Title: Station: The Rose
Fandom: Revolutionary Girl Utena & LOST (crossover/fusion)
Rating: G
Length/size: 1800 words / 250px x 250px
Content notes: none
Author notes: I'm still not sure if this is a fusion, such that Utena and Anthy are transposed to the DHARMA Initiative on the island in LOST, or if it's multiversal crossover, where post-series, Utena and Anthy meet again. In the Initiative, on the island. :D?

Summary: Hybridized roses multiplied the wild rose's five simple petals into ornate, ruffled variations. This station will seek to explore chance, hybridize and disturb fate.





At 7:15 on the dot, the knock on her door sounded. Himemiya was not quite ready, still a little blurred by sleep, her hair still down, but the woman waiting on the porch looked as fresh as the morning itself. The lines of her jumpsuit were crisp as blades, her face scrubbed and glowing, her hair tugged back into a neat braid snaking over her shoulder.

"Tenjou?" Himemiya tried to push her bag up on her shoulder, pull the door closed behind her, and shake Tenjou's hand, all while pinning her hair up as best she could.

"Utena, please," the woman replied.

She took Himemiya's bag and waited while Himemiya wrestled with her long hair, her elbows rising on either side of her head like petals, like a halo.

When Himemiya didn't respond, Utena cleared her throat, proffering back the heavy bag. "Tenjou is my surname. The intake officers here..."

Himemiya nodded. Switching to Japanese, she said "There have been some translation issues with my funding agency as well, yes."

Utena stepped off the porch. For a moment, she took in the bright morning, the expanse of green before them, crisscrossed by neat paths and dotted with cheery yellow cabins like the one behind them. Beyond the clearing, the jungle waited, a riot of complex colors and shadows. It hugged and defined the cheery, orderly quad much like Himemiya's curling hair defined the smoothness of her cheek and throat, by contrast and recombination.

"Such a nice morning," she said, her voice quiet.

"Let's go through the woods," Himemiya said as she joined Utena. "The tunnels are far too dark."

"No." Utena squared her shoulders. "I don't think --"

"Aren't you my bodyguard?" Himemiya asked. "You're certainly armed well enough."

Utena fingered the strap of her rifle; she wore a knife in her belt and a pistol was strapped to her ankle. "There's so much activity from the Hostiles --"

There was, after all, very good reasons that the island's newest researcher needed an escort. Utena was not *anyone's* choice for lab tech, but for hand-to-hand fights and personal protection, she was a natural.

Himemiya slipped her arm through Utena's. "We'd have to walk the last bit anyway. The tunnel doesn't run all the way to the station yet."

She came up to Utena's shoulder, no farther. Yet tucked in against Utena's side like this, for just half a moment (if that), she fit like a glove.

"All right," Utena said slowly. "But you'll need to follow me closely. Do as I say."

Himemiya looked up at her. Her eyes were huge and depthless behind her granny glasses. "Of course. Lead the way."

They entered the jungle beneath a young banyan, edging through and around its slim, pale roots. The morning light changed here, somehow dimming and fracturing at the same time. They walked single file, quickly but cautiously, the damp, fragrant earth absorbing most of the sound of their movement.

Overhead, birds sought solace and questioned each other. Beams of sunlight broke through the leaves and angled downward, obtuse and nearly palpable, filled with whirling motes and questing seeds.

At the bank of a small creek, Himemiya paused, sinking to one knee to dig up a small spadeful's worth of dirt. She emptied it into a jar in her bag, checked her coordinates, and labelled the jar.

Utena waited beside her, fascinated.

"Sorry." Himemiya started to rise, so Utena took her hand to help her.

The water whispered and twisted before them, catching more glints of light and darkening in unexpected shadows. They stood together, watching it, before Himemiya spoke again. "How did you come here?"

As they forded the creek and scrambled up the opposite bank, Utena started to tell her the story of her arrival on the island. Unlike many of the Initiative's staff, she wasn't a university graduate or even dropout; she'd actually been expelled from high school at 14.

"On what grounds?" Himemiya asked.

Utena held up her hand for quiet. Digging her binoculars out of her pocket, she scanned the slope before them. The trail looked clear, but she needed to listen for the crackle and sigh that might indicate Hostile presence. Himemiya stood very close behind her, almost as if she were watching over Utena's shoulder.

When she'd determined the coast was clear, Utena let the binoculars drop to swing around her neck and glanced over at Himemiya. "I was expelled for fighting."

"Oh, my," Himemiya said. She might have been impressed, or mildly shocked, or completely unfazed. Her tone was complicated. "Go on."

After school, Utena worked in a harbor, crewing with fishermen and cleaning docks.

"Weren't your parents concerned?"

"They're gone," Utena said. Her face tightened slightly, then relaxed. When she first got here, it had been - to put it mildly - difficult to accept the Initiative's love of probing questions, its demands for personal honesty and emotional openness. Anyone could challenge anyone else on any topic; for the most part, she had become accustomed to it, but her old habits and expectations, for privacy, for reticence, still caught her flatfooted now and then.

"I don't even remember mine," Himemiya said.

Utena nodded and helped her up a steep rise and tangle of exposed roots. When they were back on level ground, their hands remained clasped. Neither one seemed at all eager to let go.

The morning grew warmer, moment by moment, the light going more golden as it made its descent.

On her first long-range fishing job, on a tuna and shark jaunt out of Okinawa, Utena's boat was caught in a storm. Out of nowhere, one moment blue sky and steel gray water and blood slicking her hands as she gutted the catch, the next black thunderheads and hail that stung her exposed skin and caught like brambles on her clothing. The boat heaved back and forth, then upright, the world sliding downward to nothing, and the next thing she knew, she was waking up on a beach with men in jumpsuits and long hair looking down at her.

No one else survived. She had six broken ribs and a cracked skull; when she woke up again, in the Initiative infirmary, she could speak rudimentary English.

"It's like a fairy tale," Himemiya said, a bit after Utena finished her story, as if she'd taken some time to think it through and offer up her analysis.

Utena frowned and scratched at the back of her neck.

"No?" Himemiya asked. Her voice sounded gentle, but Utena just shrugged.

"Never liked them," was all Utena said. She took Himemiya's elbow and they edged around a massive trunk.

"Here," Utena said, hesitant, as if still working out her own thoughts, "we're all equal. Dress the same, help each other out. No royalty, no specialness just because of birth."

"Certainly that's the goal." Himemiya nodded slowly, then moved half a step ahead of Utena, so that she led the way down a short path. Around another jog in the trail, and they came to the Rose.

Before them, set into the jungle, Himemiya's research station looked like a spaceship set down to Earth. If not that, then a bell jar pushed in amidst the vegetation, though what, or who, it was preserving was not clear.

Himemiya unlocked the door - five padlocks and an electronic key pad beaded with condensation - then stood aside. "Welcome to the Rose."

Utena stepped in, still hesitant, feeling out of place, out of her depth.

"I have something for you," Himemiya said when the lights had flickered on and the computers were humming to life against one section of the curved back wall. "That is, if you want it."

She held up a patch, identical to those everyone wore, octagonal like the station itself, the chapter's logo encircled by the ba gua. Utena originally wore the crossed shovels of the grounds crew; currently, she sported the sheriff's star for security detail.

The badge Himemiya offered sported a lush rose in its center.

When she received this new assignment, Utena had tried to watch the Rose's orientation film. As far as she could make out, this station was both botanical and concerned with astrophysics. Hybridized roses multiplied the wild rose's five simple petals into ornate, ruffled variations; the goal here was to explore chance, hybridize and disturb fate.

Utena was not an intellectual; she preferred what was in front of her, what she could see and touch and accomplish, bodily, sensibly.

She'd left the screening room halfway through the film and headed to the cafeteria to scrounge up a second dinner.

The badge was stark, monochromatic, in Himemiya's small hand.

"If you'd like to work together?" Himemiya asked.

Utena found herself nodding, moving a bit closer. With safety pins, Himemiya fastened the badge over the security logo on Utena's chest. When she'd finished, she kept her hand over the logo, curved against Utena, just over her heart.

"I --" Utena started to say, just someone knocked at the glass from outside.

Swiftly, she pushed past Himemiya and swung her rifle around to her front. The figure outside was not Initiative; he or she wore darker, slightly raggedy clothes. When Utena drew closer, she made out a woman, with pale hair, knocking on the window.

Hostile.

"Get down," Utena hissed. She raised her rifle, pressing the stock to her cheek, teasing the trigger with her fingertip.

Himemiya, unperturbed, edged behind a wide table and cut Utena off. She unlatched the window and pushed it up over her head, then greeted the woman. "Eloise, welcome."

Utena could only watch. She brought her right foot back behind her left and shifted her weight, sighting the woman along the length of her rifle.

The woman's gaze flickered to Utena, then back to Himemiya. She handed a crate through the window, then stared, hard, at Utena before turning on her heel and melting into the jungle.

"Well," Himemiya said, setting the crate down on the table, then closing the window. She returned to the table and started unpacking the crate. It was filled with jars like the one she'd filled on their hike, all filled with dirt and labelled. "Now you know one of my secrets."

"She's a Hostile," Utena said. The flat, terrible fact of that was all she could see.

"That's one way of describing it," Himemiya replied. She stowed the now-empty crate under the table and brushed off her hands. "Now, what were you going to say before we were interrupted?"

Utena looked down; she had released the rifle and her new badge fluttered off her breast. She could feel again the pressure of Himemiya's hand, see her downcast face as she'd worked to affix the pins. Her lashes were lush, like her hair, like the subtle curves of her body within her jumpsuit, like the unfamiliar accent embracing her words.

"I don't --" Utena looked up, found Himemiya suddenly very close, looking up at her. "I can't remember."

"That's all right," Himemiya said. She tilted her head and nearly smiled. "I'm sure it'll all come back to you."


[end]