(no subject)
At Ohtori Academy, it's very easy to let distractions just fade into the background or even fade away entirely. One can't keep track of everything, after all.
That's the Chairman's job.
So naturally, Mikage quickly puts any thought of strange greenhouses and stranger young girls out of his mind. They aren't important to his immediate research, his work for the seminar. They aren't important to the research carried out deep in the sub-basements of Nemuro Memorial Hall. Particularly not when that research seemed to have hit a disconcerting impasse.
He had tried so many motivations for challenging the current Victor. Plain, simple fear and dislike. A sibling's possessive jealousy (the deep-seated incestuous desires were merely icing on what he had hoped was an already palatable cake). A girl's idol-worship twisted into loathing. A boy's incomprehension of what it meant to become an adult. Petty insecurities, most of them, all of which had to be properly channelled and guided before they could be of any use to him.
Though he had very nearly succeeded with Saionji's little admirer. That defeat, more than the others, still rankles.
And still, and still, the Rose Bride was not dead.
Was he going about it the wrong way?
Everyone knew that the Rose Bride belonged to the Victor. She was nothing more than a reflection of the one who had possession of her -- whatever her champion wished to see in her, he or she would see that. But just maybe...was there something deeper than that?
(deeper)
There is always something deeper. Always.
Even in the Rose Bride, there had to be something more than what was on the surface, or just beneath the surface.
He is working against time, and he knows it. There are doors that he has not tried, paths that he has not explored. But he also knows that every door he opens will lead to another corridor, and yet another set of doors, and he cannot simply keep trying to hit upon the right corridor and the right door merely by chance. There is a path prepared, however unseen or undiscovered it may be at this moment, and once it is found --
-- it will lead to the Rose Bride.
So perhaps, just perhaps, there might be something in trying a new hypothesis.
If one were to make the Rose Bride the means as well as the end, then...well, what then?
(Do you know? Do you really know?)
There is a room located in one of the deepest levels of Nemuro Memorial Hall, illuminated only by the single strong light that streams into a large, partially filled aquarium and plays across the tightly-furled petals of a single black rose bud.
The last black rose, not fully in blossom. Not yet, at least.
A single drop of water falls softly onto the rose bud, and the light goes out as abruptly as if it had been snuffed like a guttering candle.