Prince,” the Raven boomed, taking to the air in preparation for battle. “But will that be enough, do you think?”
In response, the Prince lifted his hand towards the blackened sky. Autor and Fakir looked up, and out of the darkness, something shimmered like a comet, rushing down towards them: two stars, falling and exploding into a mass of feathers, becoming two swans soaring down and colliding together just above the Prince’s outstretched hand in a bright burst of light.
Siegfried’s hand closed down, and the light between his hand turned into a hilt, then shot upwards and became a sword with two white facing swans as its crossguard. One of those swans wore a pendant necklace with a dab of red at its centre, and Fakir felt he could cry again.
“You two must leave,” he said, raising the sword towards the Raven. “It’s not safe here anymore.”
As the Prince ascended skywards, borne up with a hurricane of flowers at his feet, Autor grabbed Fakir and made for the replica study. He barricaded the doors from the townspeople who had turned into crows while Fakir gently laid Duck on the table and picked up the quill. He had never once been able to write a story about Mytho, but in this final chapter of the story, he must try.
(And he failed.)
---
epilogue
“Is this it?” Autor said, sitting in the ruins of the study.
Around him, his life’s work laid buried beneath rubble. The distant cousin whose destiny had outshone his own was wordless in grief. Once, Autor had wanted to see the expanse of Drosselmeyer’s power, and resented the one who had inherited it. Now that he had lived through the top of the house blowing off and exploding above them, and having witnessed Fakir’s sanity collapse with most of Gold Crown Town, he wondered how he had ever wanted such a thing. He surveyed the damage, only half believing it.
“This is it,” Fakir said flatly. “Drosselmeyer’s greatest tragedy.”
The weight of the axe and the slipperiness of the blood on Autor’s hands held him together. It gave the world a tenuous thread of meaning: in Drosselmeyer’s story, he might have only been a plot device that led Fakir to the truth of his ancestry—and Autor didn’t doubt that they were still in the story of the Prince and the Raven, because where Gold Crown was largely destroyed, the walls around them had somehow reformed themselves—but as he looked down at his bloodied hands, Autor realised he had done so much more.
“We’re still alive,” he reminded Fakir, then suddenly regretted it when he turned around and saw Fakir wrapping the small body of Duck in his cravat. “That’s not a tragedy,” he floundered, trying to lighten the blow.
“We’re alive,” Fakir said shortly, cradling Duck in his very much intact hands, “when I don’t deserve to be, and everyone I should have laid my life down to protect isn’t.”
Those were the hands Autor had laid his own life down to protect. Those were the hands that had never once stopped writing even as Fakir looked heavenwards and cried out for Mytho, having seen something Autor could not, while a storm of blood whirled outside, and the symphony of screaming crows and the single remaining Book Man pounded away with his axe resounding at the door. Before the last bookcase had been hacked through, Autor had picked up the brass hatstand in the study – a relic! A literal relic inherited from his grandfather! – and swung the base up into the Book Man’s balding head as it appeared. And over and over until he went down, then Autor had successfully kicked aside the axe and demanded the Book Man’s surrender.
The Book Men believed in stopping Drosselmeyer’s vile hands no matter the cost, even if the cost was their own lives – and the last of them said so again, spitting blood at him, before Autor swung the hatstand one final time.
He looked between Fakir, whose tears were pouring over his manuscript, and the man who did not understand that Fakir’s death would mean the death of all things in Gold Crown Town, and then he switched the hatstand for the Book Man’s axe and told himself that this would be the lesser of two evils.
“I saved you, ” Autor shouted at him, “I saved you and—”
“And what?! ” Fakir yelled back, “You saved me and everyone I loved, who may as well be already dead—”
“Your blacksmith! The man who raised you and gave you a sword! What about him?!”
Fakir cringed. He backed away, stricken, and no doubt he would have turned tail and fled from this nightmare they still didn’t seem to be waking up from, if the Prince hadn’t wandered towards them in a daze.
“Prince Siegfried—”
Autor swallowed his words. The boy who dragged his sword with him, dressed in the bloodied rags of the Gold Crown Academy uniform, and raised his slack, dull gaze to look at who was addressing him, was not the Prince as he should have been.
“Mytho,” Fakir said from beside him.
The boy seemed to respond to that, turning his eyes from Autor to Fakir, and it gave Autor the smallest spark of hope—but it wasn’t the name that had struck a chord in him. It was only the response to any sound directed at him.
“Who,” the mindless Prince of the story asked, “is Mytho?”
---
another story
Later, after they had found Charon lying unconscious in Raven’s blood, and took him and the newly amnesiac Mytho back to Fakir’s home, Fakir disappeared to bury Duck in a place that only they had shared. Autor stayed, wiped what blood he could off Charon’s face and hands, wrestled Mytho into a shower, and then figured out all that was happening in the time before Fakir returned.
By now, night was falling and the unconscious people of Gold Crown Town, lying in the streets, would wake up to find houses destroyed and the streets ruined. In Drosselmeyer’s story logic, Autor imagined, they would wonder about a storm that was just now passing (the sky was so dark after all!) and how it had ruined the roofs and smashed the street stalls to pieces (all that good vinegar and wine spilled on the streets like that!).
And lo, Autor thought, as the sun rose, the palace and its denizens – the porters and the servants, the guards and the gentlemen and the ladies, the common folk and their livestock , and finally the queen and the king – woke from their century of sleep.
Sleeping Beauty.
He grimaced. Now was the least appropriate time.
He looked at Uzura, who had stayed hidden in Autor’s study while he had—had taken care of the Book Man, and now sat quietly in a corner and like a marionette with its strings cut.
“I feel stupid asking this,” he said, “but in all of this, I suppose Drosselmeyer’s done something to one of his creations too?” he asked lowly.
Uzura frowned at her drum. She didn’t beat it. She didn’t even say anything.
Autor let her be, as Fakir had finally returned, dirt streaked and wielding a shovel in hand. He sat him down, passed along a wet hand towel, and told him what he understood was happening at present.
The first: that Mytho was once again heartless by his own hand.
The second: as a result of the first, the Raven had been sealed, but not vanquished.
“Then Rue is gone,” Fakir said.
Autor felt the words sink into him like a blade, and wondered if this was what Fakir had felt when he had found the two of them and Uzura at the lakeside.
“What?”
This was news he had never expected.
Fakir focused on wiping the dirt from his hands. “When I—when Drosselmeyer wrote Duck to her death, he narrated that Rue had given herself over to the Raven. Whatever that means I don’t know, but with the Raven sealed away…”
Rue, who had been so deprived of love that she had thought he was mocking her with his very confession, had surrendered or given up or something and fallen into the Raven’s grasp, and with the Raven sealed for time eternal again, Rue was—was—
“I need a moment,” he told Fakir, then stalked off to the basement, found the first bottle of kirsch and uncapped it. He drank until the memory of Rue backing him up against the wall, Rue laying her hand and then her head over his beating heart, drifted away from his spinning mind, and he staggered back up the stairs.
Point three. He was on point three.
He tried to tell Fakir what point three was, but Fakir took one look at him and hauled him to a spare room.
“No—no, Fakir, I need to tell youuuu…”
“That we’re definitely still in the story,” Fakir said lowly. “I think so too.”
Autor found himself nodding as Fakir continued, “The walls are back up. They collapsed when the Raven was freed and we were outside of them when… when you found me, but now that they’re standing again, so the story of the Prince and the Raven isn’t over yet.”
“Yes,” Autor agreed, as the words tripped out of his mouth, “that’s eggs—exactly what I was going to say.”
He sat shakily down on the bed as Fakir took his glasses from him then retrieved an armful of blankets from the linen closet.
“Can we—” he started, watching the room spin a little. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, looking for the words he wanted. “What can we do about it?”
He wanted to change the story somehow, even though he wasn’t the person destined with the power to do so. The fact was so much easier to admit with a dose of kirsch to loosen his mind. He looked up at Fakir, expecting an answer, when Fakir dropped a tonne—a tonne of blankets, good heavens, did the blacksmith make this from beaten metal as well?—onto him.
“I wrote it,” Fakir said, as if from a great distance away. He sounded as if he was talking to someone else, someone infinitely more preferable than a fairly drunk Autor sitting in the guest room. “I—I wrote Mytho into shattering his own heart to seal the Raven away. When I thought about it, I thought about what Drosselmeyer had said, and… even though I didn’t know what would happen to Rue, I did it anyway.”
He sounded like he was in tears. It wasn’t fair – Fakir had damned someone Autor had loved, after Drosselmeyer damned someone Fakir had loved; and Fakir had the gall to feel guilty about it.
There was little to do about it, other than to heave the tonne of blankets off him, rise shakily to his feet and throw a punch at Fakir.
Fakir, who had once been a Knight, avoided his punch fairly easily. But Autor, who felt the kirsch surge with a rush of heat and fury in him, grabbed him by the collar as easily as Fakir had grabbed him by his collar earlier, and let him know the depth of his rage readily.
“You—you did this? ” he spluttered.
“Mytho wasn’t going to defeat the Raven! I felt it in that study, no matter what it was I was trying to write!”
“You gave her up! You gave her up!” Autor shouted, shaking him as much as he could. Fakir, having once been a Knight and being a ballerino, gripped his arm and threw him off effortlessly.
“I didn’t want to! I never wanted to, not after it was Duck who kept trying to save Rue!”
“I saved your life!” Autor seethed, thinking of the axe, the blood, the murder he had committed while shoving his conscience as far away from the thinking, feeling part of his brain. “I saved your life for this?! ”
Fakir stepped back, eyes wild. He looked like he didn’t want to think about the body he had come out of his writing frenzy to see. As far as Autor was concerned, Fakir had thrown the quill down suddenly as the roof cracked, grabbed Autor around his blood-wet arm, and dragged the both of them out. Everything in Fakir’s life was action as a would-be Knight; he had never been of the mind to sit and contemplate and mull, like Autor did when he discovered the truth of his heritage. Perhaps that had been part of Fakir’s failure to write them a better ending.
Autor took advantage of Fakir’s daze to land a punch in his face; and feeling emboldened by his success, swung again.
Fakir caught his fist the second time around and threw him into a wall.
Autor slammed back, felt the world go grey, then felt Fakir catching him before he hit the ground, and drag him back the bed. Nothing about his grip suggested fury. Nothing about their fight had been personal. It had just… existed when he didn’t think shouting would be enough.
“I saved your life too,” Fakir said lowly. He released him and backed away. “It was that or letting Mytho lose to the Raven. And if it was that, we would have… lost everything, not just Gold Crown Town, I think. It would have escaped to the rest of the world.”
“Is this your way to say we’re even now?” Autor snarled. Even with that said, his anger was bleeding away for no reason other than how—how useless it felt. Now he felt numb. “I had to literally kill a man to save you, but all you had to do was metaphorically kill our hope?”
Fakir whirled around at the doorway and snapped back, “Why does it bother you now? Before, you were beside yourself when you heard Drosselmeyer had appeared in that study. You worshipped that man and his work! This is his tragedy! You’re a living testament to his genius! ”
“That was before!” Autor yelled, “That was before I knew this story would—”
His voice cut off. Rue pulled her way out of his addled mind and pressed her hand against his chest again, like a devastating iron weight. He felt her touch like the touch of frost descend upon him and everything in his chest and throat hurt.
“… would take something I thought I’d never have away from me.”
In the dark hallway where he had confessed his love for her, Autor had insisted the feelings he had were his own. When he said he loved her, he felt it burning hot where now he felt cold, and it was true. No wonder words of love had destroyed Princess Tutu – when Rue had turned, laughed and told him to leave, he felt his heart fracture more than when he heard the Book Man denounce him as a would-be Storyteller. Now, he started to fear his feelings had really been a plot device used to make him suffer.
“That’s what Drosselmeyer lives for, I imagine,” Fakir said from the doorway. Then he snorted and buried his face in his hand. “Lives for. That was tasteless.”
When Fakir pulled his hand away, his face was wet with tears. Autor couldn’t even imagine how he hadn’t succumbed earlier. Thinking of Rue suddenly made the hurt in his chest worse.
As he wiped the back of his hand over his face, Fakir continued, “You were right, you know. With my skill, I couldn’t rewrite Drosselmeyer’s story to any extent. But at the end…”
He looked up at Autor, as if he was bestowing the secret of the world on him. “At the end, when I felt Mytho lose—I can’t explain, I just know it was true—I pulled one of Duck’s feathers out and with it, I wrote… that for the honour of the one named Princess Tutu, Mytho did what he did to give us all hope. To never give up once the opportunity to defeat the Raven came again.”
“And what does that change?”
Fakir shrugged. “I don’t know. A better chance maybe, if another Princess Tutu appears to restore Mytho’s heart to him.”
Autor imagined doing this all over again within his lifetime and felt older already.
“Or,” Fakir continued, “you told me once, after I had gotten Duck back from Drosselmeyer, that this ability turns stories into reality. And my ability is terrible now, but if I had time… if I had time, I could do it. Change reality itself. Reality and time if I had to.”
Autor shook his head. “Impossible,” he managed to say. “Drosselmeyer’s stories made the world what it was, but it can’t… happen in reverse. You can’t unmake what happened in the past through writing. It hasn’t been done.”
“When I went to bury Duck,” Fakir said solemnly, “I heard something from around me. Spoken by someone I thought should be dead.”
“Drosselmeyer?” Autor asked, with the sense of dread of him.
Fakir shook his head. “No. A puppet, by the name of Edel. One of Drosselmeyer’s creations which he destroyed when she was no longer useful to him. I took what was left of her and Charon rebuilt her into Uzura.”
“Suppose that’s what happens to us all, when we’re no longer useful to Drosselmeyer,” Autor added bitterly.
Fakir smiled grimly. “Suppose. But once she had told me that… the story of the Prince and the Raven was alive again, and the only things I could do was to accept my fate and be granted happiness, or defy it and be granted glory. Do those words mean anything to you?”
Autor slung himself beneath the blankets. He had enough, even without the philosophy question pitched at him. “Ask me again when I’m sober.”
Fakir left him to his rest, but in trying to sleep, all Autor heard over and over like a piano segment on da capo was: accept fate and be granted happiness. Defy fate and be granted glory.
He and Fakir was neither happy nor glorious, and even though Fakir had tried to subvert Drosselmeyer’s tragic ending, he hadn’t successfully defied it. Gold Crown Town survived intact for the most part, although they were still trapped by stories, and tomorrow, the townspeople would awake and remember nothing (except… maybe the rest of the Book Men who had turned into crows. Gott in Himmel, he hadn’t even thought about them at all.) And the cost of doing so had only been Mytho’s identity and the lives of the women he and Fakir had loved.
Autor would have said that they had more likely succumbed to fate than anything else, but then world was sinking into black, and as he drifted away, he felt something hot and wet slide down his face, and then nothing at all.
---
interlude
Yes, I know that quote. It’s from one of Drosselmeyer’s short stories. “To those who accept their fate, happiness. To those who defy their fate, glory.” Not one of his best ones, I think; too much Latin sprinkled in for no real reason. By the way – if the townspeople have gone back to being people, what are we going to do about the other Book Men? You know the… the ones that were going to be avenged.
I took care of it. What story is this?
You—what? How?
I wrote something about it.
That’s—it? That’s going to get rid of the body once they uncover the study? Are you mad?
It’s taken care of, Autor. Tell me about the story.
Right. Well. If you say so – I’m getting rid of that axe. It’s evidence I don’t need hanging around me. The story I’m talking about is a bit… fantasy, but in the real world. Someone put it under magical realism, which is still new for German literature. I’m not certain about it all. Anyway – there was quite a bit about carpe diem and seizing the day and not wasting their lives.
Anything I should know about it?
… people who try to defy their fate in the real world fail. If it’s not a fantasy narrative with talking bears and all, Drosselmeyer prefers to… let the real world kick in. It’s harsh and merciless. There’s no magic solution out here.
I see.
I don’t know what you’re thinking Fakir, but we… you… you can’t change the world. Not anymore.
That’s where I disagree.
Come again?
This isn’t the real world, is it? This is the story of the Prince and the Raven. I’m the Storyteller with the ability to turn my words into reality, and you’re the scholar at my side who’s going to tell me what works and doesn’t work.
…
What did Mytho say? That something so small and fragile managed to restore his heart, even when someone like me stood against her half the time.
Did you forget that she had an enchanted necklace and she didn’t even know she was doing Drosselmeyer’s bidding the whole time?
That doesn’t matter. “For Tutu,” was what Mytho said. To honour what she had done for him. The sacrifice she had made for him. And Rue too – Rue gave herself up to the Raven for something. I don’t know what it was, but it would have been a sacrifice for Mytho’s sake.
… don’t use this against me.
What sort of people would we be if we just let this happen?! To allow Duck and Rue to die for us, to let Mytho wander around Gold Crown Town heartless—
Stop it! Enough already!
You’re not going to become a coward defended by everyone else! I’ve done that for entirely too many years – years I spent trying to suppress Mytho’s feelings and deny that the story would ever go forward, because I knew I was fated to die at the end!
Shut up. Was I a coward when I stopped that Book Man from removing your so-called vile hands?!
You’re a coward if you think that’s enough to make up for just—just sitting here and resigning yourself to whatever fate Drosselmeyer dreamt up for you!
I’m not a coward!
You are if you think Rue died for this to happen!
Stop talking about her. Stop.
… … … whatever it was they did… whatever they thought it would do… I don’t know. But it’s given us another chance. A chance for us to change our lives. A chance to prove that we are nobody’s marionettes with lives to be played with. Our feelings are our own—our fates are our own.
I don’t know if I can.
… neither do I. But I can’t accept this fate either. Duck would have said… she’d say that I should do whatever I can do to help Mytho in my own way. That we’d defend Mytho together.
… how much did you love her really?
… I don’t know. More than I love Mytho, I think.
Mytho’s still alive though.
No. Even when he came back to the Academy cursed by the Raven’s blood, he was… more than this. I think he’s even worse off than when I found him as a child.
… I see then. Fakir. Consider this an agreement.
So—you’re going to help me change this story, one way or another?
Yes. I want to know what this will be like. To defy fate. To receive glory. And transcend this tragedy that Drosselmeyer has put upon us.
---
prologue
Once upon a time, there was a man who died.
This… is not the story of that man. This is the story of a boy, who shared blood with that man, and in sharing blood, shared the ability to weave reality into his stories, until his stories became reality itself.
(At fifteen, Fakir saw his world ended, then reconstructed in a broken image of itself. After Charon recovered, having remembered nothing of the Raven ascending, showering his blood upon Gold Crown Town, or being sealed away again; after Autor found his parents alive amidst the rubble; after Gold Crown Town rebuilt itself after that ever-so-disastrous storm… Fakir and Autor sat down and got to work.)
This boy had a life full of suffering ahead of him: as a child, his parents died. As he grew older, he found himself responsible for a charge, an ageless boy who was foolishly kind and deemed it his duty to save all who were small and weak. In order to protect him, the boy tried to quell all acts of heroism that his charge found compelled to perform.
(Again, he and Charon raised Mytho to live as best as he could, for a boy without a heart.
Again, he did his best to protect Mytho in the way he saw best. He didn’t know if it was what Duck would do, but Autor was around more often, and between them, they ensured that Mytho never ran into a burning building again.)
And as he grew older still, he found himself faced with destinies that seemed to have no end of suffering. To fight and die, torn in two by a Raven’s claws. To fight and die, against an ageless knight that was his pre-incarnation made flesh.
(“If I write a story,” Fakir said, “for every day of my life up until that day… and my ability to write stories that become reality is true not only for the future but for the past…”
“You’d change the story of your own life. You’d change… the world.”
“I’d change what our lives could be.”)
Finally, he found himself with the most terrible of fates: to be forced to sit aside and be able to do nothing as the ones who loved and fought to protect died around him.
However…
(For fifteen years, Fakir wrote his autobiography, for every day of the life he had lived before his world fell apart. He carried in him the memory of Mytho as he became more emotive with every piece of his heart restored to him; and the last words Duck spoke before she sank into that lake; and even the apparition of Rue as she had given herself over to the Raven for Mytho’s sake.
If he hadn’t, he doubted he could have continued to recollect day after day in excruciating detail. Every part of your life, Autor had said, is important to that plot. To the story of your life. It’s what shaped you, after all. You can’t leave a single thing out.
Fakir complied. He left the Academy and aged, while Mytho did not; and where Mytho spent his days labouring over dance, Fakir wrote and smithed to earn his stay with Charon and waited for the day he would right the world again.
However…)
… as he sat there, watching the man who had died but stayed not-dead to control his life for a laugh, watching his hand forced to spin out a tale of tragedy, the boy thought: no, not this.
(“What happens when you reach… that point?”
“What point?”
“The point where you change the Fakir of the past’s life. What are you going to do to him to make him save the story from tragedy?
“Let’s call that the divergence point then. And to answer the second part – I don’t know.”
“Did I really spend fifteen years of my life supporting a plan that ends up with ‘I don’t know’?”
“I did think about this, if that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t know if it’ll work like I hope, but it’ll… change something.”
“So what is it?”
“I read somewhere that ideas can change the world. All I need to do is make sure the me-from-back-then doesn’t do nothing as Duck walks into that lake.”
“But how will you do that?”
“Like I said. With an idea.”)
He watched his hand forced to write, and realised: if his powers were not enough to stop Drosselmeyer, then he could only stop himself.
(“He’s going to realise what’ll happen if he sits there and does nothing, no matter how much he doesn’t want to. Being forced to do something you don’t want to doesn’t change the fact you’ve done it anyway.”)
On the desk with the frog-shaped ink holder and the duck quills, the rolls of carefully pressed parchment and the tea, a blend of Darjeeling and Assam, was a raven-handled paper knife.
In that instant, he imagined he could see the future as it would be if he allowed this tragedy to pass. An impossible instant, but this was the town in which a dead man held sway over the life of every creature within its walls. A town where a girl had leapt straight from the sky to save him from men with axes; where he had battled crows on an underground lake, at what should have been holy ground beneath the church itself; where a man had taken a sword to his own heart in an act of self-sacrifice that was now dooming them all.
In a town where the impossible became entirely possible, he saw the bleak future, the worst ending for this tale.
The tale of the Prince and the Raven would end in another way, he decided; and he held that thought as he took the paper knife and ran it into his hand, until the pain overwhelmed Drosselmeyer’s power from beyond the grave.
“Duck! Duck! ”
And then he was pulling the knife out, was up on his feet and running for his life, out of Gold Crown Town and to the lake where Duck was waiting for him.
---
ever after
This is how Drosselmeyer’s greatest tragedy ends: not only in the tears of an old dead man, mourning at how his characters in his story could change the story themselves, but also by a lake, where a boy and his duck sit peaceably, passing their days together, starting a story, full of hope, from its very beginning.
---
cambiare
And from somewhere else: a town very far away in one sense but very close in many other ways, two men sat. Between them was an unfinished manuscript: a story that had been started but had also never been a story to be finished.
“Do you think it worked?” one of them said, as the walls around their town cracked.
Already, something—he didn’t have the words to describe it, even though his tools of trade were primarily words—was happening. When they looked to the side, the ageless boy they were charged to protect lifted his empty hands up to the sky, and when he brought them down, they were clasped around a sword and the boy had become a man. The man—the king, crowned in gold and swathed in an ermine-trimmed cloak, looked around him in a panic.
“Rue! Rue, how did we reappear in Gold Crown Town—Rue?!”
“Mytho!” one of the men shouted, leaping to his feet, “Mytho, it’s alright! This will pass!” He rushed to him, but his hands passed through him, and with a blink, the king was gone.
“It’s alright,” the other man repeated, his words betrayed by the uncertainty in his face. “King Siegfried must be in the future fifteen years from your divergence point.”
“What?”
“It worked! Your plan—what you’ve done, it’s—!”
“Kwack!” came the trumpet from the house. A large white duck launched into the air from the doorway and landed itself into the panicking man’s outstretched arms. “Kwack kwack kwaaaccckkkk—”
“Autor, am I—am I seeing this? This can’t— it’s impossible—”
“It’s not! This is becoming the world you made right, Fakir!”
Something rose into the air as the walls finally crumbled: the Raven, once sealed by Mytho fifteen years in the past, but now not the Raven any longer. It must’ve have been defeated after the change from Fakir’s divergence point, or it had become something… not the Raven any longer, because it exploded into light, like the twin stars he and Fakir had once seen, come barrelling out of the sky and into Mytho’s hand. This light spread and flared across the sky, and turned it white. White like swan feathers. White like a clean new slate.
“The world’s being rewritten, Fakir!” he yelled.
“Really?” he stammered. He looked at the duck in his arms and held her closer. “Finally, after all this time?”
He sounded as though as he was in tears. Perhaps he was; Autor could not see him, not when the world had turned so blindingly bright. The light that spread across the sky was descending upon them like a thousand sunbeams all at once.
“Yes,” he said as his voice caught in his throat. He wondered what their righted future was like. Just hearing Mytho speak Rue’s name told him she was alive. That was enough. More than enough.
He clapped his distant cousin on the shoulder. They were family after all. Fifteen years of work for this—he wondered what he might remember of this version of the Prince and Raven story.
“It’s done now,” Autor said as his voice started to fade away in his own ears, “Glory to those who defy fate.”
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Rating: PG
Prompt: Orenda (n.) – A mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
Fandom: Princess Tutu
Words: 6900
Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Summary:
Or: there are some fates that you can’t accept. Especially not fates where you fail to protect anyone.
to those who succumb to fate
orenda (noun) – a mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
---
To those who succumb to fate.
Or: there are some fates that you can’t accept. Especially not fates where you fail to protect anyone.
---
penult
This is how the greatest story ever told, courtesy of D. D. Drosselmeyer, ended: Fakir standing knee deep in the lake named Despair, the body of that duck-like girl from the beginner ballet class pale and lifeless in his arms. In death, Drosselmeyer had left her—lovely, was Fakir’s word for it. Far lovelier than a drowned corpse should look. Not waterlogged and bloated with gas, but… as delicate as Duck had been in life, she was also in death.
He pulled her up with him as Uzura watched from the shore of the lake, banging on her drum steadily. Each beat, perfect and measured like a heartbeat, like what he could hear thundering in his own ears. He dropped his ear to her chest and heard—nothing.
Fakir held her like that for a very, very long time, until he thought the noise of the crows of Gold Crown Town faded to nothing. And then something clapped him on the shoulder, a quick blow that pulled him from his daze and brought him back to the world. When he looked up in panic, it was Autor at his back, frowning down at him.
Autor said nothing, which was good, because Fakir thought he had no words left in him to ask Autor to leave him to his grief.
“I was too late,” Fakir said finally, like the words were being dragged from his mouth. His voice caught on a sob and he felt like he was a child again, standing in the mess of crow’s feathers and blood before his parents’ bodies. “I was too late, I should have stopped him—”
Autor, who had earlier been gleeful beyond words to hear that Drosselmeyer himself had appeared inside the hallowed replica study room, looked at Duck’s still form and seemed to silently understand the nature of the creature he worshipped.
“No—this? This was beyond you, Fakir,” Autor started, but those were the last things Fakir wanted to hear.
“This isn’t how things were meant to go!” Fakir howled. He clutched Duck closer to him, mindless as her head flopped with his shaking. “I was meant to do something this time! I wasn’t meant to be afraid anymore, but when Drosselmeyer appeared and made me start writing, and then—when he was done—”
When Drosselmeyer was done narrating and Fakir’s quill dry of ink, Duck had walked into the lake called Despair, as dark and deep as her eyes, descending into its murk in order to lay down her own life so that her guilt would be absolved. And in doing so, the final heart shard lying in Princess Tutu’s necklace would be returned to Prince Mytho, waiting for dawn to strike the Raven down. With the knowledge that this death would release her from the selfishness of her own desires, Duck returned to whence she had come, Drosselmeyer concluded, and walked away with the swish of his cloak.
Fakir swallowed. He touched her cold face and wondered if Drosselmeyer’s power had made it true: that Duck had died guilt-ridden and alone, when he should have been there with her to protect Mytho. It was the detail that left him empty – that he had sworn to protect Mytho together with her and to never give up, and that he had failed.
“There’s still something else,” Autor said, which made Fakir realise he had been talking aloud. He knelt beside him and steadied Fakir with a hand to his shoulder.
“Princess Tutu’s necklace has the last heart shard,” he continued. “And… the Prince is still waiting.”
“The Raven’s waiting,” Fakir corrected, “but Mytho needs this final heart shard and then he’ll…”
Fight. The last word, which he couldn’t bear to say, and the one thing Fakir had never wanted Mytho to do – not when Fakir was a child watching out for Mytho, not when he raised himself to be a false Knight trying to avoid an inevitable future, not now and not ever.
“He’ll need to battle the Raven,” Autor said, as though he couldn’t see how much Fakir had dreaded it for all these years, “now, or the story of the Prince and the Raven will never end.”
He snuck a look over to Fakir. “And you know what’ll happen if it never ends.”
Yes, he wanted to say. This happens all over again.
In the end, it was Autor who unclasped the necklace from Duck’s neck, because Fakir was shaking too hard to manage it himself. With the final piece of Drosselmeyer’s sorcery lifted from her body, she vanished into a red cloud of sparkling dust, and when that cleared, it was a small yellow duck that Fakir held in his cupped hands.
Can ducks even drown? was what Fakir had thought once, deep below the town cathedral when he and Duck had descended into Rue’s trap so very long ago.
He almost cried.
---
finale
It turned out that he had been wrong. That was not how the greatest story told by D. D. Drosselmeyer ended – that had merely been the sorrowful yet beautifully tragic tale of Duck, as Drosselmeyer himself had crooned in the replica office and Fakir’s hand cramped and his eyes streamed with tears.
How the story of the Prince and the Raven ended was like this: Uzura was returned to the study with instructions not to leave; and then, with heavy hearts, Fakir and Autor took the body of Duck and the final heart shard she had unknowingly carried to Mytho. In his briar and thorn cage, Mytho stared at them bewildered, until Autor touched the necklace to the stem of his cage and watched it dissolve to ash.
“Where is Princess Tutu?” he asked softly, looking between the two of them. “What has happened?”
Autor presented him with the necklace. Fakir presented him with Duck’s small body. He hoped it would not need to come to him putting the necklace on her and watching her change from a dead duck to a dead girl, and back again.
But Mytho seemed to understand. He reached forward, past Autor’s proffered necklace, and cupped his hands around Fakir’s, not daring to take her from him but holding her all the same. Tears welled in his eyes as he looked down at her.
“I know this duck,” he said, hushed, more to himself than for Fakir or Autor’s benefit. “Even when I was in darkest despair, this duck came to me when all the birds sensed the raven’s blood and fled.”
Mytho lifted his eyes to them, his face stricken. “This duck is… Princess Tutu?”
His throat tight, Fakir nodded.
The prince who loved all and was loved by all bowed his head over her in respect. He wept openly as the booming laugh of the Raven sounded behind them.
“That something so small and fragile accomplished this…” Mytho said, tightening his hands over Fakir’s. His voice trailed away as he dipped his head, bestowed a solemn, funereal kiss to her beak and drew away. It was a kiss Duck had decided she was so selfish to want before she had died, and the unfairness of it choked at Fakir.
When Mytho lifted his head, his eyes were hard, like the topazes they mimicked; and by the time he turned around to face the Raven, he had wiped aside his tears.
“In my name as Prince Siegfried, I honour the acts of the one named Princess Tutu,” he announced.
“For Tutu! ” he cried, thrusting an open hand towards Autor, who frantically dropped the necklace in. With that said, he slapped the necklace over his open shirt, shoulders pushing back in strain as the last of the heart shards finally slid home. And when it did, it was no longer Mytho standing before Autor and himself, but the Prince from the story, perfect and regal, with the golden crown resting on his brow, the swan feather-hemmed doublet trimmed in gold and royal blue, and the long snow white cape at his back.
“So you’ve finally been restored, Prince,” the Raven boomed, taking to the air in preparation for battle. “But will that be enough, do you think?”
In response, the Prince lifted his hand towards the blackened sky. Autor and Fakir looked up, and out of the darkness, something shimmered like a comet, rushing down towards them: two stars, falling and exploding into a mass of feathers, becoming two swans soaring down and colliding together just above the Prince’s outstretched hand in a bright burst of light.
Siegfried’s hand closed down, and the light between his hand turned into a hilt, then shot upwards and became a sword with two white facing swans as its crossguard. One of those swans wore a pendant necklace with a dab of red at its centre, and Fakir felt he could cry again.
“You two must leave,” he said, raising the sword towards the Raven. “It’s not safe here anymore.”
As the Prince ascended skywards, borne up with a hurricane of flowers at his feet, Autor grabbed Fakir and made for the replica study. He barricaded the doors from the townspeople who had turned into crows while Fakir gently laid Duck on the table and picked up the quill. He had never once been able to write a story about Mytho, but in this final chapter of the story, he must try.
(And he failed.)
---
epilogue
“Is this it?” Autor said, sitting in the ruins of the study.
Around him, his life’s work laid buried beneath rubble. The distant cousin whose destiny had outshone his own was wordless in grief. Once, Autor had wanted to see the expanse of Drosselmeyer’s power, and resented the one who had inherited it. Now that he had lived through the top of the house blowing off and exploding above them, and having witnessed Fakir’s sanity collapse with most of Gold Crown Town, he wondered how he had ever wanted such a thing. He surveyed the damage, only half believing it.
“This is it,” Fakir said flatly. “Drosselmeyer’s greatest tragedy.”
The weight of the axe and the slipperiness of the blood on Autor’s hands held him together. It gave the world a tenuous thread of meaning: in Drosselmeyer’s story, he might have only been a plot device that led Fakir to the truth of his ancestry—and Autor didn’t doubt that they were still in the story of the Prince and the Raven, because where Gold Crown was largely destroyed, the walls around them had somehow reformed themselves—but as he looked down at his bloodied hands, Autor realised he had done so much more.
“We’re still alive,” he reminded Fakir, then suddenly regretted it when he turned around and saw Fakir wrapping the small body of Duck in his cravat. “That’s not a tragedy,” he floundered, trying to lighten the blow.
“We’re alive,” Fakir said shortly, cradling Duck in his very much intact hands, “when I don’t deserve to be, and everyone I should have laid my life down to protect isn’t.”
Those were the hands Autor had laid his own life down to protect. Those were the hands that had never once stopped writing even as Fakir looked heavenwards and cried out for Mytho, having seen something Autor could not, while a storm of blood whirled outside, and the symphony of screaming crows and the single remaining Book Man pounded away with his axe resounding at the door. Before the last bookcase had been hacked through, Autor had picked up the brass hatstand in the study – a relic! A literal relic inherited from his grandfather! – and swung the base up into the Book Man’s balding head as it appeared. And over and over until he went down, then Autor had successfully kicked aside the axe and demanded the Book Man’s surrender.
The Book Men believed in stopping Drosselmeyer’s vile hands no matter the cost, even if the cost was their own lives – and the last of them said so again, spitting blood at him, before Autor swung the hatstand one final time.
He looked between Fakir, whose tears were pouring over his manuscript, and the man who did not understand that Fakir’s death would mean the death of all things in Gold Crown Town, and then he switched the hatstand for the Book Man’s axe and told himself that this would be the lesser of two evils.
“I saved you, ” Autor shouted at him, “I saved you and—”
“And what?! ” Fakir yelled back, “You saved me and everyone I loved, who may as well be already dead—”
“Your blacksmith! The man who raised you and gave you a sword! What about him?!”
Fakir cringed. He backed away, stricken, and no doubt he would have turned tail and fled from this nightmare they still didn’t seem to be waking up from, if the Prince hadn’t wandered towards them in a daze.
“Prince Siegfried—”
Autor swallowed his words. The boy who dragged his sword with him, dressed in the bloodied rags of the Gold Crown Academy uniform, and raised his slack, dull gaze to look at who was addressing him, was not the Prince as he should have been.
“Mytho,” Fakir said from beside him.
The boy seemed to respond to that, turning his eyes from Autor to Fakir, and it gave Autor the smallest spark of hope—but it wasn’t the name that had struck a chord in him. It was only the response to any sound directed at him.
“Who,” the mindless Prince of the story asked, “is Mytho?”
---
another story
Later, after they had found Charon lying unconscious in Raven’s blood, and took him and the newly amnesiac Mytho back to Fakir’s home, Fakir disappeared to bury Duck in a place that only they had shared. Autor stayed, wiped what blood he could off Charon’s face and hands, wrestled Mytho into a shower, and then figured out all that was happening in the time before Fakir returned.
By now, night was falling and the unconscious people of Gold Crown Town, lying in the streets, would wake up to find houses destroyed and the streets ruined. In Drosselmeyer’s story logic, Autor imagined, they would wonder about a storm that was just now passing (the sky was so dark after all!) and how it had ruined the roofs and smashed the street stalls to pieces (all that good vinegar and wine spilled on the streets like that!).
And lo, Autor thought, as the sun rose, the palace and its denizens – the porters and the servants, the guards and the gentlemen and the ladies, the common folk and their livestock , and finally the queen and the king – woke from their century of sleep.
Sleeping Beauty.
He grimaced. Now was the least appropriate time.
He looked at Uzura, who had stayed hidden in Autor’s study while he had—had taken care of the Book Man, and now sat quietly in a corner and like a marionette with its strings cut.
“I feel stupid asking this,” he said, “but in all of this, I suppose Drosselmeyer’s done something to one of his creations too?” he asked lowly.
Uzura frowned at her drum. She didn’t beat it. She didn’t even say anything.
Autor let her be, as Fakir had finally returned, dirt streaked and wielding a shovel in hand. He sat him down, passed along a wet hand towel, and told him what he understood was happening at present.
The first: that Mytho was once again heartless by his own hand.
The second: as a result of the first, the Raven had been sealed, but not vanquished.
“Then Rue is gone,” Fakir said.
Autor felt the words sink into him like a blade, and wondered if this was what Fakir had felt when he had found the two of them and Uzura at the lakeside.
“What?”
This was news he had never expected.
Fakir focused on wiping the dirt from his hands. “When I—when Drosselmeyer wrote Duck to her death, he narrated that Rue had given herself over to the Raven. Whatever that means I don’t know, but with the Raven sealed away…”
Rue, who had been so deprived of love that she had thought he was mocking her with his very confession, had surrendered or given up or something and fallen into the Raven’s grasp, and with the Raven sealed for time eternal again, Rue was—was—
“I need a moment,” he told Fakir, then stalked off to the basement, found the first bottle of kirsch and uncapped it. He drank until the memory of Rue backing him up against the wall, Rue laying her hand and then her head over his beating heart, drifted away from his spinning mind, and he staggered back up the stairs.
Point three. He was on point three.
He tried to tell Fakir what point three was, but Fakir took one look at him and hauled him to a spare room.
“No—no, Fakir, I need to tell youuuu…”
“That we’re definitely still in the story,” Fakir said lowly. “I think so too.”
Autor found himself nodding as Fakir continued, “The walls are back up. They collapsed when the Raven was freed and we were outside of them when… when you found me, but now that they’re standing again, so the story of the Prince and the Raven isn’t over yet.”
“Yes,” Autor agreed, as the words tripped out of his mouth, “that’s eggs—exactly what I was going to say.”
He sat shakily down on the bed as Fakir took his glasses from him then retrieved an armful of blankets from the linen closet.
“Can we—” he started, watching the room spin a little. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, looking for the words he wanted. “What can we do about it?”
He wanted to change the story somehow, even though he wasn’t the person destined with the power to do so. The fact was so much easier to admit with a dose of kirsch to loosen his mind. He looked up at Fakir, expecting an answer, when Fakir dropped a tonne—a tonne of blankets, good heavens, did the blacksmith make this from beaten metal as well?—onto him.
“I wrote it,” Fakir said, as if from a great distance away. He sounded as if he was talking to someone else, someone infinitely more preferable than a fairly drunk Autor sitting in the guest room. “I—I wrote Mytho into shattering his own heart to seal the Raven away. When I thought about it, I thought about what Drosselmeyer had said, and… even though I didn’t know what would happen to Rue, I did it anyway.”
He sounded like he was in tears. It wasn’t fair – Fakir had damned someone Autor had loved, after Drosselmeyer damned someone Fakir had loved; and Fakir had the gall to feel guilty about it.
There was little to do about it, other than to heave the tonne of blankets off him, rise shakily to his feet and throw a punch at Fakir.
Fakir, who had once been a Knight, avoided his punch fairly easily. But Autor, who felt the kirsch surge with a rush of heat and fury in him, grabbed him by the collar as easily as Fakir had grabbed him by his collar earlier, and let him know the depth of his rage readily.
“You—you did this? ” he spluttered.
“Mytho wasn’t going to defeat the Raven! I felt it in that study, no matter what it was I was trying to write!”
“You gave her up! You gave her up!” Autor shouted, shaking him as much as he could. Fakir, having once been a Knight and being a ballerino, gripped his arm and threw him off effortlessly.
“I didn’t want to! I never wanted to, not after it was Duck who kept trying to save Rue!”
“I saved your life!” Autor seethed, thinking of the axe, the blood, the murder he had committed while shoving his conscience as far away from the thinking, feeling part of his brain. “I saved your life for this?! ”
Fakir stepped back, eyes wild. He looked like he didn’t want to think about the body he had come out of his writing frenzy to see. As far as Autor was concerned, Fakir had thrown the quill down suddenly as the roof cracked, grabbed Autor around his blood-wet arm, and dragged the both of them out. Everything in Fakir’s life was action as a would-be Knight; he had never been of the mind to sit and contemplate and mull, like Autor did when he discovered the truth of his heritage. Perhaps that had been part of Fakir’s failure to write them a better ending.
Autor took advantage of Fakir’s daze to land a punch in his face; and feeling emboldened by his success, swung again.
Fakir caught his fist the second time around and threw him into a wall.
Autor slammed back, felt the world go grey, then felt Fakir catching him before he hit the ground, and drag him back the bed. Nothing about his grip suggested fury. Nothing about their fight had been personal. It had just… existed when he didn’t think shouting would be enough.
“I saved your life too,” Fakir said lowly. He released him and backed away. “It was that or letting Mytho lose to the Raven. And if it was that, we would have… lost everything, not just Gold Crown Town, I think. It would have escaped to the rest of the world.”
“Is this your way to say we’re even now?” Autor snarled. Even with that said, his anger was bleeding away for no reason other than how—how useless it felt. Now he felt numb. “I had to literally kill a man to save you, but all you had to do was metaphorically kill our hope?”
Fakir whirled around at the doorway and snapped back, “Why does it bother you now? Before, you were beside yourself when you heard Drosselmeyer had appeared in that study. You worshipped that man and his work! This is his tragedy! You’re a living testament to his genius! ”
“That was before!” Autor yelled, “That was before I knew this story would—”
His voice cut off. Rue pulled her way out of his addled mind and pressed her hand against his chest again, like a devastating iron weight. He felt her touch like the touch of frost descend upon him and everything in his chest and throat hurt.
“… would take something I thought I’d never have away from me.”
In the dark hallway where he had confessed his love for her, Autor had insisted the feelings he had were his own. When he said he loved her, he felt it burning hot where now he felt cold, and it was true. No wonder words of love had destroyed Princess Tutu – when Rue had turned, laughed and told him to leave, he felt his heart fracture more than when he heard the Book Man denounce him as a would-be Storyteller. Now, he started to fear his feelings had really been a plot device used to make him suffer.
“That’s what Drosselmeyer lives for, I imagine,” Fakir said from the doorway. Then he snorted and buried his face in his hand. “Lives for. That was tasteless.”
When Fakir pulled his hand away, his face was wet with tears. Autor couldn’t even imagine how he hadn’t succumbed earlier. Thinking of Rue suddenly made the hurt in his chest worse.
As he wiped the back of his hand over his face, Fakir continued, “You were right, you know. With my skill, I couldn’t rewrite Drosselmeyer’s story to any extent. But at the end…”
He looked up at Autor, as if he was bestowing the secret of the world on him. “At the end, when I felt Mytho lose—I can’t explain, I just know it was true—I pulled one of Duck’s feathers out and with it, I wrote… that for the honour of the one named Princess Tutu, Mytho did what he did to give us all hope. To never give up once the opportunity to defeat the Raven came again.”
“And what does that change?”
Fakir shrugged. “I don’t know. A better chance maybe, if another Princess Tutu appears to restore Mytho’s heart to him.”
Autor imagined doing this all over again within his lifetime and felt older already.
“Or,” Fakir continued, “you told me once, after I had gotten Duck back from Drosselmeyer, that this ability turns stories into reality. And my ability is terrible now, but if I had time… if I had time, I could do it. Change reality itself. Reality and time if I had to.”
Autor shook his head. “Impossible,” he managed to say. “Drosselmeyer’s stories made the world what it was, but it can’t… happen in reverse. You can’t unmake what happened in the past through writing. It hasn’t been done.”
“When I went to bury Duck,” Fakir said solemnly, “I heard something from around me. Spoken by someone I thought should be dead.”
“Drosselmeyer?” Autor asked, with the sense of dread of him.
Fakir shook his head. “No. A puppet, by the name of Edel. One of Drosselmeyer’s creations which he destroyed when she was no longer useful to him. I took what was left of her and Charon rebuilt her into Uzura.”
“Suppose that’s what happens to us all, when we’re no longer useful to Drosselmeyer,” Autor added bitterly.
Fakir smiled grimly. “Suppose. But once she had told me that… the story of the Prince and the Raven was alive again, and the only things I could do was to accept my fate and be granted happiness, or defy it and be granted glory. Do those words mean anything to you?”
Autor slung himself beneath the blankets. He had enough, even without the philosophy question pitched at him. “Ask me again when I’m sober.”
Fakir left him to his rest, but in trying to sleep, all Autor heard over and over like a piano segment on da capo was: accept fate and be granted happiness. Defy fate and be granted glory.
He and Fakir was neither happy nor glorious, and even though Fakir had tried to subvert Drosselmeyer’s tragic ending, he hadn’t successfully defied it. Gold Crown Town survived intact for the most part, although they were still trapped by stories, and tomorrow, the townspeople would awake and remember nothing (except… maybe the rest of the Book Men who had turned into crows. Gott in Himmel, he hadn’t even thought about them at all.) And the cost of doing so had only been Mytho’s identity and the lives of the women he and Fakir had loved.
Autor would have said that they had more likely succumbed to fate than anything else, but then world was sinking into black, and as he drifted away, he felt something hot and wet slide down his face, and then nothing at all.
---
interlude
Yes, I know that quote. It’s from one of Drosselmeyer’s short stories. “To those who accept their fate, happiness. To those who defy their fate, glory.” Not one of his best ones, I think; too much Latin sprinkled in for no real reason. By the way – if the townspeople have gone back to being people, what are we going to do about the other Book Men? You know the… the ones that were going to be avenged.
I took care of it. What story is this?
You—what? How?
I wrote something about it.
That’s—it? That’s going to get rid of the body once they uncover the study? Are you mad?
It’s taken care of, Autor. Tell me about the story.
Right. Well. If you say so – I’m getting rid of that axe. It’s evidence I don’t need hanging around me. The story I’m talking about is a bit… fantasy, but in the real world. Someone put it under magical realism, which is still new for German literature. I’m not certain about it all. Anyway – there was quite a bit about carpe diem and seizing the day and not wasting their lives.
Anything I should know about it?
… people who try to defy their fate in the real world fail. If it’s not a fantasy narrative with talking bears and all, Drosselmeyer prefers to… let the real world kick in. It’s harsh and merciless. There’s no magic solution out here.
I see.
I don’t know what you’re thinking Fakir, but we… you… you can’t change the world. Not anymore.
That’s where I disagree.
Come again?
This isn’t the real world, is it? This is the story of the Prince and the Raven. I’m the Storyteller with the ability to turn my words into reality, and you’re the scholar at my side who’s going to tell me what works and doesn’t work.
…
What did Mytho say? That something so small and fragile managed to restore his heart, even when someone like me stood against her half the time.
Did you forget that she had an enchanted necklace and she didn’t even know she was doing Drosselmeyer’s bidding the whole time?
That doesn’t matter. “For Tutu,” was what Mytho said. To honour what she had done for him. The sacrifice she had made for him. And Rue too – Rue gave herself up to the Raven for something. I don’t know what it was, but it would have been a sacrifice for Mytho’s sake.
… don’t use this against me.
What sort of people would we be if we just let this happen?! To allow Duck and Rue to die for us, to let Mytho wander around Gold Crown Town heartless—
Stop it! Enough already!
You’re not going to become a coward defended by everyone else! I’ve done that for entirely too many years – years I spent trying to suppress Mytho’s feelings and deny that the story would ever go forward, because I knew I was fated to die at the end!
Shut up. Was I a coward when I stopped that Book Man from removing your so-called vile hands?!
You’re a coward if you think that’s enough to make up for just—just sitting here and resigning yourself to whatever fate Drosselmeyer dreamt up for you!
I’m not a coward!
You are if you think Rue died for this to happen!
Stop talking about her. Stop.
… … … whatever it was they did… whatever they thought it would do… I don’t know. But it’s given us another chance. A chance for us to change our lives. A chance to prove that we are nobody’s marionettes with lives to be played with. Our feelings are our own—our fates are our own.
I don’t know if I can.
… neither do I. But I can’t accept this fate either. Duck would have said… she’d say that I should do whatever I can do to help Mytho in my own way. That we’d defend Mytho together.
… how much did you love her really?
… I don’t know. More than I love Mytho, I think.
Mytho’s still alive though.
No. Even when he came back to the Academy cursed by the Raven’s blood, he was… more than this. I think he’s even worse off than when I found him as a child.
… I see then. Fakir. Consider this an agreement.
So—you’re going to help me change this story, one way or another?
Yes. I want to know what this will be like. To defy fate. To receive glory. And transcend this tragedy that Drosselmeyer has put upon us.
---
prologue
Once upon a time, there was a man who died.
This… is not the story of that man. This is the story of a boy, who shared blood with that man, and in sharing blood, shared the ability to weave reality into his stories, until his stories became reality itself.
(At fifteen, Fakir saw his world ended, then reconstructed in a broken image of itself. After Charon recovered, having remembered nothing of the Raven ascending, showering his blood upon Gold Crown Town, or being sealed away again; after Autor found his parents alive amidst the rubble; after Gold Crown Town rebuilt itself after that ever-so-disastrous storm… Fakir and Autor sat down and got to work.)
This boy had a life full of suffering ahead of him: as a child, his parents died. As he grew older, he found himself responsible for a charge, an ageless boy who was foolishly kind and deemed it his duty to save all who were small and weak. In order to protect him, the boy tried to quell all acts of heroism that his charge found compelled to perform.
(Again, he and Charon raised Mytho to live as best as he could, for a boy without a heart.
Again, he did his best to protect Mytho in the way he saw best. He didn’t know if it was what Duck would do, but Autor was around more often, and between them, they ensured that Mytho never ran into a burning building again.)
And as he grew older still, he found himself faced with destinies that seemed to have no end of suffering. To fight and die, torn in two by a Raven’s claws. To fight and die, against an ageless knight that was his pre-incarnation made flesh.
(“If I write a story,” Fakir said, “for every day of my life up until that day… and my ability to write stories that become reality is true not only for the future but for the past…”
“You’d change the story of your own life. You’d change… the world.”
“I’d change what our lives could be.”)
Finally, he found himself with the most terrible of fates: to be forced to sit aside and be able to do nothing as the ones who loved and fought to protect died around him.
However…
(For fifteen years, Fakir wrote his autobiography, for every day of the life he had lived before his world fell apart. He carried in him the memory of Mytho as he became more emotive with every piece of his heart restored to him; and the last words Duck spoke before she sank into that lake; and even the apparition of Rue as she had given herself over to the Raven for Mytho’s sake.
If he hadn’t, he doubted he could have continued to recollect day after day in excruciating detail. Every part of your life, Autor had said, is important to that plot. To the story of your life. It’s what shaped you, after all. You can’t leave a single thing out.
Fakir complied. He left the Academy and aged, while Mytho did not; and where Mytho spent his days labouring over dance, Fakir wrote and smithed to earn his stay with Charon and waited for the day he would right the world again.
However…)
… as he sat there, watching the man who had died but stayed not-dead to control his life for a laugh, watching his hand forced to spin out a tale of tragedy, the boy thought: no, not this.
(“What happens when you reach… that point?”
“What point?”
“The point where you change the Fakir of the past’s life. What are you going to do to him to make him save the story from tragedy?
“Let’s call that the divergence point then. And to answer the second part – I don’t know.”
“Did I really spend fifteen years of my life supporting a plan that ends up with ‘I don’t know’?”
“I did think about this, if that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t know if it’ll work like I hope, but it’ll… change something.”
“So what is it?”
“I read somewhere that ideas can change the world. All I need to do is make sure the me-from-back-then doesn’t do nothing as Duck walks into that lake.”
“But how will you do that?”
“Like I said. With an idea.”)
He watched his hand forced to write, and realised: if his powers were not enough to stop Drosselmeyer, then he could only stop himself.
(“He’s going to realise what’ll happen if he sits there and does nothing, no matter how much he doesn’t want to. Being forced to do something you don’t want to doesn’t change the fact you’ve done it anyway.”)
On the desk with the frog-shaped ink holder and the duck quills, the rolls of carefully pressed parchment and the tea, a blend of Darjeeling and Assam, was a raven-handled paper knife.
In that instant, he imagined he could see the future as it would be if he allowed this tragedy to pass. An impossible instant, but this was the town in which a dead man held sway over the life of every creature within its walls. A town where a girl had leapt straight from the sky to save him from men with axes; where he had battled crows on an underground lake, at what should have been holy ground beneath the church itself; where a man had taken a sword to his own heart in an act of self-sacrifice that was now dooming them all.
In a town where the impossible became entirely possible, he saw the bleak future, the worst ending for this tale.
The tale of the Prince and the Raven would end in another way, he decided; and he held that thought as he took the paper knife and ran it into his hand, until the pain overwhelmed Drosselmeyer’s power from beyond the grave.
“Duck! Duck! ”
And then he was pulling the knife out, was up on his feet and running for his life, out of Gold Crown Town and to the lake where Duck was waiting for him.
---
ever after
This is how Drosselmeyer’s greatest tragedy ends: not only in the tears of an old dead man, mourning at how his characters in his story could change the story themselves, but also by a lake, where a boy and his duck sit peaceably, passing their days together, starting a story, full of hope, from its very beginning.
---
cambiare
And from somewhere else: a town very far away in one sense but very close in many other ways, two men sat. Between them was an unfinished manuscript: a story that had been started but had also never been a story to be finished.
“Do you think it worked?” one of them said, as the walls around their town cracked.
Already, something—he didn’t have the words to describe it, even though his tools of trade were primarily words—was happening. When they looked to the side, the ageless boy they were charged to protect lifted his empty hands up to the sky, and when he brought them down, they were clasped around a sword and the boy had become a man. The man—the king, crowned in gold and swathed in an ermine-trimmed cloak, looked around him in a panic.
“Rue! Rue, how did we reappear in Gold Crown Town—Rue?!”
“Mytho!” one of the men shouted, leaping to his feet, “Mytho, it’s alright! This will pass!” He rushed to him, but his hands passed through him, and with a blink, the king was gone.
“It’s alright,” the other man repeated, his words betrayed by the uncertainty in his face. “King Siegfried must be in the future fifteen years from your divergence point.”
“What?”
“It worked! Your plan—what you’ve done, it’s—!”
“Kwack!” came the trumpet from the house. A large white duck launched into the air from the doorway and landed itself into the panicking man’s outstretched arms. “Kwack kwack kwaaaccckkkk—”
“Autor, am I—am I seeing this? This can’t— it’s impossible—”
“It’s not! This is becoming the world you made right, Fakir!”
Something rose into the air as the walls finally crumbled: the Raven, once sealed by Mytho fifteen years in the past, but now not the Raven any longer. It must’ve have been defeated after the change from Fakir’s divergence point, or it had become something… not the Raven any longer, because it exploded into light, like the twin stars he and Fakir had once seen, come barrelling out of the sky and into Mytho’s hand. This light spread and flared across the sky, and turned it white. White like swan feathers. White like a clean new slate.
“The world’s being rewritten, Fakir!” he yelled.
“Really?” he stammered. He looked at the duck in his arms and held her closer. “Finally, after all this time?”
He sounded as though as he was in tears. Perhaps he was; Autor could not see him, not when the world had turned so blindingly bright. The light that spread across the sky was descending upon them like a thousand sunbeams all at once.
“Yes,” he said as his voice caught in his throat. He wondered what their righted future was like. Just hearing Mytho speak Rue’s name told him she was alive. That was enough. More than enough.
He clapped his distant cousin on the shoulder. They were family after all. Fifteen years of work for this—he wondered what he might remember of this version of the Prince and Raven story.
“It’s done now,” Autor said as his voice started to fade away in his own ears, “Glory to those who defy fate.”
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