CHAPTER SIX: ICARUS

Ranma and Akane sat on a Sunday morning train en route from Nerima to Ueno. She had chosen to sit across the aisle from him. Pointedly, she directed her gaze in every direction but his.

She wore a light blue satin blouse, a black midi length A-line skirt, and black leggings. 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 had 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 was running up the stairs away from him as quickly as she could manage.

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

There was no way for him to sleep or even try 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, however, he knew that he had little latitude to argue. He was at her mercy. His only option now was to trust her and her judgment.

He thought again of that sad last night in Meguro just after Nabiki had told him at Himonya about how her mother had died. Now, a new dawning sense of foreboding haunted his recollections. He returned specifically to how she had surprised him by throwing her arms around him as they had prepared to part ways near Komaba.

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 one last time. 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 wondered now if she had already known something then and if she had actually been trying to tell him good-bye.

He also 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. The words now took on new possibilities of chilling significance.

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….

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.

"Do you wanna know how I knew?" she asked as they came up on a major intersection.

Ranma shrugged. He knew he was not in a position to ask, though he was curious. He could tell too that she was itching for the satisfaction of being able to tell him. He could let her have at least that much.

"Cocktail napkins," she said. "You began leaving them in your laundry. That and you were sketching things on some of them."

Ranma said nothing. Nothing meaningful could be said.

As the light turned, Akane sighed to herself, turned away, and resumed walking in silence. At some point, she started speaking to him again, but this time with a cool detachment which he had never seen from her before. It was eerily Kasumi-like in character.

To understand what was happening, Ranma now would have to know certain things about her sister and the rest of the Tendou family.

These were old secrets which until now Akane and the family had hoped for so many reasons could have remained buried forever in the past. Her father had worried too that Uncle Genma, if he knew the things Akane prepared to share now, might even have called off the Tendou-Saotome family honor agreement and never brought Ranma to Nerima at all.

"Maybe someone should've told you sooner," Akane said. "Maybe we owe you an apology for that. 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 was different 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 the mother's beautiful visage staring back at him was Nabiki's own. The resemblance was bone-chillingly unnatural. So many things that Nabiki had told him since that first night in Roppongi suddenly rushed forward in his mind's eye, tee'd up now at the razor-edged precipice of revelation.

He remembered what Nabiki had said about her hair as she told him about how her mother had died.

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." Her name meant "Autumn child." It was 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 a long time after Mom died."

Nabiki had mentioned her loneliness in the aftermath of her mother's death. Now, Ranma understood why that loneliness had been there; Nabiki was a literal walking reminder of who and what the Tendou family had lost, unwanted and maybe even feared. For those reasons, no one could be there to tell her that none of what happened was her fault.

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….

"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."

The doctors diagnosed Nabiki with leukemia just shy of her 12th birthday - 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."

Overnight, Soun Tendou transformed from treating his daughter like a leper to hiding her from anything and everything his unwell mind could imagine. He became possessed by the delusion that he was essentially fighting to avoid losing his wife a second time. Well intended as his desire to protect his daughter as, there were so many things she was suddenly not allowed to do. She was not allowed to leave the house except for doctor appointments. She became the escaped prisoner who was thrown back into the cave, brutally 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.

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 f-#k….

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 seemed to think he understood something too. Thank you for seeing me, listening to me, she had 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 and had only gotten himself excited over a mere 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 him, she must have wanted so badly just to have a normal life.

To be a normal girl….

Remorse and shame 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 hurt anger written on her beautiful 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 told Ranma how her sister suffered from the chemo, desperately fighting to hold on. Akane went to all of those sessions to hold her sister's hand. It meant everything to her to be able to do that for her sister. Akane didn't have anything else to give, no other way that she could think of to let her sister know how very much she loved her.

Many times, however, Akane felt maybe her sister was actually the one holding her hand. Somehow, her sister always believed in something – it was the only way for a person to endure what she had – though Akane never knew what it was. 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 turned elated and thankful when a donor was finally identified, but that turned out only to be the beginning of 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 was actually how Nabiki lost 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.

Yet, painful as even these memories were, they were just at the beginning of the long and even more painful road to 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 even 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. It felt very much like visiting an inmate in a high security prison.

Even with these Draconian precautions, there were complications. The transplant was on the slow side to engraft. Infections happened as they waited. More than once, she was left hanging on seemingly by mere threads of desperate hope and fervent wishes.

She spent a total of 121 days in the confinement of that lonely hell, but she did survive and eventually make it out.

"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 was 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)."

Her sister had finally just escaped Nerima and all her painful memories. Were her father to find out, he would almost certainly move to immediately take away her freedom and drag her back home.

I may not be a martial artist, but I'm not f-#king 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:

(1) 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.

(2) Bone marrow (BM) 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 generally 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.

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