5: metta (kindness & goodwill)
She told him, "You've got a long, long way to go."
"I know," he answered her, "Years and years."
"Yes."
"Thousands of miles."
Thousands of miles.
She said, "Yes."
"But it would be easier," he continued quietly, "It would be easier, if I had someone to go there with."
Better, if I didn't have to go all alone.
"Yes," she told him softly. "But then again, most of life is going alone. Isn't it?"
--
Isn't it?
--
Brightness lifted the weight of the night, the madness of a world without stars, and in the lightening room the artifacts of life gradually coalesced from the soft fog of nothingness and took on recognizable shapes in the light of false dawn. Insubstantial clouds slowly became edges, corners, and surfaces: the buttresses of human existence, familiar forms that divided the waking world from the fevered nightmares of the mind.
Ryoga, sitting on the folded-up futon mattress by the open window, inhaled the cool spring air and watched the light of dawn flood the world outside. He'd bitten the inside of his cheek during the night and now the soft lump of wounded flesh throbbed dully every time his tongue brushed against it. He'd woken suddenly to the taste of blood in his mouth some time during the small hours, and he'd lain awake with wide staring eyes and listened to the noise of the train as it thundered through the room, tearing apart the walls in a blind agony of inexorable motion.
Now in the stillness of the morning the stirring of small birds outside the window and the sound of the cars and people on the road brought the world back to him in gentleness, like snow falling on still water, dissipating, melting into nothingness.
Ryoga didn't think of himself as a particularly religious person, but in his childhood he'd gone to a kindergarten run by the local temple in his neighborhood, and there he'd learned to recite sutras from memory that, years later, he'd encountered again during his wanderings and clung to as a means to occasionally stave of boredom. Ryoga tended to read anything he could get his grubby mitts on, and though he'd probably be the first (or actually the second, if Ranma was anywhere in the vicinity) to admit that he didn't understand about ninety-percent of what he read, nevertheless he had a slight affinity for poetry and verse, and as an extension for certain more significant passages from various sutras.
The lines that had come to him yesterday rose once again in his mind, inflamed by the fever of exhaustion, and the words flared and burned with a light all their own in the darkness behind his wide-open eyes.
Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world;
As a star at dawn;
A bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud;
A flickering lamp;
A phantom, and a dream.
At the sound of the door sliding quietly open he turned and only belatedly realized that he'd spoken aloud.
"You don't half look like hell," Ukyo told him, entering the room carrying a tray with teacups and a teapot, with a hot-water heater dangling from her hand, all of which she sat on the floor before crossing to the little uncollapsed collapsible table pushed up against her bookshelves. She wore her cotton yukata still, with it's print of tiny frolicking moon-rabbits.
"I remembered," he said to her, and marveled internally at the way his mouth formed the words so carefully, the syllables dropping quietly into the gradually lightening room as softly as falling feathers, delicate as the first flakes of December snow.
"Remembered what?" Ukyo asked, stopping in the middle of sliding the table to the center of the room. Behind her steam rose from the teapot and dissipated into the half-darkness of the room. The light of dawn played across her features as the tree outside shifted in a morning breeze.
"The train," he said. "I remembered."
She pressed her lips together and just for a moment something flashed across her face, but it was gone before Ryoga could interpret it. Turning without getting to her feet, Ukyo lifted up the tray and gently, carefully, placed a cup across from where she knelt with the slightest noise of ceramic on wood, like a pause between two moments in a person's life. She set the other cup in front of herself. Ryoga watched the light and the shadows of tree branches move over the skin of her bare arms, flashing on the tiny golden hairs. The sound of tears came back to him, and he inhaled suddenly the cold air of the high mountains and bitter, piercing cold.
"What do you mean you remember?" Ukyo asked him carefully, without looking up from her tea. Ryoga blinked hard, then looked out the window again.
"About the…about being…there," he said, quietly, to the soft sounds of birds outside. "About what...that you were there. That I…" he looked down at his hands and watched the fingers slightly curl and uncurl. "I'm so s-s-sorry, Ukyo," he squeezed his eyes shut, biting his lip until it hurt, then releasing the damaged skin with almost a gasp. "I didn't mean to…I never meant to…" he opened his eyes and stared out the window, shaking his head.
"I never meant to put you in danger," he forced out, in a hushed voice.
He looked at her and found Ukyo staring at him. He flushed, but forced himself to meet her gaze.
"I'm sorry," he barely was able to force the words past his teeth. The awfulness of it was trying to choke him.
"Well," she said, and cleared her throat after a pause, "Well I…I guess now you know why I got so pissed off at you, huh?"
"Yeah," he whispered.
She watched him silently for a moment, before finally lifting a hand, gesturing toward the table.
"Come and have some tea," she told him, then added, "Are you okay to walk?"
"Mm," he grunted, getting to his feet and allowing himself only a tiny capitulation to his less-than-ideal physical condition after the knocks he'd taken and the damage to his head. He barely brushed the tips of his fingers against the wall as he got up, more for moral support than any real physical assistance—though it did help to orient him slightly in space, which in his case was never anything to turn up his nose at. He didn't think that he was going to pitch forward onto his face, but he knew that something, still, remained slightly off-kilter.
He actually did feel a bit better,though, than he had yesterday, despite not having eaten for over thirteen hours. He didn't have that weird sense of distant strangeness that had overwhelmed him during his ill-advised flight from Ukyo's apartment, either. The shrieking horror of the train had receded with Ukyo's presence in the room: whole and vibrant and alive. The quiet of the morning was reassuring. He crossed to the table and settled carefully on the floor.
"Tea," Ukyo said again, and Ryoga rolled his eyes only slightly, before wrapping his hands around the fragile cup and sipping cautiously.
They sat for a while in silence as the noise of the wakening city swelled up around them like the rushing of the tide: voices and cars, little animals. It was decidedly homey, but not in a disconcerting way. Ryoga let some of the tension ease out of his shoulders and with a slight sigh his head drooped. Putting down his tea he massaged his aching eyes.
"How long have you been awake?" he heard Ukyo ask, and lowered his hands and looked at her.
"Not sure." He picked up his cup again. "It was dark when I opened my eyes. It was—" he broke off and without ever having touched it to his lips set the cup down again, with exceeding gentleness and a hand that barely shook at all.
"Ryoga." Across the table, Ukyo spoke softly. She seemed to be working herself up to something very difficult, and Ryoga tried to brace himself, knowing what had to inevitably follow.
"Why did you do it?" she asked finally, and knowing it was coming didn't make it any easier.
"Do-do what?" he tried, hoping to somehow deflect the question. He thought for a moment that his deliberate denseness might infuriate the girl, as so very many of the things he did seemed to. He waited for her to bristle, saw her shoulders tense, heard the intake of breath…and then watched her fists, where they'd clenched tightly on the table, slowly open until they once again were long, slender hands.
"Why did you walk along the tracks like that?" Her face seemed strangely sad as she asked the question, and Ryoga, still not wanting to give any real response, felt pressured to say something, anything, if only to soften the edges of the expression on her face.
"Don't cry, Ukyo."
"It…seemed like a good idea at the time," he told her slowly, and watched Ukyo's brows like lively caterpillars do a little dance of skepticism above her eyes.
Clearly unsatisfied with his answer, she nevertheless took a moment before replying—reigning in her temper, Ryoga suspected. When she opened her mouth, he cringed back involuntarily.
"What exactly was it that seemed like a good idea?" she demanded, though far less…energetically than Ryoga'd expected. "Going for a stroll in front of an oncoming train, or splattering yourself all over the damn street when the freaking thing mowed you down?"
"I didn't mean—" he shook his head sharply, ignoring the way his head twinged with the sudden motion, "I didn't mean to h-hurt you. Me. Anyone."
"So you weren't…" the question Ukyo didn't seem to be able to ask hung in the air all around them, huge and awful.
"No! No I—god, Ukyo, I would never…" he drew a deep breath and exhaled, shuddering, from deep in his belly. "God. Never."
"Then why," she said slowly, enunciating each word with great precision, as if dropping heavy stones into deep water, "Why the hell were you smack-bang in the middle of the damn tracks like that, waiting to be pulverized?"
"I didn't mean to!" he burst out, hiding his face in his hands. "I didn't…" he dropped his hands and shook his head sharply. "It was like…like being l-lost," he admitted, almost swallowing the word, staring past her and the wall, into some incalculable distance, "Like…having all the p-pieces, the places or…or the things. I mean, I mean everything's in f-front of you but…but they don't mean anything." He bit his lip, a fang pressing against the skin without piercing.
"I don't understand," she said.
"Lost," he said again, spitting the word, with all its overtones of poisonous despair, the cracked and blackened edges of a pathless, unmappable world. "Not knowing. Not seeing. Not understanding…what's in front of your face; what you should know, what's so easy for everybody else, and you don't kn-know or understand because you can't, because you….you…" he trailed off, realizing belatedly the unwarranted vehemence of his voice, inappropriate for the cozy little room.
"I saw the train," he went on quietly, picking up the cup, turning it around lightly in his fingers. "I remember watching it and feeling the ground underneath me shaking. And I, I thought, 'It's a train.' I mean I knew what it was." He stopped then for a moment, but Ukyo said nothing so he continued. "I knew what it was but I didn't think anything about being there. The pieces didn't fit together."
"What pieces?"
"Me. The train." He set the cup down with a soft clink. "Death."
Ukyo exhaled a long breath. A breeze stirred in the room; Ryoga's bangs tickled his eyelids.
"And you didn't feel…anything?"
He pushed some of his hair out of his face; a futile gesture as it flopped back almost immediately.
"Things were…weird." His voice sounded very small to his own ears. "It was—I was…" he trailed off.
"You waved at me," Ukyo told him. "You just turned around and waved. And you looked like—like everything was perfectly normal. Like you were out for a stroll."
He inhaled sharply and slowly let the breath out.
"Everything felt very…very far away," he told her, and outside were the noises of windows being slid open, and the sharp footsteps of high-heels on the pavement. A momentary breeze brought the late smell of the final, falling cherry blossoms from next door into the room.
"What do you mean?"
But Ryoga shook his head. Discussions of the inner workings of his own mind did not feature very prominently within his everyday life experiences, and he'd run out of metaphors to accurately describe his experiences of the previous day. He looked at the slender girl across from him, took in her expression, and gulped and looked down at his hands. They were, he noticed, twisting against one other, the knuckle of his right thumb pushing hard against the bones of his left hand. The expression he'd seen on Ukyo's face was one he couldn't remember having seen on any girl's face ever in his life, in any connection with himself. Her eyes were wide and full of something soft and strange? Something he didn't know the word for. Her brows were drawn and a slight crease marred the skin of her forehead. Her lips were pressed together, and for a long moment, as Ryoga stared fascinated at his huge, clumsy hands, the girl was silent. He became aware of the sound of his own breath then, and of hers, from across some impassable gulf of distance.
"What time did you wake up?" she asked him finally. Ryoga stilled his hands, squeezing a knuckle of his index finger hard between the thumb and forefinger of his opposite hand. The pain was dull and distant and did nothing to calm the momentary, sharp stab of electricity within his belly at the sound of her voice in the room.
"I don't know. It was dark. I dreamt…there was a sound. The same sound. Only you w-weren't there." He swallowed. "I was all alone."
"What sound?"
"The train," he said, "Over and over. For hours."
He heard her inhale and sit back. Why, he could not imagine. But she got up, then, crouching slightly, and came around the table to him, and Ryoga drew back automatically from the strangeness of proximity without raising his head, without meeting her gaze.
"Let me look at you," Ukyo said, reaching out, "C'mon, quit squirmin' around."
Perhaps because of her words, unadorned and ordinary despite the strangeness of the situation, he ceased to pull away and allowed her to rest the tips of her fingers on his chin, tilting his face toward the light from the window. His eyes flicked to her face, then away, then back again.
"Like hell," Ukyo tsked, giving him a slight smile. "You shouldn't've got up."
"I couldn't g-go back to sleep," her fingers were still touching his skin, light and electric, painful. He inhaled and gently pushed her arm down. "I'm sorry I…almost got you killed," he said, through lips numb with the awfulness of it and the ridiculous inadequacy of any apology.
"You need to see a doctor," Ukyo told him. Dumbly, he nodded, all thoughts of arguing his mental fitness long since fled. At least she wasn't touching him anymore. But when he peered cautiously up at her, with his head still ducked slightly and hair partly obscuring his view because of the odd angle, he saw the sunlight reflected off the surface of her eyes and her eyelashes flashing pale gold.
"Will you come with me, to the doctor?" she asked in a strange voice. What was it in her tone? She seemed…perhaps hesitant, as if asking him might bring on some fearful retribution. Or perhaps the memory of the previous day had not left her, and she thought that he might disappear again, right in front of her this time, in a wisp of smoke and brief fire.
"I—" he swallowed. "N-now? But--but it's only six o'clock!"
"Yeah," she said, "And I've got to be at school by eight. And you—"
She broke off suddenly at the sharp, unexpected noise of someone hammering at the door downstairs, and Ryoga jumped and let out a little "Eep!" Giving him a wan smile, which Ryoga barely saw out of the corner of his eye as he was still unable to meet her gaze completely, Ukyo got to her feet, patting off her knees and legs.
"It's Ran-chan," she said, sounding almost apologetic. Ryoga nodded, staring at the window behind her, trying to ignore the strangeness of the moment with the girl standing over him, his most hated rival at the door downstairs, and the feeling of something cold in his gut where electric brilliance had flared only a moment ago.
"I uh—I'd better go," she said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the door in which she was already edging. Ryoga turned his head and watched her go, her long hair swinging loose as she walked. He didn't know what else he ought to do. He stayed like that until she left, then jumped sharply when she suddenly stuck her head back in the room.
"And if I come back up and find you not here I swear that there will be no hell like the one I'll unleash on you when I hunt you down again, you hear me?"
"Um—okay?" he squeaked out, in a complete return to the form of two days ago, and Ukyo gave him one of her grim, thoroughly scary little smiles before popping back out of the hall and clattering down the stairs.
Ryoga heard her open the door, and then Ranma's voice.
--
Ukyo dashed down the stairs, holding her yukata above her ankles to avoid getting tangled in the material and dieing an untimely and embarrassing death from plunging headlong down the short flight of stairs into the eerily darkened restaurant below.
"Coming!" she called, hurriedly unlocking the doors and cracking one of them—not that she'd expected anyone but Ranma, yet she felt no need particular need to flaunt her barefooted, yukata-clad self at her neighbors this early in the day. Ranma stood cockily on the walk with one hand in a pocket, the other in a jaunty, superfluous wave.
"Hey," he said cheerily.
"Aren't you early?" she quirked an eyebrow at him before ushering him inside, glancing pointedly at the clock near the stairs, visible even in the darkened room.
"I guess," he said, "But I still have to go home, beat the crap outta Pop, eat, and be late for school. I just didn't think I could do all that without stopping by here first."
Ukyo felt a smile cross her face at that, though she knew she was being ridiculous. Yet a brilliant warmth suffused her, emanating from her throat and chest, momentarily silencing her ability to speak with the thought that Ran-chan cared enough to be worried about her.
But she should at least ask, right? No point in getting her hopes up only to have them ruthlessly dashed, as they inevitably, always were…
"Did you want to see Ryoga?" she asked, hesitancy audible in her voice. When Ranma merely shrugged, it was all she could do not to let out an explosive sigh of combined relief and unbridled joy.
"I don't really need to look at 'im, just as long as he's okay," her fiancée said suggestively, raising his eyebrows at her. Ukyo nodded, then, fearing that might be insufficient, hastened to add,
"He seems more…normal today, I guess. I mean he said he remembered the train—"
"Remembered? So, what, it's like more amnesia stuff?"
"I don't know." Holding the yukata closed with one hand for no particular reason, she ran her hand through her long hair with the other, making a face at how greasy it was—she hadn't been to the onsen since Ryoga had shown up, and now she felt smelly and disgusting. And here she was with her freaking fiancée in her sleeping yukata, all rumpled and stinky and…and…
There were times when Ukyo really really hated her life.
"I don't know if he forgot, exactly, but more like he…didn't really know what was happening at the time…?" off Ranma's confused expression she added, "He said he remembered it sometime early this morning, like he'd known about it before but only realized it was…important, that it was, you know, dangerous, just a couple hours ago. Said he woke up in the middle of the night."
Ranma's expression didn't seem to be changing any. Ukyo drooped slightly.
"You wanna, uh, talk to him?" she asked, waving vaguely at the stairs. "Maybe he can explain it better than me."
"Well…" he hesitated, "Do you need me to help bring 'im to the doc's?"
"I don't know…" she wavered. "Wait here, let me see what kind of shape he's in."
Clattering back up the stairs, she had a sudden moment of surging, irrational fear as the events of yesterday ran up and down the skin of her arms, neck, and back, and her fingers itched to clench into fists for no other reason than that she feared to find the room empty a second time, truly felt the cold darkness of fear, as of plunging suddenly down, down, through the stairs, through the floor, past the sewer lines and phone lines and deep into the earth, into the blackness, into the sound of death shrieking out a nightmare like a terrible bird, a monster, a hand squeezing the life out of her—
The seven-step stairway brought her to the doorway of her room, and Ryoga was sitting quietly in the morning light and shadow, drinking his tea.
I didn't die. I didn't die. I didn't I didn't…
She fought herself for a split second, an instant when all the fear of dieing on the tracks came back to her, while the cause of all her terror of the previous day sat innocently in her room, and she opened and shut her mouth and thought of screaming at him, of storming into the room and slamming her hand on the table, or into his face, thought of snatching the teacup from his hands and flinging it out the window, thought of screaming, screaming, screaming—
But she hadn't died. And he hadn't died. And—and when she'd hit him yesterday he'd been confused and half out of his mind with something neither of them really understood and he sat there now more lost than he'd been at any other time she'd ever seen him and her anger, now, and all her fear and self-loathing and disgust and shame were of no use to her, here, in this moment, with the sun shining on his hair and off of his shoulders in the beautiful, still, and silent room.
For a moment her own shoulders trembled, and then they, too, were still.
"Ryoga, sugar," she said quietly.
He looked at her. She noticed the tear tracks on his face faint and shining, and pretended not to.
"Do you want to talk to Ranma?" she asked softly, and the lost boy shrugged. Her eyes narrowed slightly, a pale flicker of the anger that burned perpetually behind her shields of a good Osaka businesswoman flashing briefly across her face—the anger she allowed herself at Ryoga's apparent unwillingness to admit to what was so obviously written across his face.
He wants to see someone normal, she thought bitterly, Ran-chan is more normal than me
But that wasn't fair. What sort of anchor to sanity could Ukyo offer, when she barely had a handle on a nearly-unquenchable rage from a lifetime of being the one nobody ever wanted, not even herself…of abandoning and being abandoned, of denying her true self to become an instrument of vengeance to no purpose whatsoever….
Ryoga wanted to talk to Ranma. It was written in every line of his body. He and Ranma were…well, she didn't know what they were supposed to be because it sure as hell wasn't like they were friends. Best enemies, maybe. Ranma was more a part of Ryoga's life than Ukyo had ever been. Actually almost everyone Ukyo knew was more a part of her Ran-chan's life than she was.
She allowed herself a small, weary sigh.
"Get up off your butt," she said, crossing to where he sat and ignoring his sudden flinch. "I promise not to hit you, but stand yourself up, will ya?" She started to reach down and get a hand under his shoulder, but he waved her off and got to his feet with no apparent difficulty, though she noticed when his fingers brushed lightly against the corner of her table.
Which was interesting.
"C'mon," she said, "We'll take you to the doctor's."
Downstairs Ranma grinned, Ryoga glared, Ranma made some inane crack about pork (Again with the pork? Ukyo wondered.) and the two young men barely avoided breaking into a brawl right there in her restaurant—only Ukyo's stepping between them and cussing a blue streak that would have blistered the ears of even Genma Saotome prevented serious harm from befalling her precious grill and, by extension, her fiancée and erstwhile houseguest.
Aside from that the three of them made it without incident to Dr. Tofu's clinic, with the help of a taxi and Ukyo's grudging depletion of her own funds. She threatened to take the cost of the taxi out of both boys' hides if they didn't sit quietly and make nice with each other, and they succeeded in sitting docilely the entire way with hardly a peep and almost no property destruction at all.
Ryoga apologized profusely about the broken backseat ashtray when they arrived and he discovered what he'd done.
"I didn't know I was leaning on it so hard, ha-ha," he laughed nervously, scratching the back of his head, and Ranma groaned and rolled his eyes and Ukyo paid extra to cover the cost of the damage and her own humiliation, all the while grinding her heel hard into the lost boy's instep.
Not that he noticed in any way whatsoever.
--
Morning classes passed in something of a blur as teachers came and went on seemingly soundless feet, the noise of chalk on the blackboard like the whispering of hushed voices in a hospital room. Ukyo sat at her desk and kicked a slipper-clad toe against a hollow metal leg. She tried to take notes, but things seemed to be happening too quickly for her to keep up; every time she blinked the world had changed, people jumping from place to place in digital progression like moments seen between the clicking of a camera shutter. Strangely, the instants when her eyes closed, when she looked out at the darkness behind her eyes from deep within her own mind seemed to drag for long, desert-dry stretches. Ukyo found herself licking her lips at odd moments and aching for water.
When Akane came up to her during the ten minute interval between math and science, during which Ukyo was staring out the window and not doing anything very productive at all, she raised her eyes to regard the short-haired girl without much surprise. Probably Akane was about to chew her out for keeping Ranma occupied away from the Tendo's; probably she had already exacted her pound of flesh from Ran-chan's hide by the means of a vitriolic tirade or vengeful cooking spree. Ukyo was feeling the strangeness of the last few days to the core of her being at the moment, and she wasn't sure that she felt up to a confrontation with the "un-cute fiancée." As Akane approached Ukyo noticed that the muscles of her own shoulders and back were tensing, her spine hardening, as the girl everyone knew was the favorite in the race to win Ran-chan's heart stepped up to Ukyo's desk and opened her dainty, perfect little mouth.
"Are you okay?" Akane asked, and Ukyo felt her own mouth drop open for a fraction of a second before she remembered herself and shut it in a hurry. But…that was Akane, wasn't it? Always so concerned about other people. Genuinely concerned, full of goodwill and human feeling. Ran-chan was like that too….It was people like her and Ryoga who were consumed by selfish desires, by the need for revenge or a sense of inadequacy. Perpetual loneliness, endless failure…
"Fine," Ukyo said, harder and more tersely than she'd intended, and she winced internally at the sound of her own voice. She sounded the way old cracked paint on a wall looked. She cleared her throat slightly and swallowed dry saliva.
"Sorry," Ukyo told the other girl, trying to force a little lightness into her voice, sitting up a bit straighter and pushing her (disgustingly unwashed) hair out of her face. "It's been a…weird couple of days."
"I thought so." Akane nodded. "Ranma came home late last night and seemed pretty…spastic, I guess. More than usual for him, anyway." The girl glanced over at the desk the pigtailed boy typically occupied but he'd apparently stepped outside for the moment—Ukyo could hear crashing somewhere down the hall and suspected that Kuno was in the vicinity. The idiot.
"He ran out early this morning, too, and said it was something about Ryoga." The pale, short-haired girl went on, still staring at the vacated desk, then without warning turned back to Ukyo and squatting down, putting herself on eye-level with the seated girl, "Is Ryoga—is he okay?"
Ukyo looked at her, but hesitated before answering.
"Finally she cleared her dusty throat. "He's at Dr. Tofu's now," she said, and heard an unexpected note in her voice—sadness?
"He's—he's alright, isn't he?" Akane's voice quavered slightly. Ukyo raised her eyebrows.
"Dr. Tofu's the only one who can tell you that," she said. "Guess you're really worried about him, huh?"
"He's a friend of mine," Akane said simply. And that really said everything anyone needed to know about Tendo Akane.
"Well, he—" but Ukyo was nowhere near to being ready to talk about the events of the previous day, and had absolutely no intention of discussing Ryoga's little impromptu stroll down the path of Certain, Bloody and Painful Death. She shuddered internally and on the surface it became a strange little gesture, smoothing out the broad surface of her desktop with flattened palms and spread fingers, as though she were swimming.
"Ranma won't tell me what's happening," Akane continued, getting to her feet. Students were streaming back into the room. The chime sounded. Over the noise and chaos of it Ukyo almost missed Akane saying,"I asked Cologne if she would help."
Ukyo blinked up at her, as the sound of the science teacher's voice haranguing Ranma thundered down the hall. She wondered why she hadn't thought to ask Cologne for help.
Probably because of Shampoo, she mused. Ukyo would never willingly visit the Nekohanten unless compelled to be some outside threat or force, and the thought did not recommend itself to her now even in light of events of the previous day, and all her newly-acquired insights into Ryoga's current mental…situation. But Akane…Akane moved easily between the small, almost mutually exclusive spheres of the girls who should for all intense and purposes have simply been her rivals, who thought of her (well Shampoo did anyway) as little more than an obstacle. Ukyo liked to think she was a little more adult about her dealings with Akane, but even so—had she been in the same position, would she have considered seeking out the old matron for help? In her heart, Ukyo doubted that very much. Akane, though, did it all easily, without fear or hesitation, and she did it for a friend. Not even out of love.
Ukyo, after all, held no illusions about Akane's true feelings for Ryoga—at least as they currently stood.
"That was…probably a good idea," Ukyo said faintly, through strangely stiffened lips. Akane looked a bit relieved at the comment and Ukyo had a sudden flash of sympathy for the girl, worrying about Ryoga all on her own at the Tendo's.
"Can we talk more at lunch?" Akane asked then, and Ukyo found herself nodding, feeling slow and stupid next to the vibrant, caring girl. Akane scurried back to her seat at the same moment that the science teacher stalked into the room, driving a chastened Ranma before him. Ukyo saw Akane catch her (their?) fiancee's eye and mouth the word, "Lunchtime" at him, and the pigtailed boy glanced back at Ukyo and then again at Akane before nodding, jaw set and looking uncharacteristically serious.
It was going to be a long couple of hours until lunch time. They had a hell of a lot to talk about.
--
He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped, and stared out of the window. It had a screen, which was fortunate and a bit unusual, and the sound of the wind in the trees like the noise of a distant tide poured into the room and washed clean the walls, the sheets, his hands, and all the surfaces of things.
He'd forgotten, for a little while, how vast the world was. Forgotten its hugeness, the all-encompassing emptiness, the storm of impossible silence that grew with every breath, every step, every tiny prayer exhaled into the hollow void all around. Exhaled into unbeing.
"Mr. Hibiki?"
He looked up. The doctor was there, smiling. He smiled back because it seemed to be the appropriate response, and in the distance chimes were ringing with a sound like nothing else in all the world.
"I'd forgotten," he said, without moving his hands at all. The doctor came into the room.
"Forgotten what?" the taller man asked. Ryoga nodded in the direction of the window.
"There. What's there."
"Outside?" Dr. Tofu looked more closely. "The trees? The wall?"
"Something else," Ryoga told him quietly.
In a high place, the noise of the wind A great distance. The ocean, the stars, and the sky.
Absolution. Stillness without pain.
What would you give up?
Inhale.
A moment.
Exhale.
"What would you give up?"
"Mr. Hibiki!"
Ryoga inhaled suddenly and his eyes snapped wide open, and only then did he realize that he'd closed them. The doctor was standing over him, looking concerned—when had he come into the room? Ryoga looked up at him and proffered a faint, bemused smile. There was a distance in the things around him, a translucency of being that had nothing whatsoever to do with vision.
"What just happened, Mr. Hibiki?"
Ryoga, mouth still slightly open, shut it before shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.
"I think---I think I must be tired. I didn't sleep much last night…"
"You said something just now, before you opened your eyes."
"Did I?"
"You don't remember?"
Ryoga shook his head. His lips were dry. His mouth was dry. He was tired.
"You said, 'What would you give up?'"
Ryoga blinked rapidly, trying to clear is blurring vision, to push aside the exhaustion. He licked his lips and swallowed.
"That's a strange thing to say," Ryoga heard himself say, distantly. His mouth seemed to move by itself and once again the words were individual and bright against his lips, teeth, and tongue. Like melting ice water, like drops of individual melody trapped forever in singular instants the moment that they occurred.
The doctor was looking at him carefully. Finally, he let out a soft, faint breath.
"Yes," the doctor said to him quietly. "Yes, I suppose it is."
A/N: Sorry for the delay on this--I had quite a bit of material drafted for chapter 5 which I've scrapped, so I had to create about half this chapter out of thin air when I went to put it together. Thus, it took a good bit longer than I'd hoped it would. I'm not quite sure when 6 will be ready to go, so please be patient.
To those who have taken the time to review, a special thanks. A story like this really can't stand on its own legs; it needs a little help. I really appreciate everyone who has taken a moment to let me know their thoughts on this. ()