Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction ❯ THE STAGE AT KIYOMIZU-DERA ❯ THE STAGE AT KIYOMIZU-DERA ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

In the aftermath of Jusendo and his failed wedding to Akane Tendou, Ranma Saotome finds himself mired in an existential crisis ignited by ugly truths about himself and the Tendou family's darkest secrets. AU-Continuity/Divergence

Anime/Manga: Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Angst | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 01.01.2023 | Pages: 172 | Words: 76.5K | Visits: 346 | Status: Completed

THE STAGE AT KIYOMIZU-DERA

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 NOTES

“To jump off the stage at Kiyomizu” is an old Japanese proverb loosely translated as the equivalent of the English saying “to take the plunge.”

Kiyomizu-dera, an UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most important ancient Buddhist temples in Japan, was founded originally at the site of a waterfall in the foothills of Mt. Otowa in Kyoto in the late 8th Century. “Kiyomizu” translates as “pure water.” The flow of that water within the sanctuary of the temple is divided into 3 streams corresponding respectively to the fulfillment of 1 of 3 wishes: longevity; success in studies; and good fortune in love. Visitors can drink from any or all of these streams, but doing so is considered greedy.

The most iconic structure at the current site is the stage, a mountainside platform constructed in 1633, overlooking a cliff on the mountainside. During the Edo Era, a superstition arose that one could make their wishes come true by jumping off the stage. Records indicate that at least 234 individuals made the jump between 1694 and 1864 before the practice was outlawed.

Still, the stage at Kiyomizu remains a popular reference to a do-or-die resolve to act.

Feedback and comments are always appreciated.

Thank you for reading.

- KL

PROLOGUE

>There's probably a special place in Hell for someone like me. I don't care anymore. Meet me at sunset on the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera.<

The text message flashed over and over in his mind's eye, driving him faster and faster up the final West end steps leading to the Main Hall. He was taking them in twos, threes, and then fours before giving up and launching himself off the rail into the air and over the top. Now the pounding of his own heart and the rush of his own blood were giving off a deafening roar in his ears as he darted around and between the ancient columns and raced out onto the Stage.

She was standing by the Eastside rail. Her silhouette was outlined by the pink and golden hues of the late Autumn sun hanging on just above the horizon. The thick edges and bangs of her smart Italian bob danced alluringly in the breeze, accentuating the flawless porcelain complexion of her delicate heart-shaped face and the fiery, soul-piercing luminescence of her bold, brown eyes. The surprising plainness of her clothes - a peach creme cardigan, dark indigo jeans, and white canvas sneakers - somehow made her seem even more desirable and alluring.

He had seen “cute” many times before, but this was different.

She was beautiful. He wanted her.

“Ranma,” she acknowledged with a tender, heartfelt smile.

An intense, highly charged silence fell between them as he came to a stop in front of her. Then the world exploded feverishly without warning in a fiery blaze of heat and light. He cupped her beautiful face between his hands, greedily crushed his lips against hers, and voraciously drank from the deliciously wet strawberry sweetness of her tongue.

She was so soft and warm - so alive - as she reciprocated by wrapping her arms around him and pushed back with all of her weight. “Hold me,” he heard her whisper as he felt the damp warmth of her silent tears in his hands….

…. And the dead weight of a furry arm across his chest as the walls of the guest room were rattled by the thunder of a snoring panda….

Ranma bolted up in his futon in a cold sweat as the implications of the dream came crashing down on him, threatening to bury him alive.

“Oh fuck….”

CHAPTER ONE: THE BELIEVER

Disclaimer: References to “Imagine Dragons” and “Believer” are intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from the references. All rights to “Believer” and its lyrics belong to “Imagine Dragons.”

# # # # #

In the moment when Ranma saw Akane shyly looking up at him under the hood of her wedding kimono, he believed that maybe he could finally see a path to his own small share of happiness and that he was finally being afforded his fair look at the meaning of beauty and possibilities. It was a lie though - a cruel tease too good to be true.

Very quickly, in the months between the failed wedding after Jusendo and graduation in the Spring, the world fell back into the familiar doldrum of pointlessly routine insanity. Everyone still thought he was stupid and that everything was his fault per usual. He felt unbearably tired. Even the Art itself no longer inspired or satisfied him; he no longer understood for what or why he had spent so long thinking so much about fighting. Everything he looked at and touched was imbued with a dull, suffocating molasses of tired, world-weary gray.

Then came the night of Graduation Day and when he actually noticed her for the very first time. That happened at the end of March about a week after the first cherry blossoms had appeared in Tokyo. They were in Roppongi at an open-stage karaoke hall a few blocks from the main district station. That was the real beginning of everything.

He went to the party with Akane of course, not having any real reason either way to go or stay home. Most everyone he knew from the school went to that party. There was Ucchan. He also recognized Akane's girlfriends Yuka and Sayuri mingling with the guys Daisuke and Hiroshi. Some bookie friends of his future sister-in-law whose names he never bothered to remember were also there.

As he made his way deeper into the room, he caught sight of her on the stage appearing unexpectedly smart, polished and ladylike as she sang. He had not known that she could sing, but then he realised that should not necessarily have surprised him. He had bickered and crossed paths with her more times than he could count. He had even lived in the same house as her now for a little over three years. Before that night though, the only thing he could recall with certainty was simply that she had been present.

She was strikingly adept at using the lighting above to her advantage, as if the knowledge was innate and instinctive for her. Streaks of blue, green, and red angling in from her right cut mysterious, intriguing shadows. These danced across the shiny bangs of her bob-cut hair, brushed against the delicate lines of her face, and teased between flashes at the elegant two-part fit-and-flare midi that she was wearing. The top was a black, long-sleeved turtleneck and the bottom a heavy, brilliant turquoise floral-print A-line skirt with white orchids accented by pink and violet hues. Her legs, long and shapely, were handsomely clad in black tights and accentuated by a pair of black patent leather stilettos.

He had no clue about the meaning of the lyrics. They were in English, and they blitzed relentlessly across the screen with blinding speed. It didn't matter though; he was mesmerized regardless. Her knees buckled visibly as she passionately belted out her soul seemingly from the very core of her being. The visceral power of her voice exploded in the darkness with a raw, unbridled fury that drove tsunami after tsunami of bone-chilling shivers down his spine.

A breathless, deafening silence fell across the room as she touched down on the final chord of the song. The sound of a shattering glass that must have slipped from someone's hand finally broke the spell. A thunderous roar of ecstatic howling and applause then tore through everything around him as the crowd began chanting her name.

# # # # #

Ranma recalled little else about the party. Nothing about it interested him. Eventually, he found himself on the roof passing time by watching cars and people moving along the street at least 20 stories below.

“Not your kind of scene either, huh.”

He snapped his head up in the direction of the voice. She stood a few steps off to his right, also leaning against the rail. Her affect was just as cool and disinterested as his own had been just the moment before. The nearness of her, though, somehow, made him suddenly aware of his own heart now pounding in his ears. A waft of sweet peach blossoms suddenly filled the cool, crisp air around him. He felt dizzy and lightheaded.

Outwardly, though, he acknowledged her merely with a grunt to buy himself a moment. An awkward silence then settled in between them as he scrambled to arrange his thoughts into something coherent.

“Congratulations, by the way,” he eventually remembered to say. Sheepishly, he realised that he somehow had not yet managed to tell her that at any point in the day that was now nearly over.

She laughed. “For what?”

“Graduation.”

“Oh come on,” she scoffed. “That's just a matter of doing your time. Everyone graduates from high school.”

Ranma scowled. False modesty did not suit her. “Ya didn't give a speech this morning,” he noted. “Doesn't the person who graduates First usually get to say a thing or two?”

She laughed again. “Of course I didn't bother. You couldn't even pay me to do it. It would just be a bunch of empty platitudes that no one would even remember tomorrow. I'll save my breath as I make my exit.”

“Wow. Ya really hate it here, don't ya,” he realised for the first time.

She remained silent for a while. He thought she intended to ignore him before the impression of some softly spoken words drifted between them.

“Huh?”

“I said that you're the first person to notice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that? Why're ya so angry about being here?” he asked, genuinely intrigued.

She shrugged in a way that made it clear that no further answer would be forthcoming. He could understand and respect that. It was a lot better than being berated for asking what was apparently an unwanted question.

“It's about finding meaning in the pain of living,” she suddenly said, knocking him out of his aimless reverie.

“Huh?”

“The song. You were going to ask me about the song, weren't you?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“`Believer.' That's the name of the song. The lead of this American group called `Imagine Dragons' wrote it. The guy has a disease that causes a crippling arthritis of the spine, hands and feet (1). He also has these painful episodes of eye inflammation that cause blindness from time to time.”

“Old guy?”

She shook her head. “Late 20s. Started having symptoms when he was about our age. It made him extremely self-conscious. He hated crowds because of it.”

Ranma shuddered involuntarily at the thought. “Ouch,” he muttered.

“Oh come on. Don't be so squeamish,” she chided, clearly picking up on his body language. “I'd think you of all people know a thing or two about pain. Are you not the great Ranma Saotome, forged in the crucible of a lifetime of training in Anything Goes?”

He felt anger bubbling within him at her mocking challenge. “And what would you, of all people, know about pain?”

As soon as Ranma heard the words leave his mouth, though, he braced himself, expecting she would come back with something chilling and venomous. That was what she usually did. He had grown rather numb to it by now.

This time, however, something different happened. He was shocked to find his own righteous indignation reflected in her eyes as she glared back hotly at him. Her fists were unconsciously balled up at her sides.

Somehow, she did know; that much became suddenly clear as day to him. The memory of seeing her knees buckle as she passionately belted out her soul seemingly from the very core of her being, the power and fury of her voice exploding in the darkness, and the tsunamis of bone-chilling shivers shooting down his spine washed over him anew.

As he looked into the fiery, soul-piercing eyes boring into him, he found he no longer had it in himself to stay angry. Two things occurred to Ranma as he studied those eyes. First, they were bold and brown. If he were willing to be honest, he would even perhaps have considered them pretty, but this, of course, was not an appropriate consideration given who she was and who he was. Second, he actually felt remorse — and for more than just tacitly forbidden line of his previous thought.

Ranma wondered if the nerve he touched related to her mother's death. He recalled someone telling him that she had been ten and that she had been alone with her mother at the time. He could not imagine how much that would fuck with a person's head. Other than that, though, he couldn't think of anything.

“I'm sorry,” he eventually relented. A breath that he had not realised he had been holding escaped from his chest. “What I meant to say is that ya sing really well. I didn't know either that ya spoke English.”

She also visibly relaxed. “Thanks. Sometimes, that's the only way I can get out what I want to say. That and I can be heard without getting too many questions for it.”

He nodded, recognising something familiar in what she was describing. “I know how that feels, needing to vent but not wanting to get smacked down for it. Happens to me a lot.”

She suddenly regarded him with a strange expression, as if noticing something about him too for the first time. “It makes you feel small and unimportant, doesn't it. What you want, what you think, what you feel - it's all so inconsequential that no one notices or even imagines that you have the capacity for those things inside of you. Even if anyone does notice, no matter what you try or how hard you try to be heard, no one gives a fuck. Everyone around just goes milling about back and forth over and over in the straight lines of those little silos and lanes in which they live. They've got too many of their own selfish fucking needs and problems to care or do anything else.”

His eyes flew wide open as he heard her. She smiled at him in the darkness, leaving something stuck in his chest that he could not describe.

“Now you have your answer.”

“Huh?”

“You asked me why I hate it here. Now you have your answer.”

“Oh,” he said as he mulled over her words. “What exactly does the song say anyway? How does the dude find his purpose and meaning in the pain of living?”

She laughed chidingly. “In for a penny, in for a pound, huh.”

Despite himself, he also laughed as he stuck his hand in his pocket and began to fish around for whatever might have been on his person. To his surprise, though, her hand was suddenly there tugging his wrist away. “Tell you what. How about we let this one be on the House? I think that you of all people would appreciate the words,” she said with a coy smile.

She began to tell him about the four points around which the lyrics were constructed.

First, the narrator demands that the world take notice of his resolve to deliver his message. He is fired up and tired of the way that things have been.

Second, no one can impose on him any more what they think he should be; he alone is now at his sail and the master of his sea. He has suffered for a long time.

Third, whoever calls him out and tries to shout him back down into silence, they no longer matter. He has tried to vent about it in poems that no one has really noticed or cared to understand, but that no longer matters to him. He will draw his message from his very blood and speak of it with his brain as he finally sees beauty through his pain.

Now he believes. By the grace of the crucible of hellacious fire and flame, he will draw a unicorn out of a zebra and proudly wear his skin like a tuxedo. The world does not bloom without rain. Losing does not come without shame. Most important of all, though, beauty does not exist without pain.

Ranma smiled. She was right. He liked the words very much. The power and fury of her voice was suddenly there again reverberating in the ears of his mind. Yet again, the tsunamis of bone-chilling shivers shooting down his spine washed over him anew, but somehow beckoning this time toward some previously unseen shore in the distance lined with the sense of unexpected possibilities.

Time seemed to stop as he finally sensed in himself a strange new courage to finally say what he realised he had wanted to say all along.

“This life is not what I want….”

Her wide, astonished eyes held up another bizarre revelation for him in the darkness: the words were his own.

“What is it that you want, Ranma?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to respond, but stopped as another interesting idea exploded in his brain. He felt his lips come together in a smirk of his own that reached pleasantly to the corners of his eyes. “That kinda info would be worth more than gold in Nerima, wouldn't it.”

“Touche,” she acknowledged, her eyes twinkling now with genuine amusement. “Tell me this much, yeah? Do you at least like girls…?”

“H- H- HEY…!” he sputtered in mortified indignation. He felt dizzy as the blood drained out of his head.

“Okay, okay!” she managed between peals of uncontrollable laughter. “Let's come back to that.“

“WE WILL NOT COME BACK TO THAT! WE WILL - ”

“Do you like coffee…?”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

Darren Reynolds, the lead singer for the American band “Imagine Dragons,” has an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis (AS). Classic symptoms include inflammatory axial arthritis (usually focused in the lumbar spine and sacroiliac joints in the hips) and arthritis of the peripheral joints in the arms and legs. Age of onset is typically in between the late teenage years and early 30s. Extra-articular features can include episodes of eye inflammation (uveitis), inflammatory bowel involvement, psoriasis, and rarely aortic root involvement. AS is not curable; treatment is focused on preserving function and achieving long-term remission.

CHAPTER TWO: SARTRE, CHARCOAL, AND FLAT WHITES

Disclaimer: References to “Kina Grannis” and her song “For Now” are intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from the references. All rights to “For Now” and its lyrics belong to “Kina Grannis.”

# # # # #

>Come after 8 tomorrow morning.<

The train ride from Nerima took over an hour.

The address she texted Ranma the night before was in Meguro Ward. As he made his way out of the station and up the main avenue, he caught sight of the clock tower of a school peeking up over some trees in the distance. The walking directions on his phone sent him that way.

The place turned out to be a coffee shop tucked away in the sub-basement of an office building a few blocks away from Todai's Komaba Campus (1). The location made sense. After all, she would be starting there in the next few weeks.

Ranma sighed. The strange air of the exciting and unfamiliar from the night before evaporated. A familiar sense of deflated disappointment settled in as he understood. There was always a catch.

The coffee she had mentioned the night before was part of a transaction. She was going to put him to work for something, probably to help her move some stuff to whatever new place where she was going to be living. He would have preferred to be asked straight. Of course, that would have been hoping for too much.

The cafe was empty when he arrived. That was not surprising though given the early hour and that it was, after all, a Saturday. He actually did not mind. Moments of peace and quiet were rare and precious luxuries in the world in which he lived.

The remnants of his annoyance melted away as he took in his surroundings. He was genuinely intrigued by what he saw and heard around him.

The place was called “Sartre.” (2)

A sign over the faded, well-worn wooden front door read:

Existence precedes essence.

Music played softly in the background. A girl was singing to notes strummed out gently on an acoustic guitar. The words were in English, but the melody was slow enough for him to manage to pick out approximately every fifth word or so. The gist of the intimate message got through to him more or less. She was asking about the meaning of her individual existence within the vast context of all of Time (3).

Around him were naked brick walls adorned with a variety of art works: oils, water colors, and some sketches. A close look at one of the oils nearest to the door confirmed that these were actual originals rather than cheap facsimiles. The directionality of the brush strokes in one particular corner of the canvas was nonsensically incongruent. A part of the scene must have been painted over at least once.

Ranma was especially struck by four haunting charcoal sketches that he picked out scattered around the room. Though he could not be entirely sure of their full meaning, these pieces possessed an eerie sense of familiar intimacy, as if these images were speaking specifically to him. Looking up close at the strokes, he knew for sure that the same person had created them. Additionally, unlike all of the other artists who had works on the walls, this person was left-handed.

His father had taught him a long time ago how to discern the handedness of a potential opponent from the texture of katana strokes on hard surfaces. The deepest part of the stroke was always at its origin, which itself was always contralateral to the wielder's dominant hand. For the majority of the strokes in each of the four charcoals, the deepest was up and to the right.

Regardless, the four sketches were beautiful.

The first was a portrait of a very young girl. She was looking up with bright, luminescent eyes and smiling at the viewer as she cupped her face in her hands. The edges of her bob cut of hair warmly accentuated the full, sweet roundness of her big cheeks.

The second showed the arms of a woman wrapped protectively around a frightened child. The woman's face was outside the field of view, but the dress she was wearing gave her away. His tear-filled eyes were haunted with longing as he clung desperately to the sleeves of the arms wrapped around him.

The third was of a school-age girl with a prosthetic leg fighting her way up a set of stairs that appeared to be on some sort of hill or mountain under the shadows of endless rows of torii gates (4). She was accompanied by a woman - presumably her mother.

The final image was of an anonymised figure leaping off from the viewing stage of a shrine sitting on the steep side of a mountain. Wings erupted from the figure's back as it fell toward the ground.

“If Icarus had been Japanese, he would've jumped from the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera.”

Ranma spun around, startled.

There she stood smirking at him with a genuinely amused twinkle in her eyes. Several interesting thoughts occurred to him as he saw her and the shot of espresso she was holding out to him in her hand.

“Twice in less than a day that someone like me has managed to sneak up on you now? You're getting sloppy.”

Ranma felt his cheeks flush. His initial instinct was to come back with some sort of denial. Then again, given who he was speaking to, that probably would have been futile.

“Ya work here,” he said evenly, trying to change the subject. She wore a green apron over her pink cardigan and jeans. He was surprised. He had not pegged her - or any of the Tendou sisters for that matter - for the type of person who would take a part time job.

She nodded. She had been working on and off at the shop now for nearly a year, ever since Jusendo and the failed wedding. He suddenly became aware of how scarce her presence had been around the house and the dojo for some time now.

“I needed to get out,” she said. “I think you can understand that.”

Something else occurred to him as he considered where they were. Meguro was hardly convenient to get to from Nerima. “You were that certain that you would get into Todai…? For that long…?”

She replied wordlessly with the smug, knowing smile of a Cheshire cat. She had always been a brazen and audacious person, but still, he found himself seeing her now with a newfound respect - on many levels.

“You should drink that,” she said, eyeing the shot in his right hand. “Before it gets cold.”

Ranma was hardly an expert on coffee. Still, the sophisticated string of the flavors in the black liquid as it washed over his tongue impressed even him. It began with a vicious, bitter bite that quickly mellowed out into something smooth and soothing. He could also discern a hint of chocolate and strawberries at the very tail end of the shot. He found himself wanting more.

“How much for this and another?”

“Samples are always on the House - as long as you actually buy something at the end.”

She accepted the now-empty shot glass back from him and turned in the direction of the bar. He followed her and planted himself on a stool off to her left. As he studied her hands working the machine with an obvious, practiced ease, her strange, cryptic words from earlier came back to him.

If Icarus had been Japanese, he would've jumped from the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera….

The words would not stop playing over in his head. With a mental shrug, he decided to take his own small metaphorical leap off the Stage and ask the obvious question. Especially after last night, the long-running charade between them had grown tiresome.

“What was Icarus hoping to achieve by jumping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera?”

“Why're you asking me?” she called out over the sounds of the machine.

“Well, who else would I ask?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Of course ya do. You're the only one who would know.”

“Because I said that Icarus would've been at Kiyomizu?”

“Because you're the one who drew Icarus at Kiyomizu.”

Her fiery, soul-piercing eyes were boring into him now. “What gave it away?”

He glanced down at the espresso filter in her hand. “You're left-handed. The person who drew that sketch is left-handed. Only 1 in 15 people are left-handed, and even most of them in this country still learn to write and draw right-handed — unlike you. Ya also did the ones with the crippled kid under the Senbon Torii at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the woman embracing the scared boy, and the smiling girl with her cheeks in her hands.”

A deafening silence settled in the space between them as the loud hissing of steam in the line suddenly died away.

“Do you even know who Icarus is?” she eventually asked.

Ranma laughed. “Of course I do. He ain't Daedalus. That and I'm well aware that this empty cafe we're sitting in is named after a dead French philosopher. Ya know what else? I think ya know that I know all of that.”

“What made you decide to finally lay your cards out on the table?” she asked.

“What made you?”

“Because you noticed me. Because I'm running out of time. There's something I need to know before I can leave Nerima for real. ”

“What's that?”

“What is it that you want, Ranma? In life?”

He found himself torn between irritation over her persistence and curiosity over her motives. “This again? Come on!” he scoffed. “It's not like anyone's ever given a shit about that before. Least of all you.”

“That's not true. I've known for a long time that you're not really an idiot. I can respect your choice to play your cards close to the vest, being someone who does so myself. I even think I understand why.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “You know that if you even budge a centimeter in any direction in that fucked up Gordian web of entanglements of your little Ranmaverse - that so-called life of yours - people are going to get hurt. The martial artist that you've been trained to be is terrified of that, so you think you have to plod through life wallowing in your own misery, deluding yourself into thinking you're some sacrificial lamb for doing so.”

She had news for him though.

“That's all shit, Saotome, because by definition living hurts; whether we do something or nothing is irrelevant to this fact. Someone else will always be hurt simply because you exist. There's no way that the Art and its archaic justice principles or anything else in the world can change that simple, cold, hard, and nasty fundamental truth about how things are. We talked about this last night. The world does not bloom without rain. Beauty does not exist without pain. You might as well do what you can to claim your own fair share of happiness.”

“Why is what I want suddenly so important to ya?” he asked with suspicious, narrowed eyes. “And even if I did know, why should I tell ya?”

She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “You just don't have the guts to be man enough to own your person and answer my question. There are so many reasons why this matters.”

“Oh really.”

“Yes, really!”

“Name one.”

“Fine,” she relented with a sigh. “I'm going to let you in on a secret.”

“Yeah? What's that?”

“I think we actually want the same thing.”

“Oh really.”

“Yes, really. I'm not trying to trick you into anything. I love my sister - pain in the butt that she can be. I think you love her too. If you're really going to become a part of our family one day, I need to know that I can trust you to actually bring your fair share of happiness to the table. We've been through enough between my Mom dying and my father still acting stupid the way he does because of it. You can't make anyone else happy if you're not first happy with yourself. You don't have any chance of achieving that if you can't even start with admitting what you want.”

“So says the person who actually stopped the wedding when we got back from Jusendo.”

She suddenly pressed her face close and up in his own, filled with an unyielding righteous indignation that caught him completely off guard. “Yes, Saotome, I did - because it's actually what you both wanted me to do. Before or after Jusendo, you know as well as I do that you and Akane could've eloped, gone to court - whatever it would take - at any point between then if you had really wanted to get married; you still can! Yes, people would've gotten hurt by that, but you can't even use the excuse of your honor as a justification for your inaction. Everyone knows that the Tendou-Saotome agreement precedes all other agreements hanging over your head.”

How dare she…!

“Tell me that I'm wrong. I dare you. If you honestly can, then I will get on my knees here and now, apologise to you, and spend the rest of my life repenting for what I did. We both know though that isn't going to happen because you weren't ready then; you weren't ready six, four, or even two months ago; and you sure as hell aren't ready now. You want to be ready - you both do - but you have no fucking idea where to start.”

Ranma opened his mouth to shoot back with his own white hot volley of righteous indignation. To his horror and shock, however, no actual words came….

Because no honest words could come.

Because she was right.

“Let me help you, Ranma. Let me help my sister. Please.”

# # # # #

Ranma studied the flat white sitting on the table in front of him. It was quite good. The temperature was pleasantly warm rather than scalding. The milk was still creamy, and its natural sweetness was still discernible at the end of each sip.

They had been interrupted by patrons starting to make their way into the cafe. “I have to go,” she had said when she heard the chatter starting to filter in around them. “Can we continue after I come off? I'm only on for half the day today.”

He found himself surprised by how genuinely crestfallen she seemed about their conversation being cut short. He agreed to stick around and buy something to justify remaining at the shop. He began reaching for his wallet, but she surprised him again by stopping him.

“A gesture of good faith,” she explained. “Like I said, samples are always on the House - as long as you actually buy something at the end.” She pulled a 500 yen coin from her own wallet and smiled as she slipped the money into the register.

“The owner is pretty strict with all of the accounting,” she explained in response to his unspoken question. The thought of her, of all people, having to answer to someone about money made him laugh.

The now-empty mug in his hands reminded him of hers. His father had told him to always remember to study a person's hands. It was a fundamental teaching of Anything Goes. The hands always gave away things about a person.

Her hands — soft and delicate unlike the rough, calloused surfaces of his own — had brushed for a brief moment against his own as she had passed him his flat white. Strangely, he had no prior recollection of her touch before that moment. Though her fingers appeared slender and dainty, their touch was surprisingly sure, unyielding and unapologetic — exactly how he imagined the hands of a normal girl might feel.

A normal girl….

The very idea felt intimidatingly alien to Ranma, so completely and impossibly out of reach. He found himself trying to reconcile the image of her normal girl hands with the blind faith and folly in the notion of Icarus leaping from the Stage at Kiyomizu; the drive that would possess someone with one leg to endure the agony of hobbling up the endless steps under the Senbon Torii on Mt. Inari; and the beautiful, raw, unapologetic innocence and joy of being a child. She was the very last person in the world who he would ever have imagined capable of seeing and communicating so clearly about such things. The sound and the fury of her soul as she had sung the night before had clearly only been a superficial hint of something much more profound.

All the more, she seemed somehow more mystical than real to him now. He was dealing with a complete stranger who had been hiding in plain sight for so many years. Yet, now he somehow felt as if he had happened upon a long lost old friend for whom he had so very many questions.

The very thought truly excited him for the first time in a long time. When he thought about it, he did not actually have any real friends. He had stopped believing all together some time ago that there were still such people left in the world.

Now, all he knew were transactions and obligations. Everything had already been figured out for him - except how to live. He had nothing of his own, which was why he could not go forward with anything.

What is it that you want, Ranma? In life?

He looked around him at all the normal people quietly enjoying their Saturday morning. At the table in front of him sat a student with wireless buds in his ears as he typed an assignment out on a laptop. To his right sat a young man and woman talking and laughing over a small platter of croissants and a pair of drinks. At the register, a pair of young girls, presumably sisters, giggled and squealed as they chased each other in circles around their flustered mother, who was struggling to pay.

Ranma knew what he wanted; he had always known. Now, however, he felt like he could actually talk to someone about what he wanted. More than anything, he wished that he could be like the people around him in the cafe now, living a normal life.

Returning his attention to the normal girl cheerfully working the espresso machine, he wondered if she would be willing to teach him something about how to do so.

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

The University of Tokyo (Todai) is widely considered the most prestigious and selective University in Japan. Todai is the only University in Japan where undergraduates have two years of a general curriculum before choosing a specialized field of study. Among the University's alumni, faculty, and researchers, there have been 17 prime ministers, 18 Nobel laureates, 4 Pritzker laureates, and a Fields Medalist. The University has 5 campuses, including the main campus at Hongo and the undergraduate campus at Komaba.

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, and literary critic. A key figure of modern Existentialism, he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“For Now” is a song by Japanese-American singer/songwriter Kina Grannis. In the song, Grannis questions the meaning of her existence within the context of all of Time. What does her life mean if everything will one day end in nothing? She concludes that maybe just knowing for herself that once existed will be enough.

Fushimi Inari Taisha, an UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a Shinto shrine in Kyoto dedicated to Inari, the deity of rice and agriculture. The shrine sits at the base of a mountain also eponymously named Inari. The most famous feature of the shrine is the Senbon Torii, the approximately 1,000 torii gates that line the path ascending up the mountain. Since the Edo period (1603-1868), there has been a custom of donating a gate to have a wish come true or in gratitude for a wish that came true.

CHAPTER THREE: THE NORMAL GIRL

“What's it like to be normal?”

The girl sat back and studied him with a poker face as she mulled over his words. Her eyes, however, gave her away. His question had caught her off guard.

“Funny that you think I'd know,” she eventually said. “I'm a Tendou, remember?”

Ranma laughed. “Point taken. Seriously, though, I think you're probably the only person around me who does know.”

She laughed too before telling him about a quote by Sartre that she really liked. “Life has no meaning a priori; it's up to each one of us to give it a meaning and that the concept of value is nothing but the meaning that we choose for ourselves.”

He could not resist the easy opening. “Money?” he teased. “Ain't that the ultimate contrived measure of value?”

The unexpected forced smile that appeared across her features caught him off guard. She did not appear amused at all. "Sartre would've rolled over in his grave at what you just said."

“Sorry,” he said, though he did not entirely know what he was apologising for. “It was meant as a joke,” he added.

“It's okay. I don't have any illusions about who or what you think I am. I'm used to that. It's just that I was desperate. I really just had to do whatever it took for me to get out.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“You said it yourself last night. I hate Nerima. Todai is my way out, but cram school wasn't cheap, and tuition and board are even worse. It took me years to come up with what I needed. We're not exactly a family with much in the way of means.”

“Oh.” He suddenly felt extremely self-conscious. Unflattering recollections of he and his father's years of unapologetically freeloading in her family's home flashed by his mind's eye. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologise,” she said. “If anything, I blame my father more than anyone. It's his house, and he invited you and your father to stay with us. Besides, it's not like anyone cares about what I say.”

Ranma recognised the same anger he had glimpsed the night before flashing again in her eyes. She also had her fists balled up again unconsciously at her sides. This time though, she looked like she was about to cry. She seemed uncharacteristically fragile and vulnerable. His heart went out to her.

“Ya wanna talk about it?” he asked worriedly.

She smiled despite herself and shook her head. “Not right now. Maybe someday.”

“I'm sorry for making ya - “

“I told you not to apologise,” she cut him off. “You're not making me tell you anything I don't want to.”

He understood. She wanted to prove to him that he could trust her.

“Besides, you wanted to know what it's like to be normal. Being able to feel pain is a good start. There's no beauty without it, remember? You're even allowed to cry and get angry about it. That's not a sin or a crime. What would be is choosing to do nothing about it; freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”

“Another Sartre quote?”

She smiled. “It's true though.”

“When did ya get so enlightened?”

“When I realised that I was on my own and that I had to be okay with that. I had to learn to see things for myself as they were, not as I was told they were.”

“How'd ya learn?”

Her eyes lit up with an excitement that he had never seen in her before. She pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “Come with me. I'll show you. All free of charge.”

# # # # #

Ranma studied the soft object that he had just plucked out of his eye. It was a cherry blossom petal, one of countless many swept up in the cool early afternoon breeze whipping mischievously around them.

The girl led three or four steps ahead of him as they moved along a tree-lined path at Himonya Park. Her stride was quick and animated with a confident sense of purpose. Clearly, she had been here before.

She clutched her left hand firmly onto the strap of the small white purse slung across her small shoulders. She had stuffed a handful of white cocktail napkins into her bag as they were leaving Sartre.

“What are ya — ?”

“Just wait. You'll understand,” she had said cryptically with a small, secretive smile.

At some point, they veered left off of the central path onto the perimeter wrapping around the lake around which the park had been constructed. Eventually, they came in the vicinity of a small boathouse in one of the more secluded areas of the park.

Here she stepped off of the path and wordlessly began studying some of the larger trees. She pushed up hard against the trunks and tugged on the low hanging branches of a few before finally finding one that she liked.

“Meet me up there,” she said, pointing up.

Ranma turned and tracked his eyes in the direction she had indicated. Above them was a large branch at least eight meters above the ground. “Huh?” he asked incredulously.

“I said meet me up there,” she repeated impatiently. She secured her purse behind her, leapt up for a nearby branch, and began to climb. As he saw her pressed up against the trunk of the large tree, he was struck by how petite and delicate she seemed.

“I can get us up there in a leap or two,” he offered.

“No, thanks. I can make my own way up. Just meet me up there.”

“Are ya - ?”

“I said just meet me up there! I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not fucking made of glass!”

# # # # #

“Sorry, “ a chagrined Ranma muttered as he warily eyed the angry girl now sitting roughly four arm lengths away from him. She had her back up against the trunk and her knees drawn up to her chest. She appeared to look everywhere and at everything but him.

“No wonder my sister always wants to hit you,” she muttered grouchily.

She turned out to be a very good climber. Her movements had turned out to be unexpectedly graceful, even beautiful. She was much faster, agile, and confident than he had thought she would be as she determinedly made her way up toward the branch that she had selected.

“Here,” he said, offering the side of his face within arm's reach in weary resignation. Years of dealing with her sister and his unwanted fiancées had taught him the drill. This time, however, he felt he actually deserved it.

The icy stare that she flashed in reply was withering. Subsequently, she wordlessly reached into her purse, pulled out a pen and one of the cocktail napkins, and started to write something. Her silence stung more than any actual physical slap or words of reproach.

In the chilled air between them now, he suddenly had the sense of an epiphany slipping away. For a moment, the notion of Icarus leaping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera had not seemed so far-fetched or crazy at all. For a moment, he had believed that the normal girl whose hands had made Icarus leap would have been willing to teach him a little bit about living.

He found himself suddenly filled with a terrible depth of sadness. Looking at her hurt. He had to turn away. He actually wished that she had hit him as her sister would have. It would have been familiar; he would have known how to deal with that.

As he looked away, he found himself studying the still water of the lake below. There he could see the clear blue sky above, the tree with the two of them in it, and people who would occasionally pass by on the path below. Among the people who passed were some runners; a mother pushing a stroller; an old couple holding hands as they passed by; some children playing; a man walking a dog. A brilliant mid-afternoon sun illuminated the whole tableau, mocking his mood. Eventually, a couple in a boat rowed by, dissolving the image away in the ripples stirred up in their wake.

He knew that she had finished with him quite some time ago by now. Yet, he could not bring himself to leave. A half hour quickly turned to an hour and more. He did not want to go back to Nerima and the old asinine script of repetitive, predictable, unending insanity. He did not want to go back to the abysmal vacuity of who he was. Seeing if he could steel himself for the inevitable, he closed his eyes and tried imagining that he could forget.

# # # # #

More time passed, but he could not forget. With a sigh of dread, he opened his eyes and glanced back down at the water. He felt certain he would find she had abandoned him by now.

To his surprise, she remained up in the tree with him, still with her knees drawn up to her chest, and still concentrating on whatever she was writing on the napkin in her hand.

“Ever hear that old story about the group of prisoners locked away in the underground cave (1)?” she suddenly asked. Her voice was surprisingly calm, even conversational. Still, however, she did not look up at him.

“No,” he said warily. “How does it go?”

She described a group of prisoners in an underground cave who were chained with their legs and necks fixed, forcing them to look only at an empty wall in front of them. Other than the wall, they could not see anything — not each other or even themselves. Behind them burned a fire, and between them and that fire stood a wall on which their captors walked across carrying puppets and objects. The captors moved such that only the puppets and objects and not their bodies cast shadows. The shadows landed on the cave wall in front of the prisoners and became the only things that the prisoners could see.

“For the prisoners,” she said “those shadows are what talk and make the sounds, as if they're the actual people and objects rather than just representations.” The prisoners saw, heard, and knew only what the people walking on the wall decided that they should see, hear and, know.

“Brainwashing?”

“Yeah,” she agreed, still without looking up at him. “Let's have some fun with this though. Say one day the people on the wall decide to let one of the prisoners out of her chains - just to see what happens.”

“Okay….”

“Naturally, she'd look around and see the fire, but then seeing actual light for the first time would hurt so much that she'd scream and have to turn away. Her captors mock her by freely admitting that everything she sees now in the fire light is what's actually real.”

“`Freely'?”

“Yeah. They know she'd be unable to believe them. Of course, she'd choose to escape from the pain. Of course, she'd beg to be put back in the chains and want nothing more than to stare at the wall for the rest of her life. It's safe and familiar.”

“That's not what actually happens though, is it.”

“Of course not. There'd be no fun in that.”

“What'd they do with the girl then? Or what does she do?”

“Well, of course, the nastiest, most cruel thing they can think of to do with her.”

“Of course. That being?”

The girl's captors dragged her out of the cave to the world above, tied her spread-eagle to the ground, violently pried her eyes open, and forced her to look around in the sunlight. Terrified, she thought she was going to die - but then her eyes finally adjusted. She began to discern different shadows, then the reflections of people in things in nearby water, and finally actual people and things themselves. Eventually, she could look up at the sky, see the sun itself, and finally understand how beautiful the real world actually was.

“That's hardly actually nasty or cruel. Ya could even consider it a blessing in the end.”

“You're too easily impressed, and it's hardly the end. We're not even at the fun part yet.”

“No?”

“Nope. Of course not.”

“Okay….”

“I'll give you a hint. This will end up being a beautiful story.”

“I'm not getting whatcha mean.”

“Beauty does not come without pain, remember?”

Now, the girl's captors dragged her back down into the cave, threw her back in chains, and re-condemned her to face the wall. Yet, she remained euphoric and addicted to the memory of all the beautiful things that she had seen. She began babbling to the other prisoners about her new and wonderful experiences. No one believed her though; they thought her crazy and either ignored her, pitied her, or feared her. She found herself alone to slowly rot and die in the frustrated, anguished hell of her beautiful memories.

Ranma shuddered. The image of Icarus at Kiyomizu-Dera flashed again in his mind's eye. His companion was right; it was a beautifully cruel and nasty way to die.

“Here,” she said. She reached out to him with her left hand, offering him the napkin on which she had been scribbling.

Ranma trembled at his very core as he saw. She had sketched an image of him sitting at the far end of the branch while staring down at the lake below. The lines appeared rough with many of the details still missing. Yet, the weary eyes and the pained longing and sadness in them already could be seen with chillingly vivid and unmistakable certainty.

“Sorry about all the missing texture and shadowing. There's only so much that can be filled out in an hour or two.”

“You're not mad at me,” he suddenly realised, feeling very foolish.

She laughed. “Of course I was. You're really annoying sometimes, but staying mad at you would've been self-defeating.”

“Ya coulda at least let me know.”

“Ever heard of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?”

“No.”

“A core tenet of modern quantum physics. You can't accurately know the position and velocity of an object at the same time.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the awareness of being observed changes a subject's behavior.”

He understood. “Ya needed me to think ya were cold-shouldering me in order to get the pose ya wanted.”

The familiar smirk of the Cheshire cat again appeared on her lips. “You asked me how I learned to see things as they were, not as I was told they were. I said that I'd show you. You really have to look at things in order to be able to deconstruct the essence of the world around you into actual lines.”

He looked back down at the napkin in his hand and found himself tracing her lines with the tips of his fingers with genuine wonder and admiration. Raw and rough as the sketch was, it was still one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. She really did see people and things as they were, and she had been true to her word when had said she would show him how she did. However small her gesture, it was the first time in a long time that anyone had kept their word to him.

“Thank you,” he told her. He meant it.

“You're welcome.”

“How long ya been sketching?”

“A long time.”

“Since your…?” he ventured.

She nodded. “After that, there was just a lot of silence all around the house. Kasumi disappeared into the kitchen. Daddy spent time with the bottle. Akane found the dojo.”

“Ya were lonely?”

She nodded again. “I started reading, listening to, and dreaming about things that no one else around me cared about. I had to fill my own space up with something.”

“You're the prisoner who's been taken out of the chains and dragged up to the surface, huh?” he teased, trying to lighten the mood.

She smiled. “Yeah, that's me. I've been that girl for a long time.”

“But you're finally leaving.”

“Yeah. Soon.”

“Ya think I'm the same? Another prisoner being taken out of chains and dragged up to the surface?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed with a clap of her hands. “You're finally asking the right question.”

“Am I the same?”

“Uh uh,” she chided, wagging her finger at him. “That won't help you. You have to figure this one out for yourself.”

“Because ya did?”

“Because that's what a normal person would do if they really wanted to live.”

“That a challenge?”

“It's whatever you need it to be to motivate you to do what you need to do.”

He looked down again at the napkin in his right hand. Between the ghostly, unfinished lines of his own face staring back at him, a strange seed of inspiration suddenly struck.

“Can I ask ya something else?”

“Sure.”

“Can ya teach me how to sketch?”

“So you can impress my sister?”

“So I can finish what ya started on this napkin.”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

“The Allegory of the Cave” is a famous excerpt from Plato's “The Republic” examining the contrasts between reality and human interpretation of it. The story itself is presented in the Socratic style as a conversation between Plato's mentor Socrates and his brother Glaucon.

CHAPTER FOUR: LIGHT, LINES, AND THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

In the months that followed, they met on the weekends, usually on Sundays. As a given, they never met in Nerima. Most often, their sessions took place on the Komaba campus, around Naka-Meguro or back at Himonya or one of the other parks. Afterwards, they would go back to her dorm room or to Sartre to debrief over their scribbles or just talk.

Being able to just chat like a normal person with another human being felt incredible. Before then, the closest thing he had known to “just talking” was the chummy griping and groaning from time to time with Ucchan about the belligerent nonsense of some rival who never had a chance or one of Akane's usual temper tantrums. Of course, however, even he knew there were limits to what he could say and how much he could ask for her to listen; Ucchan was, after all, still one of the girls who was after him.

The conversations he had now with this normal girl were different. Somehow, between them they simply had too many interesting things to talk about beyond fighting, arranged marriages, and unasked-for and unwanted obligations. She proved funny and witty, refreshingly cool and sophisticated, always unapologetically frank and candid, and yet surprisingly sensitive in her insights. He enjoyed her company, and more and more, he began hoping she enjoyed his company too.

# # # # #

“I don't get it,” Ranma said with a bemused frown.

“What?” she asked without looking up. She laid lazily on her stomach humming softly to herself while flipping through a manga book.

“You and shoujo manga.”

“What about it don't you get?” she asked, now setting the book down and giving him her full attention.

“Ya can pontificate about Sartre, dissect Plato in your sleep, and wax poetic on the fly about human nature with metaphors drawing on quantum physics. Yet, ya can waste hours on that stuff?”

“It's not a waste. Even Fumio Kishida (1) and Elon Musk read manga.”

“But shoujo…?”

“Hey. I'm still a girl, and dreaming is what girls do from time to time.”

# # # # #

“Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love,” she muttered one morning. They were at Sartre again. She had just opened up shop for the day.

“What's that?”

“My morning coffee.”

“Oh.”

“Want one too?”

“Sure,” he grumbled morosely.

“What happened now?” she asked as she reached up to one of the shelves for a tin of roasted beans.

“Akane cooked again last night.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, glancing up in sympathy. “Maybe not as much as you are, but I'm sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“You're welcome.”

“Wish she'd just accept that she ain't any good at it and give up,” he said in frustration.

She stopped working and fixed him with a quizzical, contemplative look. “Is that really what you mean, Ranma?” she eventually asked.

He sighed. “I just wish she would actually listen to someone for once, whether it's about cooking, the Art, or - just anything. What's the point if she won't listen to Kasumi or anyone else? Definitely don't listen to me.”

She laughed. “And the kettle calls the pot black.”

“I'm being serious here!”

“So am I,” she said. “Akane definitely is not an easy person to deal with by any means, and it's definitely easy to say this, but be patient. She does listen, especially to you. She just doesn't want to acknowledge or admit that any more than you do. That's a lot of why she gets so angry with you all the time.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It's true, Ranma. Anger isn't the opposite of caring; that's apathy. My sister is most definitely not apathetic about what you say and do. And in case you don't know, for a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does.”

“Wait a minute,” he said with a confused scowl. “How'd this suddenly become about me listening? And why's that specifically a girl thing?”

“Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved.”

Ranma was intrigued. He wondered how she would know such things. Two possibilities occurred to him. “Shoujo manga, right? Or…?”

“Or?” she challenged him.

“Have ya, uh, been in love before?”

“Ranma, Ranma,” she chided, giving him her old, familiar Cheshire cat's grin. “Imagine what you will, but that's for me to know and you to wonder.”

# # # # #

They sat in her room again talking.

The same Kina Grannis song from that first day at Sartre played softly in the background. It was the one in which the singer asks about the meaning of her individual existence within the vast context of all of Time. He realised now that this particular song was one of her favorites.

“When all is said and done, what's the one thing that you would like for people to remember about you?” she asked.

The spontaneous question caught him off guard. He did not know. “Haven't really had a chance to think about that before,” he freely admitted. “Too busy just staying alive. You?”

“That I was consequential.”

“That why you've always been so interested in money?”

“No. I told you. I don't actually care about being rich one day or whatever; I just needed a way out of Nerima. I'd be lying though if I didn't admit that it was fun sometimes just to see how many eyes I could get away with poking, letting everyone know I was still there.”

“Ya don't think that anymore?”

“It got lonely,” she said. “Now, I think maybe if there will be at least one person who will care enough to remember that I was here and that changed even just one thing for them, probably that would be enough.”

“So now ya wanna be a saint?”

She laughed. “Hell no! I'm just doing my best to be okay with what I am.”

“That being?”

“A mortal human being. Maybe even one that likes chocolate, cookies, and ice cream from time to time. Occasionally fugu (3) and caviar too.”

# # # # #

“Don't be frustrated.”

He had come to Komaba fuming about the naive, contrived appearance of his early attempts with paper and pencil. She took him to Naka-Meguro to walk by the canal so they could talk.

“People think a sketch is about a person or an object, but it's actually about so much more than that. You're trying to depict a three-way interplay between the light; whatever your subject is; and your own eye. To find and understand lines in the world around you, you have to be able to participate in that conversation.”

“How do I begin?”

“Start with the light. It defines everything that you see. Your space. The objects and people in that space. Whatever relationship they have to one another. You always need to be aware of where the light is.”

“Almost sounds like the light is more important than the subject.”

She smiled. “In many ways, yes, Honestly, I'd think that the importance of light would be the most intuitive part of all this to a skilled martial artist like you. It's like in an old samurai movie, right? The guy who manages to get the sun behind him gets the kill; the one with it in front of him gets killed; and at noon, the odds are even, all other things being equal.”

She was right. When put that way, he did understand. “So I shouldn't place the light in front of me.”

She laughed. “You're getting ahead of yourself. We're talking about where the light should be in relation to the subject, and there isn't really a right or wrong. It just depends on what you want to be seen. If you think your samurai should live, draw him at sunrise. If you want your samurai to be killed, then do your sketching at sunset.”

At some point, they turned off onto one of the small foot bridges traversing the canal. She stopped walking and began looking around. He suddenly became aware of her shadow falling directly on him as she stood a few steps ahead of him in the morning sun. The canal beneath them ran perpendicularly from North to South.

“Am I about to get killed?”

“As good a spot as any for the job, right?” she replied with a coy, mischievous smirk. She turned, climbed up onto the side rail and perched herself atop with legs crossed at the knees.

“Whatcha doin'?”

“Just wait,” she replied.

She pulled her phone and a selfie-stick out of her purse and locked the phone into the mount. Then, she proceeded to shoot pictures of herself facing in each of the cardinal directions. She started with the East and ended with the South.

“Here,” she said as she dismounted her phone off the stick and handed it to him. “Scroll through and take a look. You don't even have to tell me which one turns you on most.”

Ranma became aware of his own collar choking him. The blood suddenly rushed to his head. The heat threatened to explode out of his flushed cheeks. In a panic, he fought to school his features into a scowl that he hoped would mask his mortified horror.

“Oh come on, Saotome!” she chided between peals of her own laughter as she clutched at her abdomen. “Relax! It was a joke.”

He continued to hold on desperately to his frown. He did not trust himself to say anything that would not end up getting him killed.

“That's the problem with all of you martial artists,” she continued after calming herself. “You're always so serious about everything. That's why things always end up being such a mess for you. You asked the other day what it's like to be normal. Maybe this is part of it. Normal people tease one another and laugh about it all the time.”

“I usually get hit for that sorta thing. Usually by your sister.”

“I'm not my sister,” she replied.

“Ya really have no shame, do ya?”

She flashed a warm smile back at him. “What's there to be ashamed about? We're two friends taking a walk around the neighborhood on a Sunday morning.”

He smiled back, liking how the words rang true. He also liked how she said it: unapologetically without any shame, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Even… normal.

“Just scroll through my phone and look at those pictures, okay?” she eventually said, breaking the strange silence that had fallen between them. Her voice seemed unusually quiet and near, intimate even, as it gently slipped in through his thoughts. With it came the fleeting scent of peach blossoms once more.

“What am I looking for?”

“Nothing specific, but ignore the background. Just objectively take in for yourself that each one shows something a little different about my face.”

Ranma began swiping between the four pictures like she told him. Each unique angle presented subtle, but no less real differences in what was emphasized depending on whether the sun was to her right or left, in front, or behind her.

The soul-piercing character of her eyes and the playful lines of her lips appeared most frank and candid in the one facing to the East. The shots facing North and South were far more interesting though. Here streaks of sunlight angling in from the sides cut mysterious, intriguing shadows that danced across the lush, shiny bangs of her bob-cut hair and brushed against the soft, graceful lines of her face. These angles also fully revealed the flawless porcelain complexion of her skin.

The memory of her standing on the stage that night in Roppongi overlaid itself on what he saw. She had demonstrated the same intimate understanding and mastery of the light then too. He sensed now something simultaneously enigmatic, dangerous, sophisticated and profound — even of delicious human warmth and beauty — swirling around him, drawing him in, and crying out for understanding.

She was a very beautiful girl.

I'm not my sister….

Without warning, an image of Akane's fist hurtling towards his face appeared before his mind's eye, violently knocking him out of his odd, dangerous reverie. Tumbling back toward the unforgiving reality of the present, he thought of Icarus realizing his wings had melted as he fell helplessly toward the Sea and his Fate.

“Yeah,” a shaken Ranma drawled out evenly in his best impression of cool, outward objectivity. “Different.”

# # # # #

Today, she thought they should review some basics about lines.

She took him back to Himonya and the same tree where she had told him about the Allegory of the Cave. This time, she sat beside him with long legs in high cut-off denim shorts and bare feet dangling high above the lake far below. The pleasant warmth of the mid-afternoon sun was behind them. It was late summer now.

“In a sketch, the purpose of a line is to indicate a change of plane. That's why you first have to be able to see planes in order to see lines.”

She reached into her purse and then extended her hand out to him. In her palm were a pair of casino dice.

“What're those for?”

“Hold them for me,” she said, placing the dice in his hand. “I'll show you.”

She reached into her purse again. This time she drew out one of her now-familiar pencils and a cocktail napkin.

“Changes of plane are probably easiest to see in cubes like these dice. Each side is a plane, and you can very clearly see where they meet. It's really easy to do a line drawing of cubic objects; you just draw all the straight edges.”

She handed him the napkin, showing him the simple box outlines that she had drawn.

“Our eyes and brains are inherently biased to pick out straight lines in the world around us,” she told him.

This bias was the reason children invariably produced stick figures when asked to draw people for the first time. Straight lines appealed to that universal human desire for the simplest, most direct path from A to B.

“But the world isn't made of boxes, and most lines aren't straight — just like everything else in life.”

She took the napkin back from him and started sketching again.

“Most lines are actually curves, just the way the edges of those dice really are if you look up close. In other words, a change of plane often occurs as a gradual transition.”

"And when a transition that ain't a straight line like that comes at ya head on?" Ranma asked. "Whaddaya do then?"

“You mean when you're viewing a curved surface from a perspective of direct confrontation? Like a person's forehead and the other features of their face?”

He nodded. “Or even just a ball coming at ya.”

“Good question!” There was a palpable sense of excitement in her motions as she handed him the napkin. She had overlaid curved lines on the faint orienting straight lines with which she had started.

She reached into her purse for another napkin and started sketching something new.

"To understand a curved plane coming at you, you have to break it down in your mind's eye into a progressive series of many other mini planes. Since these mini planes are arbitrary - artificial even, you need a kind of line that will subtly convey their presence. To do that, we use something called an 'implied line' as opposed to a 'hard' or 'literal' line."

The napkin she handed him now depicted two very rough images side-by-side of what he surmised was supposed to be his own face. One looked like a robot. The other one was an ethereal appearing ghostly outline rendered entirely in dashed lines. He only knew he was looking at himself because of the pigtail she had added.

An amused twinkle appeared in her eyes as she took in his reaction. “Now you're really confused?”

“I think I look a lot better in real life,” he said dryly.

She smiled. “This is an extreme example. A good sketch makes extensive use of both types of lines. It takes practice to see these things and even more to put them together.”

“How long did it take ya? To be good at this?”

“A really long time. I'm still not even sure if I'm good at it.”

Ranma laughed. “I don't think the false modesty suits ya.”

She laughed too. “Of course not, but I'm not being modest. I really still am not sure sometimes. I just try to remember why I wanted to see these things in the first place.”

“Why is that? What and why do ya want to see?” Ranma asked as he handed her back the dice.

She froze at his question and turned away. The strange silence that settled in between them confused him, even scared him.

“I'm sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “It's that foot-in-mouth thing of mine. I —”

He heard her say something, but could not make out the words. They were soft and mumbled, but seemed important. A sudden breeze carried them away. He was frustrated.

“I know you didn't hear me the first time, Ranma. It's okay,” she said. She had read his darkening mood. She told him not to apologise for seeing things, no matter what anyone else might say. “Whether people want to hear you talk about what you see is a different matter, but you're entitled to your curiosity about the world, to be a beholder just like anybody else.”

She needed to see because she needed a way to remain sane after her mother died. She had been ten then. No one could give her a reason for what had happened, and there had been nobody strong enough to love her and reassure her that what happened was not her fault. She had to figure those things out for herself.

Only she had been home with her mother when it happened; her father had taken Kasumi and Akane out to the grocery store. Her mother had been very tired that day. There were more and more of those days toward the end.

“We were in my room talking, and she was doing my hair,” she remembered. “You may not know, but there was a time when I had hair that was even longer than Akane's when you first came.”

Ranma tried to imagine her like that. He laughed at the image that came to his mind's eye.

She laughed too despite herself. “It's true.”

“I'd like to see a picture of that one day.”

She grew quiet and still again. “You can't,” she mumbled after a moment. “I… I destroyed them all.”

“Why…?”

“I still feel the touch of her hands running through my hair and pulling at it. She was laughing at something that I said one moment, and then, just like that, the next moment was just… just silence.”

That terrible, deafening silence was the worst sound that she had ever known, far worse than anything she could ever have imagined before that moment. When she turned to look behind her, she found her mother lying absolutely still on the bed, her eyes wide open, but empty and unseeing.

“Mama…. Mama!” she remembered herself helplessly crying over and over. Desperately, she climbed up on the bed and tried to shake her mother back to life. Bright red blood suddenly filled in the whites of her mother's eyes. Then the body began to turn cool and rigid.

Her mother had leukemia. At some point, the cancer had transformed and obliterated all of the marrow in her body. She died from a catastrophic spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage, bleeding to death almost instantly within her own skull before her daughter's eyes.

“That was the first time I ever saw Death,” she told Ranma. “It was also the first time I felt what loneliness truly was, when I discovered what it was like to know that I was inconsequential.” In the void that emerged in her mother's shadow, she discovered the lonely horror of her own existential crisis.

Ranma found himself slipping his arms around her and pulling her in close as she began to cry. She felt so very small and fragile in his arms, like she truly was made of glass. He wondered if the memories she was sharing now were the thing she had not wanted to talk about that first day at Sartre. She had been on the verge of tears and seemed so fragile then too.

Do ya wanna talk about it?

Not right now. Maybe someday.

Yet, the very fact of her vulnerability made her seem somehow, in this moment, like the strongest, most beautiful and real human being he had ever touched and known. He felt grateful knowing her and that such a person could and really did exist in the world.

Desperately, she buried the warmth of her face against his chest. The thick lushness of her hair brushed up against his chin, and the soft, tender warmth of her body radiated against him as she did. Holding her aroused a peculiar, unexpected feeling of rightness within him.

There is no beauty without pain….

# # # # #

It was dusk now.

They had walked the long way back together from Himonya through Naka-Meguro and now finally came to Meguro-dorii. He was glad that they had not taken the train back.

“You should go home, Ranma. Akane will be wondering where you are. I'll be fine making my way back,” she suddenly said.

Strange things began to happen between the streaks of lamplight and shadows around them as the clock tower and the main gate of Komaba came into view. Ranma was struck by how extremely tired and pale she appeared, as if for a moment she were a star that had risen and burned just a little too brightly, leaving behind now these faded remnants of herself. The sight filled him with a sad ache of yearning, even a hint of fear.

“I'll be fine,” she repeated, smiling tenderly at him now to try and reassure him. She had seen the expression on his face. “Thank you. For today. For seeing me, listening to me.”

“I, no, uh, I should be— ,” he struggled shakily.

She cut him off by throwing her arms around him, lingering one more time with the warmth of her body pressed affectionately against him. She smelled faintly of peach blossoms. “I always knew you could hear and see people and things, Ranma. Never stop or apologise for who you are. Akane is very lucky to have you.”

Girls had glomped onto him before — many times. This was different. There was no demand or violation here, no hidden intentions that he could discern. It was strange to be touched by the honest presence of just another human being. Even more strange was the fact that it was her, this normal girl, who would be the first to touch him in this way. Maybe, though, the fact that it was her was the very reason that there should have been no surprise about what was happening. “I — “

“Go home, Ranma. I'll see you next time,” she whispered before gently pushing him away. The realisation of what was happening was unexpectedly painful.

What was Icarus hoping to achieve by jumping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera?

Why're you asking me? Because I said Icarus was at Kiyomizu?

Because you're the one who drew Icarus at Kiyomizu.

He saw her waving at him now with uncharacteristic shyness before turning and walking off into the night.

“Nabiki….”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

Fumio Kishida is the current prime minister of Japan. He is an open Demon Slayer fan and has publicly pledged to support manga and anime during his term.

A quote from Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) about the ideal cup of coffee. Talleyrand was the French foreign minister under Napoleon.

Fugu, or puffer fish, is a Japanese delicacy so poisonous that the slightest mistake in its preparation could be fatal. The dish is legendary among the most daring culinary thrill seekers. The innards of the fish are suffused with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, two to three milligrams of which is lethal to a human. In the words of famous science writer Christie Wilcox, tetradotoxin is “more potent than arsenic, cyanide or even anthrax.”

CHAPTER FIVE: WHO IS SHE?

Ranma knew he was in trouble.

His face ached more from mortification than any actual physical pain, even though no one had seen the unthinkable happen. He had tripped and fallen in the middle of doing a very basic kata. In frustration, he slammed his fists into the dojo's wooden floorboards.

Go home, Ranma. I'll see you next time….

The next time, however, was not the next weekend or even the one after that. First, she told him that she had fallen behind in her studies and needed the extra time to get caught up. Then there was some on-campus event for Freshers that she wanted to attend. She promised to let him know soon when she would next be free.

He could not sleep or concentrate on anything. What dreams he had were haunted by visions of her sketches from that first day at Sartre and Himonya Park of his face on the cocktail napkin and of Icarus leaping from the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera. His waking hours were filled just as much with shadows of her essence. Whether it was the sound of her voice; the few fleeting moments when her hands had brushed against his; her eyes and their questions for him; or the scent of peach blossoms - the memories were with him wherever he went, whatever he tried doing.

He became anxious, restless, easily annoyed, and frustrated. Most everyone and everything around him grated on his nerves and even more so than before his conversations with her had begun. To make things worse, he began to sense the eyes on him wondering what was on his mind.

Most days after school, he took long walks to avoid going home. He told everyone that he was doing some extra training, which was true to an extent. Mostly, though, he just did not want to see Akane.

She annoyed him for all the things which he could suddenly see so clearly that she was not. That she was a tomboy and a klutz were nothing new. Now though he was also bothered by how literal, unimaginative, and too ordinarily linear she was in everything she did. He would even describe Akane as “banal” in her naivety.

I'm not my sister….

The fundamental difference between Akane and her sister was the absence of soaring brilliance and the mystique of genius. His fiancée lacked curiosity or imagination in the way she did things. Her subpar practice of the Art and her struggles in the kitchen were just some of the more obvious examples.

To Akane's credit, she approached everything she tried with unbridled enthusiasm. Somehow, this was invariably, hopelessly and tirelessly fresh each and every single time she started anything. All the more, each futile endeavor became more painful to watch than the last.

He thought of the ragged, ratty yellow scarf she had clumsily woven and shoddily embroidered with his phonetic initials as a Christmas gift now almost two years ago. Kasumi had mentioned to him how just that much had taken Akane weeks to produce. To him, that scarf embodied who his fiancée was and the way she was stumbling her way through life.

Ranma knew he was wrong to feel as he did. That knowledge, however, was just salt in the wound that only further compounded his need to avoid her. Flawed as Akane was, Ranma knew she was not a bad person nor even devoid of charm in her own unique way. Moreover, despite all of her verbal abuse, jealousy, and prejudice of his actions, he had been fairly certain for quite some time that she did love him - or at least that she believed she did.

When he held her at Jusendo thinking that she had died, there was a moment when he thought he could love her too for the rest of his life. Eventually, however, he began wondering if he had been responding merely to the idea of someone who would love him enough to risk their own life for him. He would be forever grateful to her for saving him, but the truth about her feelings gradually became a painful, damning albatross around his neck.

For years, he had felt compelled to find a way to somehow arrive inevitably at the conclusion that he reciprocated those feelings. However long that took to achieve was irrelevant. Contemplating any other outcome had seemed unfathomably sacrilegious and dishonorable. Besides, pretty much every other guy around him desired Akane, right? Why couldn't he?

Now, however, things were suddenly very different. In the aftermath of fantastic revelations like Darren Reynolds and the lyrics to “Believer”; the story of the escaped prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave; and the vision of Icarus leaping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera, he could no longer sustain his delusion of having any such lodestar of purpose. He was distraught, disoriented, and did not know what to do.

Ranma wished that he could ask Nabiki, his new friend and mentor, for what she would do if she were in his position. Of course, that was the one precise question that he could not — dared not — ask her. He was terrified that she would stop speaking to him altogether if he did.

I love my sister - pain in the butt that she can be. I think you love her too….

Let me help you, Ranma. Let me help my sister. Please…..

Again, he slammed his fists into the wooden floorboards.

# # # # #

The one part of home that he could not really avoid was dinner. Aside from the need to eat, he could not afford to insult Kasumi with excessively frequent absences. His esteem and respect for her were not the only things that kept him in line. He had long suspected that Kasumi, if crossed, would easily be the most dangerous and terrifying of the three Tendou sisters.

He prepared a script of things to say at the table in order to throw off Akane and the others. To his surprise, much of what he rehearsed ended up being unused.

Akane herself became oddly quiet, subdued, even somewhat distant. There were an increasing number of nights when she was the one who was actually not home for dinner. She was either out with friends, often spending the night away, or putting in extra hours at cram school.

When she was home, her mind was elsewhere. She gave brief, perfunctorily polite responses to whatever was said to her.

He considered that he should ask what was going on and if she was okay.

He wondered if her behavior was a response to his own. Maybe he had underestimated her insight into him. By confronting her, however, he would risk exposing himself to the same uncomfortable questions.

One night, he tried to sketch out the look that he saw more and more in Akane's eyes, hoping to use what Nabiki had taught him to understand what he was seeing. Per usual, despite how tired he was, he found himself unable to sleep.

As the sun rose and he studied what he had managed to produce, he shocked himself with what he saw. The bright, fierce, and soul-piercing eyes staring back at him looked nothing at all like Akane's. He knew whose they were and what they expected of him.

In short, he never really had any decision to make over whether he should talk to Akane. He owed her that much. Besides, if she was on to him, questions would inevitably be coming his way anyway. If not, talking to her would be useful for finding that out too.

The right moment was harder to find than he expected. Akane was not around enough for him to have much of an opportunity. He decided to wait for her one Friday night as she came back late from cram school.

In the threads of street light and the shadows between them, he saw her making her way into the genkan. She looked surprisingly ragged, even miserable. Her Furinkan uniform dress was uncharacteristically disheveled and wrinkled. Her shoulders sagged visibly with weariness and the weight of her school satchel slung across from left to right. An audible sigh escaped her lips as she slid the front door shut and started to slip off her shoes.

“Yo, Akane,” he called out from his seated perch at the base of the stairs. He saw her jump at the sound of his voice, clearly startled.

“Ranma?! Why are you here?” A strange undertone of skittish timidity came through in her voice. She did not sound like herself at all.

He rose and took a step in her direction.

In response, she took a small, but very real, reflexive step back.

He noticed too that she averted her eyes away from his view. Now he became uneasy and felt genuinely worried. “Ya okay?”

“Would it matter either way?” she asked quietly.

“Whaddaya mean `would it matter'? Of course it matters!”

“Let's talk some other time, Ranma. It's late. I'm just really tired.”

She tried to brush past him, but something under her bangs caught his eye. He reached out, took her by the shoulders, and spun her around to face him. Then he knew for sure.

She had been crying.

“Akane…?”

“Let go of me, Ranma.”

“Look, I - “

“I'm just worried about being ready for the Sentaa Shiken (1).”

“That's still more than four months away!”

“Yeah. For those of us who actually care about these things and want to go places in life, that's not much time at all,” she groused. “Especially for someone as dumb as me.”

The sardonic bitterness in her voice caught him off guard. He felt the familiar heat of anger rising in his cheeks. He was concerned and worried for her, and again she was attacking him. She was being so typically stupid. He should have known better than to waste his time.

“Let go of me, Ranma,” she repeated quietly. “Please.”

His first instinct was to say something back to her, but then he decided to do something different this time. He gave her what she wanted. He let go, stepped aside, and allowed her to pass. He no longer had the energy to keep fighting with her.

Something bothered him though as Akane brushed past him. Something faint, but eerily familiar, permeated the air. He lingered by the genkan wondering if his imagination was playing tricks with him.

Then, he made out a hair caught on his sleeve, one that must have landed there when Akane had brushed past him. His heart froze to a standstill in his chest as he realised what he was holding. He had not been imagining anything at all.

The hair between his fingers smelled of peach blossoms.

Fuck!

# # # # #

The peach blossom-scented strand of hair that had come home with Akane created in him a new, desperate need to see her. She was avoiding him, and he needed to understand why. Everything suddenly seemed dire and urgent. He knew what he had to do.

>Are you free tomorrow or the day after?<

He stayed awake for hours waiting for a reply to his text. None came. The lack of a response filled him with anguish, anger, worry, and fear. He was slowly going mad.

At some point, he fell into a brief, tortured sleep. A strange dream came to him.

>There's probably a special place in Hell for someone like me. I don't care anymore. Meet me at sunset on the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera.<

He had seen “cute” many times before, but this was different.

She was beautiful. He wanted her.

“Ranma,” she acknowledged with a tender, heartfelt smile.

…. And the dead weight of a furry arm across his chest as the walls of the guest room were rattled by the thunder of a snoring panda….

Ranma bolted up in his futon in a cold sweat as the implications of the dream came crashing down on him, threatening to bury him alive. That and his pants were a mess.

“Oh fuck….”

By sunrise, he was already on a train out of Nerima to Meguro. He ran from the station to the coffee shop to be in time for the morning opening.

She was not there when he came.

Instead, a tall guy with glasses stood behind the counter in her place. He also looked like a student and was relatively good looking. Ranma had not seen him around the shop before.

“You're looking for the Senpai (2) who always drew the best shots?” the guy asked. They were the only two people there given the early hour. “The really pretty girl with short hair, right?”

Ranma nodded. The barista's description of her elicited a strange, unpleasant feeling. He obviously thought she was attractive.

“She quit the other week unfortunately, but she taught me things before she left. I can do my best to make you something the way she would have if you like.”

The words cut like the tip of a sword rammed through his chest. He had to sit down and think. To conceal the turmoil in his mind, he mumbled an order for a flat white and shuffled away from the bar seeking the table by the sketch of Icarus at Kiyomizu-Dera.

He found the table, but was shocked to find the charcoal sketch missing. It had been replaced by a talentless oil depicting what appeared to be children running in a field of sunflowers. The sight of that painting nearly made him want to cry.

He raced around the shop in a rabid panic looking for the charcoals of the crippled kid under the Senbon Torii at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the woman embracing the scared boy, and the smiling girl with her cheeks in her hands.

The three other charcoals were also gone.

Almost as an afterthought, he tossed some money at the barista for the flat white and tore out the door in the direction of the clock tower near the main gates of the Komaba campus. His drink ended up untouched in a rubbish bin somewhere along the way. He knew he would be invariably disappointed and did not have the heart to bother trying it.

He easily scaled the wall up to the fourth floor window of her dorm room in two leaps. The lights were out. He saw one of her sketchpads sitting on the desk atop a neat stack of shoujo manga. The bed was also neatly made and clearly unused the night before.

The really pretty girl with short hair, right?

The sight of the unused bed triggered the explosion of horrific, agonising thoughts inside his skull.

What if she had found someone?

Was that why she was so abruptly distant and unavailable?

Dreaming is what girls do from time to time.

Have ya been in love before?

That's for me to know and you to wonder.

After all, she was a brilliant and beautiful co-ed living on the undergraduate campus of the most prestigious university in the entire country, perhaps even the entire continent. She was constantly surrounded by the best of the best and all of the opportunities and temptations that they represented.

Ranma no longer had anywhere left to run or hide from the strange and very dangerous revelation that had been haunting him since that night in Roppongi when he had first heard her sing.

Nabiki was beautiful.

Inside and out, she was truly among the most beautiful girls that he had ever met - probably even the most beautiful.

He had been wrong too in his assessment of her as “normal.” Nabiki was far more than that, genuinely special, more brilliant, gifted, and human than any other person he had ever known. She was Icarus, the first human being who had seen and heard him for who he truly was.

The line that once demarcated clearly forbidden territory was already a long gone memory far beyond even the notions of “vague” and “blurred”. The world had already tilted irrevocably on its axis a long time ago; he just hadn't realised or accepted that he had already fallen for her.

For the first time in his life, Ranma Saotome found himself in love - and it was a torture unlike anything he had ever known or imagined.

# # # # #

Ranma-chan cursed as she threw down the wind-savaged remains of the convenience store umbrella that she had picked up somewhere along the way. She was not even sure why she had bothered.

Vaguely, she recalled hours of hopeless, aimless wandering wasted meandering around the Komaba campus, Himonya Park and along the canal in Naka-Meguro. At some point in the afternoon, clouds gathered, and rain began to fall. What began as a shower quickly turned to a storm, which showed no signs of letting up as night fell. Cold, wet, and alone, she eventually gave up and resigned herself to the reality that she would have to return to Nerima and confront the consequences of reality.

With a sigh, she set about trying her best to shake off what she could of the rain from her drenched body before slipping her shoes off in the genkan. She was surprised to find Akane there waiting for her in the darkness with a warm kettle in hand. Her affect was eerily cold and flat as she looked back at Ranma before wordlessly dumping the contents of the kettle on her head.

Ranma nearly screamed as the transformation took hold and she again became a he. The water was not just warm; it was scalding. The icy, wooden monotone of her question, however, froze him in place.

“Who is she?”

“Akane - “

“I'm nowhere near as dumb or naive as you think I am, Ranma. My sisters and I just each have different ways of dealing with the pain of living. I know you've fallen for someone and that I'm not that someone.”

He did not know what to say.

“I don't need to know the reasons why I'm not good enough. Just at least tell me who she is. What's her name?”

“Akane, I - “

“WHO THE FUCK IS SHE, RANMA?!”

He forced himself to see the anguished betrayal that he knew he would find in her eyes. Seeing her like that, he did not have the heart to lie or dodge the question, and so he told her.

Akane's knees gave way, and she collapsed to the floor as she heard him say her sister's name. The tears came freely now. She made a feeble show of angrily swatting him away as he reached out to her, but eventually gave up and let him place a hand on her shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” he told her. “I do love you (3). Just not like that. I never meant to hurt you.”

Her reply to him, however, was far more devastating and unexpected than he could ever have imagined.

“I can't compete against someone who's dying, can I.”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

“Senpai” is a respectful Japanese reference to someone who precedes you or is your senior.

"Sentaa Shiken" refers to the(大学入試センター試験, Daigaku Nyūshi Sentā Shiken), a standardized test that was used for undergraduate admissions for many years by all public and some private universities in Japan. It was held annually during a weekend in mid-January over a period of two days. For many students, the test was the difference between college entrance and one year's study for the next year's exams as a rōnin. Since the test was only administered annually and entrance to top-ranked universities and colleges is so competitive in Japan, the test became a target of scrutiny by many. In addition, rules for tardiness and absences were extremely strict and always resulted in the forfeit of the right to take the exams. There were no "makeup" sessions or re-takes offered except in certain cases such as train test was replaced in 2021 by a new Common Test for University Admissions (大学入学共通テスト, Daigaku Nyūgaku Kyōtsū Tesuto).

I want to clarify that this is NOT an Akane-bashing story. At this point, it's still up in the air for me who Ranma will end up with if anyone. Would love to hear your thoughts/opinions. Thanks for reading.

CHAPTER SIX: ICARUS

Akane sat across the aisle from Ranma on a Sunday morning train en route from Nerima to Ueno. She pointedly directed her gaze in every direction but his.

He noted the light blue satin blouse, black midi length A-line skirt, and black leggings that she wore. She actually looked rather nice. She also had on makeup, which was unusual for her.

Probably she did so to mask the dark rings around her eyes and the deep lines of fatigue on her face. He knew that she had not slept and that she had spent a good part of the night crying. He had heard her from his own restless perch on the rooftop just above her room.

She told him the night before to meet her directly at the station near Furinkan at 0800. She did not want to be seen walking out of the house with him.

“We can't talk about this here. No one else knows,” she had explained. He should dress up a little though to meet her.

“Huh?”

“Pretend that you want to take me somewhere with you. Like it's a… a date and you actually want to be around me. It'll get everyone off our backs for long enough.”

Her hands subsequently flew over her mouth to stifle the fresh sobs that threatened to burst out of her chest. Before he could say or do anything, Akane had already turned, fled the genkan, and run up the stairs away from him as quickly as she could manage.

I can't compete with someone who's dying, can I….

He could not possibly sleep with such terrible words rattling around in his head. He had a thousand questions and a thousand more worries and fears.

What did Akane mean?

What had happened to Nabiki?

Why was this a secret that only Akane seemed to know?

Was Akane punishing him by making him wait until morning for answers? If so, he was at her mercy. The only option he had was to trust her and her judgment.

He thought again of that sad last night in Meguro just after Nabiki had told him how her mother had died. Now, a new dawning sense of foreboding invaded his recollection.

Thank you. For today. For seeing me, listening to me….

He could still feel the warmth of her body pressed affectionately against him and smell the peach blossom scent lingering in the air. Again and again, he felt her gently pushing him away and saw her waving shyly at him before turning and walking off into the night.

He remembered what she had said to him when he had asked what had made her proverbially decide to finally lay her cards out on the table.

Because you noticed me. Because I'm running out of time. There's something I need to know before I can leave Nerima….

Let me help you. Let me help my sister. Please….

He could not help wondering if she had already known something then.

Because I'm running out of time….

# # # # #

Akane only spoke to him after they disembarked at Ueno Station. She carefully kept at least an arm's length of distance between them as they walked along the still relatively empty city streets.

To understand the things happening now, Ranma would have to know certain things about her sister and the rest of the Tendou family. For many reasons, all concerned had hoped that these old secrets could have remained buried forever in the past. In fact, her father had worried that Uncle Genma, if he knew the things Akane prepared to share now, might have called off the Tendou-Saotome family honor agreement and never brought Ranma to Nerima at all.

“Maybe someone should've told you; maybe someone should apologize to you for that,” Akane conceded. “It's just that we'd all been through so much. Not just with how we lost our Mom, but also all that kept happening after. That and we really thought everything was over by the time you came.”

Nabiki differed from her sisters in so many ways. Other than obvious things like being left-handed and her peerlessly brilliant and gifted mind, she had been born in Kyoto just like their mother. Kasumi and Akane herself on the other hand were local Kanto (1) girls. There was far more though, things that cut straight to the heart of who and what their family was.

Akane reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, toggled it out of sleep mode, and handed it to Ranma.

His jaw dropped.

She had used an old family photo as a screensaver image. This showed a younger Akane and her sisters wrapped in the embrace of a young woman, presumably their mother. Their father was in the frame too minus the mustache and with an arm wrapped lovingly across the woman's shoulders.

If not for the long hair pinned up in a prim bun, Ranma could have sworn that Nabiki herself was the mother of the three girls in the picture. The resemblance was bone-chillingly unnatural. So many things that Nabiki had told him since that first night in Roppongi rushed forward in his mind's eye, tee'd up now at the razor-edged precipice of revelation.

There was a time when I had hair that was even longer than Akane's when you first came.

I'd like to see a picture of that one day.

You can't. I… I destroyed them all.

Nabiki had not just been trying to forget how her mother had died. She also wanted to forget how much she looked like her mother.

“What was your mother's name?” Ranma asked.

“Akiko,” Akane told him.

Autumn child. Beautiful, but maybe not very lucky.

“I know you've probably never seen pictures of her before. Even now, Dad has a hard time with having them around the house. Because Oneechan looks so much like her - far more than Kasumi or I - Dad had a very hard time looking at her too for so long after Mom died.”

There was just a lot of silence all around the house. Kasumi disappeared into the kitchen. Daddy spent time with the bottle. Akane found the dojo…. I started reading, listening to, and dreaming about things that no one else around me cared about. I had to fill my own space up with something….

Nabiki described her loneliness in the aftermath of her mother's death with these words. Now Ranma understood why that loneliness had been there. She had become a living, breathing, walking reminder of who and what the Tendou family had lost. She must have been an albatross, unwanted and maybe even feared. For those reasons, no one could be there to tell her that none of what happened was her fault.

“Unfortunately, there's something about the genes in our family,” Akane continued. The resemblance between Akiko and her second daughter was far more and worse than just skin deep. “Oneechan shares Mom's unlucky blood.”

Akane smiled sadly to herself as she recalled struggling to keep up with her sister's incessantly active mind and boundless restlessness when they used to play as kids. Nabiki as a child had been incomparably vibrant; she always had an idea for somewhere new to go or something new to try. Something changed, however, in the Spring just before her 12th birthday. She began complaining of always feeling tired and began to lose weight. She had fevers and infections too that never seemed to go away no matter what medicines the doctors gave her.

The doctors began running tests. Leukemia. She had it too. They received the diagnosis about a year and a half after they had lost her mother.

“We all thought Dad lost his mind when Mom died. He went crazy when we found out about Oneechan.”

Soun Tendou transformed, possessed by the delusion that he was essentially fighting to avoid losing his wife a second time. He went from treating his daughter like a leper to hiding her from anything and everything his unwell mind could imagine. For a long time, she could not leave the house for anything except doctor appointments. However well intended, her treatment bordered on a form of abuse.

What you want, what you think, what you feel - it's all so inconsequential that no one notices or even imagines that you have the capacity for those things inside of you. Even if anyone does notice, no matter what you try or how hard you try to be heard, no one gives a fuck….

She became the escaped prisoner who was thrown back into the cave, deprived of the things that she had previously found and used in the shadow of neglect to define herself. It must have been a horrible way to live.

Between the days spent at Sartre, Himonya, Komaba and Naka-Meguro, Ranma thought he had come to understand why Nabiki hated Nerima and home so much and why she had been so desperate and hellbent on leaving - whatever the figurative and literal costs. Maybe even she thought he understood something too. Thank you for seeing me, listening to me, she told him that final night in Meguro.

He realised now, however, that he was just wrong. He had not seen much of anything at all, just a glimpse at the tip of an iceberg. Her need to escape Nerima was about so much more than any trivial material thing or even some spiritually enlightened pursuit of the intellectual and creative freedom to be herself.

I'm going to let you in on a secret. I think we actually want the same thing.

Was he the same as her, a prisoner also trying to escape the Cave?

Answering his question would not help him, she had said that first day at Himonya.

See things as they are, not what you're told they are. You have to figure this one out for yourself.

He knew now, had figured it out for himself. She had been so right about so many things including that first secret she had shared with him, even if that “same thing” to which she was referring at the time was not exactly what either of them had in mind.

What's it like to be normal?

Funny that you think I'd know. I'm a Tendou, remember?

Like Ranma, she must have wanted so badly just to have a normal life, to actually be the normal girl for which he had so ironically mistaken her.

The chill of remorse washed over him as he recalled all the times that he had resented Nabiki Tendou for her pranks, schemes, and cynical sarcasm. The whole bit about the Ice Queen of Furinkan had been a charade of self-defense. She was hardly cold or unfeeling at all - actually very much the opposite: a lonely, angry, and sad girl who felt she had been wronged and forsaken by the people and things in which she should have been able to believe. Ranma also finally understood why Nabiki's sisters always seemed to take her history of Machiavellian behavior so neatly in stride; they felt sorry for her.

What would you, of all people, know about pain?

He remembered the anguished indignation written on her beautiful, angry face and the balled fists clenched at her sides when he had asked her that question that night in Roppongi. He wished he could take back those words. Had he been in her position, he wondered if he would have been any better. Maybe he would have been worse.

I don't have any illusions about who or what you think I am. I'm used to that. It's just that I was desperate. I really just had to do whatever it took for me to get out.

# # # # #

Akane remembered the chemo and how she went to all of those sessions to hold her sister's hand. It meant everything to be able to do that for her sister, to let Nabiki know how very much she loved her. Many times, however, Akane felt maybe her sister was actually the one holding her hand. Akane felt certain that only by believing in something could a person endure what her sister had, though she never found out exactly what her sister believed. Whatever it was must have been amazing.

In the end, the doctors decided to go ahead and do a bone marrow transplant to try and cure her; she was so young. Neither Akane nor Kasumi were good matches. Their father was not either. They tried for a long time to find a compatible donor; she had a very rare blood type (2)."

Everyone was elated when a donor was finally identified, but that turned out only to be the preamble to worse things. To prepare for the transplant, her sister received even more intense and toxic doses of chemo and radiation to eradicate the leukemia and to vacate her diseased bones with space for engraftment and repopulation with donor-derived blood lineages. These conditioning treatments were actual lethal doses — horrific in comparison to what had been administered to keep her alive while the donor search had been ongoing.

The conditioning cost Nabiki the beautiful long hair that she once had. It all fell out, and she never bothered to grow it out like that again after. Trivial as something like hair seemed given the circumstances, Ranma still felt incredibly sad hearing this.

There is no beauty without pain.

After the conditioning came the recovery. Most people did not know or understand. Recovery, rather than treatment itself, was actually the hardest part.

“You fight for your life alone. If you don't make it, well… you do that alone too.”

Nabiki became gravely immunosuppressed. They had to quarantine her in a bubble while they waited and prayed for the donor marrow stem cells to engraft and repopulate the blood lines. Other than nurses and doctors anonymized by face masks and gaudy, single-use yellow paper gowns, no one could touch her. Visits were not allowed, not even from family.

As a result, there were no hugs or get-well gifts after. Akane could not come into the room to hold her sister's hand as she had in the beginning. She could only communicate with her sister via an intercom phone as she sat by a window next to her sister's bed. For a time, they played at scribbling silly faces and coded messages on the glass with markers stolen from the nursing stations, but then they got caught.

It felt very much like visiting an inmate in a high security prison, and yet despite Draconian precautions, complications still happened. The transplant was on the slow side to engraft. Infections happened as they waited. More than once, she hung on seemingly by mere threads of desperate hope and fervent wishes.

She spent 121 consecutive days in the confinement of that hellacious, solitary prison, but she did survive.

“The doctors say you're cured if the transplant takes hold and you can make it out to 5 years cancer-free,” Akane said.

Nabiki had turned 17 by the time Ranma and his father arrived in Nerima. That and the fact that both Kasumi and Akane tested negative for the abnormal genes was why no one had thought there was any need to share this secret with the Saotomes.

Ranma knew now what Akane was trying to tell him and why they were here in Ueno making their way towards Hongo. “It came back, didn't it. The cancer.”

Akane nodded. “Oneechan asked me to come see her about a month ago.” That would have been just days after that final day in Meguro. “I'm the only one she's told. She's old enough now that she can choose on her own who knows and who doesn't (3).”

Ranma thought of Tendou-san's trademark waterworks histrionics and understood. Her sister had finally escaped Nerima and her difficult and unpleasant memories. Were the old man to find out, he would almost certainly encroach on her hard-earned freedom and do all he could to drag her back home.

I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not fucking made of glass!

“We're here,” Akane said.

Ranma turned and followed the direction of her gaze. Before them loomed the sprawling prison-like brick mass of the University of Tokyo Hospital.

“I'll go up first. Come after half an hour. I need time to help her dress.”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

Kanto is the region of Eastern Honshu that encompasses the Greater Tokyo Area and Tokyo prefecture as well as the prefectures of Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa.

Bone marrow (BM) or hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation is a procedure that can be used as an attempted cure for patients with a variety of non-cancerous and cancerous conditions. Leukemia, particularly in young people, is a common indication. Either the patient's own marrow (i.e. autologous transplant) or marrow from a doner, related or unrelated (i.e. allogeneic transplant) can be used. Autologous transplants are generally easier for the recipient to tolerate, but carry a high risk of cancer relapse because of the possibility of also transplanting back malignant passenger cells.

Patients with high-risk leukemias usually are offered allogeneic transplants during their first induced remission to reduce the risk of relapse. However, disease recurrence remains the major reason for allogeneic transplant failure, occurring in around 35-45% of patients, and leading to dismal outcomes. Novel strategies to reduce the risk of relapse remain a significant need and active area of medical research.

Nabiki would be 19, almost 20, at the time of this story.

CHAPTER SEVEN: NOT WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SAY

When Ranma came, Akane had her sister's weight draped across her shoulders. With her help, Nabiki struggled to clumsily stumble her way from the bed to a chair by the window. She was a petite girl by nature. Within weeks, however, she had become a ravaged shadow of herself from that final night in Meguro, unspeakably thin, frail, and ghostly pale. Seeing Nabiki this way caused him great pain.

However, the delighted light of surprise in her still bright, soul-piercing eyes when she saw him left no doubt that she still remained the girl who had opened his eyes to the possibilities of an Icarus who would dare come to the Stage at Kiyomizu. Yet, just as Ranma felt his heart start to lift in his chest, she quickly averted her eyes, leaving him wondering if he had only imagined her smile.

When he felt the weight of Akane's eyes on them, he understood why Nabiki had turned away. He had underestimated his fiancee (1); she wanted to test them. Nabiki must have known this too.

Eventually, Akane herself turned away. Perhaps she had seen what she needed to see, or maybe she was just no longer able to endure the knife's edge of silence that had settled over the room. “I'm going downstairs for a while, Oneechan. I think…. I think I'm not really the one who you want here anyway,” she said before tearing out of the room (2).

“Akane - !” Nabiki rasped. She reached out to her sister and tried to stumble her way forward out of the chair before succumbing to a violent paroxysm of coughs.

In the blink of an eye, Ranma was already there holding her and preventing her from hitting the hard, wooden floor. “Nabiki,” he whispered brokenly in her ear, shocked and horrified by what he found as he embraced her. She felt so very light in his arms, barely even there. Her skin was clammy and blazing with the heat of fever. “Nabiki…!”

“Go after her, Ranma. I'll be fine,” she told him. “I've always been fine.”

“No!” he hissed vehemently. The words poured out of him now in a desperate frenzy. “You can't do that, Nabiki!”

“Do what?”

“Do what?!” he exclaimed in incredulous, angry bewilderment. “Just go and disappear like that is what! Ya haven't finished teaching me how to see, how to finish that sketch on the cocktail napkin!”

“What do you think I can still teach you?” she asked. “You see everything now. From here on, it's about what you'll do with what you see.”

“No. That's not true. Ya still haven't answered my question.”

“What question is that?”

“Why, Nabiki? What was Icarus hoping to achieve by jumping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera?”

Her expression softened into a pained smile. “Why are you asking me? Because I said Icarus was at Kiyomizu?”

“Because you're the one who drew Icarus at Kiyomizu,” he answered with the familiar refrain that had now echoed now a thousand times over in his mind. “That and the ones with the crippled kid under the Senbon Torii at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the woman embracing the scared boy, and the smiling girl with her cheeks in her hands — and that scared boy was not a boy. You drew them all for a reason. All of them are you!”

Her eyes shimmered as she studied him. Eventually, she answered with a soft, mirthless laugh. “You'll find me a shitty Existentialist if that's really the question you want me to answer, Ranma. You know what happens to Icarus. Go after Akane. Go after your fiancee.”

“Then live with being a fucking shitty Existentialist, but fucking live, damn you!”

Again, she laughed despite herself. “Try not to be so melodramatic, Ranma,” she chided, shushing him with her fingers against his lips. “Akane's obviously been telling you things. I may be in here, but I'm not going anywhere today. You're just hurting my ears. The drugs make them sensitive.”

He asked her what happened.

“I guess Akane already told you about the cancer.”

He nodded.

“Pneumonia. Leukemias especially fuck hard with your immune system.”

“But they can fix this, right?”

“The pneumonia?”

“Yeah?”

“This time,” she replied with a wan smile. “There will be others.”

Contrary to what most people seemed to think, in and of themselves, cancers never actually did anyone in. Modern medicine knew of at least 4000 different cancers. Still, the end came almost invariably from one of the usual secondary sequelae: infection, bleeding, or a clot somewhere.

“I told you though, right? I'm not made of glass. You really should go after Akane. Go after your fiancee. We can talk some other time.”

Angry comprehension flashed in his eyes as she placed her hands on his chest and began gently pushing him away. He recognised that touch. It was the very same one as from that last night in Meguro by the main gates of Komaba. There was nothing chaste about it at all. That was why it hurt so very much.

Yet, she had also said that for a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does; that is how she measures for herself if and how much she is loved.

Time stopped before the world started to turn again, buffeted by a new wind of resolute clarity and purpose. Only one conceivable outcome now could right all that had been so wrong for so long.

Why the normal life he so desperately wanted continued to elude him.

Why even after Jusendo he had been unable to fulfill his duty-bound role in the Tendou-Saotome family agreement.

Three-and-a-half years had to be long enough to know, right? If he could not even bring himself to hold his fiancee's hand after all that time, then the feeling would never come. After all, it had taken him far less to know what he wanted now and more than anything in the world.

“Don't do this,” he warned.

“Do what?”

“Pretend that ya don't know or that ya don't feel it too.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

He gave out a mirthless bark of laughter. He could not help it. He was nowhere actually near that dumb. She knew better too. “If Akane knows, then ya can't not know, and I know what you're trying to do.”

She herself had already told him.

You know what happens to Icarus….

“Ranma — “

“Ya told me not to apologise or back down for seeing things, no matter what anyone else might say,” he said, cutting her off. “Ya said it's up to me what I do with what I see. Here's what I see. You and Kasumi picked Akane for me. I didn't pick anyone, remember (3”)? I should've picked. You should've been my fiancee. It should've been you!”

She sighed and turned away. “But you didn't…, and you can't anyway,” she said sadly.

“Of course I can! We - !”

Before he knew what was happening, she stunned him speechless with a warm, tender kiss planted so very softly on his lips — the very first real kiss that he ever experienced. He knew because for the first time he found himself neither repulsed nor filled with fear or suspicion at the touch of a woman's lips against his own. There was only blinding, spellbound wonder.

She felt unbelievably soft and warm, and she tasted of far, far more than he ever dreamed or imagined. He found the magic of her touch more painfully beautiful than anything he had ever known, filling him with an infinitely deep yearning and hunger that defied description. He wanted to answer and reciprocate — but then she had already begun pushing him away again before he could even think to move.

“Listen to me, Ranma,” she said firmly, pinning him down now with the full, steely weight of her fiery, brown-eyed stare. “You have to understand this. No matter how you feel about me or… or even how I may feel about you, we can't be together, and you can't choose me. You were never going to be allowed to do that.”

He did not understand.

“That's not what you're supposed to say,” Ranma whispered in her ear. The warmth of her in his arms and her scent rendered him almost delirious. “You can't say that.”

One of her favorite Sartre quotes sprang to mind.

Life has no meaning a priori…. It's up to each one of us to give it a meaning, and the concept of value is nothing but the meaning that we choose for ourselves.

He thought she was the Believer who knew that there was no beauty without pain.

The mistress alone of her sea.

The one at her own sail who understood that whoever called her out and tried to shout her back down into silence did not matter.

"Well, you're not exactly saying things that you're supposed to say either," she shot back. "I can and I should say what I'm saying because it's all true - and because I believe. Think, Ranma. Think!"

“I am thinking!” he insisted. “We want the same thing. I want to live a normal life; you want that too. That's all ya ever really wanted, right? Why ya hate Nerima; why ya know that I do too; why ya had to find a way to leave no matter the cost; why ya understand me and I you. I want to be with you!”

She shook her head at him. “There'd be nothing normal about being with a sick person like me, Ranma. You're also forgetting. You're the Heir, and you have your whole life ahead of you. The purpose of the Tendou-Saotome family agreement is to ensure the continuity of the School. That means one day having an Heir of your own. I can't…. I can't help you do that. The drugs and my genes,” she said before turning away from him. “That and you'd have a great chance of being a widower before you even turn 20.”

“No! We can talk to Tofu - “

She cut him off with an ugly, spiteful and derisive snort. “Todai and Riken doctors have worked on my case for years, Ranma. They're the ones saying this. If we'd left things in the hands of that fucking back alley hobo quack with foggy glasses who masquerades as a doctor, I would've been ashes in the wind long before you even heard of Jusenkyo.”

Ranma wanted to scream. A terrible gray sense of horrified sadness and cruel despair permeated the world around him now, settling like a shroud being thrown over the living. He felt angry for her and for them. Everything she was telling him was wrong — just invariably, simply, incontrovertibly wrong. It had to be!

I have three daughters. Pick the one you want. If she agrees, she'll be your fiancée….

Tendou-san had said those words when Ranma first came to the Tendou dojo. He could pick, and she could agree.

The old man had said other similar things too that time when Akane, in one of her typical tantrum moments, had destroyed the laundry balcony and Ranma had grabbed Nabiki to keep her from hitting the ground. For that, Akane had seen only red and hurled the Tendou-Saotome family agreement at her sister. By then, Ranma had already been living with the Tendou family for almost two years.

For the Tendou School, it doesn't matter who Ranma ends up with. That's up to Ranma and whoever he asks to be his fiancé….

For a week, he and Nabiki had pretended. He definitely did not feel for her then. The way she had rented him out by the hour and jerked him around by the chain also made clear that she didn't either.

Or was that really what happened? He really could not remember. He had been too consumed with annoyance over being collateral damage in a cat fight between the two sisters.

Thinking back now, he could not help wondering if that was actually when he should have acknowledged the truth that he now realised he had always known in the back of his mind. Desire, attraction — even love of that kind — these were not things that could be willed or rationalised into existence.

It's up to Ranma and whoever he asks to be his fiancee….

"Of course, that's what you were told, exactly what he wanted you to hear," Nabiki answered derisively. Things had been framed that way to save face. 

Her voice held an unmistakable bitterness, but then the light in her eyes shifted. She wanted to understand something.

“So many times and for so long you fought so hard to protect my sister, even from herself. You even brought her home from Jusendo.”

Too many unbelievable, magical things had happened for her to have been wrong. Demons had been thwarted, the immutable laws of sex and gender defied, and even a demi-God killed for the sake of those causes. That was why she herself had tried so hard too to help make things work.

I love my sister - pain in the butt that she can be. If you're really going to become a part of our family one day, I need to know that I can trust you to actually bring your fair share of happiness to the table.

Let me help you.

Let me help my sister.

She was so confused.

“Why was I wrong? She really does love you. Why can't you love her? Even just a little?”

Ranma sighed, recalling what he had told Akane too the night before. “I do. Just… just not like that.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why…?”

Familiar shadows of her essence began dancing once more before his mind's eye as her question rang in his ears. The sound of her voice singing; the few fleeting moments when her hands had brushed against his; her eyes and their many philosophical questions for him; and the scent of peach blossoms - all of it merged now with the beautiful, warm, breathing, living reality present before his actual eyes. The answer to her question was so simple and clear.

“Because Akane's not you. Because there are things that matter a lot more than a person's DNA and crazy eugenic ideas of continuing some School of Martial Arts with this or that bloodline.”

Silent tears spilled freely now from her bewildered eyes. He had not been mistaken. Her control verged on slipping. He sensed the moment for his move.

“Come with me, Nabiki. The Stage at Kiyomizu. Go with me there.”

In response, a hard, steely, and determined light suddenly galvanized in her soul-piercing eyes. Fear welled up within him as he saw that look. Somehow, he had said the wrong thing.

“Icarus leapt from the Stage and flew alone. That's how I drew it. That's how it's meant to be.”

“Bullshit! An Existentialist knows that nothing is pre-determined.”

“Existentialists also don't believe in love,” she said, taking his face in between her hands. Her hold felt unexpectedly firm and resolute. “It gets in the way of an individual's destiny.”

“Nabiki - !”

"If you really care about me, Ranma, and if anything I've ever told you means anything to you, then you'll listen to me now," she said, brushing his bangs away from his eyes. "If I'm Icarus, then you must be Daedelus. We've made it out of the Labyrinth, but now someone has to make it out of Crete and get to Sicily. We should never meet again like this."

“Nabiki, no, please…! Freedom is what we do with what is done to us. That's what ya said! We can choose!”

She answered with a solemn nod. “That's right. That's what Sartre said. We can choose, and I have chosen. Goodbye, Ranma….”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

The English word “fiancée” (“fiancé if a man) does not have an exact 1:1 translation in Japanese. “Iinazuke,” as Ranma and Akane are to one another, refers to a betrothal arranged by one's parents. “Konyakusha” refers to a voluntarily chosen betrothed. This nuance will become relevant in later chapters.

Don't worry. Akane is not done yet with Ranma and her sister :) I intend to explore Akane's character in greater depth in future chapters via how she deals with being betrayed by the 2 people in the world she cares the most about.

It's true :). Ranma never actually picks a fiancee among the 3 Tendou sisters in Episode 1. Kasumi and Nabiki volunteer Akane with Nabiki noting “You hate boys, right?” and Kasumi adding “That's right! How fortunate Ranma is half-girl.

CHAPTER EIGHT: DEVOTION

Night had fallen again by the time he eventually found his way back home. Defeated and deflated, he had wandered aimlessly around Ueno and other parts of the city for hours after being dismissed from the hospital. He remembered very little other than the numb fog of pain and despair that permeated everything.

Kasumi stood by the genkan waiting for him when he arrived. He had a sinking feeling of deja vu from the night before. That seemed so long ago now though.

“Okaeri, Ranma-kun,” she greeted with a small, disarming smile.

“Tadaima,” he answered reflexively, though he could not fully keep the undertone of weariness from creeping into his voice. “Kasumi, I - “

“You're tired, and you must be hungry,” she cut him off.

That made him nervous. Kasumi never cut anyone off.

“Would you like to sit and have dinner with me?” She gave a slight inviting tilt of her head toward the inner sanctum of the house. She was not really asking. Ranma knew because she was no longer smiling.

The fathers were out for drinks and not expected back until late, so it would be just the two of them. They could eat in the small breakfast area in the kitchen, which was so rarely used by anyone other than herself.

“To celebrate that `date' you left for this morning. Remember?”

He did now. That was the alibi that Akane had decided on the night before.

Ranma understood very clearly that nothing about the situation was accidental. This private time and space in which he found himself now had been deliberately orchestrated. Still, he breathed out a small sigh of grateful relief. He had no appetite for either of the fathers at that moment.

“Thank you,” he said as he fell in behind Kasumi.

She had laid out a simple meal with two settings. Between them sat a clay pot with agedashi tofu, another plate of pickled vegetables, and two bowls of miso soup. The spread reminded him of the kind of meals that he and his father occasionally received at Buddhist temples in those years when they had been on the road. Those memories were some of the nicer ones that he had from his strange childhood. They were among the few moments which he could recall of safe tranquility permissive of any genuine reflection.

“Itadakimasu,” he said quietly in response to her open-handed gesture for him to begin.

They ate together in silence for several minutes. He knew that Kasumi was studying him, searching for something. The sound of her setting down her chopsticks signaled the imminence of a judgment.

“She really loves you, you know,” she said, cutting neatly into the silence between them.

Ranma did know. It felt awful.

“Sometimes, the truest measure of devotion is the strength to actually turn away from the thing you want the most in the world. Love isn't about being with someone; it's about wanting more for them than you want for yourself.”

He sighed. Thinking about Kasumi's life and her role in her family, he knew she knew what she was talking about. “I'm sorry. It's just that… well, if I still can't even after all this time….”

He trailed off nervously at the sight of her delicate frown, but then it dissolved away in the next moment with a strange light of understanding in her eyes. Gentle laughter suddenly tinkled around him like an unexpected Spring shower. He was confused.

“I'm not talking about Akane, Ranma, although she really does care for you too.”

His eyes turned wide in astonished, stupefied comprehension at the revelation Kasumi was sharing. “She… she told ya that…?”

Kasumi nodded. “More or less. She called after you left. Akane was there too. We talked for a long time. Maybe none of us are normal, but we're still sisters, still a family,” she said with a knowing smile.

A deluge of contradictory feelings overcame him. It felt violent like waking up to whiplash from cars slamming up against one another in a chain accident on a busy highway.

“Kasumi, I….I didn't mean to fall in love with her. Nabiki that is. I know it makes no sense, but I just did, and somehow that's the only thing that feels like it makes sense.”

She laughed again. “She didn't mean to fall for you either. Believe me. That much was clear.”

“Oh. Even to Akane…?”

“Well, that's a different matter.” She gave him another knowing smile. “That's always a different matter, right?”

He realised he was smiling now too despite himself.

Kasumi's expression suddenly turned serious again. Maybe Nabiki's harsh words had not been what he hoped for, but she was not wrong. Nabiki had always been the practical sister, better than anyone in the family at playing the role of “normal”. Being with her, however, would not be. “Nabiki's not a normal girl. That's just not her destiny. I don't know if you really understand that and what it means.”

Ranma sighed heavily, appreciating the authentic gravity of her admonition. He was wise enough to realize that he could not actually appreciate the weight of that gravity. No one could actually understand what that meant without going through it.

He acknowledged that, which seemed to please Kasumi. He knew when she nodded in agreement. “You've never taken care of anyone before, Ranma-kun. That's not meant as a criticism. Just a fact that we have to acknowledge.”

He knew she spoke to him now as someone who knew things from experience. She had been down this road before and not just once. Her whole life was about sacrifice. She knew what she was talking about.

“You'll need to make sacrifices. Many and often when you least expect. It will not end. I wish someone had explained this to me before I chose to make mine.”

“What was it like?” he asked.

“What part?” She seemed genuinely intrigued by his question. No one had ever really asked her that before. “Growing up watching my mother live with her illness? Taking care of my father since she passed? Or trying to stand by Nabiki through her own?”

“All of it.”

Kasumi had been very young, of course, when everything started, so she did not really understand or even consider that “sacrifice” was a conscious choice. All she knew was that the approbation that she received from her parents for being helpful felt good. That was why she first started doing things like shopping for groceries, cooking, helping around the house, helping to care for her sisters even. In the beginning at least, the feeling excited her and took on a life of its own, even becoming addicting.

It blinded her to the bits and pieces of her childhood quietly slipping away with the passing of time. She remembered all the times when she had said no to girlfriends inviting her to do all the normal things a young teenage girl would otherwise do: window shopping, ice cream, slumber parties, or even the stupid, silly things like boy watching or pointlessly wasting hours reading shoujo manga books. There were even more times when she turned down her sisters' entreaties to play and spend time with them. They stopped asking her after a while. Everyone did.

When Akiko Tendou finally did pass, Kasumi was stunned to discover in herself a strange feeling of somehow having been cheated, robbed even of something. Even after all of the things she had done to help and what she had given up to do so, her mother was still gone. Even worse, far more things to do suddenly piled up, things that no one else could do. Certainly not her father. Akane was still too young too.

Nabiki, on the other hand, had actually wanted to be helpful. Having her around for any extended period of time, however, quickly became too painful of a reminder in too many ways of what had been lost. After all, Nabiki had been the one there when it happened, the only one who even had some semblance of a chance to say goodbye. That and Nabiki looked too much like her mother.

Kasumi knew it was wrong, but, like her father, she had been too weak to be better. After Nabiki also became sick, Kasumi recalled trying to justify the distance that she had allowed to grow between them as a consequence of naive immaturity, but that was a lie.

The guilt remained.

“I understand why Nabiki went to Akane a month ago and why she's only coming to me now,” she told Ranma sadly. “Akane was really the one who stood by Nabiki when she became ill. She was the one who went with Nabiki to all of her treatments.”

By that time, Akane had become the only one whom Nabiki would allow to do that. Akane did other things too. She invariably defended her sister when there were arguments with their now zealously overprotective father about what Nabiki could and should be allowed to do.

“So ya think I'm wrong ta feel as I do for Nabiki.”

Ranma had heard the unspoken admonition with painful clarity. The depth of Akane's bitterness made sense now. She felt betrayed in so many ways by his choice of her sister over her and for more than just his actions. No wonder Nabiki had turned away when she had first seen him that morning.

Kasumi smiled sadly. “I'm hardly one to judge given what I've just told you about myself, right? But for what it's worth, no actually, I don't. In case you haven't noticed, I'm an old-fashioned girl, not an Existentialist or anything fancy like that. I don't think there's any form of genuine love that's wrong. I think though that it's worth remembering that good intentions - noble ones especially - can very easily lead to painful mistakes if you're not clear-eyed about your choice to act on those intentions.”

Choosing to be with Nabiki would not be a choice made to feel good about how others thought of him. He would have to be prepared to accept the practical responsibilities of living, not just for himself, but also for her. It would take a lot of growing up really fast, which included maybe even taking school seriously and thinking of a way to one day achieve some financial independence and security. Running a martial arts school in this modern day and age was not going to do that, certainly not enough to take care of someone else.

“The Art has given you many good things, but now you need to be more than anything the Art can offer. These feudal notions of bushido, long training trips, and quests in pursuit of mystical fantasies will have to end.”

He would be needed like never before. That meant having to know how to listen and hear what was being asked of him even when no one was asking.

For a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does. That is how she measures for herself if and how much she is loved.

“Even after you give your all, you may still be disappointed and walk away empty-handed. Many times, you likely will. The only way you'll survive is by believing in something more magical and beyond all rational capacity to believe.”

Ranma exhaled heavily as he considered his next words. “I said that I love her. I mean it,” he told Kasumi. “I've never been happy like that in another person's company. No one's ever made me dream, smile, or believe like that in possibilities.”

Tears appeared in Kasumi's eyes as she heard him.

“Kasumi…?” he asked in a panic. He started to stand and make his way around the table, but she waved him off.

“Nabiki-chan said something that sounded a lot like that too,” she explained. “Just as my mother did about my father. You know that's something that bothers her, right?”

“That I could end up like your father?”

Kasumi nodded. “Maybe worse. You likely won't even have children of your own to hold on to and help keep you sane. You know that, right? She said she told you. Can you be okay with that?”

“I….”

“I know it's not a fair question, Ranma,” Kasumi admitted. “Nothing I'm asking of you is fair, but for Nabiki's sake and yours too, someone has to ask. You have to know what matters to you, what you really value — before you make your choice.”

He smiled despite himself, grateful for her support. They fell into a pleasant, companionably reflective silence. Time passed.

Life has no meaning a priori…. It's up to each one of us to give it a meaning, and the concept of value is nothing but the meaning that we choose for ourselves.

“Ranma-kun…?” she eventually prodded, drawing him back out of his thoughts.

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever actually been to Kiyomizu-Dera?”

"Actually… no," he admitted. He surprised himself with how sheepish he sounded. Yet, of all the places he had been and all the things he had seen, somehow he had never been. It was actually funny.

“You really should go some time,” she said. “I have to warn you though that it's not really that impressive. Nowhere near as grand or spectacular as she drew it. The three streams together are less than what comes out of a shower head, and the Stage is not really that high up.”

He was surprised.

“I always thought it was interesting how much Nabiki likes that place. I could never get her to tell me why.”

He was intrigued. “She never answered me either all those times when I asked her why she drew Icarus at Kiyomizu.”

What she truly believed….

“Can I ask ya a question, Kasumi?”

“Of course, Ranma-kun.” She slipped into her mouth a piece of long-cold tofu between the chopsticks that had somehow materialised in her hand. “That's fair. I've asked enough of you tonight, right?”

“Ya just told me that I need to believe in something beyond all rational capacity to believe in order to survive what I'm choosing. What convinced ya to believe in me?”

Kasumi, of course, did not miss the meaning buried in his words. “So it's really true then,” she mused. “Ranma Saotome really has finally chosen.”

He nodded.

She laughed. ”You know what the problem is with all of these Greek stories Nabiki and the whole world are fascinated by?”

Of course he didn't.

“Simple really. They're all invariably tragic. Even the comedic ones are ultimately tragic. It may be great for Art, but hardly so for real life, yes? We Japanese have the same problematic affinity for tragedy.”

“Uh, how is it that you and Nabiki know all this stuff about Greek philosophy and literature?”

Kasumi smiled. “Our mother used to tell us stories when we were younger. She read Classics in University and used to teach before she got sick.”

“Oh.”

“You know though that it doesn't really have to be that way with these sorts of stories, all ending in tragedy, right? I'll bet that was a choice that some old `wise' man decided at the beginning when people began to write things down.”

“And just that no one's been brave enough to challenge that?”

She nodded. “Something like that. People are herd animals with a hard time resisting inertia or even recognising that it's there sometimes, but there are other choices. There always have been. You just have to see them and pick which ones you'll act on. You're supposed to be the Heir to Anything Goes, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” Not exactly like there was a long line of candidates.

“I imagine the Art tells quite a bit about marching to your own drumbeat of Destiny and how to write your own story. I think you may be the only one who can convince Nabiki that Icarus didn't actually crash and die alone in the Icarian Sea when he reached for the Sun. I know you can because I've seen you already do something that even I stopped believing could be done.”

“Yeah? What's that?”

“You've made Nabiki happy.”

“I - “

“You have, Ranma.” Kasumi's tone was uncompromisingly firm, more firm than he had ever heard from her. “Remember that — no matter what happens now. That was the hard part too. Now, all you have to do is just convince my sisters that you intend to keep doing that; that it's finally okay for Nabiki to feel that way; and that you're ready to want more for Nabiki than even for yourself. Then, I think she'll answer your question about why she drew Icarus at Kiyomizu.”

He did a double take as he processed her words. “Sisters with an `s'…?”

Kasumi regarded him with an eerily Nabiki-like Cheshire-cat's grin before finally relenting. “I'm kidding, Ranma,” she conceded. “It'd be nice if you could convince Akane and even my father, but I know that's not really up to you. The only things I can tell you with certainty are that Nabiki does love you and they both love her very much. However you do it, I hope that you succeed in convincing Nabiki that you do mean to keep making her happy.”

He had no idea where he should begin.

# # # # #

CHAPTER NINE: THE GIRL AT NIOMON

Disclaimer: References to “The Chainsmokers,” “Cold Play,” “Chris Martin,” and “Something Just Like This” are intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from the reference. All rights to “Something Just Like This” and its lyrics belong to The Chainsmokers and Cold Play.

# # # # #

Graves.

Too many of them.

Centuries of seemingly infinite dead stretched out in every direction. The names too were endless, each now just an echo of a shadow lost in Time. The silence was deafening.

He found himself standing at Nishi Otani on the slopes of Mt. Otowa. The ancient structures of Kiyomizu-Dera loomed in front of him. Their long, forlorn shadows fell upward across the cemetery as the setting sun slipped toward the Western horizon. Angry streaks of blazing orange, red, and gold danced in between the shadows. The apocalyptic tableau seemed to be mocking the eternal, inescapable truth of pathetically ephemeral human frailty.

He sensed that he stood just a stone's throw away from being swallowed up by an abyss of madness. He knew he had to be careful and to think only about why he had come here in the first place. He did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he somehow knew that he would knows beyond any doubt when he had found it.

“Boo!”

Ranma bit down hard on a scream as he whirled in the direction of the voice that had managed to ambush him.

There she stood doubled over in uncontrollable laughter with one hand clutched at her abdomen. The other she braced against one of the stone markers to keep herself from falling over. He noted that she was wearing her familiar peach creme cardigan, dark indigo jeans, and white canvas sneakers.

“That's the fourth time that someone like me has managed to sneak up on someone like you,” she said once she had regained some semblance of self-control. “You're really losing your edge.”

“Not funny,” he answered, doing his best to sound grouchy. He was not really though. He knew he had found what he was looking for, and that made him happy.

She knew too. The familiar, mischievous light gleamed again in those fiery, soul-piercing eyes.

He missed that look. Seeing it again brought him a wonderful sense of comfort — peace even — for the first time in a long time. He eagerly wanted to forget how much he had worried about never having the chance to see those eyes on him like that again. The scent of peach blossoms now filled the air again too. Everything suddenly seemed a little brighter, even a little warmer too as they stood together in what little remained of the mid-Autumn sun.

“I'm glad you finally came to Kyoto. I was born here, you know,” she said. Her voice carried and undertone of pride that was subtle, but unmistakable.

He knew, and of course he came. It was the right thing to do. Coming for her would always be the right thing to do.

“You must be hungry,” she noted. “If not, I'm sure you'll be soon.”

She wanted to take him to Gion. She wanted to walk if that was okay with him. The trek would take under just half an hour, but it would give them time to talk.

He offered to call for a cab, adding that he had enough money now to do things like that.

She laughed as she declined. “Only if you feel you can't make it on your own two feet.”

He replied to her deft challenge with a knowing smirk. He loved that she understood that about him. Knowing so made him happy.

She led three or four steps ahead of him with a stride quick and animated with a confident sense of purpose. Clearly, she had been here before. 

Her movements reminded him of that first day at Himonya on the tree-lined path. This time, however, she had her hand in his. It was nice.

She began humming happily as they made their way between the traditional-appearing shops and homes along the streets of Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka. He had almost forgotten how beautiful her voice truly was, especially when she was singing. It had been so long. Even the most vivid recollections of his heart paled in comparison to the truth. A bone-chilled shudder traveled down his spine as he listened.

Soon they came upon the ancient white and orange mass of Yasaka Jinja. As they crossed the street in front of the shrine gates, he asked her about the song. He knew she was waiting for him to do so. The melody sounded vaguely familiar, something either from Europe or America.

She nodded; he was right. The song was an old one written by Chris Martin and the British band Coldplay (1). It was one of her favorites.

The narrator recalls a time when he used to feel like he ruled the world; seas would rise merely at his word.

Now, however, he only sweeps streets that he used to own. He believed - took for granted even - that he once held all the keys, only to find the walls collapsing all around him as he realised that he was living in a castle built upon pillars of salt and sand.

Now the mob waits to receive his head on a silver plate. He finally understands that he was merely just a puppet all along dangling on a lonely string.

Now the bells of Jerusalem ring in the ears of his haunted mind. Choirs of Roman cavalry sing all around him. He beseeches them to be his mirror, his sword, and shield, missionaries marching forth in distant foreign fields in the name of his futile cause.

At the end of the Day, as he comes to the gates of Heaven and the queue of souls arriving for Judgment, somehow he knows that St. Peter will not be calling his name.

“That sounds like it sucks shit!” Ranma remarked in horror. To him, the whole thing sounded like a vision straight out of Hell.

She laughed. “Not at all! It's beautiful.”

“How's falling from grace to be drawn and quartered by a mob `beautiful'?!”

“Details, details,” she said with a nonchalant wave of her hand. “The song is beautiful because of its lyrical candor. This narrator is just making an honest confession.”

His eyes boggled with incredulity. “Some details are everything!”

She laughed again. “You're missing the point. Beauty is truth, and it's allowed to be discordant with reason. In fact, it precedes reason, and reason is what is obliged to catch up with beauty.”

“But still…!”

“Oh, Ranma, Ranma,” she chided with a rueful shake of her head. “Sometimes, a song is just a song, and it doesn't have to be anything more than that. The inability to concede these kinds of simple points is one of the great shortcomings of these Existentialists and precisely why they end up causing themselves whole lifetimes of angst. The worst part is that most of them never realise that all of that angst is all of their own making. It's as much a choice as any of the others that they extol as virtues. You do realise that even Sartre believed in love in the end, right?”

She had made him dizzy. He did not know what to say.

“Beauty is not really about pain. Beauty is about candor. It just so happens that pain is one of those things that has a tendency to make people candid.”

“But not happy.”

“Well, you have to start somewhere,” she said, fixing him now with luminous, piercing eyes. The weight of her gaze was unnaturally heavy. He was on the verge of looking away when she started walking again and humming something else to herself.

This melody too was beautiful. It also sounded like one from America or Europe. This time, however, he was afraid to ask about the meaning. He did not want to ruin it.

She knew what he was thinking anyway. He knew when she laughed yet again before telling him.

It was another Chris Martin song, but this time a collaboration between Coldplay and an American band called The Chainsmokers.

This time the narrator talks of reading books of old legends and myths, all grand and beautiful. Knowing this leads him to lament over how he's just a normal mortal human being, nothing special or extraordinary, nothing anywhere near like ancient heroes like Achilles with his golden armor or Hercules and his God-given gifts. He is not like a modern comic book hero either; not self-restrained like Spiderman; trained and disciplined like Batman with his fists; or even Superman unfurling his large suit before he lifts off.

None of that matters though, at least not to the woman who loves him. Even if he were any or all of those things - someone with superhuman gifts, a superhero, or fairytale character - that is not what she's looking for. She is not even looking for someone to save her; she will do that for herself, thank you. All she wants is just someone who she can turn to; who she can kiss; and who can and will stand reliably beside her.

Something normal.

“Something very much like this,” she whispered as she took his arm and leaned in close. The scent of peach blossoms filled in the air around him as he found himself blanketed with the comfort of her warmth.

So this was how “normal” felt.

It was indescribably beautiful.

The desolate memory of the graves at Nishi Otani in the shadow of Kiyomizu faded easily now into the darkness behind them.

# # # # #

Despite being a landlocked city surrounded by mountains on three sides, the seafood in Kyoto tasted surprisingly good. She offered to race him for the final piece of nigiri between them, a rich piece with sea urchin piled generously high. He laughed without thinking, which elicited a smirk in reply.

“I'm serious,” she said plainly. “Maybe you're the Heir to an ancient school of martial arts, but I'm going to win.”

Now, he became intrigued. “You're that sure, huh.”

She nodded. “Aren't you going to ask me how I know that?”

He shrugged. “Why?” he said gamely.

“Because I know you. I've seen you now through more than one set of eyes now..”

“Huh?”

The next moment, he saw her licking her lips in smug satisfaction. “That's the best uni I've had in a long time.”

He blinked in stunned amazement at the now-empty platter in the middle of the table. He had not even seen her move. “H-How…?”

“Anything goes,” she said with a nonchalant shrug as she dabbed demurely at the corners of her lips with her napkin.

“But…?”

He felt the warmth of her dainty, unapologetic warmth of her fingers on his chin. She closed his gaping mouth for him.

“Try not to think too hard,” she said coyly. “Have more faith in your own eyes, and accept the truth that you see: you lost.”

“I, uh….”

She laughed again. “This is getting too serious. Let's go for a walk.”

The moon loomed low now in the early evening sky as they re-emerged on the street. She told him that the indigenous North American peoples referred to this particular moon as the Hunter's Moon. This one appeared particularly large and had a uniquely vibrant orange-red hue. It meant that Winter would be coming again soon.

Leaves began to crunch underfoot as they turned onto Shijo-Dorii and began making their way under the ancient willow trees alongside the Shirokawa Canal. He found himself reminded of Naka-Meguro back home and the days of Spring and Summer in which he had first discovered how funny and witty, refreshingly cool and sophisticated, always unapologetically frank and candid, and yet surprisingly sensitive she was in her insights. Even though he had never been here before, he felt as if he had come home to an old friend after having been away for a very long time.

Eventually, they made their way back up towards Yasaka Jinja before turning off to the East back towards Mt. Otani.

“Where are we going?”

She smiled. “Well, you came here for a reason, right? We're going for the answer to that question you keep asking.”

“Which one is that?”

“Why Icarus came to Kiyomizu-Dera, of course.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Wait! Doesn't the temple close at sunset?”

“Yeah,” she grinned back at him. “That's exactly why this is the best time to go.”

“Wouldn't we be trespassing?”

“Come on!” she said, tugging impatiently at his hand. “Don't be such a prude. Anything Goes, right? We're just going after a bit of truth. Hardly anything wrong with that.”

# # # # #

He disagreed with Kasumi.

Even from Niomon, the main gate to the temple grounds, Kiyomizu-Dera felt every bit as grand and beautiful as Nabiki had drawn it.

He stood with her at the top of the steps beneath the two-story entrance. Two stone lions stood on either side of them. The lavish Heian era orange, white, and green livery of the grand structure jumped out at him. It looked more like a Shinto shrine itself rather than the gate of a great Buddhist temple.

By now, the air had turned from pleasantly cool to actually cold. Wind lashed at his face and whipped up leaves strewn along the ground into small, frenzied circles around them.

He reached out for her. She came and let him fold her in his arms. She felt incredibly soft and warm. He wondered if he was the one giving warmth to her or if the reality was actually the other way around.

“You've come such a long way to be here,” she said as she affectionately stroked his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “I really am glad that you came, but you must be tired.”

“I'm not,” he said. “I'm just… finally happy.”

“That's good,” she replied. “That's very good. You can't make anyone else happy if you're not first happy with yourself.”

He smiled. “Then ya must be happy too.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I am. For the first time in a long time too. I believe again.”

“Again…?” He was very confused now. “When did ya stop?”

She smiled again. “Doesn't matter. What does is that you're here. That's why I can believe in possibilities again, ones which are more magical and beyond all rational capacity to believe.”

He suddenly felt very sleepy, but so comfortable and at peace. All he wanted to do was put his head down on her shoulder and rest.

“I know,” she said, as if reading the thoughts directly out of his mind. She pressed her head tenderly against his shoulder, wrapped her arms around him, and reached up to stroke his hair. “Just rest. I'll be here when you wake up, and everything will be clear. I promise. It's the least I can do since you came all this way.”

The last thing he remembered as he closed his eyes was the sight of her thick bangs dancing alluringly in the breeze, accentuating the flawless porcelain complexion of her delicate heart-shaped face and the fiery, soul-piercing luminescence of her bold, brown eyes.

Have more faith in your own eyes, and accept the truth that you see….

# # # # #

He awoke to find himself lying on the ground with his head in her lap. They were still at Niomon, and she was still there as she had promised. Now, however, she appeared with long hair pinned up in a prim bun atop her head.

A chilled shudder tore through the very essence of his bones. He remembered the graves at Nishi Otani and understood now who was here with him and had been all along.

This was not Nabiki.

The two of them really did look alike though. It was also clear where her mischievous sense of humor came from.

“You've really been stirring up quite a hornet's nest in my home for some time now, Ranma-kun,” the ghost chastised. However, an amused twinkle appeared in her eyes, undoubtedly there to put him at ease. “I thought I should see for myself just what all this fuss is about the rabble rouser that you are.”

“I, uh….” He felt a red, embarrassed heat coursing through his now very flushed cheeks. He hastily scrambled out of the ghost's lap and into a cross-legged sit across from her. “Sorry about that,” he said as he gave her a low bow. “I, well, I….”

“Relax!” the ghost said with a delighted laugh. “I won't bite you. I'm not that kind of undead spirit. It is good to finally meet you.” The ghost gave him a pleasant, charming tilt of her head. “I can see very clearly why my three little sets of eyes love you as much as they do.”

Three…?!

“Wait…! So ya mean….?”

She laughed even harder now. “Look, Ranma-kun. I admit that you actually can be quite the lady's man. I can even see why my youngest always feels compelled to hit you. Even you, however, aren't good enough to be every girl's type or loved in that way by everyone; you're just another normal boy in this sense. That's a good thing. Besides, aren't my Na-chan and little Akane enough on your plate as is?”

“Yes, about that, I'm really sorry.”

She waved him off. “Don't be. You're just a boy who fell in love with a girl. I agree with Kasumi-chan; there's nothing wrong about that. What's not right is the assumptions that everyone else has made about whom you could or should be with. You, Na-chan, my little Akane, even my husband — everyone has suffered because of those assumptions. I'm sorry.”

These things came from bad seeds planted long before he even came to Nerima. The fish had been rotten from the head for a long time. She took the blame and responsibility for that. She should have done better preparing her husband and daughters to go on living even after she was gone.

For these reasons, she had asked him to meet her here now. Everyone concerned still had choices that could be made and ways still to make things happen. She would tell him as her way of making amends.

“Brilliant as Na-chan is, she also still has no idea how wrong she is about things. Love is not an obstacle to an individual's destiny. You don't have to meet Na-chan at a place like Nishi Otani.”

“How?” he asked the ghost.

"With my husband, it would be good if both you and Na-chan could be patient and give him a chance. He's just a boy who fell in love with a girl too, but he's a good person who's only ever wanted to do the right thing. It's just that sometimes the 'right thing' is not so easy to see. The answer for dealing with him is the words that he gave you at the beginning. He can't take those back anymore."

I have three daughters. Pick the one you want. If she agrees, she'll be your fiancée….

“For Nabiki and Akane?”

The ghost smiled again. “Blood,” she told him.

“Huh?”

“The answer is written in your blood - for both Nabiki and Akane.”

“I don't — “

“Time is short now, Ranma-kun. Remember what I've said, and trust your eyes and ears. You'll know just as you knew when you first came to Nishi Otani to look for me….”

Just then, the first rays of sunlight appeared over the horizon. The ghost appeared unspeakably beautiful as she stood and began to shimmer and fade in the light falling upon her.

“I believe again in possibilities because you came. For the same reasons that Kasumi-chan believes that you can convince my Na-chan that Icarus didn't actually crash and die alone in the Icarian Sea when he reached for the Sun.”

Akiko Tendou turned and bowed once to him as the sun rose behind her.

Then she was gone.

All that remained were ashes interred in a stone marker at Nishi Otani bearing her name.

# # # # #

CHAPTER TEN: IN BLOOD AT THE SAIMON GATE

The answer is written in your blood….

Ranma awoke with a start.

He was no longer at Kiyomizu-Dera or Nishi Otani.

Instead, he found his reflection staring back at him in daylight mingled with artificial white light from overhead LED strips. Countryside scenery blitzed past the window on the other side of his reflection.

An unfinished sketch of his recurring dream of meeting Nabiki's mother at Niomon sat on the open tray table in front of him. Already, however, she could clearly be seen standing there shimmering in the first light of sunrise. Her fierce, soul-piercing eyes looked back at him with the full force of their very unnatural weight. A bone-chilled shudder rippled down the length of his spine as he closed the sketch pad and carefully slid it to one side of the table.

Now he remembered.

He was in a carriage on a shinkansen speeding back to Tokyo via the Tokkaido route. Mt. Fuji was just coming into view. That meant they were just a little over a half hour away.

Kasumi had sent him to Kyoto a little over a week ago. She thought it would be good for him to take a few days to rest and think, especially after what happened the day she and Akane had gone to help their sister return from Hongo to Komaba.

Ranma had wanted to help too. He had intended to tag along on the train ride from Nerima to Ueno, despite Akane's silent death stare. Kasumi also did not think it was a good idea for him to come, but she was not going to stop him. However, just as he was preparing to follow the two Tendou sisters down the stairs at the now very familiar subway stop near Furinkan, the text message came.

>Please don't come.<

He wanted to be angry, but he couldn't no matter how hard he tried. He definitely was not surprised, but that did nothing to mitigate how painful the words still were. He fell back toward the now too familiar abyss of sadness and despair. He still had no idea what to do with all of the implied lines and confrontational planes around him.

“Go to Kyoto, Ranma,” Kasumi had urged. “It's beautiful there, especially at this time of year. I think it will also help you to understand.”

She warned him, however, that people in the West tended to have a different perspective on things, but maybe that would be appropriate now. “It's a little slower paced. More introspective, even spiritual. It might be good for you.”

Kasumi was right.

For a moment, he was able to escape.

Kyoto was spiritually alive and ancient like no other place he had ever seen. Life did move there at a different pace. He discovered so many fantastic places to go and think: the Pathway of Philosophy, Higashi-Honganji and the massive ropes woven from the hair of devoted worshippers, the playful mystique of Yasaka Jinja, the haunting steps of Fushimi Inari Taisha, and, of course, Kiyomizu-Dera itself.

He laughed as he recalled Kasumi's terribly modest, understated descriptions of the temple. It was every bit as grand and majestic as her sister had drawn it and even more. Kasumi had always been a master of contrary understatements as tools to influence what others thought or did. She wanted him to come here.

The Niomon Gate was massive.

The Saimon Gate beyond it was otherworldly sublime in its tranquility. It was said to be a potential direct gateway to Paradise for those who came at just the right moment in their lives.

When he came to the Otowa Falls, he chose not to look at the signs declaring the meaning of each of the three streams. Instead, he chose to drink blindly from the one on the left simply because its position reminded him of Nabiki's hands. He smiled when he finally looked at the sign identifying the one that he had chosen. It was not the one for longevity or prosperity, but rather the one for love.

From the vast Stage in the Main Hall, he saw the city glowing in the embrace of the surrounding mountains now covered in the orange, red, and golden hues of the Autumn leaves under the late afternoon sun. The whole tableau was unspeakably beautiful. Still, however, the answer to the question of why Icarus would come to this specific place eluded him. He wished Nabiki could have been there with him at that moment to tell him. With a sigh, he turned away and began trudging his way back towards the city center.

En route, he stumbled on a small funeral procession just outside of Nishi Otani. He grew uneasy when he saw the picture of the deceased: a young woman clearly departed before what should have been her time. He wanted to turn away with every fiber of his being and keep moving, but somehow he felt unnaturally compelled to follow them into the cemetery grounds.

As he did so, the full scope of his problems, — still very real, heavy, and many — crashed down on him without mercy. He was in love with a dying girl who would not even see him. That girl also was still the sister of his actual fiancée, with whom he was not even on speaking terms. The status quo of the engagement clearly no longer was a tenable thing. Yet, though he was finally ready to rectify the sorry Gordian knot of his obligations, his iinazuke's silence precluded him from doing anything. If that were not enough, at some point too, he would have to deal with the buffoonery of the fathers, who still knew nothing at all.

Ranma dropped to his knees amongst the graves, thankful that no one was around to see as he did. He was torn between rage at the apathy of any Providential being that might happen to exist versus and self-hatred for having allowed himself to become so pathetically helpless and impotent. He was close to wanting to bash his own skull against one of the stone markers to end his misery. He felt unbelievably tired, and his body felt so very heavy and useless.

At some point, he fell asleep. That was when the dream first came to him along with Akiko Tendou's answer.

The answer is written in your blood….

The sun was already rising again by the time he awoke. He looked for a long time, but he never found the stone marker bearing her name. It didn't matter though. Ranma knew now what he had to do.

He had to get back to Tokyo.

# # # # #

Akane was waiting for him as he exited the shinkansen terminal at Tokyo Station. He was surprised. A terrible dread came over him as he noted the unshed tears in her tired eyes.

“D-did…?” He could not finish his question.

She shook her head. “No, but I… I need your help.”

“How did you know I - ?“

“Kasumi told me,” she answered. “We have to talk. Now.”

She led him to a chain coffee shop in the main terminal. The place was a sad, soulless, empty caricature of the neo-urban sophistication of Sartre, but she picked it precisely because it was empty. The two flat whites that they ordered to justify sitting down went untouched as she began talking.

She had to explain to him some things about the natural history of leukemias. They often began as chronic or subacute smouldering storms. Chemo and other therapies were intended to keep them this way for as long as possible. How long the doctors and the body could defer that outcome was a constant war hanging in a fragile balance. Even worse, relapsed cancers were inherently more aggressive and fundamentally more unstable genetically.

He knew what Akane was trying to say. “There isn't much time. She needs another transplant and quickly, doesn't she.”

Akane nodded. “They had to stop treatments while Oneechan had the pneumonia,” she said. They always had to stop when there was an infection.

Each time, the cancer was free to mutate and gain new means of therapeutic escape. Normally, these things took weeks or longer to happen. Several days ago, however, when the doctors tried to resume her sister's previous regimen, they were already too late. They had to fall back on the next line of options.

There was a very real chance that they would not have enough options to last until another donor could be found, especially given how hard finding a match had been the last time. Even then, because this would be a second transplant, the odds of lasting even 3 years were less than 1 in 5 — if she could survive the recovery again.

Akane shuddered as the tears that she had been holding back silently began to fall unchecked. “Oneechan…. She said she doesn't want to do it.”

He felt the air suddenly being sucked out of the room. His chest tightened in fear, unwilling to believe that he had heard correctly.

Nabiki was special. Like him, she never quit and never lost. She was always smarter and incomparably resourceful. He knew now too that she was far more resilient and determined than any other person he had ever met.

But it was true.

Akane told him how her sister had changed since the day he had last seen her in Hongo. Something was missing. The mischievous twinkle in her eyes was no longer there. In its place was the quiet, aloof listlessness of resignation.

She no longer told Akane or Kasumi things, and she rarely left her dorm at Komaba. Sometimes she went out on the rooftop to sketch or read a little, but not much more than that. The University had offered generous accommodations to help her resume attending lectures and study groups, but she hadn't taken them up on anything.

Akane could feel it. She was terrified. Her sister was preparing to die.

Now Ranma was scared too. “W- why…?!”

“Oneechan said she's… not sure if she can hold on anymore for a donor or… or if there are even enough good reasons left to want to hold on.”

Without warning, something snapped in Akane. She seized the edge of the table now with shaking hands. When she finally looked up at Ranma again, the same unearthly, savage light that had blazed in Nabiki's and Akiko's eyes too was there.

He felt the full weight of her fury boring straight to the innermost depths of his soul. He knew he would take the intensity of that gaze with him to the grave.

“I hate you, Ranma,” she spat at him. “All of this is your fault! I HATE YOU!!!!!”

There were so many reasons why.

For always being better than her at everything she tried and without ever really having to try himself.

For making her fall in love with him even though he didn't give a fuck.

For breaking her heart by not being able to love her back.

For not coming after her that day at the hospital in Hongo.

Akane herself had tried so very hard for so long. She reminded him that she had even been ready to give her life for him at Jusendo and to marry him when they came home. She really, truly had.

Most of all, though, Akane hated him for what he had done to her sister. He had reduced the strongest, most beautiful, and clever girl Akane had ever known into an impotent, lovesick wreck consumed by guilt and delusions of sacrificial Existential nobility.

“Fuck you for all of this, Ranma Saotome!”

“I'm sorry,” he told her. There was nothing else he could say. Maybe not everything was his fault, but he was used to hearing otherwise regardless. Besides, everything else Akane had said was true.

“Save it, Ranma. I didn't come here for pity. I came here because I want something else from you now.”

What she wanted was far more important than one stupid girl's heartbreak over unrequited love. There were so many of those anyway. They were cheaper than a dime a dozen.

Hearing Akane berate herself that way hurt. He had been wrong about her. Maybe he did not love her as she would have liked, but there was nothing banal or mediocre about her at all. She was special too and probably a better person than he was.

“You're worth a lot more than that, Akane.”

“Shut up, Ranma. I told you I didn't come here for fucking pity!”

He nodded. He would listen, and he promised he would do all he could to give her what she wanted.

She demanded that he stake that promise on his honor. Blindly before he knew what she was asking.

He did.

“I… We should end our engagement. I'll take care of our fathers. It's really been over for a while now anyway, right? If it was ever real in any way.”

She needed him to ask her sister to accept the engagement in her place and to help them find a donor.

“Akane…!”

He bristled with indignation at the possibility that anyone -- Akane especially -- could misconstrue in any way his willingness to help as a quid pro quo for the right to be with her sister. He would help regardless. He did not need to be anyone's iinazuke to have a reason do that.

Akane nodded. He misunderstood; she knew very well. She did not want to fight anymore. She simply meant that finding a donor alone though would not be enough — not even close. A willing donor meant nothing if they did not have a willing recipient.

“I…. I don't care anymore how you do it, but I need you to give her something to believe in again.”

That was why Akane wanted him to ask her sister to be his iinazuke.

”Ask her to… to let you love her and to give you a chance to make her happy. Tell her all that stuff about love not actually being about wanting to be with someone, but rather about wanting more for that someone than you want for yourself. Throw in all that nonsense too about how love isn't actually ever wrong and how even Sartre had a wife in all but name and believed in love in the end. Just go and do whatever it takes to help me save my sister — my best friend.”

Now, Ranma began to understand — really and truly - the true scope and gravitas of the revelation that had been imparted to him the night before. The voice of the girl at Niomon echoed again in the ears of his mind, but this time her words rang as the bells of Jerusalem ringing while St. Peter resumed calling out names. Ranma could suddenly see a path to finishing the sketch that the “normal girl” had started at Himonya so long ago.

Time is short now, Ranma-kun. Remember what I've said, and trust your eyes and ears. You'll know just as you knew when you first came to Nishi Otani to look for me….

“Akane, I… Thank you,” Ranma said as he stood and gave her a very low, solemn, and heartfelt bow.

Akane nodded and gave him a miserable attempt at a smile as she struggled through very visibly painful, bittersweet tears. “Oneechan, s-she deserves a chance to be happy. Go, Ranma. Keep your promise. Tell her that I… I love her.”

At the end, Akane gave him an address in Hongo where he could have his blood checked on the off chance that he was a match. He already knew though what the test would show.

The answer is written in your blood….

For Nabiki and Akane both….

# # # # #

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE IDIOTS ON THE STAGE

Night had fallen yet again by the time he found her on the rooftop of her dorm at Komaba. The thick flannel blanket in which she had wrapped herself fluttered in the cool late Autumn breeze. She stood alone in the darkness humming something softly to herself.

Bone-chilled recognition tore through to the essence of his soul as he listened and felt the presence of the ghost from Nishi Otani with him. He knew the song: the one from his dream about Jerusalem bells ringing and St. Peter's silence! A bewildered, haunting sense of deja vu came over him as his memories of that strange night in Kyoto became inextricably intertwined with those of a different night on a different rooftop during another season. Eventually, the last notes died away in the darkness. He had forgotten how beautiful her voice truly was.

“You've become too predictable since Roppongi,” she taunted, glancing back at him in between the faint, yellow threads of lamp light. “You can't even sneak up on someone like me anymore.”

Ranma understood. All along, she had known that he had been watching and listening to her. Maybe she even intended that he should.

He made his way out of the shadows and up to the rail on her left. He actually did not mind that she specifically could pick him out. Truthfully, he missed her cheeky audacity and even found it intriguingly endearing, even arousing. However, other far less pleasant things had to be said instead.

“It ain't true, ya know. What ya said about beauty not being possible without pain. A lot of what ya told me is true — but not that.”

“Oh?” she asked, quizzically tilting her head ever so slightly in his direction.

“Yeah.” He could not tell if she was actually curious about his meaning or merely intrigued by him challenging her. He pressed on regardless, drawing now on the words that had been given to him at Nishi Otani. “It ain't really about the pain. It's about candor. It just so happens that pain is one of those things that has a tendency to make people candid.”

She replied with a snide, derisive caricature of a laugh. “I don't know where you heard that, but someone else also tried a long time ago to tell me something that sounded way too fucking similar.”

“Oh? Who was that?”

“My mother,” she bit out tersely.

Ranma guessed she would say that, but his brow still quirked involuntarily when he heard her. “Why didn't ya believe her?”

“I told you to please not come,” she said, ignoring his question. “You're just making it harder to say goodbye — for both of us. For everyone else too, especially Akane.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do ya assume that we have to say goodbye?”

She barked out a mirthless laugh now somewhere between desperate and maniacal. “My sisters just don't get it, you know. None of you do.”

“Then tell me, Nabiki,” he said. “Let's be candid. I'm listening.”

“You're wasting your time here.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and turned away from him. All of them could easily afford to get excited about things like this re-transplantation nonsense. People assumed she should feel excited too about any chance, even with long-term odds of cure as shit as 1 in 5.

“When things go wrong though, it's me who pays for it. Not you or anyone else. All the praying to a God who either doesn't exist or just doesn't give a fuck. The helplessness of waiting; the stupidity of hoping; the pain of disappointment. My body, my life, my death. Every fucking bit of it is me alone in the end!”

“Ya think I'm going to leave ya in the end too, don't ya. I wouldn't.”

“I know, Ranma,” she replied with a sigh. “That's the problem. I think if a boy were with a girl like me, he should leave, but I also don't think if you were that boy that you'd be smart enough to actually do that. You wouldn't move on either even after I'm gone. You have this puppy dog loyalty problem.”

She could see it. He would be just as stupid as her father was for her mother and as deaf to everyone else around him as Soun Tendou was to his daughter. Nabiki resented her mother too for not preparing her husband and daughters to go on living even after she was gone. Fair or not, this was a fact.

“I won't make the same fucking mistake!” she screeched with naked, hateful fury. “I won't create monsters and leave misery the way she did when I go!”

Another shudder traveled down Ranma's spine as he recognized the haunted words of the girl at Niomon. Outwardly, though, he willed himself to press on and laugh. He had to finish the job. “I don't think what I have is called a `puppy dog problem'.”

“So what do you want to call it? Love…?!” she sneered. “You're just going to hurt yourself with that.”

“Your word, not mine,” Ranma replied with a cool, deliberate shrug.

Now, he knew for sure; she was putting on a show. This girl with him now was not the real Icarus, the one who had offered him shots of espresso that day at Sartre to get him to open up; glared back at him up in the tree at Himonya as she had sketched the essence of his soul; or kissed him for the first time that terrible day in Hongo. Because of that day and all of the things she had said that she was not supposed to say, he knew now who Icarus at Kiyomizu really was.

“I told you that Existentialists don't believe in love,” Nabiki snorted disdainfully. “If they call themselves Existentialists and do, then they're shitty ones. Love just gets in the way of Destiny.”

“Come on, Nabiki!” he scoffed. “You were so eager to help me out with my love life when ya thought it had nothing to do with ya, but now that it does, ya wanna wax poetic about feelings getting in the way of Destiny?! You're just being a coward!”

He told her she was being as melodramatic as a shoujo manga character and that Sartre himself was full of shit for saying all that stuff about love. Even he had a lifelong partner (1), which certainly did nothing to get in the way of his style. Maybe the girl cheated on him from time to time, and that was what his issue was, but, if so, that was on Sartre. A whole school of thought that said a lot of good and right things otherwise should not have to answer for one guy's poor taste in women.

Even Nietzsche no less said that love could be “the most angelic instinct” and “the greatest stimulus of life.” Love had nothing to do with greed or possessiveness or trapping anyone in anything; those things each stood apart as something else all together.

“It's not really about wanting to be with someone, but wanting more for someone else than what ya want for yourself.” He wanted more for her than for himself just as he knew she did for him; he told her so. She was as full of shit as Sartre.

Bristling with indignant rage, Nabiki sputtered back at him with an uncharacteristic lack of incoherence. Ranma watched in amusement as her lips went through the motions of shouting back at him, but no words came. Her hands folded into balled fists peaking out just below the edges of the blanket draped over her shoulders.

Ranma recognized this part of the story too. This time, however, he would refuse to be the one who backed down. Instead, he glared back at her with the full weight of his own unyielding stare straight into the deepest depths of her fiery, soul-piercing eyes.

Time passed.

He thought again of the song that she had been humming earlier, the one about Jerusalem bells, Roman cavalry choirs, and St. Peter's silence.

I believe again in possibilities because you came. For the same reasons that Kasumi-chan believes that you can convince my Na-chan that Icarus didn't actually crash and die alone in the Icarian Sea when he reached for the Sun.

Kasumi and the girl at Niomon ultimately proved right; Nabiki eventually relented. She huffed and muttered something under her breath that sounded vaguely like she was calling him a stupid, stubborn jerk as she turned away. She looked incredibly tired and world-weary, defeated even, as she sat down with her back up against the rail and drew her knees up to her chest.

Something strange began happening now there in the darkness. Ranma felt an aching compulsion to sit down beside her. The feeling harkened back with its striking reminiscence to the primordial draw that he had felt in Kyoto by Nishi Otani. He wondered if he should be on guard and uneasy, and yet somehow he was not. Instead, he only realised how tired and spent he also felt now too.

At some point, Nabiki surprised him by leaning her head on his shoulder. The scent of peach blossoms filled the air around him once more. He really had missed her very, very much. Instinctively, he wrapped an arm around her in reply.

As he did so, he discovered how very cold her body was. Now he was actually scared. He asked if they should go in.

She nodded and let him help her to her feet.

“I love you,” she suddenly said in a small, weary, resigned voice. “I'm not a coward, and I'm not trying to be melodramatic. I just don't want you to become me. Bitter and angry. Cynical and disillusioned.”

Ranma nodded. He had many things that he wanted to tell her in reply, but they had to go in. She was too cold, and she had to rest. For now, he simply said, “I just want you to be happy and to believe again. I love you too.”

“Even if I'm bitter and angry, cynical and disillusioned…?”

“Even if and no less.”

# # # # #

As he predicted, she could not last long after they came back to her room. He helped her settle into her bed and dragged the desk chair over to sit by her side. Realising what he intended, she slid over towards the wall and reached her hands out for his.

“Lie with me,” she said. “I barely take up space.”

She was much smaller than him. The toll her illness had taken on her body only further emphasized the point. Even then, the single bed still would have been tight for them both.

"It's okay," Ranma replied with a warm, reassuring smile. He gave her hands a gentle, affectionate squeeze to let her know that he appreciated her gesture regardless.

They remained as he remembered: soft and gentle, yet unyielding and unapologetic about what they were. They had been so cold when she had first placed them in his earlier as they had made their way down from the roof. He had been unsettled, but the restored warmth in her hands now put him at ease. The feel of her fingers interlaced between his own felt wonderful, something far beyond the fleeting brushes of her touch against him that he had only known before then.

He whispered a promise to still be there when she woke up as he told her to close her eyes. The smile she gave him as she faded away was still more beautiful than anything captured in his dreams and memories. The same was true of the delicate peach blossom scent of her hair now and the sound of her voice when he had heard her humming earlier in the night.

That realisation scared him. Even the most important and soul-felt of memories seemed doomed to dim with time and distance. Not a single day had passed since that first fateful night in Roppongi when he had not thought of her, but that had made no difference. Though he secretly believed more than ever in the hope of the blood-written answer given to him at Niomon and that there be no need for good-byes any time soon, he yearned for a way to ensure the fidelity of his memories.

He took up the sketch pad that he had brought back with him from Kyoto and settled back in Nabiki's desk chair. Sights, sounds, and even smells from the Spring and Summer days that they had spent between Naka-Meguro, Himonya, Sartre, and here at Komaba rushed up at him as he worked.

What's it like to be normal?

Funny that you think I'd know. I'm a Tendou, remember?

He laughed. Maybe Nabiki could never be “normal” per se, but she did have a sense of humor. Among the Tendou sisters, she was probably the only one who knew how to laugh, a skill likely rooted in her need to survive.

Meet me up there in that tree.

I can get us up there in a leap or two.

No, thanks. I can make my own way up.

Are ya —?

I said just meet me up there! I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not fucking made of glass!

He had been arrogant for underestimating her. She had humbled him.

For a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does. Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved.

He smiled.

He still had a propensity to be inadvertently insensitive and speak without thinking. Probably, that would never change. For her, however, he resolved to always do his best to listen for as long as she had something to say to him.

Ya can pontificate about Sartre, dissect Plato in your sleep, and wax poetic on the fly about human nature with metaphors drawing on quantum physics. Yet ya can waste hours on that stuff?

It's not a waste.

But shoujo…?

Hey. I'm still a girl, and dreaming is what girls do from time to time.

He hoped she still dreamed like that.

He wanted to thank her for inspiring him to dream and aspire too to be more than the vacuous, aimless person he had been before that night in Roppongi.

Ya wanna be a saint…?

Hell no! I'm just doing my best to be okay with what I am.

That being?

A mortal human being. Maybe even one that likes chocolate, cookies, and ice cream from time to time. Occasionally fugu and caviar too.

She drew him with her unapologetically playful, mischievous honesty.

A lot of people around Nerima used to say that Nabiki Tendou was a skilled liar without equal. They were wrong. In many ways, she was actually the most honest person whom Ranma had ever met. He tried to think of a time when she had actually outright lied to his face, but he could not.

People just did not always like what Nabiki said or how she said it; they resented her even more for simply not caring. That was the real reason why people disliked her. For her, however, everything had been a knife fight that had to be won because winning was surviving.

I was desperate. I really just had to do whatever it took for me to get out.

Now, the sketches that he had been working on were complete. He closed the pad and laid it on the desk beside hers.

Even as he watched her sleep, he remained unable to believe in the present reality of her being with him in this place and this time. He had missed her so very much. She really could climb trees very well, and she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, so very unique and special in so many ways.

“Ya won,” he whispered proudly in reverent admiration. She had thrived and achieved despite her rotten draw. “Against all the odds, ya already won.”

She belonged here at Todai. Even beyond here, there were so many other wonderful things that he knew she deserved the chance to know and have. Ranma wanted to give those dreams and possibilities back to her.

He needed for her to be the Believer who knew that there was no beauty without candor, be that via pain or otherwise.

Mistress alone of her sea.

The one at her own sail who understood that whoever called her out and tried to shout her back down into silence did not matter.

He remembered the penultimate question she had asked him that first night in Roppongi.

Tell me this much. Do you at least like girls?

He laughed softly to himself in the darkness, warmed by the thought of how much he really loved her.

# # # # #

Ranma awoke to the noxious annoyance of sunlight shining in his eyes. He found himself sitting in her chair with her flannel blanket from the night before wrapped around his shoulders. Morning had come again.

Nabiki was sitting up in the bed with her back to the wall studying him. She rested her chin on arms placed over knees drawn up tightly to her chest. She was cute like that.

“Good morning,” she said with uncharacteristic shyness.

“Good morning,” he replied. “I promised I would stay.”

“Thank you. I'm sorry about the bed.”

“Don't be. Your chair is luxurious compared to what my old man and I often had on the road.”

“Oh.”

An awkward silence fell between them as they found themselves studying one another. He sensed that she wanted to ask him something, probably even many things. There were things that he wanted to say and ask her too.

“Ranma — ”

“Nabiki — ”

They shared a shy laugh together over their mutually bad timing.

“The Stage,” she eventually started, breaking the silence. “I…. I can tell you now. Do you still want to know why?”

“Only if ya want. I'm pretty sure I already know why,” Ranma said with a warm, reassuring smile.

He told her about his trip to Kyoto, his time at Kiyomizu-Dera, and how he had stumbled upon Nishi Otani at sunset. He omitted the part about the funeral procession that had drawn him into the cemetery grounds.

He told Nabiki too about the recurring dream of meeting her mother at the Niomon gate, but left out the part about the prophesied blood-written answer for her, Akane, and himself. He gave Nabiki the first sketch that he had finished the night before: the image of her mother coming to them in the night at Niomon.

He understood now. Icarus came to Kiyomizu-Dera searching for her mother. She was a lonely, desperate child seeking to reclaim what had been taken away from her before she'd even had a chance to know what she'd lost. It was far more than any person alone should ever have to bear.

As Nabiki studied the drawing, powerful and raw emotions cycled across her beautiful face. Anger, sadness, joy, longing, anguish, and wonder — all of those things came and went and more than once. Finally, the dam shattered, and she began to cry as she clutched his pad desperately against her chest. The naked pain of her broken heart openly revealed itself as her body exploded with violent, unchecked sobs.

Instinctively, Ranma folded her tightly in his arms and let her bury the heat of her tear-streaked face in his shoulder. As she wept, he gently stroked her hair while whispering calm, compassionate assurances in her ear.

“I'm here, Nabiki,” he told her. “Icarus doesn't have to leap alone.”

For a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does. Because that's how a girl measures for herself if and how much she's loved.

“I hear you. I see you. I…. I wanna jump with you.”

She answered by wrapping her own arms around him in a fierce, desperate embrace. They held each other like that for a long time. Eventually, the ragged, chaotic rhythm of her broken sobs settled into a spent, even rhythm that came to a deep, exhaled coda.

“I don't know right from wrong anymore,” Nabiki said in a small, broken voice. She fell back and let go. “I'm not sure I can remember when I last did. How do we tell Akane?”

“Ain't much of anything to tell.”

More or less, he told Nabiki about how Akane had confronted him at the shinkansen terminal at Tokyo Station and ended their engagement. Of course, he left out the part about Akane's desire to have him help find a donor and the promise he had made to atone for the pain that he had caused.

“I'm a terrible sister and a really bad person, aren't I. I wasn't strong enough to not love you or to make you actually hate me that day in Hongo. I knew I should have, but I … I couldn't. I don't know how to ask Akane to forgive me.”

Ranma told Nabiki that he knew without any doubt that both of her sisters loved her very much. Love itself is not ever wrong, they each had told him. As Nietzsche of all people said, the problem arose from the assumptions that people made around love — what it is, ought to be, or should not be.

Nabiki laughed despite the tears that lingered in her eyes. “That was something that our mother used to say.”

Indeed, the girl at Niomon had.

”Maybe `coz it's true?” Ranma ventured. “I don't think Akane ever meant to fall for me any more than you or I meant to fall for each other. I don't think Akane's mad at ya or that she thinks ya did anything wrong any more than she thinks she did.”

If anyone had, probably he did in trying to convince himself for so long that he could eventually feel about Akane the way she did for him. Akane was right to hate him as she said she did. “I shoulda admitted a long time ago that I just didn't love her. “

Nabiki's features softened with sympathy. “You've never been in love before, right? You didn't know.”

“I…. Can I ask ya a question?”

She laughed again, but this time with genuine amusement. “Let me get this straight. Ranma Saotome sneaks into a girl's dorm at night, challenges her entire philosophical worldview as a lie, calls her a melodramatic coward, and invites himself to spend the night in her room. Now he wants to ask if it's okay for him to ask her questions…?!”

When put like that, he had to laugh too. “Point taken. It's good to hear ya laughing again though.”

“What's your question, Ranma?”

“That last night here in Meguro when ya pushed me away in front of the Komaba gates. Did ya know then?”

She nodded. “I had a sense. Leukemias are blood diseases.” Fatigue and decreased endurance because of anemia were often the first things a person noticed. That or unusual bleeding or unexplained fevers. “Is that… is that really the question you want to ask me?”

He smiled. She understood him too well. “That night in Roppongi. Was it really by chance that we met up on that rooftop?”

“You were so depressed after Jusendo and the wedding. Maybe I was concerned.”

“That obvious?”

“Yeah.”

He remembered how he had yelled at her that first day at Sartre when she had asked him what he wanted in life.

This again? Come on! It's not like anyone's ever given a shit about that before. Least of all you.

Just thinking about what he had said hurt. “I'm sorry. For getting angry at ya for caring enough to ask what I want. It's just that, well, no one else ever asked me. I didn't know what to do.”

“Don't worry about it. I told you. I didn't have any illusions about who or what you thought I was. I was used to that.”

“Still, I'm sorry for all the wrong things I thought about ya. No one else ever told me that my happiness was important.”

She gave him a sad, bittersweet smile. “The Tendous — we were spiritually dead as a family before you came. You brought something special with you, this realisation that there were still so many things about the world that none of us truly understood, and you made us all believe again in possibilities. For that alone, my sisters and I owe you a great deal. You still haven't asked me your real question though.”

“Which is?”

“You asked me once before what I know about love, if I'd ever felt that way for someone before. The truth is, well, I've always liked you, even from the beginning when you and your father first came into our lives. You were my first real crush, always larger than life. That was the real reason I was so mean to you. As far as the Tendou-Saotome family agreement was concerned, I couldn't have you, and then my sister developed feelings for you. I'm sorry that I was immature like that.”

With those words, so many strange ideas suddenly occurred to him. “So that time when Akane tossed me and the honor engagement to ya — ?”

“And I told you that night in my room that I loved you? That I'd felt that way for some time?”

He nodded.

“Okay, maybe `love' was a little too strong of a word back then. The essence of what I said though? I wasn't really pretending.”

“Nabiki…. I should`ve — ”

“Ranma?” she said, cutting him off with a finger gently placed against his lips. “What I want to say is thank you. For giving me a chance to know what love actually is before I'm out of time.”

“Nabiki….“

“Just hold me for a moment, Ranma,” she said as she turned and leaned her head back against him. “I feel so tired, but I'm just happy and grateful.”

Her phone began to vibrate on the desk just as she closed her eyes. Ranma started to reach for it, but she stopped him.

“They can leave a message,” she said. “Daedalus and Icarus didn't answer phones. Worshippers at Kiyomizu and mourners at Nishi Otani don't either. Kiss me.”

Her lips felt unbelievably soft and warm, even more so than the last time. Their touch against his own, now accompanied by that of her tongue against his, filled him with awe, wonder, and gratitude. That indescribable ache of infinitely deep yearning and hunger that he had first discovered within himself that day at Hongo came back again now too. In that moment, he realised how terrified he had been of never again having the chance to feel her living presence like this again.

“Nabiki….” he rasped, his voice thick and hoarse with desperate emotions.

“It's okay. I'm still here,” he heard her whisper as he felt the damp warmth of her tears against his own face. “Just hold me for now.”

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French Existentialist philosopher, social theorist, feminist activist, and writer who met Jean-Paul Sartre during her college years. Though never officially married, they were life partners for 51 years. SDe Beauvoir was openly bisexual and public about her open romantic relationships, which, at times, overshadowed her considerable academic reputation.

CHAPTER TWELVE: DAEDALUS AND THE BELIEVERS

Nowadays, Nabiki tired out easily.

Ranma remembered her telling him that her mother had been the same toward the end. He shuddered inside as he held Nabiki close and tried to redirect his thoughts.

They sat beside one another on a the Saturday morning train bound from Meguro to Nerima. Nabiki had fallen asleep resting her head on his shoulder. She wore her finest cool weather clothes, a smart ensemble consisting of a navy and grey plaid print overcoat over a crème-colored knit turtleneck; a heavy, grey midi-length A-line wool skirt; and black knee-length block-heeled leather boots. Even as she dozed, she clutched fiercely onto his sketch pad — the one with the vision of her mother at Niomon — with both her arms folded tightly against her chest.

As the two of them had agreed, she had telephoned home a few days before calling for a formal family meeting to lay everything out in the open. This would be her first time back since leaving for Todai now nearly eight months ago. For him, it would be the first time since he had left for Kyoto and Akane had ended the engagement.

As Ranma had long suspected, Nabiki confirmed that the Tendou family was old high-ranking samurai stock. Hence, they still had their land and the dojo in the middle of a modern Tokyo ward as affluent as Nerima; Tendou-san remained on the local municipal council despite not having a regular job or other typical qualifications for the position; and the family's legacy remained anchored by such an antiquated type of agreement as the Tendou-Saotome arrangement.

Especially after Akiko Tendou's death and the upending of Nabiki's world, everything revolved around the soulless moral pillars of face and honor. Even whatever love Soun Tendou might or might not have felt for his second daughter existed in subservience to the dictates of these mandates. His unhealthy obsession with keeping her safe and alive after her diagnosis had been motivated by the shame of being impotent and helpless against Death threatening his home a second time. He concealed the truth about her genes and blood from the Saotomes for the same reasons, even lying with a straight face about her viability as a potential iinazuke. Even at her graduation from Furinkan, the old man's hug and the congratulations that he had bestowed had been little more than perfunctory for satisfying the requirements of what others should see.

With great bitterness, Nabiki had swallowed her insignificance as an inconvenient Malcolm-in-the-middle, patronized or tucked away at her father's discretions, ones based on archaic values rooted in a place and time that no longer existed. Secretly, much like countless samurai daughters in centuries past, she had taken refuge in her escapist hopes and dreams, biding her time and holding on to her sanity by lashing out when she could with opportune passive-aggressive bursts of spite.

Now, however, because of all the strange and wonderful things that had happened since that night in Roppongi, she could no longer be content with going about her way in shadows. Even finally having her hard-earned freedom to leave could no longer be enough for her. In addition, she wanted to be able to talk openly about the future that she and Ranma had come to hope for and desire. Whatever the outcome, she needed to confront her father and demand that he see and acknowledge her for who she truly was. She had to make her move now - just in case she ran out of time.

“I want…. I want him to be able to love me the way he does Akane and Kasumi. Especially Akane,” she said, choking back on her heated emotions. “No conditionalities or reservations — like the way things used to be before my Mom died. I'm neither a flower nor made of glass.”

“No, ya ain't,” Ranma agreed. “I'm surprised though. Thought even now that your Dad was a sentimental moralist rather than a traditionalist.”

“Why?”

“The waterworks shows?”

“Maybe for things that involve Kasumi or Akane. Never for me.”

"Weren't your parents a love match? I thought ya said he was 'stupid' for your mother."'

Of course, the Niomon ghost had far more charitable and nuanced words.

He's just a boy who fell in love with a girl too, but he's a good person who's only ever wanted to do the right thing. It's just that sometimes the “right thing” is not so easy to see.

Nabiki sighed. "Doesn't matter. I need to talk to him for myself. Akane too. Don't worry though. I told you that I love you, that I am with you now matter what happens.“

Back in the present, Ranma shook himself and forced his thoughts to turn to something more pleasant. He closed his eyes and thought of the days that they had spent together after that night on the rooftop of her dorm. Time had slowed as things settled into an intimate, peaceful routine that felt beautifully normal. In that unexpected safe space filled with tender, heartfelt warmth, he finally tasted the true meaning of beauty and possibilities.

# # # # #

Daedalus.

They actually called it that.

Nabiki perched herself on the edge of the examination table and listened as the doctor explained. Ranma was by her side holding her left hand in his right in a gesture of support. They smirked knowingly at one another as they heard the name.

The call that Nabiki had stopped Ranma from picking up the other morning had come from the medical oncologist's office. They wanted to let her know that a potential donor had been identified. Now they were here at Hongo listening as the doctor told them about an experimental approach that could potentially increase the odds of long-term cure to something much better than 1 in 5.

The Daedalus concept consisted of taking the donor's marrow and reprograming it with a cassette of engineered mutations. The reconstituted immune system derived from the genetically modified donor marrow would possess potent anti-tumor specificity, and the HLA type would be improved to a near perfect match with the recipient. The potential risks for graft-versus-host disease and rejection would be reduced dramatically. A cured state could even potentially be achieved without the need for the usual toxic, immunosuppressive post-transplant maintenance medications.

“Has this actually been tried outside of a lab before?” Nabiki asked.

The doctor nodded. Her name was Sato, and she was young, driven and ambitious. Daedalus was a concept she had brought back to Todai and Riken after recently completing an advanced fellowship at the Farber in Boston. The Americans had already tried the approach in a dozen or so other people. The first recipient was still disease-free after six years and not taking any medications at all. Two other patients at Todai had also recently received modified transplants; they were doing well too.

“What's the catch?” Ranma asked, fixing the doctor with a suspicious gaze. It sounded too good to be true, like nannichuan being sent from Jusenkyo to Nerima.

Beyond the usual risks associated with receiving a conventional transplant, the additional risks for the modified transplant appeared to be minimal based on experience at Farber and with the two Todai patients. The CRISPR-Cas12 technology that would be used to introduce the targeted mutations carried an inherent theoretical risk of inadvertently introducing off-target mutations elsewhere in the donor's genome. In practice, however, CRISPR-Cas12 targeting accuracy was generally greater than 99.99%. The chances of picking up an unintended mutation were comparable to being struck by lightning while living in Tokyo.

“I like your boyfriend, Tendou-san,” the doctor said with a smile. “Most people are usually blind with hope and elation when I first tell them about this. Some critical skepticism is healthy. He's quite handsome too by the way.”

Ranma felt his cheeks flush as he heard the reference to himself: kareshi. It was new, fresh, and nice to hear. More than that, it was consensual and sounded so normal. That meant, however, that he actually had a girlfriend now.

Nabiki squeezed his hand, drawing him back to the present as she returned the doctor's smile with one of her own now. He did not understand her reply; it was in English as was the brief, genial conversation that followed. Whatever words were exchanged elicited a chuckle from the doctor, almost certainly at his expense.

At the end, Nabiki switched back to Japanese as she thanked the doctor for explaining her options including Daedalus. She promised to carefully consider her options and get back to the doctor with an answer as quickly as possible. Whether she agreed to a genetically modified or conventional transplant, she knew they were holding the donor for her, especially since she was such a hard match.

“You want to know what I think about whether or not Icarus should jump, right?” Nabiki said to Ranma after they left the clinic. She had her arm wrapped around his as he helped her make her way around the large hospital. They had to get to the infusion center for her next dose of immunotherapy and a blood transfusion to palliate her anemia.

“If ya feel like telling me, yeah. Otherwise, I'd settle for knowing what ya said to the doctor about me in English back there.”

She smiled. “I'll tell you both. For the transplant, it will be hard either way, conventional or otherwise. It wasn't easy the last time. I'd lose all my hair again when they do the pre-transplant conditioning. It won't really come back for at least a year. I'll be bedridden and puking my guts out too. The recovery after will be an even harder fight. You might not find me attractive anymore.”

“You're the most beautiful girl I've ever known,” he replied adamantly. “I'd cut off my pigtail and shave my head to match and to let ya know that ya losing hair won't change that. Would ya still like me that way?”

She gave him a shy nod. “You…. You're the most handsome boy I've ever known. If a little Jusenkyo magic won't change that, neither would a bit of hair loss.”

“And the thing ya said in English?”

“I told her that I liked the sound of what she said: you and I as girlfriend and boyfriend. Is that all you want me to be to you though? Maybe we've already known each other too long and too well for just that?”

Ranma found himself struck with wonder as he fell into contemplation of the possibilities. “What would ya like to be?”

“You're the one who went to Kiyomizu and Nishi Otani and came all this way for me. What would you like?”

The answer rolled naturally off of his tongue. Not “iinazuke” — an arranged fiance — as he had been to Akane. The taste of not having had a choice remained bitter and sore for him.

His answer pleased her a great deal. “I don't want to be anything to you either that I don't choose, and I don't want it tied to anything other than how I feel.” Icarus had a choice to leap or not; she would love him because she chose to love him.

“`Konyakusha'…?” he ventured. This word showed respect for the principles of "volition" and "consent."

A tender, affectionate grin alighted across her beautiful face. “That's what the doctor asked too. If you plan to ask me one day, I'm willing. Don't bother about telling me that you're broke though. I already know about that.

# # # # #

The call came as he sat waiting for the treatments to finish. Dr. Sato was the one on the other end of the line. She was surprised when she connected his voice with that of the young man she had just seen with her patient. She asked him to come by her office in the ambulatory wing of the hospital.

“We have time to talk. The infusions will take at least 3 hours.”

The ghost at Nishi Otani had spoken true to him in his dreams.

The answer is in your blood….

Technically, the information that was to be provided about the recipient was supposed to be limited to anonymized demographics. Given the circumstances, however, the doctor would not be able to conceal from him that he was identified as a donor for Nabiki. The match quality was incredibly high, far better even than the usual threshold for being green-lighted for a transplant.

“You've asked to remain anonymous,” the doctor noted. “I'm just curious. Knowing who your recipient will be, do you still want it that way?”

Ranma had been sure ever since Akane first broached the possibility of him being a donor when she met him at Tokyo Station. Nabiki's words to him earlier in the hall only reaffirmed his conviction.

I don't want to be anything to you either that I don't choose, and I don't want it tied to anything other than how I feel. Icarus had a choice to leap or not; I will love you because I choose to love you….

Nabiki could never know.

The doctor said she admired and respected his choice. Once he signed some additional papers, she would make the arrangements for a harvest to be done as soon as possible.

“Doesn't she have to agree though?” he asked.

The doctor smiled. “We wouldn't be having this conversation if the recipient hadn't agreed.”

Time was of the essence. He would receive several days of growth factor hormone treatments to mobilize bone marrow stem cells into circulation. These would then be collected by a several hours-long procedure called apheresis. Usually 2 to 3 collection sessions were needed to harvest a sufficient number of cells. About two weeks would be needed after to introduce the synthetic mutations and optimize the harvested cells for transplantation. The recipient would undergo conditioning with lethal dose chemotherapy and radiation at the same time to prepare to receive the transplant.

He deduced that Nabiki must have called the doctor back during her infusion and agreed to the Daedalus procedure then. A spectrum of powerful emotions ran through him: awe, joy, but, most of all, gratitude for Akiko Tendou's blessings from beyond the grave. Her voice echoed once again in the ears of his mind; her words truly were the bells of Jerusalem ringing as St. Peter resumed calling out names.

# # # # #

By now, the trees had become barren. A few brown and golden leaves remained scattered across the streets and sidewalks. The days remained mild and temperate, but the mornings and nights had become increasingly cool.

Still, what followed after that day when Nabiki agreed to proceed with Daedalus played out like one beautiful, almost unending dream. Everything felt so fresh, new, and insatiably addicting. It was all freedom unlike any he had ever imagined possible: just him and the only person in the world he had ever wanted.

She went with him on quiet, leisurely walks by the canal in Naka-Meguro for as long as she could endure. She did not want to go back to Himonya because seeing the trees would remind her that she could no longer climb them. She would not ask him to carry her up; that went without saying. Very often, she had to sit and rest on one of the benches alongside the water. As she did, Ranma teased her and told her stories to try to make her laugh and smile.

He never mentioned how stiff his neck and back had become from night after night of sleeping on the wooden floor in her room. He tried once or twice to share the bed with her in his girl form, which was smaller than his actual self. He thought too that this might tamp down on the exciting new feelings that her physical presence aroused in him; those also kept him up at night. He proved wrong, however, on both counts.

He had never imagined such depths and types of human feelings being possible. The beauty and allure of her body — even despite the illness and the clothes and sheets that remained between them — humbled and awed him. Countless hours simply vanished studying the interplay of light with the lines of her face; running his fingers through her hair; savoring her peach blossom scent; and holding her in his arms. He was free too to interlace his fingers with hers as he pleased without any need to explain or justify himself to anyone. He blushed imagining her shapely legs and chest and the warm, silky smooth feel of her skin pressed up against his own.

They talked about everything and nothing at all and sketched things together while daydreaming about possibilities beyond Daedalus and their present reality. She had tears in her eyes as she told him that he had made her feel, for the first time since her mother passed, like a wanted human being, loved and cherished without conditions of pity, remorse, or anything else. She had not thought she would ever find the freedom again to describe her dreams and aspirations without being judged, misunderstood, or even outright dismissed.

Ranma showed her the other sketch that he had worked on the other night as he had watched her sleep. It was the drawing that she had started on the cocktail napkin that first day at Himonya of him sitting up in the tree. He had completed the scene by placing her beside him. His eyes were no longer weary, and the pained longing and sadness that she had seen there then was replaced by the wide, bright-eyed light of hope and excitement.

“Was I really so wrong about everything?” she asked. Her eyes shimmered as she traced his lines with the tips of her fingers with genuine, heartfelt wonder and admiration. Her voice was small, broken by the weight of doubt and bewilderment.

Existentialists did not believe in God. If they did, they had little reason to believe that the individual was of any concern to Providence.

Yet, here in her hands she existed the proof that a girl like her could still meet a boy like Ranma who could love someone like her. All of this was despite how flawed with anger and scheming cynicism she was and all of the things that she still feared she could not bring to the table of any potential shared future. Here too was the proof that daughters such as her could be born as doppelgängers of mothers who could speak to them from beyond the grave.

I want him to be able to love me the way he does Akane and Kasumi. Especially Akane. No conditionalities or reservations — like the way things used to be before my Mom died. I'm neither a flower nor made of glass.

“We really do have to go back at some point, don't we, Ranma,” she said eventually with a sad, weary, resigned sigh. “That's what my mother would expect. To Nerima and our families; you to Furinkan to finish; and me back to Todai if I survive Daedalus. ”

“We'll do those things and more — together the way I'm sure your Mom would've liked,” he said confidently with a firm squeeze of her left hand. If Akiko Tendou could come to them from beyond the grave with answers truly written in blood, then this had to be a story with a good ending.

It had to be.

“Will you do something for me?” Nabiki asked, swiping in annoyance at the tears running down her cheeks now.

“Course,” he answered without hesitation. “What would ya like?”

“Would you be willing to call me `Na-Chan' from time to time? My mother used to call me that. I…. I miss hearing that name. It would help to remind me of who I really am.”

He understood. Then and there, he pulled her in close and lovingly whispered Icarus's true name in her ear for the very first time.

“Na-chan….”

# # # # #

Her words to Ranma earlier replayed in the ears of his heart and mind. “Don't worry. Whether I live ten more years or ten more days, everything'll be fine now. I believe again because of you,” she had said as they emerged at the top of the stairs leading to the street just outside the station near Furinkan.

Now, the scene opened as they had choreographed together the day before. She held on to Ranma's right hand with her left, conspicuously allowing him to help her steady herself as she made her way across the polished wooden floor of the dojo. When they arrived at the center, he silently slipped the navy and grey plaid print overcoat off her shoulders and stepped back. She settled to her knees on her own and assumed a seiza position directly across from her father. Her sisters were on either side of him as she had guessed they would be. Kasumi was to his left and Akane on his right.

Ranma bowed politely as he stepped back outside. Then he began to slowly slide the shoji partition shut with the finality of a chapter of something coming to an end. Akane's knowing eyes briefly met his own just as the last light from inside the dojo disappeared. His promises made at Tokyo Station were fulfilled.

He clung tightly to Nabiki's coat and let its lingering peach blossom scent fill his senses as the long wait began.

# # # # #

CHAPTER NOTES:

I can't think of a single instance in the anime or manga when Soun shows any affection toward his second daughter. True, her Ice Queen fascade/persona makes it difficult to see her in a sympathetic light. Still, he is her father.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SICILY AND THE ICARIAN SEA

Dread and horror, brutal and bone-chilling, seized Ranma as he took in his surroundings.

He found himself back at Nishi Otani. This time, however, he stood as a part of the funeral procession he had witnessed in his dreams. Akane, Kasumi, Tendou-san, and his own parents were there too. Still unable to believe, he shoved his way past them all looking for the dead person's picture in the hands of the priest.

Na-chan.

In the end, Icarus had leapt alone from the Stage to crash and die in the Icarian Sea. She had drawn it that way. She had said it would be that way.

The Niomon ghost had been wrong. Her false words of hope taunted him as he recalled the family meeting that Na-Chan had called on that final day in Nerima. A primal, blood-curdling roar of indescribable anguish rang out in the cold, unfeeling incense-filled darkness. With a bizarre, morbid fascination, he eventually realised that this sickly, otherworldly sound was his own scream. A rabid, insatiable flame of hatred burst in his chest, burning alive from within the remnants of his damned and dying self.

Ya said that I didn't have to meet her at a place like Nishi Otani!!!!

YOU LIED TO ME!!!!

# # # # #

Akane's desperate cry for help had signaled the end of their family meeting after nearly four hours. Ranma exploded to his feet and ran back toward the dojo at the sound of his name. The scene that met him turned the blood in his heart to ice.

Nabiki lay sprawled out on the floor face down and unconscious. Kasumi charged back towards the house to call 1-1-9. Akane scrambled over on hands and knees, rolled her sister over, and gathered her up in a fierce, desperate embrace. Tendou-san helplessly reached out and touched his daughter's face with shaking hands. Blood oozed from a gash on her lower lip.

Things Ranma's father had taught him years ago about assessing someone injured in a fight took over as he tried to assess the situation. Her hands felt cold to the touch. He searched for the pulse in her wrist. It was there, but thready and faint. With his free arm, he draped her coat over her body as a makeshift blanket and tossed her feet over his shoulders, hoping to enlist the aid of gravity to drive blood back toward her core and her head.

At some point, he became aware that paramedics had come. Only when one of them begged him to let go so they could do their jobs did Ranma move away. They carefully slipped a plastic transfer board under her body before sliding her across onto a stretcher.

As he, Akane, Kasumi, and Tendou-san followed the paramedics and the stretcher to the waiting ambulance on the street, Ranma's thoughts returned to Nishi Otani and the procession he had happened upon there for the young woman. It took the supreme effort of all of his conscious will to keep from lunging for Nabiki, taking her in his arms, and screaming at her to wake up.

Kasumi's firm hand suddenly came down on his shoulder. Her touch and the knowing look in her eyes ultimately gave him the strength to keep his composure. Her previous words about resilience came back to him now.

The only way you'll survive is by believing in something more magical and beyond all rational capacity to believe….

“One of you can come,” one of the paramedics said as her partner worked to finish securing Nabiki in the ambulance's rear bay. Various chimes and tones from the monitors could be heard now, giving them all some small measure of comfort and reassurance for the moment. “The rest of you will have to follow separately.”

“Ranma will go.”

Ranma felt another heavy hand on his other shoulder. He looked up and was surprised to find that Nabiki's father was the one who had spoken for him. Rather than the usual melodramatic show of waterworks, the old man struggled visibly with holding a stiff upper lip and choking back on his tears. Even he seemed aware that this moment held some unique and consequential gravitas.

“Ranma will go,” Tendou-san repeated. “That's…. That's the right thing now. For… for my daughter. For everyone.”

# # # # #

The medicine team managed to stabilize her, but additional tests needed to fully understand what had happened remained outstanding. The waiting took Ranma to the brink of madness. He could not stand being in the room while she was off the floor.

The doctors suspected her fainting episode occurred because of one of her treatments, something called an immune checkpoint activator. The drug worked by disinhibiting the immune system and mobilizing it to attack tumor cells. Iatrogenically induced autoimmunity was a common off-target effect for the class.

The team thought she was in an Addisonian crisis (1) because of immune-mediated injury to the adrenal glands. They could palliate her with steroid injections for now, but the underlying problem remained. They were running out of time, and things were going to keep coming apart.

Ranma needed her to hold on somehow for just a little longer. They stood so close to having their shot at crossing her Icarian Sea together. The timetable for the transplant had already been quietly set into motion.

Dr. Sato had scheduled him in Hongo for the following Monday to begin receiving the hormone treatments that would mobilize bone marrow stem cells into circulation. She hoped for her people to begin harvesting from him by the end of the week. Na-chan would enter the bubble and initiate lethal dose conditioning treatments the day after Christmas.

“I really never was going to be able to compete, was I. Thank you for keeping your promises.”

Ranma turned and looked up. He found Akane standing a few steps off to his right. Like him, she leaned up against the rail and pretended to study the people moving around in Nerima General Hospital's atrium lobby four floors below.

“Did what I could. I'm glad your sister believes in something again.”

“You found her a donor too.”

He did not answer.

“I know it was you somehow,” Akane insisted. “How… how did you manage it so quickly?”

“Sorry,” he told her. “The donor swore me to secrecy. I promised just like I promised you.”

Akane nodded. She understood. “You're free by the way. I asked my father to end the Tendou-Saotome agreement. Both of my sisters backed me up, and he'll talk to your father about it soon. I kept my promise to you too.”

“Akane….”

Tendou-san wanted to speak privately with him as well; not today, of course, but sometime soon. Once Nabiki was stable, the old man wanted to take a trip to Kyoto. He had not been for a very long time and was more than due for a visit to Mt. Otowa and Nishi Otani.

“Thank you,” Ranma said. He meant it. He also promised to move out as soon as possible. With the agreement between the families no longer in effect, it went without saying that the honor of their respective families no longer required his residence in their home. He did not own much; most of it was actually in the pack he had brought with him to Kyoto and now sitting in Nabiki's dorm room in Komaba.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Akane said with an irritated scowl. “Oneechan was never going to allow you to be thrown out on the street. Of all things, she even offered to pay rent on your behalf. Of course, the answer was `no'; Kasumi-oneechan made sure of that.”

Ranma chuckled despite himself at the other implied message he read in Akane's words. Having him continue to stay would help also to avoid arousing the suspicious eyes and ears of the nosiest and most insane residents of the Ranmaverse while they focused on what needed to be done for her sister.

“Baka,” Akane muttered, annoyed by whatever she must have read on his face. “You don't really know me that well after all, do you. I... I really am thankful that you l-lo-.… That you care about Oneechan as much as you do. My father said that he is too. If you really want to move out, no one will stop you, but you don't have to, uh, you know, and I'm… I'm also sorry I said that I hate you. I didn't mean —”

Ranma managed a smile, recognising the now very Akane-like perseveration on guilt in which she was about to trap herself. “I understand,” he said.“Ya don't owe me an apology or anything else.”

She nodded, looking visibly relieved. There was something else that Akane wanted to say now. She was suddenly choking back hard on tears.

“Can we….? Can we start over with trying to be friends? Like normal people this time?”

He liked the sound of that. He liked it very much. This time too, she was asking him as the man that he actually was (2).

“I'm Akane,” she said with a bright smile as she extended her right hand to him. The brilliant orange glow of the late Autumn sunset filtered in through the skylight above, casting interesting lines and shadows between them. “Would you like to be friends?”

“I'm Ranma,” he replied. “Yeah. I'd like that — a lot.”

As they shook hands, however, the PA system overhead suddenly came to life with an announcement. The voice specifically mentioned his name and asked him to return to the medicine floor at his earliest convenience.

Ya said that I didn't have to meet her at a place like Nishi Otani!!!!

YOU LIED TO ME!!!!

# # # # #

“Ranma!”

He awoke in darkness, startled by a firm hand on his shoulder and the sound of his own name. He blinked to orient himself and adjust his eyes. The frantic thud of his own heart and the rush of blood to his head roared wildly in his ears.

Eventually, he made out the soft, delicate lines of Nabiki's beautiful face dancing in shadows created by faint yellow track lights above them. She stood peering down at him with worried eyes - very much alive. She had an IV pole gripped in her right hand, which she used to help keep herself upright.

He remembered now; they were in Nabiki's room on the medicine floor and not Nishi Otani. That had just been a scene in a very bad dream. The other bits were re-lived experiences from what had been one very bad and surreal day. Still, he wanted to launch himself at her and take her up in his arms to confirm that she was real.

“Na-chan…?!” he rasped.

“I'm fine,” she said, calmly lowering herself onto the couch beside him. She deliberately moved in close, huddling deep into the blankets wrapped around her shoulders, drawing her knees up to her chest, and letting him feel the living motion of her body now pressed up against his. “Try not to be so melodramatic. It's been a long day, and it's too late for that much noise.”

He remained too shaken, however, to believe fully in her living presence. The memories — the terrible, abrupt end of their visit back to the Tendou dojo earlier and the anxious hours that followed — were still far too raw. He could not organize his thoughts into anything resembling coherent words.

“I…. I….”

“Will you hold me?” she asked softly, still trying to save him from his thoughts. This time, he managed to make his hands move and take hold of hers. He shuddered; she still felt cold, even after another blood transfusion and being initiated on steroids.

“You need to find a way to hold on,” she said, surprising him. “I told you before that there would be other times, right? This is how it'll be until it ends - one way or another. I need to know you're going to be okay no matter what happens.”

“Na-chan, I…. I….”

“I know. You think that's what you should be telling me, but I've seen and done this before, remember? I'm not going to be like my mother, and you're not going to be like my father.”

He nodded. “I promise.”

“I don't need you to make promises about this kind of thing, Ranma. I just need to know you'll follow through. I heard by the way that Akane spoke to you earlier?”

“Uh, yeah. What's the connection?”

“None,” she replied with a smirk. ”I know social graces aren't exactly your forte, but this is called a `subject change'.”

“Nabiki….” he growled in half-hearted annoyance. He was slightly calmer now, but still somewhat dazed. His heart was still beating fast.

“Just now while you were sleeping, I was thinking,” she started to explain, ignoring him. “Sometimes, it's good to remember that there are still things in the world other than our own problems. I'm glad that you and my sister can still be friends. You need friends; we both do. You're welcome by the way.”

“For what?”

“For seeing to it that you didn't end up homeless.”

Oneechan was never going to allow you to be thrown out on the street. Of all things, she even offered to pay rent on your behalf…..

“I could've gone back to my Mom's at any time, ya know.” His old man had apparently already fled there while Ranma had disappeared between Kyoto and Komaba. “Ya didn't have to get involved.”

Nabiki froze, visibly irked by his words. Ranma knew he was really in trouble when he saw the thinning line of her lips and the balled fists now in her lap. Still, even if the words had come out entirely wrong, she really should not have been offering to pay anything to anyone on his behalf, much less to her own family. That was what he meant to say.

“Well, great!” she spat. “Even after everything we've been through, Ranma Saotome is still a misogynistic asshole with no problem playing hero for the girl, but who can't stomach the girl doing anything nice for him. People wonder why I have such an aversion to seeming nice? There's your fucking answer why! No wonder Akane always wanted to hit you! Go back to your Mom for all I care!”

Clearly, the whole thing had come out wrong, but that did not matter. Somehow, seeing and hearing her angry like this felt dangerously sexy and simultaneously endearing, striking once more at that unexpected chord of primordial need of Man's need for Woman that had been such a mystery before her. The first time he had experienced the feeling was when she had stood beside him on the rooftop that first night in Roppongi. Now, however, his mind made no attempts to minimize the feeling with apologies or rationalisations of illicit or forbidden secrets. He felt like a moth drawn to a flame.

Two or three inches at most stood between his lips and hers, no less inviting even with the scab from her wound earlier in the day. Her delicate, heart-shaped face still had its flawless porcelain complexion. The soul-piercing luminescence of her eyes remained, blazing with the heat of very Tendou-like anger. Dizzy now with the scent of peach blossoms, he wondered if he was losing his mind.

“Na-chan, I - “

“Don't `Na-chan' me, you - !“

That was all it took to make him snap. His body became possessed by a will of its own, lunging forward to cut her off with the crash of his own lips against hers.

Her eyes went wide as she fell backward onto the couch with a muffled yelp of surprise. He recognized his opening. His tongue shot forward, searching desperately for the deliciously wet strawberry sweetness of her forgiveness and the reassurance of her affection.

There's probably a special place in Hell for someone like me. I don't care anymore. Meet me at sunset on the Stage at Kiyomizu-dera.

His eyes became misty with emotion when he finally felt her pushing back with her own tongue, and her arms came up around his neck with equal hunger and desire. He felt her teeth grazing against his lip followed by the faint, but unmistakable metallic taste of blood from her reopened wound. She really was here with him, still very much alive, very real, and also very right; he really was being an ass.

No one had lied to him or betrayed him in any way, and Icarus could not surrender to chasing mirages of madness, anxiety or fear that circled menacingly in the shadows cast by the setting sun. There was no need for any of that because even a setting sun eventually had to come around and rise again. All they had to do was hold fast to one another and remain in the middle road between Heaven and the Icarian Sea. Daedalus, who had come to Niomon, would do the rest now.

Right?

You don't have to meet Na-chan at a place like Nishi Otani….

“I'm sorry,” he whispered over and over as he ran his hands through her hair in a desperate, repentant frenzy. “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” she whispered breathlessly. “I'm here. I'm still here. With you.”

As the scents of blood and peach blossoms continued to intermingle in the darkness, something else strange and indescribably profound began to happen. He remembered the Kina Grannis song from that first day at Sartre in which the singer asks about the meaning of her individual existence within the vast context of all of Time. The melody now replaying in his head reminded him of her question that he had been unable to answer at the end of that night in Roppongi.

What is it that you want, Ranma? In life?

He knew now with absolute certainty. All of the implied lines and confrontational planes that had revealed themselves since that night suddenly crystallized with magical clarity as a singular path of Destiny. From the instant when he had first seen and heard her sing, this path had always been there leading directly to this very moment of the living present.

“Will you marry me, Na-Chan…?”

Time stopped.

The question was right, but definitely not the timing. He had not even begun to contemplate how to get her a ring. Something was very wrong with his mouth today — far more than usual. Afraid of what other dangerous diarrhea of words would slip out, he bit down frantically on his tongue until it too began to bleed.

Nabiki sat up in the darkness and licked her lips as she studied him, but her expression was unreadable. The consequential silence that settled between them was deafening. Suddenly, at some point, her soul-piercing eyes brightened with the light of some new sort of understanding.

“Of course, only Ranma Saotome would have the balls to come to a girl empty-handed with a question like that,” she mused with a dangerous looking smirk. “What do you think I should say?”

“I…I —.”

In the old days before Roppongi, coming empty-handed to Nabiki Tendou to ask for anything would have been masochistic if not outright suicidal. She was wrong though. Indignantly, he wanted to protest that he was not empty-handed at all, but then he could not — still would not — tell her about the answer given to him at Niomon. He began to panic, not knowing what to do.

“I'm kidding,” she relented as a brilliant, amused smile finally alighted across her beautiful face. “I knew you were broke, and I meant it when I told you I was fine with that.”

In morbid fascination, he watched as she raised the fingers of her left hand to her lips and then tenderly pressed their blood-tinged tips in between the lines of his own. With her other hand, she lovingly brushed aside some hair that had fallen over his eyes. Whatever Nerima and all those people thought of Nabiki Tendou, the real Na-chan didn't actually care about having nice things, being rich one day or whatever. It was never really about any of that.

“All I ever really wanted was to be free to live a life that I choose, however short or long that might be. You gave me back that possibility plus so much more. I can't thank you enough. So, when we reach the shores of Sicily, yes, I will.”

Ranma froze in awe as the full profundity of Na-chan's message crashed down on him: she knew. The taste of her blood now mixing with his own in his mouth left him with no room for any doubts.

The scent of peach blossoms swirling around them grew thicker and sweeter than ever. Whether she was Nabiki Saotome or Nabiki Tendou, she always would be a mischievous, free-spirited force of soaring, soulful brilliance adorned in the mystique of genius; secrets could never get the better of her. St. Peter's voice continued to call out names as the bells of Jerusalem rang over the rooftop at Roppongi; Sartre and the trees at Himonya; Nishi Otani, Niomon and the Stage. Everything was indescribably beautiful - even better than something normal.

“I love you.”

“Even if I'm bitter and angry, cynical and disillusioned?”

“Even if and no less.”

“That's good. Do you still like coffee…?”

THE END

CHAPTER NOTES:

An Addisionian crisis, also called an adrenal crisis, is a potentially life-threatening medical condition requiring immediate emergency treatment. It is a constellation of symptoms (caused by insufficient levels of the hormone cortisol) that indicate severe adrenal insufficiency. In this case, Nabiki's acute adrenal insufficiency was caused by use of immunotherapy for cancer. I chose to attribute Nabiki's fainting episode to an Addisonian crisis since:

- Autoimmune adrenal involvement is common with immunotherapies for cancer.

- A person can go from being deathly ill to relatively well very quickly (within hours) with steroids. JFK, who actually suffered from natural Addison's Disease (as opposed to drug induced) is a good example of how someone can look and function reasonably with treatment.

- The circumstance serves to emphasize the fragility of Nabiki's health at this point.

Ranma was in his girl form when Akane asked him this question in Episode 1.

CONCLUDING AUTHOR NOTES

“The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera Sicily and the Icarian Sea” was a personal writing experiment on multiple levels. I had four goals when I set out to create this story, all of which I recognize may be controversial to some Ranma fans. I understand and respect that view.

First, I wanted to test if I could leverage influences from Japanese Magic Realism and Existentialist philosophy to give a novel, but still believable, contemporary twist to the Ranma universe. Whether intended or not, Takahashi's story and her characters have a lot of compelling potential touch points with these two schools of thought.

Second, I wanted to explore the idea that maybe Ranma's inability to tell Akane that he loves her reflects that he simply does not have genuine romantic feelings for her. I wanted to explore this possibility in a way that was friendly and considerate of Akane as a human being. Still, after all the time they have known one another and all the crazy things they have been through, even the shyest person should be able to say something. Ranma is definitely not shy.

Third, I've always found Nabiki Tendou an intriguing character with tremendous untapped potential for deeper development. Often forgotten, Takahashi's portrayal of Nabiki evolves as the story goes on. She starts off as a seemingly ordinary boy-crazy, teenage girl. The Machiavellian aspects of her behavior seem to be adjustments that Takahashi decided to add later.

Still, I wanted to treat Nabiki in my story in a way that harmonizes both portrayals in a single believable and rounded character. I think it's worth remembering that Nabiki, like Akane, is also just a teenage girl whose personality is still in a formative (albeit late) stage of mature development. People are not born Machiavellian; powerful influences, usually traumatic ones, are required to drive such behaviors. “The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera” explores one thread of trauma that could potentially explain the dichotomy (intended or otherwise) in Takahashi's portrayal.

Fourth, I wanted to explore the untapped unrest I see in Ranma's character and its potential implications for more than just his passion for the Art.

He may be immature and speak with a lot of inadvertent foot-in-mouth, partly because of his atypical upbringing. However, like the Tendou sisters, Ranma is also still a growing teenager.

Another aspect of Ranma's character that I think is not well explored is the fact that he's actually a very intelligent young man and that the people around him greatly underestimate this aspect of his character, despite all of his faults and faux pas. His unmatched adaptability as a tactician in fights and his aptitude for quick learning when he's sincerely invested in a task (e.g. new martial arts techniques) are clear evidence of that native intelligence. As such, I find it impossible to believe that Ranma, in his heart of hearts, would be genuinely content by any measure with the status quo of his life. I wanted to explore this unrest in his character and its potential implications for more than just his passion for the Art.

I'm not sure if I've succeeded with my objectives. Regardless, I have had tremendous fun writing “The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera.”

I again want to give special thanks to my beta readers WinterBlossom117 and Kniteshadow; your critical reviews and insights have definitely made this story better.

Equally important, the feedback that I have received privately and in public reviews has been a great source of inspiration throughout. Many thanks to all the readers who have followed and commented on “The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera.”

I hope you enjoyed my story, and thank you again for reading.

See you soon.

- KL