AUTHOR'S NOTES:

Disclaimer: I do not own Ranma 1/2 or any of the related characters. The Ranma 1/2 series is 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.

"Consequential" is a short one-shot set during Chapter 1 of my other work "Kandinsky's Dragon and the Destroyer of Worlds." These stories take place roughly 18 years after the Takahashi canon. The concept for "Consequential" was inspired by a comment from one of my reviewer's, which I really appreciate. Many thanks, Hiro_0147.

- KL

CONSEQUENTIAL

Born again like new, like me, like you,

Happiness is a shapeless thing

That slips through your fingers when you speak of it

The ocean spreads out before me

at the spot where I remember you leaving….

…. It all meets together again somewhere, then flows on…

- Hamasaki Ayumi, "Far Away"

Kiki could feel the enhanced reactive foam soles of her carbon fiber plate-reinforced trainers ricocheting reassuringly off the pavement as she flew down the hill, a cool, late-November wind lashing against her face as she ran. She was wearing her favorite royal blue hybrid running jacket along with black cold weather running leggings. The branches overhead were already barren, the leaves strewn about the lakeside path, dancing in playful circles whipped up by the morning breeze.

Since leaving Japan, running had become one of her most reliable methods for creating time and space to think. She was here now because she needed to regain her center - for her mind to again be clear and sharp - and she had to do so quickly. She would be going on Service the following day, having drawn the short straw to cover the main hospital for the holiday this year. She was still reeling from her encounter the day before at the coffeeshop, the neat order that had served to wall off her post-Japan life suddenly in tatters. She had found herself drowning helplessly in a storm of memories, unable to concentrate or do anything constructive after.

Eventually, she had given up. Their voices – Ranma and Akane's - were suddenly with her wherever she went, whatever she tried to do, making her smile and cry all over again.

Now, she had wireless buds in her ears blaring out old Sakai Izumi, Matsu Takako, Kuraki Mai, and Hamasaki Ayumi love ballads that she had not listened to for years. These were the songs that she and Akane used to love when they had been teenagers.

Kiki understood now. Teenage girls were really stupid creatures. No wonder no one took them seriously. The desire to be loved was universal and innate. Being loveable though was a choice. A person first had to be loveable before they could be loved.

Akane had been loveable. On the other hand, even Nabiki herself could not love Nabiki back then.

That had been the fundamental difference between her and her beautiful sister, why Akane in her short life had so easily become the one thing that Nabiki had always wanted – and still struggled - to be.

Consequential.

# # # # #

It had been a partly overcast Saturday morning in late November.

Kiki had dropped into a coffeeshop seeking her preferred usual, a flat white made lukewarm to avoid scalding the milk and destroying its natural sweetness. She had been on her way to a very much unwanted blind date set up by some girlfriends from work. Men had always found her attractive, but she had never understood why being attractive had to come with the expectation that she should be with someone. Even her older sister Kasumi had become increasingly pushy on this point as of late.

For the most part, she was amused by this aspect of what men and the world thought of her. Maybe she even enjoyed teasing and playing once in a while. Lately, however, she was more frustrated and annoyed with the badgering. Her thirty-sixth birthday had just come and gone.

Someone's eyes were watching her as she paid. She felt it and turned to scan the room.

She recognised him immediately – her dead sister's former fiancé.

Almost eighteen years had passed since they had last seen one another. She had just taken leave from the University and returned from Ueno to Nerima to grieve. Ranma and her sister had survived Jusendo only for a car accident to take her away a little over a half year later. He had been left alone without ever having said how he felt.

They could not find a noukanshi good enough to make her sister look beautiful one last time. Her body had just been too completely destroyed in the accident. The brutally cruel and undignified reality their family had been left with was that there had been no choice but to cremate Akane directly, and it needed to be done quickly.

She knew Ranma probably didn't remember or even notice, but Nabiki had watched him in the days before and after the funeral. For a moment in the beginning, she had wanted to blame him for Akane's death, for the one time he had been unable to protect her. He was the one who had been with her when she had died.

Yet, as Nabiki listened to herself in her own head, she had been ashamed and retreated back into her usual unseen pit of self-loathing - the dark, solitary, secret corner of her heart back then that no one else knew about or even imagined existed. More than anyone, she knew how much Ranma had loved Akane. Nabiki knew because she was the one who had held him, crying with him in the darkness the night before he left. They did not talk about it, but she knew his intentions and understood his reasons.

He was gone by the time everyone else awoke the next morning.

In the years that passed, Kiki had wondered on more than one occasion about him and how he was doing. After all that had transpired, he had become family. He still was as far as she was concerned.

Once, when she had visited Nagoya, she had seen his mother and asked. She was happy to hear from Auntie Nodoka that he had finally found his cure, but very much saddened to learn that life otherwise had been very unkind to him in the aftermath of Akane's death.

His body had been ravaged by a disease that made continuing to practice as a Master of the Art no longer possible. He had nearly died on more than one occasion. Nodoka Saotome had protected her son though, never once actually mentioning the name of the specific disease or even where he had gone.

As Kiki studied the face looking back at her now, she noted that he was still incredibly handsome despite all that had happened. His blue eyes – the eyes which gave him away, always letting her read him like an open book – were still fierce, intense, and piercing yet kind and sincere. He still had the same boyishly warm and infectious smile that she remembered. His movements too were still graceful and with purpose.

Her trained eye could tell though that the raw power and strength behind those movements was diminished. She was saddened by this observation, but quickly tucked away her feelings behind her mask, hoping she had been fast enough for him not to notice.

"Ranma-kun! It's been so long! How are you?" she greeted him in Japanese. The words felt strangely foreign on her tongue. She rarely spoke the language anymore these days aside from during weekend calls with her surviving sister Kasumi.

Still, Kiki was unable to stop herself from smiling as she made her way over to stand by his table, surprised by how eager she sounded. She was happy to see the warmth in his eyes too as he invited her without hesitation to take the seat across from him.

She was well aware that he had not always been fond of her. She had excelled at being a reliable pain-in-the ass for her almost brother-in-law throughout the years that he had lived with her family. Back then, she was constantly playing with his feelings and exploiting his earnestness for what she knew he must have thought was merely her personal entertainment.

He never knew, of course, what the actual motivation for her actions had been. No one did, and she had seen to it that no one could. The truth was that she always thought more of him than she imagined he had probably ever thought of her. Though she outwardly teased and played, she had always secretly been in his corner, silently always believing and never betting against him, never really wanting to see him suffer or be hurt.

As he talked with her now, she could tell that Ranma Saotome still possessed the aura of someone and something larger than life, of a force bringing with it unexpected and unimagined possibilities. She had always admired that aspect about him. Despite the hand that he been dealt, he had apparently done quite well for himself. His high school record, as she knew, of course, had been too poor for anything direct, but that was a story for another time. He eventually studied international policy all the way through to a doctorate from SAIS. He had focused on international development and political economy. After graduating, he had stayed close and taken a job within the World Bank Group.

She knew she was one of the few who had always known and appreciated the true breadth of his native intelligence, something that everyone else, himself included, had underestimated when they had still been kids. The eyes though - those eyes which always gave him away to her - had told her better. As many challenges, opponents, and adversities as he used to routinely overcome, he couldn't not be. Knowing this had been one of the ways that she used to assuage her conscience over her role in the chaos that had surrounded him, assuring herself that he would always find a way to persevere anyway. Still, she was impressed and happy for him that he had realised something of his potential for other things in addition to the Art in the end.

He shared vignettes from his missions with her. Three times he had been evacuated out of Burkina Faso by chartered French military transports owing to the seeming fashion of military coups. He recalled too being deployed to Ilocos Norte where they had been sent to oversee the reinforcement of mountainsides prone to deadly mudslides caused by excessive and disorganized rice farming. He had organized and led impromptu rescue details to more than one affected village during his tour. There was also Baia Mare in Transylvania and the new municipal water supply system that they had constructed to replace the local wells that had previously been used for centuries, but which were now tainted with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals due to industrial development. Most recently, he had been in Bhutan to launch an initiative to improve access to basic medical care throughout the Thimphu Dzongkhag region with the construction of a new network of rural village clinics.

Her own fascination and excitement for his stories surprised her, but he was still unmistakably Ranma as he told them. More than once, she found herself smirking at the familiar confident bravado in his storytelling voice and laughing in delight at his offhandedly wry tongue-in-cheek potshots. There was also a palpable humanity to what he described for her. She could feel his genuine empathy and concern for the people he talked about helping, and she felt happy thinking of how someone like him had come and been there for all of those people.

He was a genuinely good and special person – always had been. Few people ever truly impressed her. He was one of the few. She always felt small and ordinary alongside people like him and Akane, knowing that she was just one of many in the hierarchy of supporting cast members in their larger story. The feeling used to make her angry, even jealous, and was one of the many reasons that she had been so mean to him back when they were still kids. The others only paved a long-forbidden road to nowhere.

# # # # #

Nabiki used to love messing with Akane. Teasing her younger sister, borrowing her clothes without asking, provoking a reaction out of her whenever the opportunity arose had been some of her most beloved pastimes back then. Akane used to get so angry. The ire directed at her was usually second only to the fury that Ranma routinely used to draw on himself with his chronic foot-in-mouth disease.

"What a bad person Nabiki is sometimes," she overheard her older sister Kasumi telling their father more than once when no one had thought Nabiki had been around.

Warui hito.

Those were Kasumi's exact words, so openly ugly and spiteful. Everyone always mistook Kasumi for an innocent angel. She got away with so many things because of it.

Nabiki had been hurt, but she was also not surprised. Of course, Akane had always been the victimized baby who had to be protected at all cost. Nabiki was just Malcolm in the middle, naughty if she was being playful, a nuisance if she had needs.

Whatever.

Away from their assuming ears and prejudging eyes, there had never been any doubt between her and Akane about how much they had loved one another. Akane had not just been her sister, but also her best friend, the one person in the world who had ever cared enough to seek out and touch the great secret lurking behind the frigid Ice Queen mask that she had worn back then. Only Akane knew how hot and full of feelings she actually was and always had been on the inside, how complete of a lie the entire frosty, apathetic persona that her angry and confused teenage self had displayed to the rest of the world had been.

Nabiki had created that persona to hide how much she had despised herself for being so little, weak, and unhelpful – how inconsequential she had been - when their mother had died. All of it had been necessary to preserve her crumbling sanity. She had just turned ten then. In her brain, their mother's passing had somehow been translated as a choice to leave because she hadn't been good enough of a reason for their mother to want to stay. So, she had reasoned, if she chose to make people not like her, get them to be just a little afraid of her, then she could have control. She couldn't be surprised. She couldn't allow herself to be vulnerable, never wanting to be exposed and helpless like that again.

She would rely on the two things that she knew had always set her apart from her sisters to do so. She was smart, and she was witty – much more than anyone else around her. She could easily think of more ways than anyone else to poke people in the eye with pranks and schemes, more than enough to keep everyone at a distance. She didn't have to be bored in the process. Maybe it could even be a little fun.

One day at lunch during her final year in elementary school, she conceived of her trademark method. A boy in her class had wanted the package of gummies that Kasumi had placed in her lunchbox. She hated candy, and she discovered that the boy could be made to pay. The boy's name was Kunou Tatewaki. Money would be the point system by which she could keep score of how much smarter she truly was.

Yet, Akane had seen through her, loved her, and embraced her despite how inadequate and flawed a person she had been. Akane had always been like that, gifted with an empathic instinct for the true nature of goodness in people and their innermost feelings – as long as the other person's name was not Ranma Saotome.

You are a good person, Oneechan, Akane had said when she had confronted her sister. Please don't go away and leave me too. Don't change, at least when it's just you and me. I love you.

Nabiki had been trying to charge Akane to have her extra salmon onigiri at lunch that day. Akane's disappointment in her had been so unexpectedly devastating. Nabiki had been so ashamed, and so she honored Akane's wish. It was one of the few truly right things she did back then.

Together, she and Akane became closeted addicts of shoujo manga romance novels, sappy pop songs about all flavors and forms of love, and the sweetness of ice cream, cookies, and chocolate. In the summers, they would sit together in her room for hours listening to the latest J-Pop hits while reading and dreaming secretly of princely boys who would one day come and sweep each of them off their feet. They would be whisked away together to far off places that were bigger, brighter, and better than anything they had ever known.

In that other world, the cold, impersonal gray steel and concrete and the stifling summer heat of Tokyo would be replaced by gardens, palatial mansions, and manors rendered in bold hues of bright colors illuminated by brilliant sunlight under cool, endless blue skies. There would be no immature, misogynistic daydreamers like Kunou Tatewaki and Gosunkugi Hikaru to harass them or dismiss them as "just some girls". There the boys would cherish them as if they were each princesses in their own right. They each could be truly, inside and out. the most beautiful and precious people on the entire Earth.

In that other world, they would still have been three daughters who had their mother. Their father would have been able to still smile, joke, laugh, and play with them and would not have become such a pitiable, helpless, heartbroken middle-aged invalid of a widower. Their older sister Kasumi could have been a girl just like them with whom they would be able to go shopping, have ice cream, and pine for unattainable romantic ideals.

Then Ranma came, and those precious days became increasingly few. Nabiki had wanted to hate him for it, for taking her sister and those moments away from her. In the end, though, she couldn't. Instead, she could only be grateful to the hapless Jusenkyo-cursed aqua trans-sexual for all of the color, joy, excitement, and magic that he brought into her sister's life and for making them all imagine and believe again in possibilities.

Akane had always been the most beautiful of the three Tendou daughters. Ranma made her still even more special and more beautiful. Akane was always so hopeful and happy when she thought of him or spoke of him – even when she was angry or crying because of something he had unwittingly said or done.

The inescapable corollary to Nabiki's happiness for Akane, however, was that she found herself quietly filling up with indescribable depths of sadness and loneliness that she could not share with anyone. She wished that she also could one day mean that much to another human being, that someone like Ranma could somehow find something to love in her like that too. At times, the agony of holding on to her secret had been almost too much to bear, driving her to the edge of madness in the solitude of a darkness where no one could be allowed to follow, where no one could ever be allowed to see her cry.

She had slipped just once. That was the time when she had tricked Akane into briefly passing the responsibilities of the Tendou-Saotome honor agreement to her. She had intended for the episode to be a joke teaching Akane, who was acting particularly spoiled at the time, to appreciate what she had. In the end, though, the joke had really been on her and the danger of her treacherous teenage girl hormones.

For a moment, he had been the black prince in cognito from one of the shoujo mangas that she and Akane used to read, unknowingly leading her to the dangerous razor's edge of temptation. She was ashamed to admit how much she had liked seeing his bright, blue eyes studying her with wonder and naked curiosity; feeling his strong, steady hands on her body as he had carried her that one time when the balcony had collapsed beneath them; taking in how good he had smelled - how clean, fresh, and definitively masculine his scent had been. For the first time in her life, she understood that feeling weak in the knees was not just a trite cliché from girly romance books, but an actual thing that real people could feel around each other.

The implications terrified her.

She had thrown him back at Akane as quickly as she could manage – within the rules, of course, of her outward modus operandi to make the show convincing. Afterward, she redoubled her efforts to wall herself off. More than ever, she sought every available opportunity to throw the biggest grenades of naughty mischief in his direction that she could think of. She even tried to convince herself that she enjoyed doing it.

That was a lie though.

In the final analysis, Kasumi was right as always. Nabiki really just was a very bad person sometimes. She just happened to be a bad person who, from time to time, cried herself to sleep at night, secretly wishing that she could have been born as a girl named Akane instead.

# # # # #

Kiki felt small, naked and empty-handed when Ranma turned around and asked about her. "I'm almost embarrassed to tell you about myself," she told him. Her unchecked honesty surprised her. A bittersweet sense of relief washed over her as she saw in his eyes that he didn't believe her.

He knew she was studying finance at Todai when he had left. She told him that she herself never returned to Ueno Park either after and that she ultimately left Japan all together just like he did. She had completed an International Baccalaureate and made her way after to a British university where she had read in biomedical sciences.

She could not tell him though that she had done it all because of how badly she wanted to become someone else other than just old, plain, ordinary Nabiki Tendou, someone who deserved to be a leading cast member in a new and unique story of her own.

Even when she had been at Todai and though she had been the best, she still had been "just a girl." At most in any study group or class, she was roughly a 1 in 5 since a girl probably was not really expected to need all that education long term. There had been all that ochakumi shit at seminars and office hours too, and the boys would always say stupid things like having her with them in pictures was great because it helped make the shots not look too much like prep school photos. There had just been so much decorative rose among stones nonsense about everything. At the end of it, she realised, as everyone knew, a girl like her would graduate, get hired to make some company or office look good, work a few years, eventually marry well because of her resume, and then, of course, gracefully bow out when the time came to start a family and all.

Ranma did not notice the shadows that were now clouding over in her eyes, moving immediately like everyone else to comment on the British English that she had picked up after leaving Japan. She could see him admiring the essentially native authenticity that she had achieved with the clean, polished accent that she had created for Kiki Tendou. She actually had been quite fluent for a long time, even when they were still in Japan. Still, she had enrolled in brutal, intensive elocution classes during her IB, training tirelessly and with painstaking meticulousness to eliminate all trace of the Japanese phonemes in her English.

"What university?" he asked.

She was annoyed and thought she should pay him back by playing with him a little. "A small college called Balliol in the country about an hour west of London," she said.

To her surprise, he laughed. "Did ya join the crew team?" he asked, clearly picking up on her game. She was amused now, even impressed. The boy she had known never would have pushed back against her like that. He had indeed grown up.

She gave him a cool, knowing smirk, touché twinkling in her eyes. "I tried my first term. It was something everyone had to try at least once. I wasn't very good. A lot of early mornings spent flailing around in cold river water. I think everyone was relieved when I quit."

They both laughed. From there, the conversation wandered to a number of other things including Brexit, other current events, and unexpected cultural similarities between the British and the Japanese. He was surprisingly well read and informed, his rough edges now rounded off by a new sophistication underneath the veneer of his still genial, casual vernacular speech.

It felt good to talk with him.

Then he asked about her father. She knew his question had been innocent. She did not begrudge him for asking.

Still, she was displeased by the reminder of the unresolved rift between her and her father and the vexing expectations, not just from him, but from everyone in general of her as a single, attractive, accomplished woman. She was suddenly reminded too of the badgering of her well intentioned, but misguided girlfriends and why she was even here in the neighborhood on this particular Saturday in the first place. When she saw Ranma's eyes studying her hands folded around her no-longer-warm blue pastel mug, she found that she had enough.

"I have to go," she told him in English.

The hurt, panicked puppy dog expression in his eyes though was too much. She was not conceding to any regret or remorse, but he was still too damned sensitive. She did want to see him again, hadn't intended to give him the impression that she was walking out on him.

"We should catch up again soon though," she said as she stood.

Then, she saw it as he stood too. He stumbled to the right and caught himself against the table. As he looked back up, she saw now a subtle, but unmistakable saddle-shaped divet in the bridge of his nose. That had not been a feature of the face that she remembered. The meaning of these things was clear to her trained eye.

She was worried now, and her mind raced to formulate a plan.

She willed herself to smile with her best approximation of innocence, consciously choosing to allow him to keep his dignity. His eyes told her that he was satisfied, even proud, as he concluded for himself that she had not noticed. She turned toward the register and came back with a pen and a napkin.

"Here," she said in Japanese, handing him the napkin after she had finished writing. "My number and address. I'm a little far away, but would you like to come over for brunch next weekend?"

Initially, she had considered inviting him on Thursday for the late-November holiday, but had quickly changed her mind, worried that she might come off as presumptuous, even intrusive.

"Nothing fancy. We'll do takeaway from somewhere nearby. I promise I won't cook," she added when she saw his wavering expression.

# # # # #

In the present, as Kiki knelt at the edge of the shore and dipped her left hand in the cool, clear lake water, she could still see Ranma's handsome face in her mind's eye smiling and nodding back at her. That look alone told her that for once where he and Akane were concerned, she had done the right thing.

She would be able to keep an eye on him.

She could finally be consequential.

Maybe Akane would have been proud of her.