He had been a tailor for decades, all of his adult life. A sigh escaped him as he considered the oddities that many of his myriad of customers over the years had presented him. The bit of glass held between his fingers was something that didn't make sense to him, that man he fitted earlier that week had under no circumstances become a strange blue woman, that was impossible. Yet the thin slice in his finger did not lie, the glass that had shattered in the man's hand as the water seemed to melt him into her was in pieces, and what explanation could there be for that if nothing of the sort had ever happened?

Thinking about it too closely was hurting his head, and at his age, did it even really matter anymore? Strange things were happening, why just the week before there had been a mummy sighting in his hometown a bit further down the coast.

So Cold

By: XZero

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 9 - Depth

A heavy sigh escaped his lips as he gazed over the edge of the transport ship, Korea had become a hot zone during his prolonged sleep, and so an overland trek and a short two day swim was out of the question. With North Korea actively hostile with their southern counterparts the companions could not risk crossing down the peninsula a swim, increased coastal patrols closed the gap that Ranma and his father had once used to gain South Korea when on their way into China.

This fishing boat they'd secured passage on certainly dealt with that, although it had not come without cost. They were expected to assist with the nets, and myriad other tasks aboard the rural ship. They had no time to assist Ranma in furthering his control, which, while not perfect, was such that he no longer emit a bonfire aura at all times, or leaked power at the slightest interruption of his concentration. Mousse assured him that in time he'd attain a level of control more akin to how he once was, rather than the boorish control he felt he now had. It was at once a bolster to his depleted ego, and a frustration that burned at his pride. He was once the most precisely controlled of all his friends, and now he was a child by comparison, everyone he knew had aged, and he was a stranger in his own body.

It was at moments like these that the raven haired martial artist wished he could bring himself to the oblivion brought by alcohol, anything to save him from this bleak reality. Certainly, he was now enjoying the company of Kiima, a beautiful woman, but more than the hormone driven lust he felt and squelched with his ironclad will, he was uncomfortable with her. He could sense her attraction to him, which was hard to miss, but he didn't know how to feel about the situation, for him, it had been less than three months since she had been his enemy for Akane's life. Now, she was perhaps his closest friend, and the lingering emotions he felt for the women in his past were older, and confusing in their absence.

Growling in frustration he smacked a palm against the rail, inadvertently denting it deeply.

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't wreck my boat young man." A wheezing voice stated from behind him. The shock of being caught off guard froze him in place, gasping aloud as he spun to face the ship's captain. The man was leather-skinned and short, barely taller than his female aspect used to be. Barely five foot or not, the old man was experienced, and still strong. He stood upright and confidently. Ranma looked down at the dented rail and flinched. He'd lost control of himself and broken something, which frankly just irritated him more at this point. Why couldn't things just go back to the way they were?

"I... I'm sorry, I'll fix it, I promise." He tried to reassure the man, but at the same time display his penitence. His pitiful look succeeded at something.

"That's alright young man. Perhaps you'd care to talk about whatever it is troubling you?" The older man stepped up to the railing, and could rest his chest against it without much leaning, which just stuck out to Ranma again how much taller he was. He'd become accustomed to his greater reach and change in balance. But his perspective remained stubbornly the one he'd had when he was frozen. The world was a little smaller to him now, and he couldn't reconcile it, and that frustrated and angered him.

"Sure, couldn't hurt much." Ranma muttered to himself, still unsure how to explain the situation without convincing the man that he was crazy. "You know how me, an' Mousse, an' Kiima are martial artists? You know, really good ones?" The old man was certainly familiar enough with their casual feats of superhuman strength and agility to understand that much.

"Sure, though y'all manage to do some stuff I don't think I've ever seen done before." The boy's explanation of martial arts was perhaps the least unbelievable thing he could imagine to explain their powers.

"Did you hear about that mountain that got it's top blown off twenty years ago?" He hoped the man knew of destruction of Jusendo's summit, it would help his cause.

"Yeah, I remember. Not everyday that tornadoes and bombs hit the same spot on top of a mountain." The old man couldn't understand how this could possible have anything to do with what the young man was talking about. Hell, how should this youngster even know about that. He appeared to be no older than his middle twenties, certainly not old enough to remember the significance of a mostly obscure event in China. The Japanese weren't exactly known to be the most social of the Asiatic peoples.

"Well, I was there. I was fighting this guy who could shoot fire, and just wouldn't go down. I thought I was going to lose everything. My fiancee at the time was in danger if I didn't beat him." Kiima was approaching them now, he could feel her. Perfect, as much as he didn't want a confrontation with her, she deserved to know why he hadn't done anything to advance their relationship, which was awkward in its present form.

"I fought against Kiima, an' against the leader of her people." He grasped the Gekkaja from the metal tube the staffs were stored in. Twirling it in his grip he pointed it out at the water, igniting a portion of his aura to power the staff. The old man's gasp and widened eyes weren't unexpected, hell, Ranma would likely have been in shock if the old man had not.

"Until I got my hands on this staff. I knew what it could do, and I thought that if I used it to freeze myself, than the fireball that was heading for me would just thaw me again. Boy was I wrong. Before I knew what was happening, I saw everyone who'd come with me to save Akane, I saw all of them die. Except, they hadn't died at all, because the fireball was just to keep them away from us all, threaten and taunt me because I was helpless to save them, to save her." He voice was rough, and there was a sound like something caught in his chest.

Kiima, unsure of herself, hung back, listening to Ranma's admissions. He had refused to talk about any of this while they were still at the mountain, and now she understood. How does one reconcile their life, reconcile the changes and the frankly outlandish situation, by talking to someone who once was involved. This old man didn't know Ranma, couldn't truly judge him. His opinion of the pigtailed man didn't matter in the least. And that is why he was perfect for this. Because he was someone who didn't matter.

"When I stabbed myself with the Gekkaja, I didn't count on the fact that the staff needed ki to trigger the effects it used, and that stabbing myself with it when there was nothing to thaw me quick enough, that I'd start to freeze over completely." His voice was breaking at point, but even as he slid the staff back into the tube he continued.

"I was frozen... for twenty years." He blurted out, and at that moment, all the sounds of the ocean were as distant echoes to the gravity of his pronouncement. "And now everyone I knew is older than me, and my ki, something that used to be controlled, is wild, and a lot stronger than I'm used to."

"Young man, I don't know what kind of magic that was, and I don't wanna know. But it sounds to me like your problem isn't so difficult." The older man straightened and turned away from the sea, facing Kiima even as he spoke to Ranma. "Your problem is that you don't know if you can get your life back under your control, back to something resembling what you are used to, am I right?" Ranma nodded dumbly, turning to look at the man.

"Life don't work like that. You see the ocean? That's life, waves, ebbs and flows. All you can really do is try to balance yourself so that when they come, you don't get knocked down, or pulled under. Things are a lot less complicated than you're making them out to be. So things are different now? Well, so what? Things are always changing. Just go with the flow. And maybe start by being straight about where things stand between you and your lady friend." He gathered himself to head back to his cabin.

"Either way, even if you're confused, making no decision is worse than making the wrong one, so whatever you're going to do, do it." He started moving off toward his cabin, leaving Ranma dazed by his words.

Kiima, seeing the man go, mouthed a silent 'thank you' to the old man, who merely nodded in return. She chose then to approach Ranma, she wouldn't talk to him about what she'd heard, but undoubtedly he knew she heard it. He didn't react when she stood next to him, and she took that as a good sign, more so when he gazed at her with a soft look in his eye. She smiled and was about to say something when a voice broke the silence.

"And fix the railing while you're at it!"

Ryouga

"I don't get it 'kane, she's ridiculously good, and she's using his style. How can this be? None of this makes any sense." Ryouga ran his hands roughly through his dark hair, sighing and squeezing his eyes shut as the tension built between them. "She wasn't this good just six months ago, not unless she's been hiding it, and doing that implies even more familiarity between her style and Ranma's hidden one." She knew which one he was talking about, Ranma rarely used his hidden style, it was going to be his contribution to the Anything Goes Ryu, but it hadn't been finished. The only scrolls that described his techniques were kept at the Saotome home, a part of his shrine.

"I don't know either. But now that I think about it, her drawings all these years, they've had a common theme." She didn't have to say more. Ryouga and Akane had told their daughter idealized versions of their adventures as teens. They'd kept certain parts out of their tales, but her drawings as a little girl, and even now were of the things they had left out. She had drawn the Orochi, she'd drawn the dragon tap, three months ago she'd won an art contest in class, and when asked, she'd replied that she was drawing them from her imagination. That she dreamed about heroes frequently. They had brushed it off at the time, thinking them the idle fancies of an adolescent girl.

Almost frantically, Akane went to the folder where she'd kept the drawings, Ryouga sighed upon seeing the faded and abused blue file case, Akane was a pack rat of unimaginable intensity, every scrap of paper that Rei had brought home had been out into a folder like that, and the blue one contained everything from Rei's first doodles on anything she could get her tiny hands on, to her art class things. Rei excelled at art class. But now, he could see that she had a goal in mind. The drawings were often varied, but Akane, who would look through this collection every few months, crying and proud, knew better than anyone its contents.

"Ryouga, take a look at these." One by one she would leaf through the stack of pages, carefully ordered according to age, and draw one or two out at a time, setting them aside and continuing her search. Several of them were incoherent, but upon closer inspection, going back as far as age six, Rei's drawings were almost never without intent, if confusing form. With improving clarity he could see events that had been alluded to during Ranma's life. A page filled with clumsy green or blue dots, surrounding a vague shape on a field of black construction paper. Another of a cart and garishly dressed man. The strangest of them was of a pork bun. The trend continued on, becoming more defined as the young girl gained practice at putting imagination to medium.

"My God!" Ryouga exclaimed, reaching a leaf containing an image of an eerily familiar set of of pools. "Jusenkyou." He stumbled over the word, disbelieving. His wide and fearful gaze turned to Akane. He'd never seen this one, and from the look on her face, and the condition of the drawing, it was fairly old.

"I never knew what the springs actually looked like, Rei just said that it was something she'd seen in a dream once and felt like drawing." Her voiced was haunted, and the fear in her eyes was deep. She had expended her tears, but the terror she felt did not abide. Nothing she could have ever imagined had prepared her for Ranma to return from the dead, especially not if he'd be bringing something back with him. Rei had drawn the past, things she couldn't have known about but seemed to anyway.

They had known that she saw things that no one else did, and she knew things that she should not, but this was irrefutable, was strange, not unlike the sort of weird that Ranma brought to the ward.

"What should we do? How long do you think this has been going on like it is now? You said that she's only been improving drastically over the last few months? Do you think that's when it started?" Akane seemed frantic, she didn't want the strangeness that had interrupted and pained her teenage years to ruin her daughter as well.

"I don't know Akane, I don't know." Truly, there wasn't anything to be done, either Rei would volunteer the information or she wouldn't, but Ryouga didn't want to ask too much, invite more curiosity on the subject than she already had. Encouraging this could be disastrous

"Perhaps you should just ask her?" Came a voice from the door, where, leaning on the frame was their daughter. She had done her hair up in a low ponytail, and the ghost of a smile lit her features. She was beginning to frown, something in her expression unclear to them. Akane stepped forward, the emotions of their attempt at understanding what was happening finally having an outlet. One step was all it took before she charged her daughter, taking her into a crushing hug. Her eyes clenched tightly closed, Akane wanted nothing more than to never again let her daughter out of her grasp, fearful that she would just vanish.

"Mom... need air." The young woman wheezed, the tremendous strength her mother possessed working to their mutual disadvantage. Startled, Akane loosened the grasp she had on her child, but did not concede to release her. She took a half step back, gazing down into her daughter's eyes, beautiful brown eyes. They were the same shade as Ryouga's and just as expressive, and at this moment, they were expressing an uncommon irritation.

"Now, like I was saying." The preteen stepped out of her mother's embrace and moved further into the room. "I didn't want to tell you this, because if you know then you might act differently." She paused again, tears misting now in her eyes, her indignation beaten out by some other emotion.

"Daddy, when he tells you to stay back, listen." She didn't clarify, her eyes looked into space, and Ryouga could tell that she was remembering something, a part of him realizing that she was remembering something that had yet to occur. Her trembling lip and wet eyes told him that if he didn't remember this advice, that he might not survive to regret it.

Ryouga nodded firmly, and just like that, the confidence and strength in his daughter seemed to vanish, and she was weeping. He stepped forward, enveloping the young girl in his arms, her tears soaking hotly into his chest, while Akane came around to hug their child from the another side. The three of them stood in a family hug for some time before things were even close to right again.

Khu Lon

She and Xian Pu had made good time, the fishing vessel had brought them all the way from the coastal town to a small port where Japanese inspectors would not likely harass them as the disembarked. To be sure, they did come in under cover of darkness, a mile from shore. The old women felt the chill of the water in her bones, and with that reminder, other details crept into her observations. Her condition was not what it once was. She had clung to life with a dragon's stubborn jealousy for almost three hundred years. Perhaps her time was coming soon, but whether it was coming or not, she was not ready, and so death, and the gods would have to wait. Over her shoulder she noted Xian climbing from the waves onto shore. Her lavender hair was streaked with silver, stress did that to parents, in fact, she had only been thirty or so when the first shocks of silver appeared in her now white locks. She was an old woman, and she hoped, that much as she had, Xian could watch several generations of daughters become women.

"Xian, we will rest a bit further ahead for the night, after we've dried off of course." At seeing her great-great-granddaughter's relief, she could not help but chuckle softly. Xian Pu may be a grown woman now, and indeed a mother, but she was little changed from the small girl she remembered. The younger woman could be relied upon to swim the entire length of the distance from China to Japan, and still fight any number of skilled enemies when she drug herself from the surf, but give her the choice, and she would rest and perhaps sneak a few sweets. Khu Lon smiled wistfully. Would she live to see the mischief the latest generation would get into? She was beginning to think not, but this needed to be done. Something was indeed brewing, her senses hadn't escaped her, she could feel it. They had traveled away from the shore for only an hour and found a suitable campsite when something took her from contemplations of mortality.

"Grandmother?" Xian's voice is what drew her attention. She lifted an eyebrow at the figures swiftly approaching them.

"Well I'll be. Mint and Lime, what brings you out here?" She had a clue of course, but the simple men would tell her, confirming things.

"Greetings Elder, we felt your presence as we were headed toward the coast. We thought to share some information with you. May we join your camp?" She was surprised, though she did not show it. All the same, Herb had apparently done a great deal to educate the louts, for she remembered their uncivilized behavior when last she saw them. There it was again, wistful remembrance creeping and trying to steal her mind to the past. Imperceptibly she shook herself from the daydream, smiling cryptically to mask her inattention.

"Of course boys, of course, come sit, and share with us your story." She gestured to a stretch of ground across the fire from herself, and the men sat hastily, a pair of tired sighs escaping their lips as they sank to the ground.

Mint began immediately, and without doubt, they would have much to ponder that night.

A/N: Much quicker this time. Certainly, this isn't my finest, and is rather less than I thought, but I promise, this is going to be the last travel/filler chapter before Nerima, and the reunion. That one is going to be not only interesting, but a bloody pain to write. I'm a full time accounting student, so its gonna undoubtedly be awhile between this and the next, though not nearly as long as the last wait. Thanks folks, for your consistent support, finding that most all of those who'd once reviewed are doing so again is a great lift to my spirits. Maybe I'll be good at this writing thing one day.