CHAPTER SEVEN: NOT WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SAY
When Ranma came, he found Akane with her sister's weight draped across her shoulders. With her help, Nabiki struggled to clumsily stumble her way from the bed to a chair by the window. She was a petite girl by nature, but now she had become a ravaged shadow of herself from that final night in Meguro, unspeakably thin, frail, and ghostly pale. Seeing Nabiki like that caused him great pain.
However, the delighted light of surprise in her still bright, soul-piercing eyes when she saw him left no doubt that she was still the girl who had opened his eyes to the possibilities of an Icarus who would dare come to the Stage at Kiyomizu. Yet, just as Ranma felt his heart start to lift in his chest, she quickly averted her eyes, leaving him wondering if he had only imagined her smile.
When he felt the weight of Akane's eyes on them, he knew why she had brought him here and why Nabiki had turned away. He realised now that he had underestimated Akane; she was testing them. Nabiki must have known this too.
Eventually, Akane herself turned away. Perhaps she had seen what she needed to see, or maybe she was just no longer able to endure the knife's edge of silence that had settled over the room. "I'm going downstairs for a while, Oneechan. I think…. I think I'm not really the one who you want here anyway," she said before tearing out of the room (1).
"Akane – !" Nabiki rasped. She reached out to her sister and tried to stumble her way forward out of the chair before succumbing to a violent paroxysm of coughs.
In the blink of an eye, Ranma was already there holding her and preventing her from hitting the hard, wooden floor. "Nabiki," he whispered brokenly in her ear, shocked and horrified by what he found as he embraced her. She felt so very light in his arms, barely even there. Her skin was clammy and blazing with the heat of fever. "Nabiki…!"
"Go after her, Ranma. I'll be fine," she told him. "I've always been fine."
"No!" he hissed vehemently. The words poured out of him now in a desperate frenzy. "You can't do that, Nabiki!"
"Do what?"
"Do what?!" he exclaimed in incredulous, angry bewilderment. "Just go and disappear like that is what! Ya haven't finished teaching me how to see, how to finish that sketch on the cocktail napkin!"
"What do you think that I can still teach you?" she asked. "You see everything now. From here on, it's about what you'll do with what you see."
"No. That's not true. Ya still haven't answered my question."
"What question is that?"
"Why, Nabiki? What was Icarus hoping to achieve by jumping off the Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera?"
Her expression softened into a pained smile. "Why are you asking me? Because I said Icarus was at Kiyomizu?"
"Because you're the one who drew Icarus at Kiyomizu," he answered with the now familiar refrain that had echoed a thousand times over in his mind. "That and the ones with the crippled kid under the Senbon Torii at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the woman embracing the scared boy, and the smiling girl with her cheeks in her hands — and that scared boy was not a boy. You drew them all for a reason. All of them are you!"
Her eyes shimmered as she studied him. Eventually, she answered with a soft, mirthless laugh. "You'll find me a sh#tty Existentialist if that's really the question you want me to answer, Ranma. You know what happens to Icarus. Go after Akane. Go after your fiancee."
"Then live with being a f-#king sh#tty Existentialist, but f-#king live, damn you!"
Again, she laughed despite herself. "Try not to be so melodramatic, Ranma," she chided, shushing him with her fingers against his lips. "Akane's obviously been telling you things. I may be in here, but I'm not going anywhere today. You're just hurting my ears. The drugs make them sensitive."
He asked her what happened.
"I guess Akane already told you about the cancer."
He nodded.
"Pneumonia. Leukemias especially f-#k hard with your immune system." She was on the mend and had come off supplemental oxygen the day before last. Once she was able to get around a room on her own again, she would be sent out.
Contrary to what most people seemed to think, in and of themselves, cancers never actually did anyone in. There were over 4000 known cancers. Still, invariably, it was always one of the usual secondary sequelae — infection, bleeding, or a clot somewhere — that eventually did a person in.
Just like what happened to her mother.
"But they can fix this, right?"
"The pneumonia?"
"Yeah?"
"This time," she replied with a wan smile. "There will be others. I told you though, right? I'm not made of glass. You really should go after Akane. Go after your fiancee. We can talk some other time."
Angry comprehension flashed in his eyes as she placed her hands on his chest and began gently pushing him away. He recognised that touch. It was the very same one as from that last night in Meguro by the main gates of Komaba. There was nothing chaste about it at all. That was why it hurt so very much.
Yet, she had also said that for a girl, how a guy listens is one of the most important things that he does; that is how she measures for herself if and how much she is loved.
Time stopped before the world started to turn again, buffeted by a new wind of resolute clarity and purpose. Only one conceivable outcome now that could right all that had been so wrong for so long.
Why the normal life he so desperately wanted continued to elude him.
Why even after Jusendo he had been unable to fulfill his duty-bound role in the Tendou-Saotome family agreement.
Three-and-a-half years was long enough to know, right?
If he could not even bring himself to hold her hand after all that time, then the feeling just was not there. It had taken him far less to know what he wanted now and more than anything in the world.
"Don't do this," he warned.
"Do what?"
"Pretend that ya don't know or that ya don't feel it too."
"I don't know what you mean."
He gave out a mirthless bark of laughter. He could not help it. He was nowhere actually near that dumb. She knew better too. "If Akane knows, then ya can't not know, and I know what you're trying to do."
She herself had already told him.
You know what happens to Icarus….
"Ranma — "
"Ya told me not to apologise or back down for seeing things, no matter what anyone else might say," he said, cutting her off. "Ya said it's up to me what I do with what I see. Here's what I see. You and Kasumi picked Akane for me. I didn't pick anyone, remember (2")? I should've picked. You should've been my fiancee. It should've been you!"
She sighed and turned away. "But you didn't…, and you can't anyway," she said sadly.
"Of course I can! We – !"
Before he knew what was happening, she stunned him speechless with a warm, tender kiss planted so very softly on his lips — the very first real kiss that he ever experienced. He knew because for the first time he found himself neither repulsed nor filled with fear or suspicion at the touch of a woman's lips against his own. There was only blinding, spellbound wonder.
She felt unbelievably soft and warm, and she tasted of far, far more than he ever dreamed or imagined. He found the magic of her touch more painfully beautiful than anything he had ever known, filling him with an infinitely deep yearning and hunger that defied description. He wanted to answer and reciprocate with everything that he was — but then she had already begun pushing him away again before he could even think to move.
"Listen to me, Ranma," she said firmly, pinning him down now with the full, steely weight of her fiery, brown-eyed stare. "You have to understand this. No matter how you feel about me or… or even how I may feel about you, we can't be together, and you can't choose me. You were never going to be allowed to do that."
He did not understand.
"That's not what you're supposed to say," Ranma whispered in her ear. The warmth of her in his arms and her scent rendered him almost delirious. "You can't say that."
One of her favorite Sartre quotes sprang to mind.
Life has no meaning a priori…. It's up to each one of us to give it a meaning, and the concept of value is nothing but the meaning that we choose for ourselves.
He thought she was the Believer who knew that there was no beauty without pain.
The mistress alone of her sea.
The one at her own sail who understood that whoever called her out and tried to shout her back down into silence did not matter.
"Well, you're not exactly saying things that you're supposed to say either," she shot back. "I can and I should say what I'm saying because it's all true – and because I believe. Think, Ranma. Think!"
"I am thinking!" he insisted. "We want the same thing. I want to live a normal life; you want that too. That's all ya ever really wanted, right? Why ya hate Nerima; why ya know that I do too; why ya had to find a way to leave no matter the cost; why ya understand me and I you. I want to be with you!"
She shook her head at him. "There'd be nothing normal about being with a sick person like me, Ranma. You're also forgetting. You're the Heir, and you have your whole life ahead of you. The purpose of the Tendou-Saotome family agreement is to ensure the continuity of the School. That means one day having an Heir of your own. I can't…. I can't help you do that. The drugs and my genes," she said before turning away from him. "That and you'd have a great chance of being a widower before you even turn 20."
"No! We can talk to Tofu – "
She cut him off with an ugly, spiteful and derisive snort. "Todai and Riken doctors have worked on my case for years, Ranma. They're the ones saying this. If we'd left things in the hands of that f-#king back alley hobo quack with foggy glasses who masquerades as a doctor, I would've been ashes in the wind long before you even heard of Jusenkyo."
Ranma wanted to scream. A terrible gray sense of horrified sadness and cruel despair permeated the world around him now, settling like a shroud being thrown over the living. He felt angry for her and for them. Everything she was telling him was wrong — just invariably, simply, incontrovertibly wrong. It had to be!
I have three daughters. Pick the one you want. If she agrees, she'll be your fiancée….
Tendou-san had said those words when Ranma first came to the Tendou dojo. He could pick, and she could agree.
The old man had said other similar things too that time when Akane, in one of her typical tantrum moments, had destroyed the laundry balcony and Ranma had grabbed Nabiki to keep her from hitting the ground. For that, Akane had seen only red and hurled the Tendou-Saotome family agreement at her sister. By then, Ranma had already been living with the Tendou family for almost two years.
For the Tendou School, it doesn't matter who Ranma ends up with. That's up to Ranma and whoever he asks to be his fiancée….
For a week, he and Nabiki had pretended. He definitely did not feel for her then. The way she had rented him out by the hour and jerked him around by the chain also made clear that she didn't either.
Or was that really what happened? He really could not remember. He had been too consumed with annoyance over being collateral damage in a cat fight between the two sisters.
Thinking back now, he couldn't help wondering if that was actually when he should have acknowledged the truth that he now realised he had always known in the back of his mind. Desire, attraction — even love of that kind — these were not things that could be willed or rationalised into existence.
It's up to Ranma and whoever he asks to be his fiancée….
"Of course, that's what you were told, exactly what he wanted you to hear," Nabiki answered derisively. Things had been framed that way to save face.
Her voice held an unmistakable bitterness, but then the light in her eyes shifted. She wanted to understand something.
"So many times and for so long you fought so hard to protect my sister, even from herself. You even brought her home from Jusendo."
Too many unbelievable, magical things had happened for her to have been wrong. Demons had been thwarted, the immutable laws of sex and gender defied, and even a demi-God killed for the sake of those causes. That was why she herself had tried so hard too to help make things work.
I love my sister – pain in the butt that she can be. If you're really going to become a part of our family one day, I need to know that I can trust you to actually bring your fair share of happiness to the table.
Let me help you.
Let me help my sister.
She was so confused.
"Why was I wrong? She really does love you. Why can't you love her? Even just a little?"
Ranma sighed, recalling what he had told Akane too the night before. "I do. Just… just not like that."
"Why?" she asked. "Why…?"
Familiar shadows of her essence began dancing once more before his mind's eye as her question rang in his ears. The sound of her voice singing; the few fleeting moments when her hands had brushed against his; her eyes and their many philosophical questions for him; and the scent of peach blossoms – all of it merged now with the beautiful, warm, breathing, living reality present before his actual eyes. The answer to her question was so simple and clear.
"Because Akane's not you. Because there are things that matter a lot more than a person's DNA and crazy eugenic ideas of continuing some School of Martial Arts with this or that bloodline."
Silent tears spilled freely now from her bewildered eyes. He had not been mistaken. Her control was slipping. He sensed the moment for his move.
"Come with me, Nabiki. The Stage at Kiyomizu. Go with me there."
In response, a hard, steely, and determined light suddenly galvanized in her soul-piercing eyes. Fear welled up within him as he saw that look. Somehow, he had said the wrong thing.
"Icarus leapt from the Stage and flew alone. That's how I drew it. That's how it's meant to be."
"Bullsh#t! An Existentialist knows that nothing is pre-determined."
"Existentialists also don't believe in love," she said, taking his face in between her hands. Her hold was unexpectedly firm and resolute. "It gets in the way of an individual's destiny."
"Nabiki – !"
"If you really care about me, Ranma, and if anything I've ever told you means anything to you, then you'll listen to me now," she said, brushing his bangs away from his eyes. "If I'm Icarus, then you must be Daedelus. We've made it out of the Labyrinth, but now someone has to make it out of Crete and get to Sicily. We should never meet again like this."
"Nabiki, no, please…! Freedom is what we do with what is done to us. That's what ya said! We can choose!"
She answered with a solemn nod. "That's right. That's what Sartre said. We can choose, and I have chosen. Goodbye, Ranma…."
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CHAPTER NOTES:
(1) Don't worry. Akane is not done yet with Ranma and her sister :) I intend to explore Akane's character in greater depth in future chapters via how she deals with being betrayed by the 2 people in the world she cares the most about.
(2) It's true :). Ranma never actually picks a fiancee among the 3 Tendou sisters in Episode 1. Kasumi and Nabiki volunteer Akane with Nabiki noting "You hate boys, right?" and Kasumi adding "That's right! How fortunate Ranma is half-girl."