FicWad

CHAPTER ONE: NOVEMBER (THE COFFEE SHOP)

It all began on a partly overcast Saturday morning in late November.

The chartered Medevac from Paro via Mumbai and Frankfurt had touched down at Dulles roughly eighteen hours prior. He needed to forget the pain. The steroid burst that he had grudgingly conceded to was driving him insane with rage. The insomnia was merciless and unrelenting. The appointment that the U.N. field office had arranged through HQ with the expert in Baltimore would not be until the following Monday. Fighting against the incessant burn weighing down his right foot, the slog of his malaise, and his short windedness, he stumbled out of his 18th street studio and dragged himself across T and up 20th to a coffee shop just off Dupont that he frequented whenever he was back in town.

As he sat staring at the latte art atop his untouched mug to try to steady himself with aimless inconsequential thoughts, he heard that voice cutting in above the soothing banality around him in elegantly polished British-accented English. She was asking for a flat white off the list menu. It would be great if the barista could keep the milk lukewarm to preserve its natural sweetness, but then she politely offered that a latte would also do if it was too much trouble. The request was unusual enough to draw notice, even here in a town like this.

He was reminded somehow of a girl he knew from a long time ago, though he had never heard that girl actually speak English. Still, a bittersweet sense of nostalgia that he did not expect washed over him. He found himself glancing over in the direction of the register.

It /was /her.

Sensing his gaze, the woman turned, her wide-eyed expression clearly indicating that she recognised him too. Familiar piercing brown eyes in a heart-shaped face still framed by the same smart and practical Italian bob hairstyle stared back at him. She was wearing a navy and grey plaid print overcoat over a crème-colored knit turtleneck, a heavy, grey midi-length A-line wool skirt, and black knee-length block high-heel leather boots.

The Japanese girl in his memories would never have dressed this way. This European fashion clearly suited someone who spoke the kind of English she did. Still, it was unmistakably her, and somehow this ensemble suited the woman now making her way toward him. If he was willing to be honest, he would even perhaps consider her attractive - but this, of course, was not an appropriate consideration given who she was and who he was.

"Ranma-kun! It's been so long!" she said in their native Japanese, smiling warmly as she stood now by his table.

Despite himself, he was happy to see her.

There was a mature, elegant grace in her motions as she accepted his invitation to take the seat across from him. He suddenly found himself feeling very sheepish, his words feeling strangely foreign and clumsy to his tongue and ears.

Almost eighteen years had passed since they had last seen one another. That had been just after the funeral. She was the one who had seen him off as he left the Tendou dojo for the very last time.

# # # ##

He and Akane had survived Jusendo only for the car accident to take her away a little over a half year later. He was left alone without ever having said how he felt. Even worse, he had been unable to do anything other than hold her as she died bleeding and broken in his arms.

The two kids who had been street-racing had also died in the crash. He did not feel sorry for them. They had taken away the only real happiness that he had ever known.

The Tendou family could not find a noukanshi confident or skilled enough to make Akane look beautiful one last time. Her body had just been too completely destroyed in the accident. The offensive, nightmarish reality that they had been left with was that there had been no choice but to cremate Akane directly, and it needed to be done quickly.

A lot of people came. He could not remember though who exactly had been there anymore. To everyone’s surprise, Nabiki was the one who received the urn with Akane’s ashes. He definitely remembered that much, and seeing the small, unassuming box in Nabiki’s hands, he finally comprehended how utterly and completely he had failed. For the first time in his life, he understood what losing and being defeated meant. There would be no rematches, no second chances.

Remaining at the dojo and even Nerima after was untenable. From that moment on, everything he saw, heard and did only reminded him that Akane was no longer there and that his weakness was the reason for it. He was slowly going mad.

Yet, Akane’s entire family – even Nabiki –had stood by him without any hint of recrimination or blame. They protected him as people began to talk. They each told him in their own way that he was a good person who had done nothing wrong and that his honor was still intact. Their undeserved kindness hurt more than anything they could have said or done to punish him for what he had not been able to do.

Akane’s ashes were interred in the family shrine within the dojo. When he came to pay his final respects the night before he left, he found Nabiki there sitting seiza before the shrine. She was wearing the same royal blue kimono that she had worn the first time he met them all. The obi around her waist was a brilliant rose red. It was only the second time Ranma ever saw her wear a kimono. As she looked up at him and nodded to acknowledge his presence, he realised that she had been waiting for him.

With her fierce and soul-piercing eyes, she asked wordlessly if he would leave his pack by the far wall and join her. They sat together in silence for a long time. Eventually, she wordlessly took his arms, placed them over her shoulders, and then placed her own around him. She pressed her cheek up against his, sharing with him the raw, salty heat of her own tears, as she began to cry. At some point, he realised that he was crying too. They held onto each other for a long time.

When dawn broke, he gently untangled their arms from one another, stood, and brought her to her feet with him before bowing low first to the shrine and then to her. 

“Thank you,” he said.

He was stunned when she bowed just as low to him in return. “You are a good person, Ranma,” she said before turning and making her exit.

Jusenkyo was the first place he went after he left Japan. He succeeded this time in ridding himself of the Curse, and then helped the Guide in return destroy the place forever. The victory, however, was a pyrrhic one, and not just because Akane was no longer there to share it with him.

Shortly after, the illness declared itself and began to steal the Art away from him in agonising bits and pieces. It was almost as if having the Curse had protected him somehow. The bitterly ironic but logical corollary he often wondered about was whether or not he could have turned back Time somehow for his body if there had  been some way to re-acquire the Curse. That hypothetical, however, was a tortured road of Hell to nowhere.

His Fate now was to endure a slow, tortured rot that felt very much like something far worse than Death. Without Akane, the Curse, or the Art, he struggled miserably for a long time to recognise who he even was anymore. He had wanted very much and more than once to end things.

Akane, though, had known him too well, far better than he had ever realised when she was still alive. With her final words, she had made ending his own life irreconcilable with the preservation of the only thing about him that remained intact back then: his honor.

At first he was livid when his predicament became apparent. The poetic justice of this punishment, however, did not escape him. In the end, he accepted it because he knew it was what he deserved for having failed her.

The pain and the anger never went away. Time, though, did somehow dull their edges to something bearable. It was like the ever-present ring of tinnitus in the head of a person with Meniere’s disease. He came to understand very well why someone as angry and onerous as Beethoven would write the 5th and 9th symphonies. Trapped between the inability to live, but honorbound not to die, there had been no choice but for him to somehow find a way to reinvent himself to avoid going insane.

# # # ##

“How are you?” asked the Japanese girl sitting across from him in the present.

Of course, none of these things were what Ranma told her. He was convinced that he still looked well enough on the outside so that the ever-present shadow of his illness was not conspicuous. He would not dare talk about the illness with her. She was, after all, still Nabiki Tendou.

Now, he was almost 35. He was successful and respected enough in his profession, completely self-reliant despite everything that he had been through, and living alone. He omitted the part that this was fine with him. Because he was alone, he did have to worry about disappointing anyone or anyone being disappointed with him. No one really mattered to him – at least no one living.

He talked about how he had found his way abroad to this particular city. His path had been somewhat meandering, non-traditional, of course, but that was him.

Shockingly, he very unexpectedly found himself turning with obsessive, unexpected fury to school to reinvent himself. He was surprised to discover that he was actually quite good at it once he cared to apply himself. He was not stupid, contrary to what many including himself had believed about him when he was younger.

His high school record, as she knew, of course, had been too poor for anything direct, but that was a story for another time.

He ultimately studied international policy all the way through to a doctorate from SAIS. His focus had been international development and political economy. After graduating, he had stayed close and taken a job within the World Bank Group. A Martial Artists duty was to help and protect others. With his work with the Bank, he could still go places and help and protect others.

He shared vignettes from his missions with her.

Three times he had been evacuated out of Burkina Faso by chartered French military transports owing to the seeming fashion of military coups.

He also recalled being deployed to Ilocos Norte where they had been sent to oversee the reinforcement of mountainsides prone to deadly mudslides caused by excessive and disorganised rice farming. He had organised and led impromptu rescue details to more than one affected village during his tour.

There was also Baia Mare in Transylvania and the new municipal water supply system that they had constructed to replace the local wells that had previously been used for centuries, but which were now tainted with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals due to industrial development.

Most recently, he was in Bhutan to launch an initiative to improve access to basic medical care throughout the Thimphu Dzongkhag region with the construction of a new network of rural village clinics.

Life was interesting enough.

She listened in rapt fascination, smirking at the familiar confident bravado in his storytelling voice, laughing at his offhandedly wry tongue-in-cheek potshots, surprising him with unexpected empathy and concern for the people he talked about helping.

It’s like she's somehow truly someone different now, he thought. Or maybe he had just never really taken the time to know her at all despite their history? The possibilities were intriguing. The thought made his brain itch.

"I'm almost embarrassed to tell you about myself. Not anything near so interesting as you," she said.

He knew she was studying finance at Todai when he had left.

She had dropped out and also left Japan shortly after he did, completing an International Baccalaureate, and making her way to a British university where she had read in biomedical sciences.

He remarked how that explained her British English. The essentially native authenticity of her clean, polished accent was stunning.

"You would be surprised how differently people treat you just because of an accent," she replied. She actually had been quite fluent for a long time, even when they were still in Japan. Still, she had enrolled in brutal, intensive elocution classes during her IB, training tirelessly and with painstaking meticulousness to eliminate all trace of the Japanese phonemes in her English.

"And Biomed sciences?"

"Yeah," she said with a shrug."Like you, I realised somewhere along the way that I wanted to learn about something that had meaning for more than just myself.” She had become tired of herself, the child who she realised she had been.

He was not sure he understood, but he nodded anyway.

"What university?"

"A small college called Balliol in the country about an hour west of London."

Ranma laughed. He could still see the girl he once knew lurking behind the false modesty. He had visited that "small college" once before some years back as a tourist.

"Did ya join the crew team?" he asked, wanting to be certain she knew that he had caught her, that he knew she was testing him. The boy she had known never would have.

She gave him a cool, knowing smirk, /touché/twinkling in her eyes. "I tried my first term. It was something everyone had to try at least once. I wasn't very good. A lot of early mornings spent flailing around in cold river water. I think everyone was relieved when Iquit."

They both laughed. He did not remember her being a good swimmer.

"The British are really a lot like us, you know," she continued. "Some famous cultural anthropologists have actually made whole careers out of the topic. There is a neat order to things on that island. They operate with a tacit understanding of a hierarchy that permeates every aspect about their society. There are unsaid manners for everything, and you can never really say what you're actually thinking. That stiff upper lip and polite smiles stuff, yes?"

"That why ya left?"

"It was a fascinating island, but still an island," she replied with a shrug.

He thought he understood what she meant."Brexit?"

Her laugh was mirthless. "Just asymptom of something a long time in the making. In retrospect, it probably was inevitable. The actual tragedy is that everyone was just too blind to see it."

He agreed.

A comfortable silence settled in between them.

"How are your father and Kasumi?" he suddenly remembered. He had not seen or heard from them since he had left.

Something flashed in her eyes, but then it quickly disappeared behind a polite smile. "Kasumi is well. She's married and has two kids, a boy and a girl. Still in Tokyo. No, he isn't anyone that you knew. Daddy, well, he passed away a few years ago."

"I'm sorry." Ranma remembered her father fondly. Soun Tendou had always been kind to him, even after all that had happened.

"It's okay. He suffered for a long time. It was just his time to rest."

She unconsciously folded her small hands around the pastel blue mug holding her flat white, which was clearly no longer warm.

He noted her slender unadorned fingers and suddenly became aware of the soft ticking of her watch. The second hand was notching its way around an unnumbered face.

"I have to go," she said in English, her voice suddenly cutting through his thoughts. She had clearly followed his eyes. "We should catch up again soon though," she offered as she stood.

Ranma stood too, but then caught himself leaning against the edge of the table. Panic seized him. He did not want her to see him stumble. He looked up and saw her smiling. He was satisfied that she had not noticed.

Still, a strange, unexpected feeling came to him as she started to take a step around the table. He found himself actually not wanting her to leave. Suddenly, as if realising this, she turned toward the register and came back with a pen and a napkin.

"Here," she said in Japanese, offering him the napkin after she had finished writing. "My number and address. I'm a little far away, but would you like to come over for brunch next weekend?" Seeing the change in his expression, she added, "Nothing fancy. We'll do takeaway from somewhere nearby. I promise I won't cook."

Ranma smiled and nodded.

# # # ##

He never made it for brunch.

By the time he met with the expert the following Monday, a fire had travelled up from his foot to his knee, he could no longer stand on his own, and he had to be wheeled into the examination room in a hospital-issue wheelchair. The fevers and night sweats had come back, and breathing was excruciating for him. His gums also ached and bled.

As he lay on the exam table waiting while the trainee presented his case to the attending, a sudden bone-crushing heaviness seized his chest. He was wracked by violent spasms of coughing as he found himself slowly drowning in his own blood.

With all his remaining strength, he dragged himself off the table, fell hard onto the cold white linoleum tiling, and crawled into the hallway to call for help. The last thing he remembered was watching with macabre fascination as the blood slowly pooled and soaked into the carpet in front of his eyes.

So this is how it ends, he remembered thinking bitterly to himself.

A cold darkness rushed out to envelope him while a deafening silence roared up in his ears. Akane's frowning face was now looming at the precipitous edge of his vision, clearly displeased with him.

Ranma no baka! You promised…!

A disgusting sense of shame consumed him. With renewed determination, he reached into a furnace of rage and tried to scream his way through it one last time.

Nothing happened.