10/18/22 AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hi all,
With this chapter and the last, I feel this story has come to an interesting branch point of possibilities, and I wanted to get your feedback on how best to proceed.
The "answer" for how Ranma's relationships with Nabiki and Akane evolve from this point on may be "written in his blood," but this could still mean any number of things. There is a reasonable moral justice case to be made for having Ranma and/or Nabiki pay a price for the misery that they have caused Akane. On the other hand, I think that the argument that Ranma deserves a break is equally justifiable.
I am considering writing 2 different versions of this story with different potential endings and letting you choose which you like best.
Look forward to hearing what you all think.
Thanks.
- KL
CHAPTER TEN: WRITTEN 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, his reflection was staring back at him in broad daylight mingled superfluously 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 was laid out on the open tray table in front of him. Already though, 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, even if said sister probably wasn't even going to speak to him. 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.
The text message came as he was preparing to follow them down the stairs at the now very familiar subway stop near Furinkan.
Please don't come.
He wanted to be angry at her, 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. There were 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 it reminded him of her 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. Nabiki's affinity for the place seemed natural and intuitive to him now. Still, however, the answer to the question of why Icarus would come to this specific place remained unclear. A wave of painful longing struck him then; he wished she could've been there with him and that she would tell him now.
With a sigh, he turned away and began trudging his way back towards the city center. That was when he stumbled on a small funeral procession just outside of Nishi Otani. The picture of the deceased was of a young woman clearly departed before what should have been her time. A horrific vision of meeting Nabiki here one day soon flashed before his mind's eye. 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.
The full scope of his problems, which were still very real, heavy, and many, crashed down on him without mercy. He was still in love with a dying girl who wouldn't even see him and who would only ever profess reciprocity when he wasn't around. Said girl was still the sister of his actual fiancée. That actual fiancée still refused to speak to him, and they still had to confront the now untenable future of their engagement. At some point too, he would have to deal with the buffoonery of the fathers, who still didn't even know.
Ranma came to his knees and began to cry helplessly amongst the graves. At least here no one would hear or see how broken, lost – how impotently pathetic even – he had become. 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. Unchecked, these diseases would inevitably enter into a final fulminant terminal phase called a "blast crisis." What remained of a person's functional blood lines could plummet from almost normal to zero within weeks or even hours, crowded out by the merciless, stormy expansion and encroachment of millions of rapidly proliferating tumor cells — just like what must have been what happened to her mother.
How long the doctors and the body could defer that outcome was a constant war hanging in a fragile balance. Like all cancers, leukemias were inherently genetically unstable. The potential cassette of mutations that the tumor could acquire was infinite, far greater than the capacity of even the most advanced medicine and the smartest minds to anticipate. Relapsed cancers were inherently more aggressive and fundamentally more unstable genetically.
He knew what Akane was trying to say. He had already reached the same conclusion himself. "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.
One of the doctors, however, had approached them with a new idea that could possibly shift the odds considerably. Her name was Sato. She had just returned after completing an advanced fellowship in Boston. She wanted to initiate a new study protocol based on what she had learned in her time in America.
Despite the terrible circumstances, Ranma couldn't help but laugh when he heard the name of the study.
Daedalus.
The idea was to take a donor's marrow and reprogram it with a cassette of engineered mutations to improve the long-term odds of cure. That cured state could even potentially be achieved without the need for the usual toxic, immunosuppressive post-engraftment medications. It was a potential shot at a truly normal life.
"Has this actually been tried in a person before?" Ranma asked uneasily.
Akane nodded. "The Americans have already tried it in about a dozen people. The first recipient is still disease-free after 6 years and not taking any meds at all."
"So what's the catch?" he asked. It sounded too good to be true, and he still had not heard a reason for why Akane was coming to him now.
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 could understand not wanting to be a human experiment.
"No," she said. He didn't understand. Obvious agitation contorted her features now. "When I said she doesn't want to do it, I mean none of 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. She was 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."
Whether her sister went with a conventional transplant or a gene-edited one, the fundamental problems remained the same. A matching donor was still necessary. She would have to undergo the torture of lethal dose conditioning again. Then she would still have to exile herself again for months in a bubble while waiting and to see if she was going to live or die.
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 f-#k.
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.
"F-#k 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.
His own heart ached hearing her berate herself that way. He had been so very wrong about Akane. 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 f-#king 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 be his fiancee and to help them find a donor.
"Akane…."
He would help regardless. He didn't need to be anyone's fiancée to do that. He also didn't want his willingness to help with finding a donor misconstrued in any way as a quid pro quo for the right to be with her sister.
Akane nodded; she knew. Finding a donor alone though wasn't going to be enough — not even close. A willing donor meant nothing if they didn't 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."
So that she would again be that girl they'd both seen belting out the very essence of her soul that night so very long ago now in Roppongi….
Or the one at Himonya who had been such a skilled and confident climber of trees….
And who had admonished him that he had no chance of making anyone else happy unless he first knew what he wanted and could be happy with himself….
That was why Akane wanted him to ask her sister to let him be with her.
"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 understood — really and truly understood – the revelation that had been imparted to him the night before. The voice of the girl at Niomon was echoing again now in the ears of his mind, but this time her words were the bells of Jerusalem ringing as St. Peter resumed calling out names. The path to finishing the sketch that the "normal girl" had started at Himonya so long ago was now so very, very clear.
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, 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….
