SORS IMMANIS (AS LONG AS LOVE INTOXICATES)
Sors immanis et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis, status malus
Vana salus,
Semper dissolubilis
Obumbrata et velata,
Michi quoque niteris…!
(Fate, cruel and inane
You are a malevolent spinning wheel,
Vain hopes for my well being,
Inevitably fading into nothingness
Veiled and in shadows,
You torment me…!)
– Excerpt from "Fortuna Imperatix Mundi" of the Carmina Burana
Anonymous 13th Century Bavarian Monks
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DISCLAIMER:
I do not own Ranma 1/2 or any of the related characters. The Ranma 1/2 series was created by Rumiko Takahashi and is owned by Shogakukan and Viz Video. This fanfiction is intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from this story. All rights to the original Ranma 1/2 story belong to Rumiko Takahashi.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
My inspiration for "Sors Immanis" came while listening to Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" from the Carmina Burana cantata on a morning run. This story is an experiment with some new ideas and writing techniques. It is unrelated to "The Stage at Kiyomizu-Dera" or any of my other Ranma ½ stories.
Feedback and comments are always appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
– KL
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CHAPTER ONE: SUNTORY HALL
PRESENT DAY
Sors immanis et inanis….
All of that blood. Its warm, sticky feel and thick, metallic smell. In her hair, her hands, her clothes — everywhere. It would not come out, could never be washed away….
The woman sitting in Row 10 of block RB opened her eyes, desperately grasping at the remaining threads mooring her in the present. No one knew about the mess raging in her head. She could not let anyone find out. She forced herself to breath, trying to focus again on objective facts to orient herself.
She was at Suntory Hall. There was no blood here. No trains either. A sigh of relief escaped her lips. Everything looked as it should. The illusion remained intact.
Hauser and Sulic were on stage debuting a new collaborative arrangement of Orff's Carmina Burna with the King's College Choir. Most people thought Orff wrote the words, but the woman knew better. She had read the Schmeller compilation for a class back in her Todai days. Orff had created the cantata by orchestrating a small subset of the poems.
True to form, the giant Croatians were rabid stage animals as they tore through "O Fortuna" with their fierce facial expressions, wild body motions, fingers blitzing with lightning speed up and down their fingerboards, and sonorous vibratos wringing every last ounce of resonance from the long notes. It was all grotesquely sublime in its profundity.
Even then, the Friday night ushers had other more interesting preoccupations than the two master cellists. Many of them were university part-timers from Todai or one of the other nearby schools. Management loved them because they were cheap, eager, abundant, and yet sufficiently educated to handle the kind of clientele that sought refuge from the rest of the world at a place like this.
They were also avid people-watchers with vivid imaginations. Currently, they were whispering again amongst themselves about the woman and the air of mystery about her. She was a regular who had bought the whole row out for the entire season.
To be fair, Row 10 of block RB was hardly a row per se, consisting of only 2 seats, but that was exactly why Row 10, with its unobstructed right wing view of the stage was the most desirable position in the entire house. For both acoustic and business-minded reasons, the engineers and architects had deliberately designed the Main Hall without private boxes. Row 10 in block RB was as much of a private sanctuary as anyone could find in that hall.
"Akiko Tendou" was the name on the season subscription (1). However, rumors had been going around for some time that this name was just an alias, the kind of thing that truly "special" people used when they went around town trying to be themselves. Indeed, the woman did exude a certain gravitas that smelled of power and influence. Boys fantasized about speaking to her, and girls dreamed of being her.
She was strikingly beautiful and in an uncommon way. Her face was delicate and heart-shaped with full, soft cheeks. She had the flawless complexion of a porcelain doll and bold, luminous eyes. She had a petite frame with a lithe, slim-waisted figure and long, well-toned, pleasingly shaped legs.
As usual, she had come directly from the office, wearing her custom-tailored black knee-length pencil skirt, matching suit jacket, a handwoven silk ivory blouse. Her feet were clad in handmade Italian black patent leather heels. Her thick and shiny silken hair was tastefully pinned up in a simple and tidy bun. A pair of bold, iridescent solitaire pearl earrings completed the ensemble.
The woman knew that the concert hall staff were scrutinizing her and throwing around gossip about who she might be. She had been one of them herself back in her undergraduate and law school days. Probably, they thought she was here at the behest of some wealthy father or other fancy patron. Even in the modern 21st century, Japan was still sadly a man's world, and her looks hardly helped with staving off the undesired unconscious biases about pretty girls that came with that reality.
Just shy of thirty, most people meeting her for the first time mistook her for a junior paralegal fresh out of university rather than the managing partner and chief legal counsel for Taniguchi & Ishikawa. Correcting those preconceived notions, however, would have been disadvantageous and self-defeating. To serve her ambitions and appease the indignant, smoldering rage of her disillusioned misanthropy, she had taught herself to prey on people's prejudgements about women. People meeting her for the first time found themselves unknowingly disarmed by the initial illusion of dainty innocence wrapped with a bowtie of enigmatically charming charisma.
She had no choice. Surviving to win had been all that mattered. Might alone distinguished justice from sin and barbarism, separating the "haves" from the "have-nots". She had to get even. For her mother. For Kumi and all of the other have-nots in the world left to rot and die as she had. For her sister.
Now, by every outward measure, she had won. Young, beautiful, and gifted with a genius IQ, she had succeeded in acquiring the wealth and power she had spent most of her whole life chasing. She could take almost anything she wanted, whenever she wanted, and from whoever she wanted.
Yet, she remained herself miserable and unfulfilled. In the end, her whole Nietzschean worldview had been discredited by the agnostic apathy of reality. Fucking Tolstoy had been right all along. Fate and Destiny had just been human delusions in equal measure.
It as only possible for us to live for as long as life intoxicates. Once sober, we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion — a stupid fucking delusion….
With a sigh, she tried to redirect her attention back to the ongoing performance on the stage below, but could not. It was all too much, even for her. Just an hour ago she had been at the hospital again. They asked her questions that no one ever wanted to be asked. Her thoughts turned to the night before, again seeking a reminder of why she still had to be here.
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The misty evening breeze had carried the rich, fresh scent of petrichor from the heavy late afternoon April squall that had blown in from the Bay earlier. The rain had ceased only a half hour prior or so. Only then had the remaining clerks and associates been able to escape for the night, giving "Akiko" the privacy she had been secretly craving for the better part of the day. She tore out of her 49th floor office for the rooftop. In the omnipresent glow of city light and the skyscraper's red aviation obstruction lamps, she had scowled derisively at her own unwelcome reflection staring back from the murky puddle of water at her feet.
Like a Wellesian protagonist in his Rosebud moment, she found herself drowning again in reflections on the root of her whole haunted lifetime of misery and anger. Kane was just a boy who did not want anyone to take away his one favorite toy in the world. She was just a girl who did not want people to laugh at her for having lost her voice and not having things that others, especially the ones who had too much, took so easily for granted (1).
The Robinhood morality arguments she had used to justify her actions, her penchant for the playful white lies and little wealth redistribution projects that made her Machiavellianism palatable, were all lies. Whether her way or Kane's, the result was the same. Inside, she had become a monster, the kind of rotten, hubris-filled "have-all" she had once so bitterly sworn on her mother's grave she would never become.
Frustrated with herself, she tugged with her left hand at the right lapel of her coat and began grinding the pointed heels of her stilettos into the slick, wet EPDM surface. Slowly, she made her way toward the West parapet. All of this shit running through her head now was a waste of time, just like everything else lately. No matter what she said or did, she was still just one very fucked up little heathen whose head rang a little too much with delusions of destined exceptionalism.
Once at the parapet, she swung her legs over and dangled her feet over the edge. A numb, morbid fascination settled in as she studied the countless cars and people unknowingly milling about around Scramble Square and the other busy Shibuya streets far below. Her calm, cool detachment despite the circumstances shocked even her. Even her acrophobia no longer registered. From that dizzying height, death would be unnecessarily messy and grotesque, but almost certainly instantaneous. There would be no time to feel pain or even muse about the sloppiness of the method.
So much had changed since that day in Suginami when she had first grasped her own mortality, now about a dozen years ago (1). She smiled wistfully at the thought of how far her own views on death had evolved. She could hardly believe how that she had once even been innocent enough to agonise over all the things she would not have the chance to say or do. If there were in fact an afterlife, she imagined that her dead mother would have spent a good first part of Eternity giving her stupid daughter shit for dying so young and leaving so much unfinished business.
Except she did not die. The boy whose heart she meant to break ended up being the one to save her sorry ass. She became deluded with a sublime illusion of joy. For a moment, the world truly looked and felt wonderful, full of hopes and crusades in which she could even invest her whole heartfelt being.
In the end, of course, everything proved to be a lie, cruel and protracted. After all, this story had begun with a question not unlike what Eve brought to Adam when Eden ended. Everything after was naturally pre-ordained.
Am I the reason?
Fate was just balancing the books now, collecting its dues of inexplicable misfortune and senseless tragedies. Her sister. Her man. All of that blood. In her hair, her hands, her clothes — everywhere. It would not come out, could not be washed away.
She could not forget.
Now amid the lonely shadows of this shattered Camelot, everything looked and felt unbearably tired and gray. All of her righteous fires of indignant purpose had been put out by the cold, unfeeling cruelty of Fate. If she died today, she knew no rosy sentimentalities or soulful longings would haunt her final moments. Everything had become inconsequential, all of it flowing forward in the inescapable, unidirectional current of Time. It would all culminate one way or another in the immutable certainty of Oblivion. In that sense, the difference between being blown off the roof versus jumping off or even doing nothing had felt annoyingly small and trivial.
As long as life intoxicates….
All that kept her from going over the parapet was the haunted bit of knowledge that, despite everything, both her man and her sister had never stopped believing in her. Why they loved her and valued her sorry life more than each of their own still confused her, but that did not matter. Her death could not undo all that had already happened. He was fighting for his life now because of her, hanging on by a thread. He still needed her there to keep the vultures away.
Maybe my Honor is the only thing holding me together right now. I promise you and Mom, though, it'll hold. For you, I'll keep my word….
Watashi ni nokotte iru no wa anata dakedesu. Itsumademo eien ni, anata no koto mo… mamoru….
(You are all I have left. I will always protect you too….)
So she did nothing.
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The next day, the hospital called the woman in for a goals-of-care discussion with one of the doctors.
He looked the same when she arrived, of course, just as he had for the last few months, silent and unmoving. His head was wrapped in bandages. Tubes were shoved down his throat and up his nose. The color had long ago been bleached out of his skin. The muscles of his face had been wasted away by cachexia. Monitors and chimes droned on in the background. The vent remained set on full assist.
The irony of them calling just after four (2) in the afternoon was not lost on her. She had a fair idea why they wanted her to come. Still, she was livid when they actually said it to her face.
"You're asking me to let him die."
"No, Ma'am," the doctor replied. "We're just asking you to objectively consider what is best for him — and for you too. It's been over four months. You shouldn't feel guilty. Everything imaginable and then some has already been done. Please consider letting him rest. His mind is already — ."
"What the fuck am I paying you for!"
"Ma'am, this isn't about — "
"Get the Hell out of here before I break your face and see to it that you never practice again in this country!"
The woman turned away, stormed towards the seat by the man's hospital bed, and reached frantically with her left hand for his unmoving right one.
The world knew the man as the famous manga illustrator Hibiki. As far as the doctors were concerned, he was already a brain-dead corpse. She just knew him as the one boy she had ever loved. To her, even in his sad emaciated incapacitation, he still remained the most beautiful human being she had ever seen.
He was an ex-martial artist turned manga illustrator and writer who had made a considerable name for himself. He excelled at blending the fantastic with the grit of reality, packaging it all in a unique comedic style imbued with a sardonic wit. His execution of this while remaining unpretentious and believable in his lofty ambitions really stood out for his readers. It all stood in remarkable, ironic contrast to the brash recklessness that had been so off-putting about him when they had first met as kids now so many years ago.
His best known series was about a teenage martial arts genius who had trained in his family's form of the Art his whole life. The boy also happened to be cursed to turn into a girl whenever exposed to cold water, and to complicate matters further, he was helplessly honorbound to choose a fiancee from among three sisters from an old, traditional family. The girls' father was best friends with the boy's own father.
The books were good — very good. She had read them all from cover to cover, even fed him some of his ideas, especially ones about the really naughty and fucked up middle sister in his most famous series.
After all, she had been the one who had gotten him into sketching in the first place. Of course, he had long surpassed her though. He had always had that annoying habit of so easily excelling at things whenever he cared to apply himself.
The secret to why these books made such an impression on people was because many of the stories were not fictional at all. He really did train in his family's ancient form of the Art from a young age. His childhood on the road really did result in significant social deficiencies, not the least of which was that crude danseigo (3) slang that he could never let go of whenever he spoke, leading most people to prejudiciously write off his considerable native intelligence. His father did agree with her father to a union of their families before either of them were even born.
She and her two sisters did come from an ancient family of previous high-ranking samurai prior to the Restoration. Consequently, they still had land and even a dojo in the middle of Tokyo's affluent Nerima ward; their father sat on the local municipal council for most of his adult life despite not having a regular job or other typical qualifications for the position; and antiquated, inadvertently misogynistic notions of honor and duty unconsciously pervaded the Tendou's dysfunctional family life.
As to whether a boy could change into a girl at the touch of cold water, well, the woman wryly thought of how going to the moon too had been considered a fevered fantasy for the vast majority of humanity's sorry time on this lonely planet.
She sighed as memories of his essence washed over her. His sweet cedar and pine wood scent. The forbidden thrill of his fingers once so freely intertwining with her own. The reassuring warmth of his hand wandering across the nape of her neck just under the edges of her hair. The firm, unyielding strength of his muscular arms reaching from behind to draw her in close. Most of all, the loving, apologetic way that his fingers would always linger over the one flaw on her body — the ghost of that old burn scar over her left breast.
Tears again began spilling down her cheeks. The metallic taste of blood emerged in her mouth as she bit back on the pain of her memories. The simple platinum band on her ring finger felt unbearably heavy and painful to wear. Yet, she could not bear to take it off. Ever so tenderly, she took up his unmoving right hand between both of her own and intertwined her fingers with his.
As long as life intoxicates….
You are all I have left. I will always protect you too….
"I'm here, Ranma," Nabiki Saotome (4) whispered in her husband's ear. "I won't let them hurt you. I promise. Please just wake up. You don't even have to come back to me…."
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Sors immanis et inanis….
The dramatic final chorus refrain of "O Fortuna" had come around. As the last chord reverberated through the Hall, the giant Croatians stood and smashed their wooden cellos into the stage.
All of that blood. Its warm, sticky feel and thick, metallic smell. In her hair, her hands, her clothes — everywhere. It would not come out, could never be washed away….
Fate was a fucking bitch, and "happily ever after" was just a nasty children's fantasy. She could be okay with that. She just wanted him to wake up.
For you, I'll keep my word. Just don't go.
I love you.
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CHAPTER NOTES:
(1) These details become relevant in later chapters.
(2) In Japanese, the word for "four" and "death" have the same pronunciation.
(3) Spoken Japanese has some words and some grammatical constructions associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. These differences are referred to "gendered language". Speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba (女言葉, "women's words") or joseigo (女性語, "women's language"), and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo (男性語, "men's language"). Ranma's speech pattern in both the anime and manga is prominently colored by danseigo.
(4) Japanese law requires a married couple to share the same surname. However, the law does not specify that a wife has to take her husband's name or vice versa.