(REVISED 8/4) CHAPTER ONE: SUNTORY HALL AND THE HEATHEN
SUMMARY:
Ranma Saotome finally chooses, but who and why are just the beginning of this story. With "happily ever after" quickly turning out to be a disappointing fantasy, Ranma and the one girl he actually comes to love must now deal with the consequences of their indiscretions and find constructive ways to move forward on their divergent Fated paths. AU-Continuity/Divergence
DISCLAIMER:
I do not own Ranma 1/2 or any of the related characters. The Ranma 1/2 series was created by Rumiko Takahashi and is owned by Shogakukan and Viz Video. This fanfiction is intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from this story. All rights to the original Ranma 1/2 story belong to Rumiko Takahashi.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
My inspiration for "Sors Immanis" came while listening to Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" from the Carmina Burana cantata on a morning run. This story will be an experiment with some new ideas and writing techniques. To clarify upfront, this story is unrelated to "The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera" or any of my other Ranma ½ stories.
Feedback and comments are always appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
– KL
SORS IMMANIS
Sors immanis et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis, status malus
Vana salus,
Semper dissolubilis
Obumbrata et velata,
Michi quoque niteris…!
(Fate, cruel and inane
You are a malevolent spinning wheel,
Vain hopes for my wellbeing,
Inevitably fading into nothingness
Veiled and in shadows,
You torment me…!)
– Excerpt from “O Fortuna” of the Carmina Burana
Anonymous 13th Century Bavarian Monks
CHAPTER ONE: SUNTORY HALL AND THE HEATHEN
Present Day
Sors immanis et inanis….
Most people thought Carl Orff wrote the words for the Carmina Burana cantata. The woman sitting alone in Row 10 of block RB knew otherwise. She had read the actual text from Schmeller’s compilation for a class once back in her Todai days. Orff had simply orchestrated a small subset of the poems.
Tonight, the renown crossover cellists Hauser and Sulic were on stage debuting their new collaborative arrangement of Orff’s cantata with the visiting King’s College Choir. True to form, the giant Croatian were rabid stage animals as they tore through “O Fortuna” with their fierce facial expressions, wild body motions, fingers blitzing with lightning speed up and down their fingerboards, and sonorous vibratos wringing every last ounce of resonance from the long notes. It was all bone-chillingly sublime and profound.
Even then, the Friday night ushers at Suntory Hall had other more interesting preoccupations than the two master cellists. Many of them were university part-timers from Todai or one of the other nearby schools. Management loved them because they were cheap, eager, abundant, and yet sufficiently educated to handle the kind of clientele that sought refuge from the rest of the world at a place like this.
They were also avid people-watchers with vivid imaginations. Currently, they were whispering again amongst themselves about the young woman and the air of mystery about her. She was a regular who had bought the whole row out for the entire season.
To be fair, Row 10 of block RB was hardly a row per se, consisting of only 2 seats, but that was exactly why Row 10, with its unobstructed right wing view of the stage was the most desirable position in the entire house. For both acoustic and business-minded reasons, the engineers and architects had deliberately designed the Main Hall without private boxes. Row 10 in block RB was as much of a private sanctuary as anyone could find in that hall.
The name on the season subscription was “Akiko Tendou” (1). However, rumors had been going around for some time that this name was just an alias, the ironic kind of thing that truly “special” people used when they went around town trying to be themselves. Indeed, the woman did exude a certain gravitas that smelled of power and influence. The boys fantasized about speaking to her, and the girls dreamed of being her.
She was extremely beautiful and uncommonly so. Her face was delicate and heart-shaped with full, soft cheeks. She had the flawless complexion of a porcelain doll and bold, luminous eyes. Her thick and shiny silken hair was tastefully pinned up in a simple and tidy bun.
Her clothes and jewelry were simple and elegant, standing in stark contrast to the festive evening dresses and flashy earrings and necklaces that most other girls her age favored when they came to Suntory Hall. In fact, the woman usually showed up looking like she had come directly from a boardroom meeting or something of the sort.
Tonight, for example, she had arrived in a clean cut black double-breasted gabardine overcoat. Underneath, she had on a custom-tailored black knee-length pencil skirt, matching suit jacket, and handwoven silk ivory blouse, all of which elegantly showcased her petite frame and its lithe, slim-waisted figure. Her long legs were well-toned and pleasingly shaped. Her dainty feet were clad in handmade Italian black patent leather heels. A pair of bold, iridescent solitaire pearl earrings completed the ensemble.
Of course, the woman knew that the concert hall staff were scrutinizing her and throwing around gossip about who she might be. She knew because she had been one of them herself back in her undergraduate and law school days. Probably, they thought she was here at the behest of some wealthy father or other fancy patron. Even in the modern 21st century, Japan was still sadly a man’s world, and her looks hardly helped with staving off the undesired unconscious biases about pretty girls that came with that reality.
At thirty-two, she still looked young enough to be a junior paralegal fresh out of university rather than a managing partner and the chief legal counsel at a unicorn firm like Taniguchi & Ishikawa. Correcting those preconceived notions, however, would have been disadvantageous and self-defeating. To serve her ambitions and appease the indignant, smoldering rage of her disillusioned misanthropy, she had taught herself to prey on people's prejudgements about women. People meeting her for the first time found themselves unknowingly disarmed by the initial illusion of dainty innocence wrapped with a bowtie of enigmatically charming charisma.
Ultimately, the right of might was all that distinguished justice from sin and barbarism and the "haves" from the "have-nots". She had no choice. She had to become the most ruthless of all wolves in sheep's clothing, a bitch and a heathen of the most dangerous kind. She had to get even. For her mother. For Kumi and all of the other have-nots in the world left to rot and die as she had. For her sister.
Surviving to win had been all that mattered.
Indeed, by every outward measure, she had won. Aside from still being young and beautiful with a genius IQ, she was wealthy and connected, secure in her possession of the power to take almost anything she wanted whenever she wanted from whoever she wanted.
Except she was miserable. Unfulfilled. Her whole world view shattered and discredited.
With a sigh, she fought to redirect her attention back to the ongoing performance on the stage below. Tonight of all nights, if even for just an hour or two, she needed something to distract herself from the spiraling descent toward madness raging in her head.
Just an hour ago, she had been at the hospital listening to questions that no one ever wanted to be asked.
Just last night, she had stood the night before on the dimly lit rooftop of her firm's office skyscraper off Shibuya's iconic Scramble Square, commiserating in solitude with her self-loathing misery. She had come so close to throwing herself off the edge.
The misty evening breeze carried the rich, fresh scent of petrichor from the heavy late afternoon April squall that had blown in from the Bay earlier. The rain had ceased only a half hour prior or so. Only then had the remaining clerks and associates been able to escape for the night, giving "Akiko" the privacy she had been secretly craving for the better part of the day. In the omnipresent glow of city light, she had scowled derisively at her own unwelcome reflection staring back from the murky puddle of water at her feet.
Like Charles Foster Kane in his sorry Rosebud moment, she had found herself drowning yet again in reflections on the simple, singular root of her whole haunted lifetime of misery and anger. Kane was just a boy who did not want anyone to take away his one favorite toy in the world. She was just a girl who did not want people to laugh at her for not having things.
The Robinhood morality arguments she had used to justify her actions, her penchant for the little wealth redistribution projects that made her Machiavellianism palatable, were all lies. Whether her way or Kane's, the result was the same. Inside, she knew she had become just as much of a monster as Orson Welles' protagonist, the kind of rotten, hubris-filled "have-all" she had once so bitterly sworn on her beloved mother's grave she would never become.
Frustrated with herself, she tugged with her left hand at the right lapel of her coat and began grinding the pointed heels of her stilettos into the slick, wet EPDM surface, slowly making her way toward the West parapet. All of this shit running through her head now was a waste of time, just like everything else lately. No matter what she said or did, she was still just one very fucked up little heathen.
At the parapet, she swung her legs over and dangled her feet over the edge. A numb, morbid fascination settled in as she studied the countless cars and people unknowingly milling about on the busy Shibuya streets far below. Her calm, cool detachment despite the circumstances shocked even her. Even her acrophobia no longer registered. From that dizzying height, death would be unnecessarily messy and grotesque, but almost certainly instantaneous. There would be no time to feel pain or even muse about the sloppiness of the method.
She smiled wistfully at the thought of how far her own views on death had evolved since that day in Suginami when she had first grasped her own mortality, now about a dozen years ago (1). In her innocence, she had agonised with unspoken shame and sadness over all the things she would not have the chance to do or say with the people she loved. If there was in fact an afterlife, she imagined that her dead mother would have spent a good first part of Eternity giving her stupid daughter shit for dying so young and leaving so much unfinished business.
Except she did not die. The boy whose heart she meant to break ended up being the one to save her sorry ass. Afterward, she found herself deluded by a sublime illusion of joy. The world truly looked and felt wonderful, all so real and full of hopes and crusades in which she could believe with her whole heart.
It ultimately proved to be just one very cruel, protracted lie. After all, this story had begun with a question not unlike what Eve brought to Adam when Eden ended. Everything after was naturally pre-ordained.
Am I the reason?
Dying that day in Suginami would have been merciful. She just did not know it then. Fate was just balancing the books now, collecting its dues of inexplicable misfortune and senseless tragedies.
Her sister. Her man. All of that blood. In her hair, her hands, her clothes — everywhere. It would not come out, could not be washed away.
She could never forget.
Now amid the lonely shadows of this shattered Camelot, everything looked and felt unbearably tired and gray. All of her righteous fires of indignant purpose had been put out by the cold, unfeeling cruelty of Fate. If she died today, she knew no rosy sentimentalities or soulful longings would haunt her final moments. Everything had become inconsequential, all of it flowing forward in the inescapable, unidirectional current of Time. It would all culminate one way or another in the immutable certainty of Oblivion.
In that sense, the difference between being blown off the roof versus jumping off or even doing nothing had felt annoyingly small and trivial.
All that kept her from going over the parapet was the haunted bit of knowledge that, despite everything, both her man and her sister had never stopped believing in her. Why they loved her and valued her sorry life more than each of their own still confused her, but that did not matter.
Her man was the one fighting for his life now because of her, hanging on by a thread. He still needed her there to keep the vultures away.
So she did nothing.
The next day, the hospital called her in for a goals-of-care discussion with one of the doctors.
He looked the same when she arrived, of course, just as he had for the last few months, silent and unmoving. His head was wrapped in bandages. Tubes were shoved down his throat and up his nose. The color had long ago been bleached out of his skin. The muscles of his face had been wasted away by cachexia. Monitors and chimes droned on in the background. The vent remained set on full assist.
The irony of them calling her just after four (2) in the afternoon was not lost on her. She had a fair idea why they wanted her to come. Still, she was livid when they actually said it to her face.
"You're asking me to let him die."
"No, Ma'am," the doctor replied. "We're just asking you to objectively consider what is best for him — and for you too. It's been over four months. You shouldn't feel guilty. Everything imaginable and then some has already been done. Please consider letting him rest. His mind is already — ."
"What the fuck am I paying you for!"
"Ma'am, this isn't about — "
"Get the Hell out of here before I break your face and see to it that you never practice again in this country!"
The woman turned away, stormed towards the seat by the man's hospital bed, and reached frantically with her left hand for his unmoving right one.
The world knew him as the famous manga illustrator Hibiki. As far as the doctors were concerned, he was already a brain-dead corpse. She just knew him as the one boy she had ever loved. To her, even in his sad emaciated incapacitation, he still remained the most beautiful human being she had ever seen.
He was an ex-martial artist turned manga illustrator and writer who had made a considerable name for himself. He excelled at blending the fantastic with the grit of reality, packaging it all in a unique comedic style imbued with a sardonic wit. His execution of this while remaining unpretentious and believable in his lofty ambitions really stood out for his readers. It all stood in remarkable, ironic contrast to the brash recklessness that had been so off-putting about him when they had first met as kids all those many years ago.
His best known series was about a teenage martial arts genius who had trained in his family's form of the Art his whole life. The boy also happened to be cursed to turn into a girl whenever exposed to cold water, and to complicate matters further, he was helplessly honorbound to choose a fiancee from among three sisters from an old, traditional family. The girls' father was best friends with the boy's own father.
The books were good. She had read them all from cover to cover, even fed him some of his ideas, especially ones about the really naughty and fucked up middle sister in his most famous series.
After all, she had been the one who had gotten him into sketching in the first place. Of course, he had long surpassed her though. He had always had that annoying habit of so easily excelling at things whenever he cared to apply himself.
The secret to why these books made such an impression on people was because many of the stories were not fictional at all. The man really did train in his family's ancient form of the Art from a young age. His childhood on the road really did result in significant social deficiencies, leading most people to write off his considerable native intelligence. His father and hers did agree to a union of their families before either of them were even born.
She and her two sisters did come from an ancient family of previous high-ranking samurai prior to the Restoration. Consequently, they still had land and even a dojo in the middle of Tokyo's affluent Nerima ward; their father sat on the local municipal council for most of his adult life despite not having a regular job or other typical qualifications for the position; and antiquated, inadvertently misogynistic notions of honor and duty unconsciously pervaded the Tendou's dysfunctional family life.
As to whether a boy could change into a girl at the touch of cold water, well, the woman wryly thought of how going to the moon too had been considered a fevered fantasy for the vast majority of humanity's sorry time on this lonely planet.
She sighed as memories of his essence washed over her. His sweet cedar and pine wood scent. The forbidden thrill of his fingers once so freely intertwining with her own. The reassuring warmth of his hand wandering across the nape of her neck just under the edges of her hair. The firm, unyielding strength of his muscular arms reaching behind to wrap around the achingly aroused endowments of her bare chest.
The metallic taste of blood emerged in her mouth as she bit back on the pain of her memories. Her sister eventually walked in on them one day of course. If he had chosen her sister instead of her, things would have turned out a lot better for everyone.
Tears again began spilling uncontrollably down her cheeks. The simple platinum band on her ring finger felt unbearably heavy and painful to wear. Yet, although she knew she was unworthy of this ring, she could not bear to take it off.
Ever so tenderly, she took up his unmoving right hand in both of her own. As her fingers intertwined with his, a stormy sea of memories stirred anew within her broken heart.
"I'm here, Ranma," Nabiki Saotome (3) whispered in her husband's ear. "I won't let them hurt you. I promise. Please just wake up. You don't even have to come back to me…."
Sors immanis et inanis….
The dramatic final chorus refrain of “O Fortuna” had come around. As the last chord reverberated through the Hall, the giant Croatians stood and smashed their wooden cellos into the stage.
Fate was a fucking bitch, and “happily ever after” was just a cruel children’s fantasy. She could be okay with that. She just wanted him to wake up.
You don’t even have to come back to me.
I love you.
# # # # #
CHAPTER NOTES:
Ranma Saotome finally chooses, but who and why are just the beginning of this story. With "happily ever after" quickly turning out to be a disappointing fantasy, Ranma and the one girl he actually comes to love must now deal with the consequences of their indiscretions and find constructive ways to move forward on their divergent Fated paths. AU-Continuity/Divergence
DISCLAIMER:
I do not own Ranma 1/2 or any of the related characters. The Ranma 1/2 series was created by Rumiko Takahashi and is owned by Shogakukan and Viz Video. This fanfiction is intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from this story. All rights to the original Ranma 1/2 story belong to Rumiko Takahashi.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
My inspiration for "Sors Immanis" came while listening to Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" from the Carmina Burana cantata on a morning run. This story will be an experiment with some new ideas and writing techniques. To clarify upfront, this story is unrelated to "The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera" or any of my other Ranma ½ stories.
Feedback and comments are always appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
– KL
SORS IMMANIS
Sors immanis et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis, status malus
Vana salus,
Semper dissolubilis
Obumbrata et velata,
Michi quoque niteris…!
(Fate, cruel and inane
You are a malevolent spinning wheel,
Vain hopes for my wellbeing,
Inevitably fading into nothingness
Veiled and in shadows,
You torment me…!)
– Excerpt from “O Fortuna” of the Carmina Burana
Anonymous 13th Century Bavarian Monks
CHAPTER ONE: SUNTORY HALL AND THE HEATHEN
Present Day
Sors immanis et inanis….
Most people thought Carl Orff wrote the words for the Carmina Burana cantata. The woman sitting alone in Row 10 of block RB knew otherwise. She had read the actual text from Schmeller’s compilation for a class once back in her Todai days. Orff had simply orchestrated a small subset of the poems.
Tonight, the renown crossover cellists Hauser and Sulic were on stage debuting their new collaborative arrangement of Orff’s cantata with the visiting King’s College Choir. True to form, the giant Croatian were rabid stage animals as they tore through “O Fortuna” with their fierce facial expressions, wild body motions, fingers blitzing with lightning speed up and down their fingerboards, and sonorous vibratos wringing every last ounce of resonance from the long notes. It was all bone-chillingly sublime and profound.
Even then, the Friday night ushers at Suntory Hall had other more interesting preoccupations than the two master cellists. Many of them were university part-timers from Todai or one of the other nearby schools. Management loved them because they were cheap, eager, abundant, and yet sufficiently educated to handle the kind of clientele that sought refuge from the rest of the world at a place like this.
They were also avid people-watchers with vivid imaginations. Currently, they were whispering again amongst themselves about the young woman and the air of mystery about her. She was a regular who had bought the whole row out for the entire season.
To be fair, Row 10 of block RB was hardly a row per se, consisting of only 2 seats, but that was exactly why Row 10, with its unobstructed right wing view of the stage was the most desirable position in the entire house. For both acoustic and business-minded reasons, the engineers and architects had deliberately designed the Main Hall without private boxes. Row 10 in block RB was as much of a private sanctuary as anyone could find in that hall.
The name on the season subscription was “Akiko Tendou” (1). However, rumors had been going around for some time that this name was just an alias, the ironic kind of thing that truly “special” people used when they went around town trying to be themselves. Indeed, the woman did exude a certain gravitas that smelled of power and influence. The boys fantasized about speaking to her, and the girls dreamed of being her.
She was extremely beautiful and uncommonly so. Her face was delicate and heart-shaped with full, soft cheeks. She had the flawless complexion of a porcelain doll and bold, luminous eyes. Her thick and shiny silken hair was tastefully pinned up in a simple and tidy bun.
Her clothes and jewelry were simple and elegant, standing in stark contrast to the festive evening dresses and flashy earrings and necklaces that most other girls her age favored when they came to Suntory Hall. In fact, the woman usually showed up looking like she had come directly from a boardroom meeting or something of the sort.
Tonight, for example, she had arrived in a clean cut black double-breasted gabardine overcoat. Underneath, she had on a custom-tailored black knee-length pencil skirt, matching suit jacket, and handwoven silk ivory blouse, all of which elegantly showcased her petite frame and its lithe, slim-waisted figure. Her long legs were well-toned and pleasingly shaped. Her dainty feet were clad in handmade Italian black patent leather heels. A pair of bold, iridescent solitaire pearl earrings completed the ensemble.
Of course, the woman knew that the concert hall staff were scrutinizing her and throwing around gossip about who she might be. She knew because she had been one of them herself back in her undergraduate and law school days. Probably, they thought she was here at the behest of some wealthy father or other fancy patron. Even in the modern 21st century, Japan was still sadly a man’s world, and her looks hardly helped with staving off the undesired unconscious biases about pretty girls that came with that reality.
At thirty-two, she still looked young enough to be a junior paralegal fresh out of university rather than a managing partner and the chief legal counsel at a unicorn firm like Taniguchi & Ishikawa. Correcting those preconceived notions, however, would have been disadvantageous and self-defeating. To serve her ambitions and appease the indignant, smoldering rage of her disillusioned misanthropy, she had taught herself to prey on people's prejudgements about women. People meeting her for the first time found themselves unknowingly disarmed by the initial illusion of dainty innocence wrapped with a bowtie of enigmatically charming charisma.
Ultimately, the right of might was all that distinguished justice from sin and barbarism and the "haves" from the "have-nots". She had no choice. She had to become the most ruthless of all wolves in sheep's clothing, a bitch and a heathen of the most dangerous kind. She had to get even. For her mother. For Kumi and all of the other have-nots in the world left to rot and die as she had. For her sister.
Surviving to win had been all that mattered.
Indeed, by every outward measure, she had won. Aside from still being young and beautiful with a genius IQ, she was wealthy and connected, secure in her possession of the power to take almost anything she wanted whenever she wanted from whoever she wanted.
Except she was miserable. Unfulfilled. Her whole world view shattered and discredited.
With a sigh, she fought to redirect her attention back to the ongoing performance on the stage below. Tonight of all nights, if even for just an hour or two, she needed something to distract herself from the spiraling descent toward madness raging in her head.
Just an hour ago, she had been at the hospital listening to questions that no one ever wanted to be asked.
Just last night, she had stood the night before on the dimly lit rooftop of her firm's office skyscraper off Shibuya's iconic Scramble Square, commiserating in solitude with her self-loathing misery. She had come so close to throwing herself off the edge.
# # # # #
The misty evening breeze carried the rich, fresh scent of petrichor from the heavy late afternoon April squall that had blown in from the Bay earlier. The rain had ceased only a half hour prior or so. Only then had the remaining clerks and associates been able to escape for the night, giving "Akiko" the privacy she had been secretly craving for the better part of the day. In the omnipresent glow of city light, she had scowled derisively at her own unwelcome reflection staring back from the murky puddle of water at her feet.
Like Charles Foster Kane in his sorry Rosebud moment, she had found herself drowning yet again in reflections on the simple, singular root of her whole haunted lifetime of misery and anger. Kane was just a boy who did not want anyone to take away his one favorite toy in the world. She was just a girl who did not want people to laugh at her for not having things.
The Robinhood morality arguments she had used to justify her actions, her penchant for the little wealth redistribution projects that made her Machiavellianism palatable, were all lies. Whether her way or Kane's, the result was the same. Inside, she knew she had become just as much of a monster as Orson Welles' protagonist, the kind of rotten, hubris-filled "have-all" she had once so bitterly sworn on her beloved mother's grave she would never become.
Frustrated with herself, she tugged with her left hand at the right lapel of her coat and began grinding the pointed heels of her stilettos into the slick, wet EPDM surface, slowly making her way toward the West parapet. All of this shit running through her head now was a waste of time, just like everything else lately. No matter what she said or did, she was still just one very fucked up little heathen.
At the parapet, she swung her legs over and dangled her feet over the edge. A numb, morbid fascination settled in as she studied the countless cars and people unknowingly milling about on the busy Shibuya streets far below. Her calm, cool detachment despite the circumstances shocked even her. Even her acrophobia no longer registered. From that dizzying height, death would be unnecessarily messy and grotesque, but almost certainly instantaneous. There would be no time to feel pain or even muse about the sloppiness of the method.
She smiled wistfully at the thought of how far her own views on death had evolved since that day in Suginami when she had first grasped her own mortality, now about a dozen years ago (1). In her innocence, she had agonised with unspoken shame and sadness over all the things she would not have the chance to do or say with the people she loved. If there was in fact an afterlife, she imagined that her dead mother would have spent a good first part of Eternity giving her stupid daughter shit for dying so young and leaving so much unfinished business.
Except she did not die. The boy whose heart she meant to break ended up being the one to save her sorry ass. Afterward, she found herself deluded by a sublime illusion of joy. The world truly looked and felt wonderful, all so real and full of hopes and crusades in which she could believe with her whole heart.
It ultimately proved to be just one very cruel, protracted lie. After all, this story had begun with a question not unlike what Eve brought to Adam when Eden ended. Everything after was naturally pre-ordained.
Am I the reason?
Dying that day in Suginami would have been merciful. She just did not know it then. Fate was just balancing the books now, collecting its dues of inexplicable misfortune and senseless tragedies.
Her sister. Her man. All of that blood. In her hair, her hands, her clothes — everywhere. It would not come out, could not be washed away.
She could never forget.
Now amid the lonely shadows of this shattered Camelot, everything looked and felt unbearably tired and gray. All of her righteous fires of indignant purpose had been put out by the cold, unfeeling cruelty of Fate. If she died today, she knew no rosy sentimentalities or soulful longings would haunt her final moments. Everything had become inconsequential, all of it flowing forward in the inescapable, unidirectional current of Time. It would all culminate one way or another in the immutable certainty of Oblivion.
In that sense, the difference between being blown off the roof versus jumping off or even doing nothing had felt annoyingly small and trivial.
All that kept her from going over the parapet was the haunted bit of knowledge that, despite everything, both her man and her sister had never stopped believing in her. Why they loved her and valued her sorry life more than each of their own still confused her, but that did not matter.
Her man was the one fighting for his life now because of her, hanging on by a thread. He still needed her there to keep the vultures away.
So she did nothing.
# # # # #
The next day, the hospital called her in for a goals-of-care discussion with one of the doctors.
He looked the same when she arrived, of course, just as he had for the last few months, silent and unmoving. His head was wrapped in bandages. Tubes were shoved down his throat and up his nose. The color had long ago been bleached out of his skin. The muscles of his face had been wasted away by cachexia. Monitors and chimes droned on in the background. The vent remained set on full assist.
The irony of them calling her just after four (2) in the afternoon was not lost on her. She had a fair idea why they wanted her to come. Still, she was livid when they actually said it to her face.
"You're asking me to let him die."
"No, Ma'am," the doctor replied. "We're just asking you to objectively consider what is best for him — and for you too. It's been over four months. You shouldn't feel guilty. Everything imaginable and then some has already been done. Please consider letting him rest. His mind is already — ."
"What the fuck am I paying you for!"
"Ma'am, this isn't about — "
"Get the Hell out of here before I break your face and see to it that you never practice again in this country!"
The woman turned away, stormed towards the seat by the man's hospital bed, and reached frantically with her left hand for his unmoving right one.
The world knew him as the famous manga illustrator Hibiki. As far as the doctors were concerned, he was already a brain-dead corpse. She just knew him as the one boy she had ever loved. To her, even in his sad emaciated incapacitation, he still remained the most beautiful human being she had ever seen.
He was an ex-martial artist turned manga illustrator and writer who had made a considerable name for himself. He excelled at blending the fantastic with the grit of reality, packaging it all in a unique comedic style imbued with a sardonic wit. His execution of this while remaining unpretentious and believable in his lofty ambitions really stood out for his readers. It all stood in remarkable, ironic contrast to the brash recklessness that had been so off-putting about him when they had first met as kids all those many years ago.
His best known series was about a teenage martial arts genius who had trained in his family's form of the Art his whole life. The boy also happened to be cursed to turn into a girl whenever exposed to cold water, and to complicate matters further, he was helplessly honorbound to choose a fiancee from among three sisters from an old, traditional family. The girls' father was best friends with the boy's own father.
The books were good. She had read them all from cover to cover, even fed him some of his ideas, especially ones about the really naughty and fucked up middle sister in his most famous series.
After all, she had been the one who had gotten him into sketching in the first place. Of course, he had long surpassed her though. He had always had that annoying habit of so easily excelling at things whenever he cared to apply himself.
The secret to why these books made such an impression on people was because many of the stories were not fictional at all. The man really did train in his family's ancient form of the Art from a young age. His childhood on the road really did result in significant social deficiencies, leading most people to write off his considerable native intelligence. His father and hers did agree to a union of their families before either of them were even born.
She and her two sisters did come from an ancient family of previous high-ranking samurai prior to the Restoration. Consequently, they still had land and even a dojo in the middle of Tokyo's affluent Nerima ward; their father sat on the local municipal council for most of his adult life despite not having a regular job or other typical qualifications for the position; and antiquated, inadvertently misogynistic notions of honor and duty unconsciously pervaded the Tendou's dysfunctional family life.
As to whether a boy could change into a girl at the touch of cold water, well, the woman wryly thought of how going to the moon too had been considered a fevered fantasy for the vast majority of humanity's sorry time on this lonely planet.
She sighed as memories of his essence washed over her. His sweet cedar and pine wood scent. The forbidden thrill of his fingers once so freely intertwining with her own. The reassuring warmth of his hand wandering across the nape of her neck just under the edges of her hair. The firm, unyielding strength of his muscular arms reaching behind to wrap around the achingly aroused endowments of her bare chest.
The metallic taste of blood emerged in her mouth as she bit back on the pain of her memories. Her sister eventually walked in on them one day of course. If he had chosen her sister instead of her, things would have turned out a lot better for everyone.
Tears again began spilling uncontrollably down her cheeks. The simple platinum band on her ring finger felt unbearably heavy and painful to wear. Yet, although she knew she was unworthy of this ring, she could not bear to take it off.
Ever so tenderly, she took up his unmoving right hand in both of her own. As her fingers intertwined with his, a stormy sea of memories stirred anew within her broken heart.
"I'm here, Ranma," Nabiki Saotome (3) whispered in her husband's ear. "I won't let them hurt you. I promise. Please just wake up. You don't even have to come back to me…."
# # # # #
Sors immanis et inanis….
The dramatic final chorus refrain of “O Fortuna” had come around. As the last chord reverberated through the Hall, the giant Croatians stood and smashed their wooden cellos into the stage.
Fate was a fucking bitch, and “happily ever after” was just a cruel children’s fantasy. She could be okay with that. She just wanted him to wake up.
You don’t even have to come back to me.
I love you.
# # # # #
CHAPTER NOTES:
- These details become relevant in later chapters.
- In Japanese, the word for “four” and “death” have the same pronunciation.
- Japanese law requires a married couple to share the same surname. However, the law does not specify that a wife has to take her husband’s name or vice versa.
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