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Nanami sees them, distantly, framed by the shimmering heat tailing the ends of cars and pedestrians streaming around them. Under the unrelenting brightness of the sun, she thinks briefly that they are a mirage streaked pink and purple.
Panic spikes through her first. Nanami did not leave Ohtori so much as claw out a hole in its side to escape through, a cornered animal desperately running through the thickets surrounding the school and towards the endlessness of the world. She half-remembers the pain of each step, the briars that snarled around her ankles and tried to drag her back. Or was it her own doubt? Her memories of leaving Ohtori are only slightly less blurred than her time at Ohtori itself, but she remembers the price: losing her brother, or losing herself.
It has been a year since that day. Nanami misses nothing about Ohtori, no one.
There is a secondary reason for her panic. The street that stretches between her and them is long, but she can make out their closeness. Anthy’s hair is longer — or perhaps simply let loose — and Utena is standing close to her, reaching with a hand to pin her hair back behind her ear, a private moment stolen shamelessly where anyone could see.
Nanami’s displeasure lasts for all of two heartbeats before a wave of jealousy crashes over her. She cannot look away, wanting desperately to steal away their joy for herself. Ohtori has come, one last time, to torment her. It is saying to her that there will always be one more thing that she cannot have. The choice to be neither princess nor witch betrothed was, she knew, an unending loneliness. And yet they had carved out something else entirely.
There were brief moments in the past that Nanami found herself wanting not the costly love of her brother nor the chatter of her friends. At night, curled up alone, she had wanted to be the Rose Bride and wanted to be the suitor. She coveted Utena’s ease of being, and deeper below her dislike of Anthy she had wanted the girl to like her, to understand why there was a bitterness between them that never made sense when she looked directly at it.
These thoughts were poison that she suffered alone, crying into her pillow before waking the next day, shell hardened once more. Nanami pities her younger self, rages for her even now on the sidewalk.
In the distance, Anthy turns. Her smile is no longer private but it is still radiant. Nanami has never seen her truly smile.
Anthy does not stop smiling when she sees Nanami; it only becomes something softer, as if she is greeting an old friend. There is an old primal instinct that urges her to run at this kindness; when had they ever gotten along? Instead, Nanami stands her ground, tilts her head in greeting.
She sees Anthy’s hand rest on Utena’s arm, urging her to turn. She thinks that her eyes go a little wider, her stance straightening. Nanami wonders if they might run from her as she might, if the past visited her.
And then Utena is waving at her, smiling too. Her movements are wide and energetic, and they are not leaving. No, Utena’s fingers are curling inward, urging Nanami to join them.
Nanami wonders if this is a lesson from Ohtori: they will fade into the midday heat by the time she reaches them and she will have another reminder of what the world was. A lonely and difficult place to exist in, that left her struggling in every sense of the word to survive.
But it was her choice to leave Ohtori screaming, and her choice to survive in the real world. Nanami has learned to bear the solitude that comes with it. And she would like to think that for all that she has been through, the universe would offer her a single kindness.
Nanami steps forward, her pace unceasing. She melts into the crowds of people, trusting that when she breaks from them on the other side there will be no room for her loneliness to remain and that she might find tenderness waiting for her yet.