Work Text:
The matinee goes like this:
The curtains open on Juri — always Juri, the starved saint, the collared dog, the hanged prince. Sitting there, a needle of light under the widow's peak of the proscenium, she is the only possible center-of-interest. The rest of the world unfurls from her axis. Shiori enters her orbit and at once feels everything behind her back dull.
They're having lunch in the garden again. They do this because Shiori has been working on her honesty. She thinks about this while watching Juri eat, hands arranged into cathedrals — European-style, wrists bent, each index a bone-white flying buttress — around her knife and fork. The back of her chair paints a handsome halo behind her head, gilds her curls like the setting sun.
There is only one center stage. To face Juri is to face away from the audience, and insodoing become one of them.
One day, she woke to find someone missing from the cast — one, two, three, a perfect rapture, excised even from memory. Maybe more. The space they took up feels bigger still, a great gaping maw, a vacuum lined with teeth. Around it, Ohtori feels less focused. Emptier, and bigger for it. Hungrier.
But Juri is still here, and Shiori is, too. Maybe they will be forever.
And so, in preparation for an eternity place-setting Il Purgatorio, they do this every day. Spotlight glints on the buttons of Juri's uniform; Shiori watches her reflection in the brass. "You eat so politely," she says. Her voice is, as ever, soft as the Devil's. Her lashes brush the swell of her cheeks as she smiles. "It's only me, you know."
"…Oh?" It's only an instant of hesitation, but it's enough for Shiori to know she's chipped something away. Only me. Only your noose; only the collar you keep. Already, Juri's smiling, composed as ever. Shiori doesn't bother to listen to the rest of her response.
To face Juri is to sit downstage. Juri sits, eclipsed, hidden by the silhouette of Shiori's uniform, her hair, her staging. A view for her alone. Shiori's shadow swallows her whole.
The thing about saints is that they only work in absolutes. There is no almost-martyr, no reward for giving up the ghost right at the very end. If the only love Juri knows is starvation, then to love Shiori is to go without her. If the only Shiori Juri knows is the role she's been written, then to touch is to ruin them both.
And wouldn't it be so nice? To see Juri ruined, just short of canonization. Shiori lives this stage, masks and all. She breathes these lines, has the diction and delivery drilled into her, knows the crosses and the blocking by heart. She's perfectly fabricated to bring Juri down with her. Fiction with an exit wound. This is something only Shiori can do. This is something Shiori aches for, and has ached for, and will ache for again.
Yes, she thinks. Yes, it would be nice. She is, after all, working on her honesty.
The matinee ends; the curtain falls. Night takes Ohtori like a closing jaw. Juri's door sits unlatched.
Shiori swallows her whole.