I was re-reading Tokyo Babylon last night and was suddenly struck by the sudden, visceral thought that Seishirou's last words to Subaru in X/1999 may well have been "I'm sorry... and thank you." Partly because that is The Thing Clamp Characters Say To Break Your Heart Right Before Disappearing Forever, but also because of the first time Subaru encounters this phrase in the DREAM arc:
In this scene, Subaru encounters a childhood acquaintance who unexpectedly lashed out at him and ran away, with no closure whatsoever. When they meet again, she explains why:
Seishirou spends most of Tokyo Babylon going on about how wonderful Subaru is, and how kind he is to everybody--specifically, that because he's kind to everyone, it means that nobody is special to him. So Seishirou deliberately goes out of his way to make Subaru hate him specifically so Subaru will pay attention to him, because he doesn't understand that the fact that he wants Subaru's attention means that he loves him! Seishirou might be a physical adult, but he's emotionally immature and doesn't understand how feelings work, or what love is.
To be fair, Subaru is equally oblivious of his own feelings for Seishirou, up to a point and it takes the Eye Incident, where Seishirou loses an eye for/because of him + Hokuto to really force him to realize it. Because the two are mirrors of each other, it makes perfect sense that Seishirou didn't recognize his own feeling for Subaru until Subaru lost his eye in X/199, and Fuuma explains the reasoning to him. That triggers a bunch of feelings in Seishirou (we later learn that Hokuto also tried to explain it to him but he didn't get it before then), culminating in his death at Subaru's hands, and he understood his feelings by then because his mother told him he would one day die at the hands of the person he loves.... and the one thing Seishirou has wanted his entire life, even if he would never admit it to himself, was that he wanted to be loved.
And the thing about Seishirou's plan to make Subaru hate him is that it works. Subaru drops out of school, takes up smoking, and devotes his life to hunting Seishirou down so he can kill him. In the end, he becomes Seishirou, right down to the eye and his role in the Dragons of Earth (and Sakurazukamori, for that matter). IT WORKED.
Fuuma tells Seishirou that Subaru's wish is different from what he thinks. Subaru doesn't really want to kill Seishirou, he wants Seishirou to return his feelings, but the problems is that the only way Seishirou can return his feelings is to let Subaru kill him.... and Seishirou does actually want to return Subaru's feelings! So angst and tragedy for everyone results.
"I'm sorry... and thank you." The fact that this particular phrase so ambiguous is icing on the cake--what exactly would Seishirou be sorry for? For everything/anything he ever did? For being selfish? For not realizing that he lost the bet so much earlier? Ditto the "thank you", although there I think that's more "thank you for granting my wish/thank you for loving me" because for him, the two are synonymous. For Seishirou, love means letting someone kill you instead of killing them, inverting the relationship between assassin and prey, because he can't feel/understand any other kind of relationship.
That said, I don't think there's anything Seishirou could have said at that point that wouldn't have hurt Subaru. "I love you" is the truth, but far too direct; he's more likely to phrase it as "I lost the bet" or even "you won the bet after all". "I never loved you" is a blatant lie, and Subaru would know that once Fuuma offered him the eye afterwards. "I wanted to love you" is true, but not the whole of it, because he finally understood that he loved Subaru in the end, even if his expression of it was so warped and twisted. Etc, etc.
The wording in Seishirou's death scene does make it seem like whatever he said was pretty simple: "I... you..." with the verb missing, since Japanese sentences go Subject-Object-Verb. So maybe he did say "I love you" after all, because at that point there was no longer any reason to hold back. Subaru got what he wanted in the worst way possible and it broke him. Again.
I don't know, this is just me rambling, and I still need to re-read X/1999 in full. But given the parallels between Seishirou and Subaru's childhood friend in Tokyo Babylon, it makes sense to me that he might echo her words in his dying breath. Regardless, leaving it to the audience's imagination was such a great move, because there are so many possibilities, all of them painful, and the ambiguity and uncertainty just adds to the torment.
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
andulkaphoto
romaincrisis
titsay
