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CHAPTER TWO: DECEMBER AND JANUARY (THE STATUE OF THE CHRISTUS CONSOLATOR)

He woke up with his mouth drier than he ever thought it could be. A stiff rod was rammed down his throat, preventing him from speaking. Tubes and lines were protruding from every orifice of his body, and every part of him was intolerably heavy and on fire. He could hardly move. He was lying on a bed, his hands and feet tied loosely to the rails. Alarms and chimes fired piercingly from every direction.

He cursed furiously in his head. He had been in this situation before.

The difference this time was the voice that suddenly ambushed him in the darkness, jolting him out of his misery. Of all the voices it could have been, this one was not one he ever would have imagined it could be.

"Calm down, Saotome. You're not dead, and you're going to be fine," she said coolly. "You're on my Service."

He again started trying to sit up and whip his head around to see if it really was her, but the rod slammed back hard against the back wall of his throat. It was clear that his efforts would be futile. He was left struggling helplessly through a violent fit of gagging.

Her face was suddenly peering over him. Her smirking countenance danced in the shadows caused by the harsh yellow track light above her. She had on a plain black T-shirt underneath a rumpled white coat that was draped loosely over her small frame. She reached up to a monitor hanging over his bed. Her fingers danced over the screen with practised ease, silencing the screaming alarms as she paged a nurse. As she reached over him, he caught sight of an ID badge dangling off her neck that read:

Nabiki Tendou, M.D., Ph.D.

School of Medicine

Medicine Faculty

Her eyes followed his, and she answered with another smirk.

"You never made it to brunch, so Inever got to tell you. A little rude of you, but it's fine," she teased."Now you know."

Ranma scowled. He knew she was reading the obvious questions in his eyes.

She patiently told him what he wanted to know. He was in the MICU at a hospital in Baltimore and had been out in amedically induced coma for weeks. It was now near the end of December. He was lucky that he had passed out in the outpatient clinic, or no one ever would have been able to get to him in time.

He had suffered a major relapse of pulmonary-renal syndrome, this time with diffuse alveolar hemorrhage, glomerulonephritis and a recrudescence of his prior mononeuritis. He had almost lost his transplanted kidney, and his prognosis had been touch-and-go for a while. They had blasted him with grams of IV steroids and rituximab and PLEXed him to bits on top of Hail Mary vanco-peme and ampicillin in the background, even though acomprehensive kitchen-sink ID workup had been unrevealing.

An angry shame suddenly washed over him anew as he comprehended the full extent of his naked vulnerability before Nabiki Tendou. It would all be in his medical records. She knew everything.

He could tell from her eyes that she was reading his thoughts again.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, catching him off guard. "I don't blame you for looking at me that way. I'd do the same in your position. I probably should have recused myself from the beginning. I promise you that there are no strings attached. I just wanted to help. If you want, I'll arrange to have someone relieve me in the morning."

He was surprised by the small shake of his head from side to side. Even though the reasons were unclear to him, he believed her.

She smiled, not a smirk this time, but asoft, warm, and sincere expression. It was actually cute.

"Don't worry," she reassured him. "Can't tell anyone unless you tell me I can. Geneva, Hippocrates and all that, you know."

The sound of the door sliding in its track behind her interrupted them. Nabiki turned smoothly to regard the nurse in navy scrubs.

"Doctor Saotome is awake," she stated coolly in her posh British English, making him wonder if the moment prior had just been his imagination. He was amused though despite himself. No one ever called him that. Not even when he was in the field.

"I'll let the Unit team know on my way out," she was saying. "From my perspective, the plan would be to continue IV Medrol at the current dose and frequency. I'll be back with my fellow to round on him in the morning."

The nurse nodded appreciatively."Thanks, Kiki. They'll probably start weaning trials on him then after shift change. You should get some rest."

Nabiki wordlessly tapped the nurse on the shoulder in her own gesture of appreciation before slipping out of the room. She spared him a tired, but assured glance as she quietly slid the glass partition shut.

# # # ##

The Saturday he was discharged was the first time he saw the sleek, red BMW E85 Z-roadster. The car was pulled up just outside the main entrance off Wolfe Street. Nabiki was there wearing dark wash jeans along with the same crème-colored knit turtleneck and black block high-heel boots she had worn that day at the coffee shop, holding the passenger door open for him. An orderly in green scrubs carefully wheeled him through the sterile white lobby, through the plexiglass doors, and into the cold early January morning.

She had offered to drive him back the 45 miles between Baltimore and his Kalorama studio. Or rather she had dictated that she would. He should not have been surprised, but he was.

She had tsked in annoyance the day before when she caught him studying the inscription at the base of the Christus Consolator statue towering over them in the center of the domed lobby of the old hospital.

Come unto Me

Ye that are weary

And heavy laden

And Iwill give you rest

-Mathew 11:28

He had ended up being downgraded from the MICU three days after awakening followed by another four days on the floor and an additional three weeks on Meyer 7 for intensive inpatient rehab. For all that he had seen, done, and endured in his crazy 35 years, the weeks on Meyer 7had been more brutal than anything he could have imagined. He had to learn how to stand and even how to breathe all over again.

Now they were in the old hospital building on this late Friday afternoon after his final pulmonary rehab session. Nabiki had just finished her afternoon clinic and had come by to wheel him around for some air.

"Spare us both the misplaced gratitude, Saotome," she groused in Japanese. "Even if there really is a Christus or whatever somewhere out there, you aren't exactly a priority. None of us are, and that's fine. People come through here thinking we save people on behalf of some higher being or purpose or whatever, but we never do. We just buy what time and space we can, and your body either does what it has to do, or it doesn't. It's actually that simple. Just give yourself the credit that you deserve, and let it be."

Ranma had never been sure if he believed in a higher being, but he was still surprised. "Wow. So why do ya bother doing watcha do?" he asked.

"Because someone has to," she replied, brushing him aside as if it were the most obvious thing. "I'll drive you home tomorrow by the way," she had added as she had turned and wheeled him away. "An Uber or Lyft would just cheat you of your $150, dump your arse on the street, throw all your stuff at you like rubbish, and leave you to figure out the rest."

He could not stop himself from laughing. In the days and weeks since he had awoken in the Unit, he had discovered how refreshingly raw and unapologetically vulgar she could be in Japanese. That Nabiki was so unlike the cool, sophisticated Anglicized persona that she had created for herself: young, intelligent, and intensely driven but not threatening. Either way, though, the fearsome spectre of the mercenary Ice Queen girl he remembered as a high school kid was gone. It was replaced instead by this strange, spunky Jekyll-Hyde enigma of a woman who was both a lady and amischievous, fire-breathing, profanity-spewing dragon crusader. There could be no doubt that she was a Tendou and Akane's sister.

From the floor nurses and others, he had gradually pieced together that Nabiki, or Kiki as she was known to English-speaking friends and colleagues, had come to Baltimore from the U.K. for a physician scientist training program. She had torn through a doctoral thesis in immunology in addition to an M.D. in eight years. Apparently, this pace was quite fast for such a program. He had always known that she was incredibly intelligent, but still could not help being impressed.

She had stayed after graduating and worked her way up as a medicine house officer, then a post-doctoral fellow, and now as newly minted junior faculty. She was well-loved. Everyone's descriptions of her were imbued with the fondness and pride you have for the daughter you’ve raised. Nabiki too had great esteem and affection for them.

Somehow Nabiki Tendou had grown up to be a good and decent person. She still had her uncanny knack for always somehow knowing something about everyone and was definitely still agossip. However, the amoral, shark-like pragmatism and weaponised intentions about it all were gone now, replaced with only good will. She used her information now only to elicit smiles and friendly words in the halls of the massive hospital. He saw evidence of this often on the late afternoon walks on which they had begun going regularly.

They found themselves indulging in what had become a peculiar but comforting routine of verbal sparring and genial banter. Her company was fun, he realised, more fun than he had known for a very long time. Not having to convalesce alone for once was also nice. A part of him was actually sad that he would be leaving the hospital, knowing that these days were about to end. He was glad that they had met again and that she was here with him now. Maybe she might have been thinking something similar when she had offered him the ride.

"Fine," he acquiesced."You're driving me."

"I knew you'd see it my way."

# # # ##

Nabiki was a vicious road warrior. She expertly coaxed angry, throaty screams out of the inline-six with her right foot and the manual gearbox as she wove and tore between the traffic around them at 90 miles per hour. The torques slammed him back in the high-bolstered black leather seat. The lateral Gs whipped him from left to right.

He gripped tightly onto the discharge items and personals in his lap. The German two-seater's tiny trunk only had room to accommodate the hospital-issue wheelchair and only after being half disassembled.

They were shouting at each other to be heard over the wind lashing at the canvas roof overhead and the rumble of the 18" run-flats below.

"Sorry for the noise and for it being so tight in here," she was saying, "but I bought this for the character and passion. Besides, having to project your voice like this is great for working on your breathing!"

"Where'd ya learn to drive like this?! You ever worry about something called a speed limit?!" he yelled back.

"Why?! You have a problem with a girl actually knowing how to drive?!"

"Not at all. Just jealous. I don't have a car. Not in the country much the last few years, and even if I was, the streets in the city are crap to put up with."

His foot itched. They both knew the real reason he did not bother with driving. It did not have to be said.

"In all seriousness," she said, breaking the silence, "I don't usually drive like this, but the faster we get you home, the better it is for you. You may be discharged, but you're still deconditioned, and you'll be tired and aching soon. You can dose off if you need to. It's fine."

She was right. By the time they arrived, he felt like he had run a marathon. His head and arms were heavy, and he was panting when he tried to speak. Nabiki fished his dead weight out of the car and transferred it to the waiting wheelchair with surprisingly skillful ease. She was quite unexpectedly strong despite her petite frame.

# # # ##

"Spartan," she said as her eyes took in his tiny eighth floor studio. She had splayed him out on the bed and was standing over him, outlined by sunlight gently angling in from the east-facing window behind her. "But charming," she added approvingly."You picked it for the light, didn't you." A statement, of course, not a question.

"Ya still love reading people."

"It's useful in my line of work," she answered with a shrug. "Patients usually just tell you what they think you want to hear, but not what you really need to know. At least you've grown the balls to call me out on it."

Before he could shoot back, she had already moved on to the small kitchen and was rummaging through the weeks-old ruins in his refrigerator.

"You need groceries," she pronounced. "Get some rest. I'll be back soon." She was already out the door before he could say anything.

It was just past sunset when he woke to the rhythmic staccato of a knife rapping against a chopping board and the hiss of something frying in a pan.

He sat himself up and took stock of his surroundings. Two neat stacks of letters corresponding to bills and junk mail respectively sat atop the console table by the door. The navy-blue hospital-issue wheelchair was folded up and leaning against the opposite wall. Her boots stood neatly on the shoe rack next to his own shoes. A bouquet of pink roses, yellow tulips, and blue hydrangeas in a glass vase had been placed on the table.

Nabiki was in the kitchen with his red apron on, oversized as it was for her. She was standing by the counter working."You have good equipment. Too bad you never use it," she called out without looking up from the cutting board. The butt of his Wusthoff chef's knife oscillated with a confident rhythm in her left hand.

"Not around enough. Besides, how do ya know? I thought ya said you don't cook."

"No," she corrected him. "I just said I wouldn't when I invited you to brunch."

"British food is awful," she continued in response to his unspoken follow up question. "I was a poor student, but I had to live, so I learned."

A while later, she was helping him into achair at the table. He was impressed. There was a platter of seared U-8 Bangladeshi king prawns deveined and butterflied with surgical precision. These encircled a risotto cake topped with frisee salad containing lardons and diced chevre. The poached eggs laid on top of the salad were thoughtfully taken all the way to done in tacit acknowledgement of the medications he was taking for his condition. Two settings opposed each other across the platter. A bottle of champagne completed the ensemble.

"I thought I'm not supposed to drink with my meds."

"Come on!" Nabiki scoffed as she took the seat across from him. "You actually think in France that they can get away with telling patients on those types of meds that they can't have an occasional glass of wine? Americans are just a bunch of prudes sometimes. Live a little, Ranma-kun, otherwise, what's the point of going through it all."

She popped the cork. A fresh, yeasty aroma with a hint of spiced pears and apples filled the air.

"You smell it, don't you," she said with a knowing smile.

She was right. He could not remember the last time he had been able to smell. It was always the first thing to go when his disease was flaring. Broken and shattered as his body was, he could see that he really was slowly mending.

"Cheers?" she offered, tipping her flute as she handed him one.

"Cheers."

# # # ##

"What do I owe ya for all this?" he asked as the meal came to an end.

She laughed. "I don't keep ledgers anymore. I'm just happy for you. You've been through a lot."

"Wow! I like this new you."

He was taken aback by the sad, knowing smile with which she answered him. "I'm sorry for all the mischief and trouble I used to cause. I've been meaning to tell you for a while now. I know I was a b-#ch, but you were in love with my little sister. I couldn't be easy on you."

"That obvious?"

She laughed. "To everyone but the two of you! But to your point, I haven't really changed. You just never noticed, but that's okay. I was never out to hurt anybody, but I wasn't interested either in being a likeable person back then."

"Why is that?"

Her expression clouded over, but she gave him an answer anyway despite herself. "You know I lost my Mum when I was young. I was ten. I hated myself for being so little, weak, and helpless when it happened. I know this makes no sense, but somehow her death was translated in my brain as her having chosen to leave because I wasn't good enough for her to want to stay. If you choose to make people not like you though, get them to be just a little afraid of you, then you're the one in control. You can't be surprised. You're not vulnerable, and I never ever wanted to be vulnerable like that again."

"But everyone at the hospital loves you!"

She paused, taking a deep swallow of champagne before continuing. "Poking everyone in the eye, always letting them know that I was smarter than them stopped being fun after a while. I know people used to think that I loved money, but it wasn't even ever about that. Money was just a point system for keeping score of how much smarter I thought Iwas. That and I got lonely, which was even worse than being vulnerable. I've seen death many times since I lost my Mum, and even as a physician – maybe even more so - I still feel helpless every time no matter what I've done, but I also finally realised that aside from buying time, the only other thing I can try to do that matters is to not let anyone I care for die alone. Dying itself is not the most terrible thing that can happen to a person. It's dying alone."

Akane did not die alone, he suddenly thought to himself.

"No, she didn't," he heard Nabiki say. He did not realise that he had spoken his thoughts aloud, and he had not said that name aloud either in years. "I never had a chance to thank you for that. You have no idea how grateful I am."

Unshed tears were glistening now in her eyes. He could feel what she was asking, drawing them perilously close to the elephant in the room that he realised they both had been avoiding now for some time, which made him uneasy. He had never spoken to anyone about how it felt to hold Akane and watch her die in his arms.

"I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me," she said, swiping at her face in annoyance. "You don't have to tell me, and we don't have to talk about this again. We're supposed to–"

"You want me to."

"Akane is my sister. I love her, but you don't owe me this."

"Yes, I do. And I want to," he added, realising that he actually did now somehow because he was talking specifically to her. He tugged on the old, familiar rage at the unfairness of it all, thinking of how he and Akane had survived Jusendo together only for her to be ripped away from him on that chilly Nerima Autumn morning.

They were running to school, late as usual. They were bickering again about something he could no longer remember. As they came to the crossing the block up from the school gates, two cars drifted around the corner, their tires screeching over the pavement. Akane was closer and shoved him away as hard as she could.

The terrible, blood-curdling scream that followed would haunt him forever. He turned and saw her a few meters away lying on the pavement in a crimson pool of her own blood, looking back at him with agentle, tired smile. There were no words to describe the impossibly sad, pained expression on her beautiful face.

He scrambled over to Akane on his hands and knees, a wild and frantic animal. His hands flailed hysterically over her broken body, but he was too afraid to touch her. A sickening rattle emerged from her throat as she mouthed the words to him

“Hold me….”

He felt his hands obeying as he ever so carefully lifted her into his lap. He told her that everything would be okay, but they both knew it was a lie.

In one final clearly Herculean effort for her, Akane reached up and tenderly brushed his cheek with the tips of her fingers. 

“Promise me you’ll live,” she rasped. “On your honor.” Those were her final words.

He did of course. Only later would he realise just how little he knew or understood what he was saying and doing. 

The light faded from her eyes, her hand dropped away, and everything was still.

"I couldn't protect her. So-called'man among men,' heir to the Anything Goes School, I couldn't f-#king protect her," Ranma uttered brokenly under the old oppressive weight of his shame. He recognized the disgustingly familiar taste of tears in his mouth and could not bring himself to look up at Nabiki.

"She protected you. In every way she could, she protected you," Nabiki whispered in amazement. "I didn't know."

He heard her pushing her chair back from the table. Wordlessly, she 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, wracked by her own anguished sobs. They held onto each other for a long time.

He suddenly remembered how they had done this too once before so long ago. This time, though, the words she said when they were both spent were very different.

"Thank you," she mumbled quietly.

He was stunned. "For what?" he asked. He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice. 

"For loving her as much as you do. For being there to do what mattered. For being here now to tell me. She really loved you more than life itself."

"We never talked about it. I never told her that I loved her."

Nabiki stepped back and studied him with astrange look on her face. It was an expression he could not quite describe because he had never seen anything like it before. Determination then settled in her eyes, and she started speaking again.

On her first night as an intern, they assigned her to an old man with end-stage heart failure who was being put on hospice. He had been rolled out of the cardiac ICU when the Unit team had realised that nothing could be done for him, and the bed was needed for someone who actually had a chance. He had been hanging on for weeks on an Impella, ahorrific-sounding propeller screw that was threaded up through a groin catheter into his heart. The device was a Hail Mary of hemodynamic support while waiting for an LVAD or a transplant. The man, though, had deteriorated to the point where he was not a candidate for either. He was doomed to keep going down aroad to nowhere.

"They usually just slip away in minutes when the device is turned off, but he didn't," she was saying."He was a fighter."

The man was delirious when she came to do her transfer assessment. The oxygen starvation had gotten to his brain. Seeing her, he had snapped out of his catatonic state. Something wild and desperate blazed in his eyes as he lunged at her, caught her by the wrist, and dragged her down to the bed. "Take me home, take me home, you can't let me die here alone!" he cried out.

"I was such a stupid, f-#king child. I was so afraid. I couldn’t even remember to hit the panic button that was in the room.”

She promised the old man that we wouldn't let him die there alone, that everything would be set by morning, just a few hours more, asked him who he wanted to see and do when he got home. Maybe she even said that everything was going to work out fine, that it was all going to be okay somewhere in there.

“Whatever I could think of to just make him stop. The worst thing I said though was that I wouldn't leave, that I'd stay with him, but I didn't."

She had torn out of the room as soon as the man's possessed strength had been spent. After a minute or so, one last awful dying scream rang out from that room. Realising what was happening, she ran back as fast as she could, but he was already gone.

"You know that Edvard Munch painting called 'The Scream'? The final look on his face was like that, only so much worse. He knew I'd betrayed him, and he did die terrified and alone. It was the adrenaline, one last surge that a body blasts out when it knows it's on the verge of death, that made him act the way he did. He meant no harm. He  was too sick to even know what he was doing. He had absolutely nothing left in the world, couldn't really do anything at all except cry out and try to be heard one last time by somebody, anybody. But he got stuck with me, and I lied to him on his deathbed. I did it because I was weak and scared, and that lie must have been the last thing he ever remembered."

Nabiki took his face firmly between her hands and fixed him with fierce, soul-piercing eyes. "That, Ranma, is what doing something wrong is actually like. Not the kind of thing you think you did or didn't do for my sister. Not that you lived and she didn't. You did exactly what Akane asked you to do."

# # # ##

Haunting memories exploded in his brain as he hovered at the edge of sleep and wakefulness. The images were all of Nabiki.  She was standing cheerfully before his table that fateful day at the coffee shop. Her face was there when he awoke for the first time that night in the Unit. She was smiling encouragingly as she reached her hand out to him when he started learning how to stand again.

The sound of her voice and the warmth of her tender embrace from the night before came back now too. He could feel her holing him again as she bared her own naked vulnerabilities in a heartfelt bid to make him believe again that he was a good person. She had told him to be proud, to remember that he had always been and was larger than life, and to know that he was strong - stronger than anyone she had ever known.

Somehow, he believed he could believe her and what she was telling him. Maybe one day soon he could even believe again in something of his own.

All of it came flooding violently over him as the realisation dawned that she had come and been there for him for some time now. She had cared for him and saved him in ways that no one ever had –maybe not even Akane.

But why?! It was all just some crazy dream that made no sense, right?

Yet, when he opened his eyes, he found Nabiki still there, her small frame folded neatly in his arms, asleep. They were on the hard wooden floor of his studio. Her heart-shaped face with its porcelain doll complexion was tucked against his chest. Her dark, shiny, silken hair smelled of peach blossoms. She seemed impossibly fragile and delicate, ensconced in her crème knit turtleneck and jeans, impossibly at odds with the fiery dragon she had been just hours before.

Another strange and dangerous revelation suddenly exploded in his brain. Nabiki was beautiful. In fact, both inside and out, she was truly among the most beautiful women he had ever met, maybe even the most beautiful. The whole world suddenly felt like it had just tilted irrevocably on its axis.

Panic seized him. He was teetering on the edge of once clearly forbidden territory now, but somehow the lines suddenly seemed vague and blurred. He wondered if they were really there anymore. He could not avoid the question. If Akane had been able to see them, he wondered what she would say, how she would feel.

"She'd call you a baka, but she would be proud of you," came the drowsy, grumbled response.

Nabiki was awake.

He swallowed nervously, but he could not take it back. Then, to his surprise, he suddenly realised that he also actually didn't want to take it back. He had already been drawn over the fatal razor's edge and was already falling into something too unfathomably vast and deep to understand.All he knew was that her re-discovered presence made him feel happy again for the first time in a long time.  

"And you?" he asked. "What do ya say? Where do we go from here?"

She drew herself up to a cross-legged sit and fixed him for a long moment with her piercing brown eyes before answering.

"I'm happy." She reached over and took his hand in hers. "But you've just been through a lot, and there was some alcohol last night. I also know I'm no picnic. So, I'll make you this deal. If in a year, give or take, you can still tell me those words and mean them, there are things I want to tell you, important things. For now, I'd like for you to just think about getting back on your feet so you can walk hand-in-hand with me, even if it's just for a little while."

"Ya sound like you've been down this road before."

"No, actually I haven't," she replied, surprising him. "I'll even admit to you that I'm a little scared. I hope you can understand after the things I told you last night. The answer to the other question that you're going to ask is that I was in the area the day Imet you at the coffee shop for a blind date. Some of the girls at work forced it on me. I gladly stood the guy up. I wanted to stay and talk with you."

Ranma was without words.

"So do we have a deal?"

"Deal."

They shook on it.

"Oh, by the way," she called over her shoulder as she started to push on the bathroom door. "You never actually asked your question about Akane, but it was written all over your face."

"NABIKI!"