Chapter 1
"You sure you want to do this?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. It shouldn't be that hard. They're all already half insane. We just have to twist the knife a little and rip it out." A low chuckle. A glossy picture manifested from the shadows. Long, brown hair pulled to the side framed a smiling face. The shot was obviously made by someone with talent. "This one's first. Don't do anything yet. Just watch. See how far along she is before we strike."
"W-well, I don't know if we want to mess with these people. They've got some powerful allies and are pretty strong th-themselves." Nervous. Well, well.
"Oh, don't worry. With the correct…persuasion, everything should go smoothly. Just make sure you do your job correctly and maybe you'll live to be an old age."
An audible swallow bounced off the dank metal walls and faded into the darkness.
***
It was a quiet day in Nerima. Unusually so. It wasn't a tense silence or an uneasy silence, just…empty. Joggers who went for their daily run by the Tendo Dojo frowned in thoughtful contemplation -and trepidation- of what was to come. Quiet did not exist in Nerima. It just didn't. The usual sounds of heated battle between two particular martial artists were replaced by the low whistle of a passing breeze. The loud splash followed by the louder screams of rage did not echo through the dojo, only an occasional koi splash.
It was a quiet day in Nerima. So quiet that not even the songbirds had the heart to break it. So quiet that when the joggers passed by the Tendo Dojo uninjured and thoroughly confused, they knew.
Something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Inside the Tendo Dojo, Kasumi Tendo, the eldest daughter of Soun Tendo, dusted the tables with a fervent determination. Everything was spotless, and she knew it, but she continued to flick off the nonexistent specks with strained energy. All the while she hummed a cheerful tune and stretched a rubber smile across her face.
It irked her that in the past few weeks it had been getting harder and harder for her to maintain her oblivious happy countenance. With Akane's death and the little issue with Ranma and what not. She knew that ever since her mother's death, the entire family depended on her smile. Now that her youngest sibling was gone, she continued to be happy for her father and sister and she would rather live in a hog sty than let that smile slip just once after years of such practice.
It hurt to smile now so she had to practice. Just keep it up, Kasumi. You can hold it. You have to hold it. She stopped dusting at the shogi board and sighed wistfully. A vision of her father and Uncle Saotome appeared on either side of the board and looked up at her with smiling adoration. They vanished as soon as she passed the feathers of her duster over the worn wood. She stood and inspected her surroundings. Satisfied that everything was in order, she headed upstairs to her room, smile still in place and duster still at hand.
Kasumi walked up to her door and paused to check the halls before resting her hand on the knob and turning. Anyone who knew Kasumi and her tidy nature would have expected her room to be sparkly clean and in perfect order. What hid behind her door, however, was the exact opposite.
A black cloth, permitting the sunlight no admittance onto her walls, shaded her window. Clothes were strewn everywhere, bits and pieces of glass and paper littered the floor. The walls and ceiling adorned wide long, streaks of black. Occasional words and phrases showed up in the obscene calligraphy but most of it was just a collection of warped, twisted doodles.
Once Kasumi stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, the smile dropped, the duster fluttered to the ground and her once slightly bouncy step melted into a hunched, dejected gait. She slowly raised her face to the ceiling, fists clenched and white. Suddenly, she screamed. She howled like a wounded animal, she roared like an angered beast. She picked up her already mutilated table and threw it into the wall, reducing it to kindle wood. She pushed her dressing drawer to the ground and pounded it with all her strength. Her fist went straight through and with a scream of rage she tore it back out, hurling splinters everywhere.
Still in a heated rage, she uncapped a large black marker and started drawing, her muscles jerking with slightly suppressed fury. The ragged lines formed a vague image of a boy. Muscled arms, smiling face, braided pigtail. Then, she picked up a piece of broken glass and with an anguished shriek, plunged it into the figure's heart.
Kasumi, her anger dissolving with her energy, backed away from the drawing slowly and started to giggle. Her giggle rose and became peals of hysterical laughter. She pointed an accusing finger at the figure and said, tears of an unnamed emotion leaked from her eyes, "There! There! That's what you get, y-you- you b-bastard!"
Spent, she finally collapsed to the floor. Kasumi reached down into her apron pocket and pulled out a gold chain. She unclasped the locket attached with shaking fingers and smiled tiredly at her mother's image. "Hi, momma," her voice was high and childlike. "Aren't you proud? I smiled all this time. I smiled just for you, momma. Just like you told me to."
Kasumi closed her eyes as if listening the picture respond. "Yes, yes. I'll keep smiling." She paused. "Don't worry, momma. I'll make dinner. Just as soon as…" The world seemed to slowly blur and fade before her very eyes. "As…soon…as…" As unconsciousness claimed Kasumi as its own, somewhere, far, far away, someone looked on…and laughed.
****
"Hey, Nabiki?"
A slender young woman turned slightly in her swivel chair, her brown, short-cropped hair swaying. She looked at her roommate, her face automatically assuming one of disinterested inquiry. "Yeah?"
Kino, Nabiki's college roommate, seemed to have trouble with her words. "Is something, you know, bothering you?"
Nabiki's expression hardened but she remained polite and carefully refrained from telling the girl to mind her own damn business. "No. Why do you think that something's bothering me?"
Kino blinked and Nabiki could already tell that she was regretting her decision to talk to her icy roommate. "I don't know. You just seem distracted lately." Her face brightened and she laughed, a high, nervous laugh. "But don't worry about it. You know me. Always taking these things the wrong way. Sorry."
Nabiki nodded and silently applauded Kino's wise change of tactic; drop the damn subject and shut up. "It's no problem. People make mistakes." She turned back to her textbook but the information didn't bury itself into her brain like it usually did. She frowned. If a ditz like Kino could tell when she was upset than some self-chastisement was called for.
Life had been getting harder lately. She was juggling the taxes and bills for Kasumi and the Dojo, her father in the asylum, and herself, a sophomore in college. Nabiki dimly registered the fact that Kino was talking to her. She was going out, fine, she'll be late, okay, don't wait up, sure. The door slammed, leaving Nabiki to her thoughts. She shuddered. She always tried to avoid being by herself because she knew she would remember. If she was making a good deal, doing homework, talking to someone, doing something, she wouldn't think about her past. Now it came rushing back to her…
~~FLASHBACK~~
"Ranma, you idiot!" The pig tailed martial artist ran past Nabiki with Akane hot on his trail.
He looked back and yelled, "Well, maybe if you wouldn't poison the food, I would be able to eat it without hurling my guts up!" Ranma, distracted by his insults, didn't see the giant of a panda and ran right into him.
The panda held up a sign that said 'Don't insult your fiancé, boy.' "You try and eat her cookin' then, ya old goat!" Ranma roared in retaliation.
Akane, using the momentary distraction to stalk up behind him, gave him a good whack with the frying pan she had in her hand. She then picked him up and with a scream of rage, hurled him out of the house.
Nabiki silently counted off the things that would happen next. Splash, she thought to herself and sure enough sounds of water splashing erupted just seconds after Ranma's departure via Pissed Akane Airlines. "Ranma's mating calls," she muttered under her breath. Comments consisting precisely of "What ya do that for?!" and "Uncute tomboy" in a high, very feminine voice had Nabiki smiling. She turned to see Akane advancing upon the drenched red head. "And the female's response." She winced as the clang of another frying pan whack sounded. "Ouch. Love most definitely hurts."
~~END FLASHBACK~~
~~FLASHBACK~~
Nabiki sat in the dark against her door and quietly listened to the sounds outside her door. Everything seemed so perfect, she thought with a bitter smile, but around here nothing is as it seems. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's a good chance that it's not a duck. She mentally scolded herself for not being able to do something to stop it. She was caught in the lovely illusion that after all the hardships that she and her family had endured, there would finally be peace.
"Peace," she muttered under her breath, her harsh tone was choked by tears. Listening to her father cry out in the night, ranting about how he could see Akane and her mother she realized peace was clearly not an option in Nerima.
"Kasumi! Nabiki!" shouted Soun. "Come, come! Akane has come back! I can see her! She- she's on the ceiling!" Nabiki heard footsteps shuffling down the hallway. Soun's outbursts died down as Kasumi calmed him. A muffled melody floated cut through the tense air; Mother's lullaby. Tears built in Nabiki's eyes, she couldn't see clearly anymore. She buried her head in her arms. And for the first time since her mother's death, she wept.
~~END FLASHBACK~~
Nabiki inhaled sharply and blinked back the moisture building in her eyes. No, no she would not cry. Not now, not ever. She frantically clutched her pencil in her hand and began to write. Figures, square roots, quadratic equations, numbers, numbers and more numbers. They were her only comfort. Kasumi could not sing for her. They brought back memories. She shook her head wildly. "No," she choked. "No more memories." Numbers, only numbers.
She reached across her desk for her calculator and felt her hand brush against something hard. It fell off of her desk and landed in her waste bin with a loud metallic clang. She was torn. If she turned away from the numbers, her dear numbers, they might cease their pain-numbing effects. She shook her head. That was-that was silly. She reached into the waste bin and pulled out a picture frame. It contained a magnificent shot of Akane and Ranma, holding hands. Her fingers trembled as she held the picture close to her chest.
Nabiki slowly turned back to her paper and attempted to resume her calculating. But something was holding her back. Maybe it was her shaking hand, maybe her tears blurred the figures together into warped images. She refused to think that they could no longer ease her suffering. No, not her numbers…not her dear numbers! 15 feet, a velocity of 10 feet per second. Y= 15x+10x+0. No, no that was wrong. She couldn't solve it, she couldn't solve it!
With a moan of despair, Nabiki shoved away from her desk and staggered in circles in the middle of her room. Where? Where now? Still clutching the picture frame in her hands, she gasped desperately. Why was it so hot all of a sudden? She strode to the window and slid the glass up with little effort. Cold air blasted Nabiki's face and she inhaled. Why won't the pain go away?!
She stumbled backwards, her face contorted and twisted with an onslaught of raw emotion. She ran. She ran to her last option. Nabiki turned the light on in the bathroom and, the picture of her beloved couple still clutched in one hand, locked the door behind her.
"Well, well, Nabiki. This proves to be much easier than I anticipated." The faceless shadow smile humorlessly and disappeared into the night.
"You sure you want to do this?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. It shouldn't be that hard. They're all already half insane. We just have to twist the knife a little and rip it out." A low chuckle. A glossy picture manifested from the shadows. Long, brown hair pulled to the side framed a smiling face. The shot was obviously made by someone with talent. "This one's first. Don't do anything yet. Just watch. See how far along she is before we strike."
"W-well, I don't know if we want to mess with these people. They've got some powerful allies and are pretty strong th-themselves." Nervous. Well, well.
"Oh, don't worry. With the correct…persuasion, everything should go smoothly. Just make sure you do your job correctly and maybe you'll live to be an old age."
An audible swallow bounced off the dank metal walls and faded into the darkness.
***
It was a quiet day in Nerima. Unusually so. It wasn't a tense silence or an uneasy silence, just…empty. Joggers who went for their daily run by the Tendo Dojo frowned in thoughtful contemplation -and trepidation- of what was to come. Quiet did not exist in Nerima. It just didn't. The usual sounds of heated battle between two particular martial artists were replaced by the low whistle of a passing breeze. The loud splash followed by the louder screams of rage did not echo through the dojo, only an occasional koi splash.
It was a quiet day in Nerima. So quiet that not even the songbirds had the heart to break it. So quiet that when the joggers passed by the Tendo Dojo uninjured and thoroughly confused, they knew.
Something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Inside the Tendo Dojo, Kasumi Tendo, the eldest daughter of Soun Tendo, dusted the tables with a fervent determination. Everything was spotless, and she knew it, but she continued to flick off the nonexistent specks with strained energy. All the while she hummed a cheerful tune and stretched a rubber smile across her face.
It irked her that in the past few weeks it had been getting harder and harder for her to maintain her oblivious happy countenance. With Akane's death and the little issue with Ranma and what not. She knew that ever since her mother's death, the entire family depended on her smile. Now that her youngest sibling was gone, she continued to be happy for her father and sister and she would rather live in a hog sty than let that smile slip just once after years of such practice.
It hurt to smile now so she had to practice. Just keep it up, Kasumi. You can hold it. You have to hold it. She stopped dusting at the shogi board and sighed wistfully. A vision of her father and Uncle Saotome appeared on either side of the board and looked up at her with smiling adoration. They vanished as soon as she passed the feathers of her duster over the worn wood. She stood and inspected her surroundings. Satisfied that everything was in order, she headed upstairs to her room, smile still in place and duster still at hand.
Kasumi walked up to her door and paused to check the halls before resting her hand on the knob and turning. Anyone who knew Kasumi and her tidy nature would have expected her room to be sparkly clean and in perfect order. What hid behind her door, however, was the exact opposite.
A black cloth, permitting the sunlight no admittance onto her walls, shaded her window. Clothes were strewn everywhere, bits and pieces of glass and paper littered the floor. The walls and ceiling adorned wide long, streaks of black. Occasional words and phrases showed up in the obscene calligraphy but most of it was just a collection of warped, twisted doodles.
Once Kasumi stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, the smile dropped, the duster fluttered to the ground and her once slightly bouncy step melted into a hunched, dejected gait. She slowly raised her face to the ceiling, fists clenched and white. Suddenly, she screamed. She howled like a wounded animal, she roared like an angered beast. She picked up her already mutilated table and threw it into the wall, reducing it to kindle wood. She pushed her dressing drawer to the ground and pounded it with all her strength. Her fist went straight through and with a scream of rage she tore it back out, hurling splinters everywhere.
Still in a heated rage, she uncapped a large black marker and started drawing, her muscles jerking with slightly suppressed fury. The ragged lines formed a vague image of a boy. Muscled arms, smiling face, braided pigtail. Then, she picked up a piece of broken glass and with an anguished shriek, plunged it into the figure's heart.
Kasumi, her anger dissolving with her energy, backed away from the drawing slowly and started to giggle. Her giggle rose and became peals of hysterical laughter. She pointed an accusing finger at the figure and said, tears of an unnamed emotion leaked from her eyes, "There! There! That's what you get, y-you- you b-bastard!"
Spent, she finally collapsed to the floor. Kasumi reached down into her apron pocket and pulled out a gold chain. She unclasped the locket attached with shaking fingers and smiled tiredly at her mother's image. "Hi, momma," her voice was high and childlike. "Aren't you proud? I smiled all this time. I smiled just for you, momma. Just like you told me to."
Kasumi closed her eyes as if listening the picture respond. "Yes, yes. I'll keep smiling." She paused. "Don't worry, momma. I'll make dinner. Just as soon as…" The world seemed to slowly blur and fade before her very eyes. "As…soon…as…" As unconsciousness claimed Kasumi as its own, somewhere, far, far away, someone looked on…and laughed.
****
"Hey, Nabiki?"
A slender young woman turned slightly in her swivel chair, her brown, short-cropped hair swaying. She looked at her roommate, her face automatically assuming one of disinterested inquiry. "Yeah?"
Kino, Nabiki's college roommate, seemed to have trouble with her words. "Is something, you know, bothering you?"
Nabiki's expression hardened but she remained polite and carefully refrained from telling the girl to mind her own damn business. "No. Why do you think that something's bothering me?"
Kino blinked and Nabiki could already tell that she was regretting her decision to talk to her icy roommate. "I don't know. You just seem distracted lately." Her face brightened and she laughed, a high, nervous laugh. "But don't worry about it. You know me. Always taking these things the wrong way. Sorry."
Nabiki nodded and silently applauded Kino's wise change of tactic; drop the damn subject and shut up. "It's no problem. People make mistakes." She turned back to her textbook but the information didn't bury itself into her brain like it usually did. She frowned. If a ditz like Kino could tell when she was upset than some self-chastisement was called for.
Life had been getting harder lately. She was juggling the taxes and bills for Kasumi and the Dojo, her father in the asylum, and herself, a sophomore in college. Nabiki dimly registered the fact that Kino was talking to her. She was going out, fine, she'll be late, okay, don't wait up, sure. The door slammed, leaving Nabiki to her thoughts. She shuddered. She always tried to avoid being by herself because she knew she would remember. If she was making a good deal, doing homework, talking to someone, doing something, she wouldn't think about her past. Now it came rushing back to her…
~~FLASHBACK~~
"Ranma, you idiot!" The pig tailed martial artist ran past Nabiki with Akane hot on his trail.
He looked back and yelled, "Well, maybe if you wouldn't poison the food, I would be able to eat it without hurling my guts up!" Ranma, distracted by his insults, didn't see the giant of a panda and ran right into him.
The panda held up a sign that said 'Don't insult your fiancé, boy.' "You try and eat her cookin' then, ya old goat!" Ranma roared in retaliation.
Akane, using the momentary distraction to stalk up behind him, gave him a good whack with the frying pan she had in her hand. She then picked him up and with a scream of rage, hurled him out of the house.
Nabiki silently counted off the things that would happen next. Splash, she thought to herself and sure enough sounds of water splashing erupted just seconds after Ranma's departure via Pissed Akane Airlines. "Ranma's mating calls," she muttered under her breath. Comments consisting precisely of "What ya do that for?!" and "Uncute tomboy" in a high, very feminine voice had Nabiki smiling. She turned to see Akane advancing upon the drenched red head. "And the female's response." She winced as the clang of another frying pan whack sounded. "Ouch. Love most definitely hurts."
~~END FLASHBACK~~
~~FLASHBACK~~
Nabiki sat in the dark against her door and quietly listened to the sounds outside her door. Everything seemed so perfect, she thought with a bitter smile, but around here nothing is as it seems. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's a good chance that it's not a duck. She mentally scolded herself for not being able to do something to stop it. She was caught in the lovely illusion that after all the hardships that she and her family had endured, there would finally be peace.
"Peace," she muttered under her breath, her harsh tone was choked by tears. Listening to her father cry out in the night, ranting about how he could see Akane and her mother she realized peace was clearly not an option in Nerima.
"Kasumi! Nabiki!" shouted Soun. "Come, come! Akane has come back! I can see her! She- she's on the ceiling!" Nabiki heard footsteps shuffling down the hallway. Soun's outbursts died down as Kasumi calmed him. A muffled melody floated cut through the tense air; Mother's lullaby. Tears built in Nabiki's eyes, she couldn't see clearly anymore. She buried her head in her arms. And for the first time since her mother's death, she wept.
~~END FLASHBACK~~
Nabiki inhaled sharply and blinked back the moisture building in her eyes. No, no she would not cry. Not now, not ever. She frantically clutched her pencil in her hand and began to write. Figures, square roots, quadratic equations, numbers, numbers and more numbers. They were her only comfort. Kasumi could not sing for her. They brought back memories. She shook her head wildly. "No," she choked. "No more memories." Numbers, only numbers.
She reached across her desk for her calculator and felt her hand brush against something hard. It fell off of her desk and landed in her waste bin with a loud metallic clang. She was torn. If she turned away from the numbers, her dear numbers, they might cease their pain-numbing effects. She shook her head. That was-that was silly. She reached into the waste bin and pulled out a picture frame. It contained a magnificent shot of Akane and Ranma, holding hands. Her fingers trembled as she held the picture close to her chest.
Nabiki slowly turned back to her paper and attempted to resume her calculating. But something was holding her back. Maybe it was her shaking hand, maybe her tears blurred the figures together into warped images. She refused to think that they could no longer ease her suffering. No, not her numbers…not her dear numbers! 15 feet, a velocity of 10 feet per second. Y= 15x+10x+0. No, no that was wrong. She couldn't solve it, she couldn't solve it!
With a moan of despair, Nabiki shoved away from her desk and staggered in circles in the middle of her room. Where? Where now? Still clutching the picture frame in her hands, she gasped desperately. Why was it so hot all of a sudden? She strode to the window and slid the glass up with little effort. Cold air blasted Nabiki's face and she inhaled. Why won't the pain go away?!
She stumbled backwards, her face contorted and twisted with an onslaught of raw emotion. She ran. She ran to her last option. Nabiki turned the light on in the bathroom and, the picture of her beloved couple still clutched in one hand, locked the door behind her.
"Well, well, Nabiki. This proves to be much easier than I anticipated." The faceless shadow smile humorlessly and disappeared into the night.