l’ultima prova dell’amor mio | chiyo | trial | [re: nyk, oH BOY]
The truth about opera is that it’s not really very sophisticated.
Beneath the elaborate costumes and in between the bars on the staff, once one has chipped away the gold filigree on names like Mozart and Berlioz, it’s nearly all the same story.
And the function of a beautiful young woman in this story is similar to the function of Iphigenia at Aulis is similar to the function of a clay pigeon at a shooting range. She’s created so that she can be destroyed — lovingly festooned with soaring arias and wrapped in embroidered silk, haloed by the golden glow of the stage lights from above, and then, over the course of an act or two or five, stripped of everything. Seduced, abandoned, betrayed, disgraced. Her lover kills her or she kills herself. Because her responsibility is the same as that of all the similarly virtuous, doomed girls who become saints: suffer beautifully, then lie down and die.
And she’s reincarnated a hundred, hundred times for her trouble, as Marguerite and Manon and Juliette and Lucia and Cio-Cio and Euridice and Mimi and Isolde and all the other idiot ingenues who die beautiful and tragic and sanctified, too weak to be resentful and too delusional to realize their own stupidity.
Even in her better lives, when she’s a Mabel or a Sophie or a Susanna, she remains an object to be acted upon. Not a thing that acts for itself.
Chiyo wasn’t that kind of girl. Had been, maybe, but wasn’t anymore. She knew that, lying awake in Takayama
(naoto breathing beside her and she thought in those moments she might hate him more than anyone in the world)
(she’d drug herself to sleep most of the time to avoid thinking about it but there were still those nights when it didn’t come fast enough)
feeling an ache deep inside like new teeth trying to break skin.
And she felt it again as her classmates slowly began to pick at the threads she hadn’t been able to tuck away neatly enough and unravel the secret she’d been trying to keep for months.
(Forty days in the desert and temptation whispering in her ear the whole time. She knew she’d made a rather different decision than the last person to be in this situation.)
She would not be that kind of girl, she told herself. She would hit stupid, stuttering Isamu Nakano until he was gulping down mouthfuls of his own blood, she would do whatever it fucking took to go home and she wouldn’t regret it for a second, because what she had written on that stupid computer was true: there was no point in her living if she couldn’t have what she’d been promised.
But then Nyk, maybe the one she’d spoken to least of anyone here, addressed her directly and she froze.
You’re the traitor, right?
“I’m — you <fucking> —“ her breath was seizing in her chest; her shoulders were jolting with the effort of speech “— you can’t call me a traitor when you’d — you, Nyk, and all of the rest of you would do the same thing—“
She took several large breaths, her hands shaking as she reached up to adjust her butterfly clip slightly. There were tears beading in her eyes and running hot down her face; she stared up at the ceiling and bit the inside of her cheek, chin thrust defiantly forward, not wanting to look any of these people in the eye.
(There were times when she’d felt more tenderly about all of them and more guilty about the fate to which they’d been consigned. But now was not one of those times. Now, she thought Suzume Yamaguchi was maybe the stupidest, most obnoxious person she’d ever met in her life — maybe because Izumi Meiki, apparently capable of little apart from crying and acknowledging out loud how useless she was, had been a close runner up. And she couldn’t stand Isamu Nakano, laughing and kyehehe-ing as though he weren’t ruining everything, or Toshio Todoroki, or — or any of them.)
The tears kept coming. Her voice cracked as she tried to speak through them.
Maybe she was that kind of girl after all.
“It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t ask for any of this to happen! I was part of Project Love because I thought they could help me, and then everything turned bad and all I could do was try to hide until it was over, and if you saw what happened there, Archress, you wouldn’t blame me for anything.”
The smell of blood had been overpowering — not sweet, the way stage blood smelled, but thick and sour. Her memories of what happened were still broken, but she thought she remembered a moment that seemed to last forever: blood in the air, footsteps on the floor, and her under a desk, knees drawn up to her chin, a hand clapped over her mouth so the owner of those footsteps wouldn’t hear her breathing.
Chiyo was a professional. She could hold her breath for a very long time, even now. She could play dying and then dead well enough to bring the theatre critic from Il Giorno to tears. But it hadn’t done her any good.
She squeezed her eyes shut and held her fists against the side of her head, breath still coming in gulps and gasps, words coming out almost faster than she could think about them, hating all of her classmates, hating herself, hating—
“And then she — I was still scared of her, but I found out who she was and thought she understood me because we were so much like each other. And then he ruined everything and she left me here all by myself. She said she didn’t care, but she was so scared when it really happened, and I’ve just been trying to do what she told me because I don’t — I’ve never known what else to— she told me Goro and Suzuki would help after she died, because they were part of Project Love, too, and they’re still here, but they haven’t—”
She hadn’t understood the word substitution in Kayoko’s note, but it sounded like they’d switched it from something to do with swords to something to do with — guns? Annie Get Your Gun. A Western musical, the kind she’d liked. It might have made sense to make that particular correction, given the place they were in.
Chiyo braced herself against her podium. Attempting to suck in air between sobs was making her light-headed, and all she could think of right now was someone who had died nearly two months before.
He’d needed to go. She knew that. Between Haku, Rover and Naoya, there was only one she’d considered smart or strong enough to be an imminent threat, and when the randomizer landed on his name, it had been the best possible outcome of that trial. Fuck, she’d suggested it to the rest of the town guard. But the things that made him dangerous had also been the things that made her wish she could talk to him again, had been the things that made him right and a damned sight more tolerable than nearly anyone else here.
She didn’t write back when the fake thing in the forest wrote to her, but she’d thought about him a hell of a lot since then.
And about what he’d said to her that morning by the laundry spring.
“I thought for a long time whenever one of you would die. I m-made myself sick over it. But what she promised me was enough that nothing else mattered. Whether you like it or not, everyone has something they would kill for. Every s-single one of you included.”
