6: samudaya (attachment, desire/the origin of suffering)
"You're a man of hidden depths," Dr. Tofu said to him later. Ryoga was sitting propped up on the bed's pillows and doing his best to while away the time with the thickest book he'd been able to find on the doctor's shelves: Natsume Sōseki's I am a Cat.
"I didn't take you for the bookish type," the doctor clarified, smiling slightly and gesturing at the book in the boy's large, rough hands. Ryoga didn't bristle at the offhanded statement. He knew that the doctor wasn't the sort of person to take a swipe at somebody to make himself feel important; he was merely stating a fact. Ryoga didn't look like the bookish type. Even after having cleaned up in the clinic's little shower and donning a fresh set of soft pajamas which the doctor kept on hand for use by his...unique patients...Ryoga remained a powerfully muscled, droopy-haired individual and generally seemed more suited to rampaging about the place smashing things to pieces than sitting quietly on a bed engrossed in a tome of mammoth proportions.
"I'm really not," Ryoga told the doctor mildly. Shutting the heavy book and setting it aside, he sat up and dangled his legs over the edge of the bed. "But when there's nothing to do for hours and hours..." he shrugged.
"Test results take time, I'm afraid," the doctor said apologetically.
"You don't mind me borrowing, do you?" Ryoga asked, and the doctor waved a dismissive hand. "Is it okay if I walk around? I've been stuck here for a while..."
"Well..." the doctor hesitated, frowning slightly, "It's not what I'd wish you to do, but I suppose that just a bit of moving around the clinic would be acceptable. I'd ask that you not over-exert yourself, though. A few minutes at a time, and no more."
"All right," Ryoga said carefully, amazed all over again by the sound of the words.
Speech was an extraordinary thing. A beautiful human thing. He picked up the book and smoothed his thumb over the cool surface of the cover. After a few more cautionary words the doctor left him alone, and Ryoga kicked his heels against the smooth bright floor. After a few moments he sighed and set the book aside, on the soft soft white clinic bed, and got up and went over to the window. He rested his left hand on the stiff pearl-grey curtain and looked out at the trees and the little garden the doctor maintained, and at the whitewashed stone wall overgrown with moss and vines. The sun sparked, bright and real, over the fresh green leaves and the new shoots and stems of spring, bending and waving in a gentle breeze. An airplane passed overhead, too high to leave a trail, angling off toward the horizon. Ryoga watched it for a while, wondering where it was going and how many people were going with it. The fuselage flashed in the April sun.
It was now well after three o'clock. He'd been at the clinic since around six. The experience had proved to be exactly as tedious as being trapped in Ukyo's little tatami room, with the added bonus that much of the place was done up in varying shades of white and grey. In addition, a lovely antiseptic aroma permeated the air and made his hair stand on end if he allowed himself to think about it for even a moment. It was the nasal equivalent of nails on a blackboard.
Ryoga knew that he needed more practical experience at being indoors for long stretches at a time. Other people managed it easily; the doctor wasn't climbing the walls to get away from the smell and Ukyo herself seemed more than comfortable hanging around inside the little box with two stories that she called a home. Once upon a time Ryoga himself had attended school and spent the better part of his time in his own home, or at the very least in his neighborhood, but his sense of direction seemed to have grown drastically worse over the last year or so that he'd been hunting Ranma. He hadn't even seen his own house in six months. It was ridiculous!
He turned back the bed where the book lay still and unalive. The silence of the room moved slowly in the spaces between the walls, like the rippling of curtains in an invisible breeze. He could feel his exhaustion scrabbling at his eyelids and up and down the back of his neck, cold and dry like the fingers of an old woman. He shuddered convulsively, a kind of slow creeping shiver that turned into a brief uncontrollable spasm that twitched his shoulders, arms, hands and spine—a moment of organic reality, a capitulation to his humanity. Hibiki Ryoga was not indestructible. He rubbed the back of his neck and resisted the urge to run a hand through his thick hair. Despite the shower and the soft white pajamas he'd been fitted with, Ryoga still felt filthy. The convenience of the heated shower could do nothing for his hair, which the good doctor had kindly informed him in no uncertain terms he was not allowed to wash, and Ryoga had been subjected to what he now considered to be one of the five great humiliations of his life.
He'd worn a shower cap.
The memory of it made him shudder all over again.
Somewhere a clock struck the quarter-hour, and Ryoga heard a door opening and shutting, and soft voices, and then the sound of footsteps in the hall, far too light to be Dr. Tofu's. For some reason a sudden electric feeling snapped through his skull: lighting without thunder.
"Ukyo?" he called, and then wondered why.
A familiar face presented itself at the doorway, then, on top of a body leaning comfortably against the jamb, hands in her pockets.
"Yo," Ranma said, barefoot and with her sleeves rolled up to accommodate her smaller female frame.
"Ranma," Ryoga said in surprise, "What are you doing here?"
"Came to check on ya." She pushed away from the door and padded across the room, female hips making her walk something decidedly less masculine than the boy used in his more ordinary form. Ryoga barely noticed, except for the brief surge of jealousy that stabbed through him at the fact that at least Ranma could walk on two legs even when he'd been transformed.
Life was so unfair.
"Why would you—" Ryoga began, as Ranma bounced onto the bed in the exact way he would have done as a man, yet somehow seeming offensively cute in doing so as a girl. Dr. Tofu's book, disturbed the by the jostling of the mattress, started to slip off the bed and Ryoga yelped and dove for it, catching it just before it hit the floor.
"Why the hell are you a girl, anyway?" he demanded nastily, planting his butt on the floor and drawing his legs up into an Indian-style sitting position, cradling the book protectively. He shot an irritated glare at the boy trapped in a girl's body and bared a bit of fang in a partial sneer, just to remind his well-wisher that he didn't need her/his pity, thank-you-very-much.
"Freak rainstorm," Ranma said airily, and Ryoga growled low in his throat at this reminder of how small an inconvenience Ranma's curse really was, and how little it interfered with the pigtailed boy's day-to-day life. Ranma was the only victim of Jusenkyo who attended school regularly—how fair was that? "Doc's boilin' some water for me now." She squinted down at Ryoga. "Why you sittin' on the floor?"
"I like the floor!" Ryoga snapped. There was no way in any world he was going to sit on any bed, anywhere, with a busty, extremely female Ranma. The visual image alone was enough to make him want to go beat his head against a wall until the entire building fell down around them.
"Ain't it dirty?" Ranma crouched and peered over the edge of the bed in a catlike pose. Ryoga scowled.
"It ai—it's not dirty! And where'd you learn to speak Japanese anyway, from a bunch of homeless bums?"
"Nothin' wrong with my Japanese," Ranma growled, grinding a pointy elbow into the top of Ryoga's head. "If you're not gonna get up here so's I can talk to you like a normal person, I guess I'd better come down there." She popped off the bed and on to the floor. They glared at each other a bit, being longtime enemies and all.
"So, uh," Ranma said eventually, leaning back in a posture of complete comfort with legs folded up in the lotus position, "Ukyo said you remembered 'bout almost bein' clobbered yesterday."
"She did clobber m—oh, you mean the train?"
"Yah."
"Oh." Ryoga looked down at the book where it rested in his lap. "Yeah. About two or three o'clock this morning...I remembered." His voice faded into silence and he bit back a sigh.
"So I guess you were real grateful to Ucchan for savin' your life 'n stuff, right?"
"Uh...I suppose..."
Ranma snorted. "Ya better be, or I'll beat a damn confession of gratitude outta ya, even with a hole in your piggy head."
"Empty threats, Ranma, empty threats."
"Watch your mouth, Porky," Ranma snapped. "Anyway, if you remembered about the train maybe it means you remembered—"
"Your girlfriend?" Ryoga drawled, and was rewarded when Ranma's blushed a delicate pink and then punched him in the arm.
"I mean Akane, you jerk," she growled.
"It isn't like that, though," Ryoga continued in a genial tone, eyes fixed on some distant point as he grabbed Ranma and smushed his fists against her shell-like ears. "I mean I always remembered about the train, it was just that I didn't understand how it could hurt me." A punch to the stomach from a tiny fist like a piston doubled him over and Ranma sat up, massaging her ears.
"So you're not getting' your memories back then?"
"No," said Dr. Tofu as he entered and upended a large kettle over Ranma. "And I would ask that you please refrain from physically attacking my patient any more, Ranma."
"Sorry, doc."
"I'm sure this sort of behavior is perfectly normal for the two of you," Dr. Tofu went on, gazing sternly at both of the contrite-seeming young men, as steam rose from one of them and dissipated gently into the air. "But, as to difficult as it may be for you to believe, Ryoga most emphatically does not need any more holes in his head. That means the both of you behave or I'll throw you out," here he pointed at Ranma, "And you can discover all of the delightful wonders of enforced bed rest. Have I made myself clear?"
"Yes doctor," the chorused.
"And get up off of the floor," the doctor added on his way out the door. "Come sit on the couches out front if you must."
Ranma, hopping easily to his feet in a smooth, gravity-defying motion, glanced at Ryoga and to his surprise saw the bandana-less boy getting up with some difficulty—barely a fractional hesitation that anyone else would not even have noticed, but to Ranma's trained eye it spoke volumes. He pursed his lips. Sure, him and Ryoga weren't exactly best buddies or whatever, but...
On the other hand, there was no way in hell Ryoga'd forgive him for offering to help—if anything the idiot would probably try to kill him right then and there in the little room. Ranma shook his head hard, like a dog, sending lukewarm drops of water flying in every direction. Ryoga gave an irritated, spluttering cry of indignation.
"The goddamn hell is wrong with you?" the lost boy demanded, wiping his face and, Ranma noted, leaning heavily on the bed as he did so. While the other boy was thus distracted, Ranma grabbed his by the shoulders and started hustling him down the hall. Ryoga gave a startled squawk when he was grabbed and immediately began protesting, even as he was wiping Ranma-water out of his eyes.
"What the hell are you doing you cross-dressing idiot? Damn you to hell Ranma, I can walk on my own, my legs aren't broken you—"
He finally shut up when Ranma shoved him unceremoniously into a comfy chair and perched himself on the arm of the couch. Ryoga's face was a stormy red.
"I'm not broken," Ryoga growled, in his most menacing Ranma-prepare-to-die tones, "I don't need your help."
"Kept ya from wanderin' off, didn't I?" Ranma dismissed his anger with a wave and ignored Ryoga's animal growl. "An' I didn't give ya a piggyback or nothin' so just quit your squealin' already."
Ryoga's hands gripped the arms of the chair he'd been dropped into, and Ranma heard the sounds of splintering wood.
"Ranmaaaaaaa—" the lost boy began in a low snarl, but was prevented from completing the thought by the well-timed arrival of two girls, one clad in a powder-blue jumper and t-shirt combo, the other in a boy's school uniform. "Prepare to—Ukyo!"
The change was instantaneous and, to anyone who didn't know the boy better, would have been remarkable. Ryoga 'eep'd' and sat back quickly in the chair, trying hard to appear as if he'd been resting quietly and not at all about to leap across the coffee table at Ranma and attempt to pummel the pigtailed boy into oblivion.
Ukyo was not fooled in the slightest. Eyes narrowing, she kicked off her sneakers and marched across the room to stand directly in front of the mighty young man, who cringed.
"Have you been fighting?" she roared at him, and even Akane flinched.
"No, Ukyo!"
"It's true!" Ranma said hastily, getting to his feet and laying a placating hand on Ukyo's slim shoulders. "No fighting here!" He'd seen how angry the girl had been the previous day and had hoped that a good night's rest might have put a damper on some of her more violent tendencies toward his longtime rival. Apparently that was not the case.
Ukyo, for her part, seethed outwardly, while internally trying to ignore Ranchan's heavy warm hand on her shoulder, and the strange dismay the sight of the wide-eyed boy with the bandaged head in front of her engendered.
God, what was wrong with her? And what the hell was the matter with Ryoga? Couldn't he learn to rest quietly for two freaking seconds together without picking some sort of fight? Arrrgh, he was such a—a loser, a jerk, a jackass! Dammit!!
Shrugging of Ranma's hand, she resisted the urge to throw her bag across the room in frustration and took two sharp steps away, turning her back so no one could see her face. The lunchtime discussion between herself, Ranma, and Akane had been somewhat calming, but it hadn't done a whole hell of a lot for her awareness of how filthy she still was, nor had it done anything to decrease the strange sensation that seemed to be filling her at this moment, like cold water pouring into a dark hollow place. Her chest rose and fell sharply as she fought for mastery of herself. Why did she feel so horrible, so hollow, so empty? What was this taste in her mouth? What was this darkness at the edge of the world, what was this grief that consumed her?
She swallowed and blinked rapidly.
"I think some introductions are in order," she heard Akane saying from somewhere behind her, and swallowing again she turned, sniffling slightly and hoping no-one would notice. Ryoga was looking at the short-haired girl with a slightly bemused expression.
"But we already met, yesterday," the lost boy offered, shifting slightly in the chair, but trailed off under the weird stares both Akane and Ranma were giving him. He sighed and looked down at his hands. "...but...it wasn't r-really yesterday, was it?" he finished in a small voice. Akane shook her head.
"I'm sorry for the way I reacted," she said. Ryoga's gaze remained fixed on his lap, and he absently lifted a hand to finger the fresh white bandages that until now he'd almost managed to forget were there.
"I'm sorry I don't remember you," he told her quietly. And he was sorry, because she seemed like a nice person, and if they did know each other--even without the whole dubious "love" question--.it still seemed unfair to her that he simply had no recollection. How could something like this have even happened? How did an acquaintance turn into a stranger overnight, how was a face wiped from memory altogether, along with all the other aspects that made up a human being? Size and shape, voice and gestures. What about the way she smiled, or the way her hand moved when she talked, or the way she carried herself when she walked? What about the reflection of the sunlight off the skin of her hand when she clutched her school bag in slender fingers? How could something like that be removed? It wasn't a matter of "forgetting" or "remembering," it was as if...
As if something had been ripped out of him, something as real as the bones of his feet or the tongue in his mouth. Something that belonged to him had been taken. He'd been robbed.
They both had.
"I don't think it's your fault," Akane was saying. Ryoga blinked up owlishly at her. "Ukyo," the short-haired girl continued, "She told me you're missing a month of your life. Is that—" she swallowed, as if the thought pained her. "Is it true?"
"Mm." He nodded dropping his eyes, feeling somehow ashamed. But he should be ashamed, shouldn't he? After all, out of the four people currently in the room he was the only one with a crippling gap in his memory, wasn't he? And here the rest of them were, crowded around him, staring down with eyes full of what looked so very much like pity….He swallowed. And Ukyo'd come in looking like she wanted nothing more than to sock him in the jaw, and his fists still itched to pay Ranma back for his earlier digs, and now...now this Akane person's eyes were full of a shining sadness all on account of him and...and...
And he couldn't even remember how he knew her.
He pushed back a little farther into the chair, pressing his spine into softness and licking his lips. Not knowing where else to turn he shot a pleading look in Ukyo's direction. To his neverending astonishment she caught his gaze, and sudden understanding flashed across her face.
"Come over here a sec, Ranchan," she said sweetly, and Ryoga jerked in shock at the sudden speed with which Akane pivoted on her heel at the exact moment that Ukyo took Ranma's hand and started dragging him in the direction of the couch, cuddling up to him in a most fiancée-like manner, making little cooing noises.
"Rrrannnnmaaa!" the girl in front of Ryoga went from sweet and concerned to demonic rage in less time than a formula-1 racer took to go 0-60, miss the hairpin turn, and barrel off the tracks into the defenseless,cr wd. Ryoga first winced, then gaped as Akane decked her fiancée, slamming his face through the tiled floor with a single practiced, well-placed blow. Chunks of tile and fine white dust flew up all around them. Ukyo stepped aside with a bored expression as debris rained around her feet; apparently this extraordinary violence qualified as a fairly ordinary occurrence. Ryoga thought he saw her stifle a yawn, but it might have been his imagination.
Maybe that's why I was in love with her? Ryoga pondered bemusedly, and only realized his mouth was hanging open when Ukyo leaned across the table, reached out a long hand, and shut it with a quiet click.
"Is that...normal?" he sounded shell-shocked to his own ears. Ukyo just shrugged as she settled back on the couch.
"'Bout as normal as anything 'round here ever is," Ranma grumbled, peeling his face off the floor with an audible pop! Ryoga only counted it a blessing that Akane hadn't cracked a water main with the blunt instrument of her fiancée's skull. Ryoga just knew that would have ended unpleasantly for him. Things like that always did.
"What's all the noise out here?" Dr. Tofu asked, padding into the room on slippered feet and completely ignoring the massive hole in the middle of the floor. "Oh! Akane, Miss Ukyo, I didn't know you were here! Would you like some tea?"
The girls were suddenly all sweetness and sugar cookies as they chorused an affirmative, and Ranma groused as he flung himself down in the chair next to Ryoga's and as far away from Akane as currently possible. Cracking the tile had left his face a bit red, and Ryoga couldn't help but grin at his discomfort.
"Ya better wipe that smartass grin offa your face, pig-boy," Ranma growled in a low voice, audible only two the two of them. Ryoga brushed some imaginary dirt off his knees and went right on grinning. Akane and Ukyo settled on the couch across from them and when the doctor entered he brought for a moment a serenity that encompassed the entire room, so that Ranma didn't even launch an attack on the still-grinning lost boy—not even when Ryoga snagged the manjuu that he'd obviously been reaching for. It was probably just a coincidence, after all. Yeah. That was it: a coincidence.
The girls chatted lightly about school, and Ranma joined in animatedly after a few moments of extended sulking, cheering right up and seeming to have completely forgotten the violence of the previous moment completely. And I'm the one with a memory problem, Ryoga mused, marveling at the ease with which Ranma shrugged off insults to his person; then again, considering the madness that made up the lives of Ryoga and everyone he knew, perhaps Ranma's attitude was more suited to dealing with the insanity. It was probably to the benefit of a great many people that Ranma wasn't the sort to hold a grudge over every personal slight.
On the other hand, maybe the pig-tailed boy was just an idiot. Watching Ranma guffaw loudly at some bone-headed remark he himself had made, Ryoga figured the 'idiot' hypothesis was probably a lot more viable.
Ryoga tried to glance surreptitiously at Akane as he nibbled on the snacks, attempting to catch a glimpse of anything, any one thing, which might trigger a spark of recognition for the girl whom both Ukyo and Ranma had insisted was the object of his undying affection. Honestly, he wasn't sure how well he was managing at being surreptitious, though. He knew that he wasn't exactly the most gifted of individuals when it came to things like subterfuge, or anything as complex as actual lying.
But...
But...
Hadn't he been, once?
There...was there something? At that moment, when she turned her head, when the sunlight flashed off the curve of her throat? And she smiled, and Ukyo said something that made her laugh, and she closed her eyes briefly as her lips parted in genuine amusement.
Some other time. Some other place.
Did I lie to you? He asked silently, blinking rapidly, trying to hear the noise of voices over the sounds of memories that weren't there. Someone touched his face, someone kissed him lightly, someone...
someone whispered,
"the stars remain steadfast"
remain steadfast
His realized that his head hurt. Pain, there was pain, unaccountable and distant and dull. How long had it been hurting? Had it only begun to, or had he only just noticed it now? Akane, face still transfigured with something like joy, smiled at him with unbearable kindness. There were lights in the distance, faint lights, and oscillations of sound...
What would you give up?
The sounds a rushing of the tides or a finger on a glass, wind-chimes ringing and ringing in endless circular sound, metal, glass, refracting brilliances in edges and fractured light—
"Ryoga man, you okay?"
He blinked, and remembered to breathe, and realized that he was staring at a point somewhere beyond the wall, half-eaten manjuu gripped lightly in one hand, the other hand almost, but not quite, touching the side of his skull.
His chest rose and fell with light, shallow breaths. Cold, clean, rushing like water.
"H-headache," he said, eyes fixing once again on Akane whose mouth had become a little "o" of concern. He squeezed his eyes shut . "Hurts..."
"Do you remember something?" came the girl's voice, and it grated, an agony of cracking ice. He shook his head, then gasped with renewed pain as the gesture rushed down the inside of his skull to his spine like falling stones crashing down the side of a mountain. He pressed a closed fist to his forehead and his mouth opened in a voiceless cry. Air rushed into the empty space where his jaw came unhinged, filling the hollow space. There was a crash, somewhere else, and someone shouted something.
"Oh god..." a man's voice—the doctor? And footsteps, someone running into the room. "Ranma, help me—get his other shoulder, we have to..."
Strong hands grasped his arms, lifted him on both sides to stand, and his hands clenched and unclenched as his body tried to curl in on itself. In a matter of moments, in the midst of a great darkness and terrible light, he felt the world subsume him. There was a voice somewhere. He didn't know where it came from. He didn't know where it went. The world opened at his feet; he saw the rushing darkness, and a light filled all his vision. Came from nowhere, went to nowhere. Breath filled his body: water and air, sunlight and glass, snow falling into cherry blossoms into white skin into emptiness. He stumbled into nothingness, he saw the shapes of trees, he heard a chaos of noise from some great distance, a clashing of cymbals, a crying of horns. Voices shouting unintelligibly and the autumn sun shone on the trunks of trees and he was falling down, through the grass, into depth, into darkness, into the deep earth and in the distance he heard the voices of birds, and a girl was crying.
white light
stars
pain
someone said
breathe
"The stars remain steadfast."
Dust-dry, the desert. A waste of sand and burning sunlight. The blue cracking sky snapping wide like the wings of a bird lifted on the wind, moving up, back and away. Away the sky and all shadows, away the coolness of the deep earth, and all stillness of mind. Away the dreams of cool darkness, galleries of trees, deep wildernesses. Vast the sky and the enormous blue emptiness, the falling without falling that subsumes all self: enormous, huge, hollow, wide.
goodbye Tokyo
goodbye, goodbye...
The thunder of the wind came upon him without warning, blowing up in a storm of flying sand that assaulted his eyes, nose and mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his jaw closed and clapped his hands over his ears to shield them. He fell onto his knees and huddled into a ball, trying to protect as much of his body as possible from the driving, shrieking horror.
Ryoga huddled close to the ground as the stinging sands lashed him, shredded his clothes and tore at his hair like steel-strong fingers. He fought to draw breath after agonized breath in the midst of the tumultuous frenzy. The shriek of the wind was the voice of an old woman, and in the darkness behind his tightly clamped eyes he thought that he momentarily caught a glimpse of wild, flying hair.
The wind died to a low howling after some interminable stretch of time; long moments of air-less agony during which he struggled with increasing desperation against the weakness of his own body. Finally he let his hands fall from where they clutched at the sides of his head, and, gasping, he allowed his body to slump sideways on to the sand. The clouds and noise were lifting, and from far away a great silence rolled in.
As the last of the winds died, Ryoga drew a clear breath. He opened his eyes. His breath came in deep hard gasps and he swallowed once or twice, laying a hand on his chest, forcing air into his lungs.
"God..." he whispered hoarsely. The dry air had sucked all moisture from his mouth.
goodbye Tokyo
He stood up, looking around, turning in a circle.
"Ranma? Doctor? Ukyo? A...Akane?"
The wind answered: nothing, nothing.
He looked down at his hands. The backs were reddened from the abuse of the sand. His clothes had been shredded. But he wasn't wearing the white pajamas the doctor had so kindly lent him to wear. No, he was in his usual clothes, black shirt and pants, battered shoes, socks and leg bindings. Cautiously he lifted a hand, and felt the familiar and lately-absent well-worn softness of his usual bandanna.
"Is this really happening?" he asked, because it seemed a logical question. But if it was a dream he wouldn't be asking, would he? He pushed two fingers against the side of his head, gingerly at first, then when there was no pain he pushed harder, harder, against the spot where the hole had been, where something had been...had been...
Been torn out of him. Something had been torn out of his head.
Some knowledge. Some feeling, some quality of self.
But there was no pain. Only the silence of the desert, the vastness of the chalk-blue sky. And the sun, the sun...
He looked down at the ground and saw, resting innocuously in the sand close to where he'd been lying a few moments before, the black bulk of his lately missing pack, red umbrella perched neatly atop it. He licked his dry lips and glanced around. When had he seen a desert? The last time there had been a desert he'd been...
He'd been...
Dreaming?
Peering into the blackness...scrub, grasses...hills limned in moonlight
Someone said, "What would you give up?"
"What would you...?" he exhaled the words. Hadn't the doctor said...he'd asked...something. Some broken thing. Dreams and memories and the pain that was gone.
The desert at night.
Someone said
"Goodbye, Tokyo."
He reached down with a hesitant hand and lightly touched the straps of his pack. He expected something, some electric spark, but there was nothing. Just the roughness of the material and, when he lifted it, the familiar, comfortable weight of his whole life.
He pulled the umbrella out through the straps that bound it to the top of the pack and opened it experimentally. Absolutely nothing happened, except that it offered some minor protection from the relentless, copper coin sun.
Rooting in the pack, he saw all the items that had been there the last time that he'd seen it. How long ago had that been? A month; that was what Ukyo had said. It was pretty hard to believe. And where the hell was he now, anyway? He pulled out one of his precious canteens and allowed himself a couple of mouthfuls of water, then clipped it to the outside of the pack where it would be within easy reach. Grabbing a yellow long-sleeved shirt he hastily exchanged it for the black one and, with a comfortable practiced motion he once again shouldered the reassuring weight of the pack.
Holding the umbrella over his head, thankful for the small shade it offered, he picked a direction at random and started walking.
--
"Well shit," Ranma said as he back out of the room while Dr. Tofu did...doctorly things, and Ryoga's limp body lay unresponsive on the recently mussed white sheets. The lost boy's head lolled and although his eyes were half-open only the whites were visible. Ryoga's eyelids fluttered as though he struggled in the midst of some dream.
Akane and Ucchan came racing down the hall just as he was leaving the room, and Ranma fielded them both, spreading his arms wide and shaking his head, then gently but firmly hustling them both back into the front waiting area.
"What the hell is going on?" Ukyo demanded, stomping her foot, eyes bright and wide. Ranma stammered; he didn't really feel that he was in a position to answer that question.
"I don't—I, he just kind of, I mean you saw what I saw right? So you know as much as I do at this point—"
Akane was glowing with a faint battle aura, though she seemed momentarily unsure whether she ought to direct it at Ranma or not—this was a rare situation where circumstances were for once not obviously directly due to some boneheaded action on Ranma's part.
"I want to see him!" Ucchan demanded, trying to shove past Ranma's larger, heavier frame, but Ranma was for once in no mood allow her to have her own way, and resisted as best he could by simply not moving. "Dammit Ranchan, is he sick? What the hell is happening back there? Get out of my way!"
"Ucchan, please I—I don't think—"
"Perhaps," interjected an aged, dry voice, that sent a thrill up Ranma's spine in spite of himself, and caused even Ukyo to blanch slightly, "Perhaps you two young ladies, if it isn't too much trouble, might let the good doctor work in peace while he struggles to protect the life of your friend. Unless, of course, you wish him to be permanently damaged, in which case by all means you ought to go dashing down that corridor and putting yourself in the doctor's way."
As one, the three martial artists turned to regard the impossibly tiny, wizened form seated on the couch's green upholstery. They gawped at her as Cologne calmly polished off the last of her manjuu, then sipped nonchalantly at Akane's lukewarm tea.
In a sudden flurry of motion Dr. Tofu almost ran into the room, headed for the nearest telephone.
"I'm going to call an ambulance," he was saying rapidly, "Ranma, Ukyo, Akane, I want you to—"
"I would highly recommend against that course of action," the Amazon Matriarch interrupted smoothly. Dr. Tofu stopped with his hand halfway to the phone and his jaw dropped.
"What are you doing here?" he asked in a decidedly unimpressed-by-3,000-years-of-Chinese-history sort of voice. The children didn't even see the old woman move; she was simply suddenly across the room and casually whacking Tofu in the head with her staff, known and feared wherever disrespectful martial artists congregated. Ukyo and Akane both winced at the hollow "Thunk!"
"Young man, I am here because Miss Tendo asked that I assist with this somewhat unusual problem. I believe that my unique expertise in all matters mystical may be more helpful in resolving the circumstances in which Mr. Hibiki and by extension my son-in-law and the two girls here have found themselves embroiled."
"But didn't you just get through telling us not to get in the doctor's way?" Ukyo demanded, hoisting a skeptical eyebrow. She hadn't liked the way the Matriarch referred to her as one of 'the two girls', as if she didn't even warrant being addressed by her own name. She flinched involuntarily when the scary old lady glanced in her direction, but remarkably no violence was forthcoming.
"Indeed I did, Miss. Kuonji, but that is because the two of you are children," she gave the word a special quality of not-quite-scorn that only a 300 year old bat of a woman could possibly enunciate with such relish, "Whereas I myself am actually in a position to help your Mr. Hibiki. Or perhaps you would rather he were shipped off to the hospital where his mental state will continue to degrade until he is finally left as merely a shell of the person you once knew? This is not a condition that can be resolved by your modern medicine." Here she turned back to the doctor, who was standing with one hand resting on the telephone, clearly unwilling to take the word of the old woman at face value, no matter how many times he had witnessed the effectiveness of ancient Chinese and Japanese magic and techniques in interrupting the lives of unsuspecting martial artists.
Ukyo was busy muttering how Ryoga wasn't 'her' anything, but both Cologne and the doctor were ignoring her. Instead, Dr.Tofu said, simply, "You have two minutes to explain yourself. After that, if you can't convince me, I'm calling an ambulance and sending him to the nearest hospital."
"Fair enough," Cologne said simply, and tapped the tip of her staff lightly against the tiled floor as she paused for a moment, then began to speak.
"As you may or may not know there are a great many demons, monsters, gods and lesser deities which remain in the world today long after their followers and those cultures which once worshiped them have disappeared forever from the face of the earth. The tribes and nations which reside in the Byankala mountains near my home are one such example of these remnants of ancient eras, though they are by far neither the most powerful, nor the most ancient--and those beings are mortal for the most part. Beings of much greater power exist, many of whom predate human beings by thousands or even millions of years.
"At Akane Tendo's request, I researched Mr. Hibiki's condition—what little I've been able to find out about it and observe for myself--using what resources I have available to me here, all of which I assure you are far more esoteric than any which you yourself possess, my young doctor, though I do find your overall willingness to delve into the knowledge of ancient traditions very admirable. At any rate, through diligent research and some hasty fortune-telling, I've been able to discern some of the cause of the young man's problem."
Dr. Tofu eased his hand off the phone, but his brow remained furrowed and his lips were pressed tightly together. He waited for the woman to continue.
Cologne was not in the least discomfited by the stern silence of the young man who towered over her. She continued, "I can say with great confidence that Ryoga's condition will only continue to worsen, and that exposing him at this point to Akane was a grave error, and one which has hastened the degeneration."
"What degeneration?" Ukyo demanded, and was ignored. Akane tightly gripped Ukyo's left arm with both small strong hands, and met her eyes imploringly. Ukyo subsided, with a strange sense of gratitude for the unexpected contact.
"Ryoga has a mark on him. I don't yet know which mark it is, but I have been able to observe enough of the damage to his ki to be able to say that at I strongly believe I can at least identify the nature the being that is responsible for his memory loss, his loss of time, and for the injury to his head and mind."
"Then—it's a person? It's something alive?" Ukyo leaned forward eagerly, and only Akane's tight grip on her arm prevented her from dashing across the room and attempting to lift Cologne up by the front of her shirt—a decidedly suicidal move for any martial artist stupid enough to try it.
"'Alive'?" The old woman scoffed. "Fool girl, have you not heard me at all? No, whatever has done this is a mystical or eldritch being, of great and terrible power. Too great, perhaps, for me or anyone else to undo. It remains for us to discover both what the nature of this being is and what reason, if any, it had for doing such injury to the young man."
Ukyo slumped in Akane's grip, and the short-haired girl released her hesitantly, allowing Ukyo to momentarily turn her face away as she shut her eyes tightly.
Demons and lame-ass magic...what kind of world are we living in?
"You believe that you can help him?" Tofu asked the old woman, looking down at her with his arms folded and an uncertain expression on his face. Cologne, rather than taking issue with his apparent impugning of her skills, responded gravely, apparently feeling that the situation warranted such seriousness. Or perhaps she felt that the doctor was a colleague of sorts, albeit an extremely junior one.
"I believe that, of all the medical and mystical practitioners in the entire nation of Japan, and most of China as well, I am the one most suited to helping Mr. Hibiki. He should count himself fortunate indeed that I am someone he knows, and that young Miss Akane had the foresight to seek out my assistance."
Akane flushed a bit and looked down at her sock feet. Ukyo wondered what it felt like to be praised by a member of an enemy camp, especially one with such a high-and-mighty opinion of herself. Ukyo had certainly never experienced such a thing; Cologne typically barely acknowledged her presence even when they were in the same room together, and when she did it was only to heap scorn on the secondary rival of her darling little Shampoo. Ukyo really hated that crazy, interfering old bat.
But, that obnoxious little voice in the back of her mind which had really been getting out of hand lately, But what if she can help? What if she can save Ryoga?
Well, so what if she could? It wasn't like it would make any difference at all in Ukyo's life.
No, it certainly didn't matter.
"I think my two minutes are up," Cologne said to the doctor, bouncing up onto the top of her staff with a single, mighty spring. She met the doctor's eyes with a steely, unflinching gaze, then gave a slow smile. "Well? Are you convinced that this old lady knows a little something more about the world than what modern science can teach you?"
"Maybe..." the doctor hesitated, turning to cast a glance down the silent hallway. "Basically you're saying someone damaged—"
"His mind, yes. But the mark is there, clearly, in his ki, for anyone with the ability to see it. Whatever did this is an ancient force, older than the Amazons, older in fact than the people of China and all its various tribes. Older, possibly, than mankind. It took something from him, something central to his being. Now the real trouble has begun."
"Because...of me?" Akane asked in a small voice. Ukyo wondered how the girl was processing all this. What did it mean to find out that someone you thought of as merely a friend found you in some way central to his life? "Why me?"
"Imagine, if you will, a jigsaw puzzle." The Matriarch gestured with two tiny, wizened hands, though she went right on balancing on the knotted top of the stick—Ukyo wasn't even going to guess how. "If you have a completed puzzle, you can clearly see the way in which all of the pieces connect to all the other pieces and make a single, coherent whole. Occasionally, you can lift it right up off of a surface and it will remain whole.
"Now," she gestured with one hand, "Imagine if you put your fist cleanly through the center of that little puzzle of yours. Of course it will initially remove those central pieces. But the question that I put to you know is, what happens to the rest of the pieces when the center is removed?"
There was a moment of silence between the five martial artists before Ranma spoke up, quietly, from his position some distance behind the two fiancées.
"The whole thing comes apart."
"That's right, son-in-law." Cologne nodded, as a proud teacher to a particularly precocious student; Ukyo rolled her eyes. "All the pieces depend on all of the others to hold together. Without that center, without in fact any several pieces, the whole thing will comepletely dis-integrate. Ryoga's psyche is trying to cope with the lack of any coherent memory of Miss Tendo here, but since she has figured so prominently in his life in the past year, nearly all of his memories have been affected."
"Because he remembered me," Ranma said.
"Yes. And Ukyo. And quite probably Nabiki and Kasumi. Genma, Mr. Tendo, Happousai—"
"But wait a minute!" Akane interrupted. "Why didn't I have the same problem with that technique Shampoo used on me when she first got here?"
"Because that technique is not the work of an ancient, malicious entity. Nor, you may have noticed, is it anywhere near as effective. You were able to eventually regain all your memories because, while they were suppressed by the Shiatsu and the formula of the shampoo, nonetheless they remained firmly lodged in your head. In Ryoga's case, he has no memories to regain. Those memories are destroyed."
Akane looked stunned. Ukyo couldn't blame her.
"So he'll never...he can't get those memories back at all?" the long-haired girl asked. Cologne gave her a haughty glance, then softened slightly, sighing and shaking her head.
"You can't regain what doesn't exist. And as he encounters situations and people associated with those extinguished memories, his mind will struggle to compensate. More and more pieces will be wiped away. First the little things—the Tendo Dojo. Mr. Tendo. Genma. Kasumi. Nabiki. Eventually, in the end, even you son-in-law, and you, Miss Ukyo, will be expunged."
"My god..." Ukyo breathed.
"But Ryoga's association with my son-in-law goes back a long, long way, doesn't it?" Cologne's tones were now those of a teacher, trying to guide her pupils to some newer, more difficult understanding.
"Yes," Ranma answered her, "A couple a' years ago, we went to school together."
"And tell me, son-in-law, what sort of person was Mr. Hibiki at that time?"
Ranma hesitated. He looked up at the ceiling, chewing on his lip as he struggled to remember. Finally, dropping his gaze, he glanced at Ukyo and Akane before addressing the Matriarch.
"He was angry," Ranma said, "All the time."
Cologne nodded. The answer didn't seem to surprise her.
"We grow up," she said, mildly, looking into the doctor's face. "We grow older. It's a difficult thing, for someone to have a part of their being taken away, whether they willed it or no."
Dr. Tofu exhaled a long breath. His shoulders slumped. Casting another glance down the long hall, his face for a moment betrayed an internal struggle: the war between his desire to help his patient through his own training, and his experience with the truth of the mystical forces Cologne and those like her commanded.
Finally, he said, "What do you intend to do?"
"I need to examine the boy," Cologne told him. "There are techniques for tapping the spirit world and obtaining information. This is what must be done now. I must beg for assistance from the deep-down creatures, those who inhabit worlds rarely visited by humans in this day and age."
"How long will something like that take?"
Cologne smiled her disturbing little smile.
"Not long," she said, and then for some reason looked over at Ukyo, smile broadening. "If I have assistance."
A/N:
"Piggyback" in Japanese is "onbu," so, sorry, no pun there.
Too many characters in this chapter. Gah. I'll try to narrow it down a bit for the rest of this story.
It's taking me longer on these chapters now because I'm preparing to leave Japan in a couple of weeks after two years so...there's a lot to take care of. I've accumulated so many books I could open my own library.