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CHAPTER FIVE: JULY (THE TANABATA INTERLUDE)

It was the first weekend in July.

Ever since the night when Ranma told her for the first time that he loved her, there was a game that they began playing on the weekends. One person would take the other to places where they had been through stories as he had that first night with his recollections of Iceland. The other person would prepare food that they would share as the story was told. It was the best they could manage within the constrained logistics of social distancing.

Though the disease had stolen much of the Art from him, one thing that Ranma had retained was the full agile dexterity of his hands. He was pleased with the reassuringly balanced weight of the santoku and its carbonised steel blade oscillating in his right hand. Each clean, precise stroke into the flesh of the large squid laid out on the chopping board was punctuated by a smart rapping staccato percussion.

The timer went off just as he finished with the final cut. He turned to the stove behind him, donned a pair of heat-resistant mitts, pulled down the oven door, extracted the cake pan holding the souffle cheesecake, and set it aside to cool on a waiting trivet. He would decorate it with sliced strawberries and kiwis later.

He also had dashi stock simmering in asaucepan on the black ceramic induction stovetop above. He stopped the heat, brought the pot over to the table, and laid it over another waiting trivet next to a platter of potato starch—dusted fried tofu and small bowls of grated white radish and bonito flakes, which he would use to finish dressing the dish just before serving. Also on the table was another platter layered with tempura-battered shrimp and vegetables and a bowl of fresh sunomono – a sesame, cucumber and seaweed salad. The stovetop was now clear for him to lay out the large griddle over the center burner for the ikayaki.

Glancing up at the wall clock, he noted the hour with satisfaction. Half past five precisely. He had sufficient time to finish before she arrived.

# # # ##

"I feel like we're at an izakaya,”Nabiki mused with a smirk as she looked over his work laid out on the table. She held her thin-rimmed ochoko up to the chilled tokkuri angled in his hands.“Haven't been to one in years. Any particular occasion?"

It happened to be the eve of Tanabata. Ranma had never given much thought to the day before, dismissing the whole summer stargazing and wish-writing thing as fun, archaic rituals mostly for kids, something like Santa and Christmas Eve. Things were different now though.

He told Nabiki so with a smile before planting a kiss on her cheek. He delighted in inhaling the sweet peach blossom scent of her freshly washed hair as he drew in close. She always showered and changed immediately after arriving at his place. She usually came in scrubs for convenience.

"Aren't we a little old for this now, Ranma?" she asked.

"I don't think so," he answered smoothly. "You're still every bit as sexy as ya were at seventeen by the way…."

"Oh really," Nabiki purred in response with intrigue. She looked up at him with a sultry bat of her long lashes before taking a sip of the contents of her ochoko. Her eyes lit up amoment later with appreciative delight. "A daiginjo, huh? Really light and sweet. Reminds me of something I tasted once some years ago."

"Kikusui Kuramitsu. From Niigata," he told her.

She whistled appreciatively."Bankrupt now?"

"Meh," he grunted with a casual shrug.

She told him that she had Kikusui Kuramitsu once before. It was the finest sake she had ever had. "That was at the best izakaya that I've ever been to," she noted wistfully. "I was in Aichi-ken then. They have quite a few of them there, as I'm sure you can imagine. It was even around Tanabata then too actually."

He himself barely knew Aichi, but his mother had originally been from there. Aichi-ken was known to the rest of the world, of course, as the home of the largest auto manufacturer in the world. What could she have been doing there though on a Tanabata evening?

"There's a story to this, yeah?" he ventured.

"Maybe," she replied before strangely seeming to lose herself in thought for a moment. Eventually, as if she had decided on something, she looked up at him with a coy smirk and asked,"Is that where you want to go tonight?"

"Sure."

"What are you willing to offer for it?"

He picked up the plate with the souffle cheesecake, now decorated with sliced kiwis and strawberries, and held it in front of her. "How about this?"

"Ooh!" Her eyes lit up, ogling the cake with gustatory interest and delight. "Okay. In the interest of full disclosure though, are you still okay with hearing this if I tell you that there's a guy involved?"

Ranma felt his face turn hot and flushed as he choked on the sake suddenly burning in his mouth. Nabiki's laughter filled the room as she slapped him repeatedly on the back to help him clear his airway. He could only imagine how he must have looked to her.

"Sorry," she managed as she fought to regain her composure. She was playing with him again. It was classic Nabiki.

"Cheap shot," he rasped hoarsely once he started to breathe again.

"Don't be like that, Ranma," she said before pecking him on the cheek. "You're really cute when you get flustered, but look, I wouldn't insult you with that kind of story."

"Spill," he deadpanned.

Nabiki smirked again as she demurely took another sip from her ochoko.

# # # ##

A guy named Toshibumi, or "Tosh" as he preferred to be called, came into the picture in the summer at the end of her second year at Balliol. He was a graduate student at Catz who moved into their house. He had come from Japan as an Oxford Kobe scholar for an M. Phil in mechanical engineering.

Lisette, the English brunette Ranma had met just weeks before at the funeral, had been the reason that Nabiki even had anything to say about the guy. Her friend wanted to have him and tapped Nabiki to be her wingwoman.

Nabiki agreed. At the very least, Lisette promised she could probably work a few good drinks and meals out of it

"I was confident that this would be quick and easy," she told Ranma. "I considered myself reasonably well prepared from having watched you and Akane for so long."

She was wrong though. Very quickly, she discovered how infuriatingly alike the British and Japanese could be with these matters. Nothing happened. No one made any moves.

"Lisette began to fume and fret that maybe Tosh just didn't like women. Me, I was figuratively beating my head against a wall trying to figure out what the f-#k was wrong with them both."

Eventually, Nabiki began thinking that maybe she was the problem. She started finding reasons to not be available.

One night near the end of the academic year, they were talking about summer plans over drinks. Lisette would be going to Nagasaki for a field project. She was a cultural anthropologist focused on Japanese ethnography. Tosh would be going home to his parents in Nagoya and wondered if the two of them would like to meet up with him there.

"I was more than happy to wish them agood time meeting up and have that be the end of it from my perspective," Nabiki remembered.

Ranma knew by now that she did not like going back to Japan. She had always been bothered by what she felt being awoman there meant. There were too many unspoken labels and expectations. Nabiki felt he could understand because of his Jusenkyo experience.

Nabiki told him how when she had been at Todai, even though she had been undeniably the best, she was also still"just a girl." At most in any study group or class, she was a 1 in 5. A girl was not expected to need all of that education long term.

"There was all that ochakumi sh#t at seminars and office hours, and the boys would always say stupid things like having me with them in pictures was great because it helped make the shots not look too much like prep school photos," she recalled with obvious bitterness in her voice. "So much decorative rose among stones rubbish about everything.”

At the end of it, as everyone knew, a girl like her would graduate, get hired to make some company or office look good, work a few years, eventually marry well because of her resume, and then, of course, gracefully bow out when the time came to start a family and all.

“Along with Akane being gone and how quiet and meaningless everything felt after, that's why I left both Todai and Japan. I realised that I just couldn't live that life."

The price for that decision, however, was her relationship with her father. This had quickly devolved into a viciously bitter mutual resentment over her choice.

Until now, she had not ever said directly that the relationship was poor. Ranma, however, had already noted for some time how very little she ever spoke about Soun Tendou. He remembered in particular the distant look in her eyes that day at the coffee shop when he had asked her how the old man was doing.

Still, Ranma was surprised. His impression of the old man had always been that, though he was somewhat aloof at times, he was still a kind, loving father.

"He seemed offended -- even betrayed somehow -- that I wanted to leave Japan. The path that I wanted to follow made no sense to him," Nabiki recalled bitterly.

In retrospect, though, she realised that she  probably should not have been surprised. After all, he did still subscribe to arranged marriages as a matter of family honor. The only thing he ever wore was a training gi. The Tokyo house she and her sisters grew up in and the land they owned had been in the family since the beginning of the Edo era.

“The irony was that the sh#t he was saying was a lot of the exact stuff that made me want to leave in the first place,”she mused wryly. “He didn't understand that either."

Ranma offered her an encouraging hand. She took it eagerly.

"I said terrible things to him," she admitted. "I couldn't understand how someone like Mum could find areason to love someone like him. I think I even said it might have been better if he had been the one who had died all those years ago instead of Mum. That way I could have been left with only good memories of him. I still could have had my Mum there by my side, understanding and supporting my dreams and ambitions. My mother always stood up for me and by me."

Nabiki recalled how, when she left Japan, she angrily burned the one kimono set that she owned. That had been the beautiful royal blue one with the red obi that Ranma remembered from the night before he left Nerima. She had placed the ashes in a box that she left on her old desk for everyone to see.  

“I really had no interest in going."

Notwithstanding, Nabiki had been on her own financially with little extra available to spend on trips like what Lisette had in mind.  In fact, she would only be able at most to get away for a long weekend before having to report for a paid summer internship in London that she needed in order to make ends meet. Lisette was adamant, though, that Nabiki had to go with them and was willing to even pay her fare and expenses to do it.

"Wouldn't be a story to tell though if ya didn’t," Ranma noted. "Tell me honestly, were ya even just alittle bit attracted to this guy?" he asked despite himself.

Nabiki laughed as she kissed him. "He was easy on the eyes, charming and funny and all, but so are a lot of people. He wasn't self-made like you or I though. I didn't know how bad it was until we arrived in Japan. There was always something about him that didn't feel right. I know I shouldn't prejudge or stereotype, but maybe part of it was that he was a Todai boy."

"Well, to me as a guy, it's obvious that he liked ya. And I thought ya said he was a scholarship kid."

"Yes, he did like me, and he did come on a scholarship," she conceded. "He definitely had enough ability to earn things on merit, but that was exactly one of the big problems with the whole thing for me."

"What do ya mean?"

The scholarship that the guy came on was originally intended to be need-based. He did not need any scholarship by any stretch of the imagination. It was also unclear if he even had any real ability.

“You and I make our way on merit. We are what we earn, but for people like him, it's all just a sport. He competed for it just to say that he could, not giving a damn about taking it away from someone who might have actually needed it. His name carried weight with the judges.”

Ranma was struggling now to hear Nabiki through the thoughts that danced around menacingly in his head. There were repulsive images of a pseudo-Anglicized Kunou-like figure tailing her around campus with roses and trying to put his arms around her. He shook himself and tried to force himself to focus.

"You probably won't be surprised, Ranma, but Oxford is one of those places where famous and connected people sometimes go by aliases. His real family name was Toyoda, not Suzuki or whatever he made up for the people he met in England. His mother's maiden name was Fujiwara.”

Nabiki laughed as she saw the expression on his face. "My God, you're actually really jealous! Look at me, Ranma," she insisted, taking his face by chin and forcing him to look directly into her eyes. “I'm here with you now, and I don't drive a Japanese car. If I ever do, I promise you it won't ever be one made by his family."

"Wait!" Ranma said. He now recognised the names she mentioned. "Ya mean that he was from that Toyoda family and that Fujiwara family…?"

The Toyoda family practically owned Aichi-ken. The Fujiwara family had intermarried with the royal family for centuries. It was essentially a direct extension of the imperial bloodline these days.

"Yes," Nabiki confirmed."The son-of-a-b-#ch waited until he met us off the shinkansen in Nagoya to tell us who he really was. That wasn't the part that pissed me off though. Icould humor him for wanting to go abroad in cognito for that. After all, it was no fault of his own that he was born with the name he had."

However, when the entourage arrived to collect them in a Century limo complete with a white-gloved chauffeur followed by another car of porters, everything became clear to Nabiki. The guy’s eye had been on her from the very beginning. Lisette was being dragged along and used.

"Certain families have sons that just don't court or marry non-Japanese girls," she told Ranma.

"Wow…!” He finally understood."You could've had all that."

"Yeah," she admitted. "The stupid, f-#ked up Nabiki you grew up with, the one from Nerima who started off at Todai when you left would've leapt at that possibility."

He remembered how Nabiki had once described that girl and her outward obsession with money and material things. That had been when she still believed that she could march to her own drumbeat under the long shadow of the labels and expectations she now only openly resented.

People used to think that Iloved money, but it wasn't even ever about that; money was just a point system for keeping score of how much smarter I thought I was….

Nabiki sighed as she laid her head on his shoulder. "People like Tosh are why someone like me now just doesn't really belong in Japan. Not anymore."

Ranma found himself chagrined by the realisation that he should have known better. Nabiki was always deliberate and precise when she spoke, whether in Japanese or English, whether she was being profane or demure. "Ya have a reason for telling me this story tonight, don’t ya."

She nodded. The reason she went in the end was because of a call from Kasumi a few days after.

“She told me that I should come home because someone wanted to see me, someone other than our father. She was quite strange about it, wouldn't tell me who it was, but said that I would regret not listening to her. My way home would be paid for.”

It suddenly became convenient for Nabiki to tell her sister that she had concurrent plans on a tight timetable. That way she could avoid dwelling too long in Tokyo.

Nabiki was surprised though when Kasumi said that passing by home or even Tokyo at all would not be necessary if Nabiki was not inclined. The person who wanted to see her happened to be from Nagoya and would actually prefer to meet there.

Nabiki was intrigued enough to bite.

# # # ##

That was the first time Nabiki went back after dropping out of Todai. She insisted to her friend that they go through Kansai International on a red eye. Nagoya was much closer via shinkansen from Shin-Osaka, and she hated Narita.

"Too close to home, and the arrival terminal and customs there remind me too much of a prison or an asylum," she explained. For Nabiki, Tokyo itself would probably always feel like a giant prison.

The guy and his entourage were waiting for them at Nagoya Station. Though thoroughly traditional in their values, the family were Anglophiles as a matter of fashion. He invited them for an English-style tea at his parents' place. The family home was a dull, grey Edwardian-styled mansion on a hill overlooking Toyota City.

Nabiki reluctantly went along since she had little else to do until her meeting with the mystery person later that evening.

"His mother was there under the pretense of civility, but I could feel her eyes sizing me up from head to toe for potential," Nabiki remembered. "I was angry at first, but then Irealised I didn't have to give a sh#t. I would only be around Aichi for alittle under three days the way I had arranged things, so I could afford to amuse myself with the game and be as off-putting as possible."

Nabiki told Ranma how she only shook hands, deliberately bowing to no one. She crossed her legs at the knees instead of placing both off to the side when she sat. She spoke only in English with the dual intent of keeping Lisette engaged and frustrating the hosts. Doing these things, however, seemed to achieve the opposite of her intended effect.

"You remember what I told you about how people respond to you differently just because of stupid things like accents?" she said. "For a moment, I wished I could undo all that elocution training I had put myself through until I remembered why I'd done it in the first place. Even pretending to regress would be a form of bowing."

They asked enough questions of Lisette to be polite, but the real questions were for Nabiki. Had she ever been to Nagoya and Aichi-ken before? Having such a beautiful and accomplished daughter, what kind of people were her parents, and what did they do? Would she be returning to Tokyo or perhaps going to Kansai after graduating?

Nabiki asked questions too about their family and talked about politics. She mentioned how Koizumi also had lived and studied in the U.K. and sympathized with how his visits to Yasukuni were controversially viewed outside of Japan. She talked favorably about his commitment to the war in Iraq alongside the British and the Americans. She even grumbled about gender disparities and glass ceilings for women in Japan.

Yet, the more she said, the more excited everyone else became, and the more they wanted to say, including even the mother. Nabiki was second-guessing herself and her assessment of the situation by the end of the afternoon.

Then the guy made his move that evening. Nabiki was rudely brought back to reality.

She had slipped out of the hotel for her meeting while Lisette napped to try to catch up on her jetlag. He announced himself as she arrived at the izakaya.

"He must have waited and followed me as I left," she realised. "It was stupidly cliché and predictable, being Tanabata and all, so I should've expected it. I was annoyed and tired of the game, so I had a drink with him and got to the point.”

The guy liked her and had set the whole trip up to serve his agenda, leveraging his family name and resources to do so, hadn't he.

He started to tell Nabiki that he was not a bad person, that nothing in his life had ever been normal. Now he just wanted to be a boy who simply liked a girl.

She almost felt sorry for him. He did have a point about his lack of choice in terms of his name or the family that he had been born into. She could relate, not exactly having been proud at that time about her own family.

"But then he gave me his reasons for why he thought we might be good together. All of them were bad. My looks, my education, achievements, social standing, and - the worst of all - that I was Japanese too." He was exactly what she thought he would be and worse.

She told him that she was not interested.

"I said to him that he could have had any girl in the world. That included one who would actually want to come back and live in Japan like the trophy he wanted. Unlike a lot of other kids who found their way to Oxford, I didn't have the luxury of going through life like that as if it were a sport. I'd seen and experienced enough even by then to know how raw and real the world really was and what it was like to live with the weight of actual consequences."

The guy had scoffed and told her that he thought she was one of that "new type of Japanese girl" who just hated men and that her British education was f-#king with her head.

"Arsehole actually said that to my face," Nabiki remembered bitterly. "I don't hate men, but I can't stand people who think they know what box I should fit into or that there should even be a box and then hold it against me for just being honest about who I am. It's f-#ked up how, in the world that I left, that's called a'virtue' if you're a man, but 'feminism' if you're a woman and how you have to apologise for it just because you're a girl."

The hostess came conveniently at that point and informed Nabiki that her host had arrived. She welcomed being led away to one of the private rooms in the back, leaving the asshole behind at the bar, expecting never to see or speak to him again.

As she saw the room ahead where the hostess was leading her, Nabiki wondered if maybe she should have been more nervous or even curious about this mystery meeting. She was too angry to coherently gather her thoughts. The person who was there waiting for her that night, though, was the last person she could ever have imagined wanting to see her.

# # # ##

Ranma was not sure he had heard Nabiki correctly. "My Mom…?!"

"Yes," Nabiki confirmed.

"She…. She drank with you…?!"

"Yes," Nabiki told him with acalm chuckle, her eyes clearly amused as she watched him. "She knew quite a bit about labels actually and could definitely hold her own."

He struggled to process the image.

Nabiki patiently gave him a moment to process the thoughts that she must have known were now spinning torrentially in his head.

He ran through some quick mental math. Four years after Nabiki had left Japan would place these events shortly after he had received his transplanted kidney. By that time, his parents had finalised their divorce.

His mother had endured a star-crossed arranged marriage to Genma Saotome defined by years of terrible psychological abuse and neglect. She had done so out of sincere maternal love and pure, unbridled determination to remain, however she could, a part of the life of her only son. Ironically, Genma's cruel disownment of Ranma merely for the crimes of leaving Japan to start his life anew after Akane's death and for being cursed with ill health finally freed her of the burden of having any incentive to remain.

Ranma remembered that his mother had considered reverting to the use of her unmarried name of "Sasaki." In the end, however, she chose to hold on to "Saotome" because, as she told him, "You and I should have the same name."

Ranma’s mother had overheard Nabiki’s exchange with the guy. "I felt embarrassed that she had seen me like that, but then she told me that I shouldn't be. She was not surprised. She said I was the daughter whose personality was most like my mother's.”

Of course, everyone in Aichi's 'certain circles' would know by morning how Nabiki Tendou had swatted around and slapped down the scion of the most important family in the entire prefecture like agnat. That was okay though, even funny Ranma’s mother thought.

Ranma knew that their mothers knew each other, but he had not known that they had been so close. Nabiki had not known either until that night. He also had never known of this meeting between Nabiki and his mother. She had never told him.

"I know," Nabiki said. "She promised me upfront that she would not repeat anything either of us were to say that night to anyone so that I could feel free to speak my mind."

He had to ask the obvious. "Why did she want to see ya so badly?"

Nabiki took his left hand in her right and began tracing the lines on his palm with the index finger of her left hand."She said she wanted to do my mother a favor. I think she must have been in Nerima shortly before this. She wanted to do what she could to encourage me to make up with my father because she loved my mother, Mum loved us both, and whether I wanted to believe it or not, she said that Daddy loved me too."

"Did your father send her?"

Nabiki had been angry at first because she thought that too, but no, her father had not. Kasumi was not behind it either, though she had been more than keen to support the intervention."Everything that happened was your mother's own independent idea. I told her my reasons for leaving and the things I had told my father. I said that there was no way I would or even could go back."

"What did she say?"

"She surprised me," Nabiki admitted.

As traditional as Nabiki had always thought Nodoka Saotome was, she had told Nabiki that she could understand and that she respected her for being strong and brave enough to leave. If Nodoka Saotome could have lived her life over, she would have borrowed some pages out of the younger woman's playbook. She agreed that Nabiki should stand tall and be proud of herself, but she should also still make peace with her father because she of all people should remember that life was short.

A strange change suddenly came over Nabiki's expression and demeanour. Ranma sensed that there was something else she wanted to tell him now, something that had clearly been on her mind for some time. He could tell she knew that he was studying her.

"I have something to confess to you," she eventually admitted. "I knew that you had been sick even before we met again that day at the coffee shop. I'm sorry for only telling you now. I just didn't know how to talk about this before."

Ranma was stunned. "What do ya mean?"

Nabiki fought to keep her eyes on him as she explained. "I asked your mother how you were, told her that I truly hoped you were well wherever you were, whatever you were doing. She protected you and didn't go into any of the details of your specific disease or say where you were. Still, she just told me enough to understand how close she thought she had come to losing you; how shaken, hurt and scared she had been; how badly your father had wronged you and why she had finally left him and returned to her home in Nagoya."

Ranma reached out and tenderly brushed her hair out of her eyes.

"I'm not mad," he reassured her."My Mom was a lot like you. She also had reasons for most everything she did."

Nabiki released the anxious breath that she had been holding. He was touched by how worried he could see she had been about his judgement.

"Thank you for not being angry with me," she mumbled with uncharacteristic shyness.

"What else happened?" he asked, gently nudging her on.

"She said that men of my father's generation may not understand a daughter like me, which was actually okay, but she was certain that he did love me and that he really was proud too. His reservations about my choices were not because I was a daughter – but because he was my father, and he just didn't want me to end up alone in life. He of all people knew what that was like."

"Is that what your father told her?" he asked.

Nabiki shook her head. "He didn't tell your Mum anything, but she was certain because she knew that my father truly had loved my mother. They had been happy together with what they had, star-crossed as they were. Your mother thought that among us three sisters Iactually turned out to remind him most of Mum because I looked and sounded the most like her. All the more he couldn't tell me such things. He didn't know how. I didn't have to believe anything she was saying or even ever agree with anything my father or anyone else thought or said about me. Still, she was convinced that I should at least try to have a dialogue with him if for no other reason than it would have pleased my mother."

She reached for her ochoko and held it up to him. Ranma grabbed the tokkuri and obliged her as she reached with chopsticks for a piece of long cold ikayaki.

They didn't talk any more about her father or her family for the rest of the night. Instead, Nodoka asked her about her new life in England. They talked for a long time.

“She was surprisingly easy to talk to,”Nabiki remembered fondly. “She was genuinely curious and interested in everything that I had to say, and she was so funny and kind. She wanted to listen to me. Somehow, I felt like I was being given a chance through her to tell Mum about myself.  I told her about what I had become, all that I had done, and all that I wanted to do. I was so happy."

Her eyes were misty as she reached for Ranma's hand.

"I wish that I had taken the time long before to know her better. I asked if I could stay in touch with her and write from time to time. She said she would've liked that too, but well…." Nabiki was unable to finish the sentence.

Ranma knew now precisely when this night must have occurred. Nodoka Saotome had gone abroad to be close to her son in the final months of her life. Much like Nabiki and himself, there had been nothing left in Japan for his mother by that time.

"This was around when she found out that she was dying. She was preparing to leave Japan for the last time, wasn't it."?

Nabiki nodded sadly as she reached back into her memories. Auntie Nodoka was leaving the next day, and she was there that night to say goodbye. At the end, there was something that she gave Nabiki because she said she had no daughter of her own to pass it on to.

“She had in her hair a tama kanzashi that had been a wedding present from my mother. She said she would understand and that it would be perfectly fine if I never found an occasion to wear it, my hair always having been on the shorter side and my chosen path being what it was. Still, she wanted me to have it anyway."

Nabiki stood to fetch her purse. When she returned, she pulled out one of her silk shawls delicately wrapped around along, slender object. She placed it carefully on the table between them before unwrapping the contents. Inside was a simple rose gold hairpin about 15 cm in length and tipped with a jade flower wrapped around a giant luminous pearl.

"Here," she said as she carefully slid the unwrapped silk toward Ranma. "Your mother told me that there had been too much tragedy and hurt around the labels and expectations implied by this gift.”

His mother pointed out to Nabiki that even the story of Tanabata itself is about unfair and hurtful expectations. Orihime and Hikoboshi's love is portrayed as being in conflict with duty, and God her father punished them for being themselves by star-crossing their marriage for all days of the year save for just the one.

”This kanzashi, your mother told me, was too beautiful for such painful associations. She wanted to find a way to redefine what it could mean, and she thought I could help."

Ranma understood. He carefully picked up the hairpin and studied the jade flower and pearl. He was surprised by how solid and heavy the whole thing felt in his hand. It really was beautiful.

"She wanted you to help because she wouldn't be around long enough to do it herself," he finished for Nabiki, choosing to spare her from having to say it.

She nodded with unspoken gratitude in her eyes. "Your mother really was a remarkable person. I'll always be thankful to her for that night. I told you that it's the best izakaya I've ever been to and the best sake I've ever had.”

She and her father still never agreed with her leaving Japan or anything that she did, but because of Auntie Nodoka, they could at least talk to each other again. In the end, she was able to see and accept that he really did love her in his own way.

"You've had telling me this story on your mind for a while, haven't you," he realised.

"Yeah," Nabiki admitted. She looked very tired now. "It's not an easy story to tell. I promised your mother though that I would try my best to do what she was asking for her kanzashi. Beyond finding in it a reason to sort of reconcile with Daddy, I'd like it if we could redefine together what this gift means."

Ranma smiled as he wrapped his arms around her, gently spun her around and invited her to lean back against him. "Is that a marriage proposal, Doctor Tendou?" he asked.

"Someday, yes, whenever we're ready. That would be nice," she murmured thoughtfully. She smiled as she began fingering the thick edges of her Italian bob. It was overdue for a trim. The ends were now just grazing at her shoulders. "Maybe one day my hair might be just long enough to do up with a kanzashi. I might have penned a Tanabata wish on tanzaku like that if I were someone who believed in doing such things."

"Are ya?" he asked.

"Didn't used to be," she replied. "But then here you are, giving me no choice but to admit that there are still many things about the world that I truly don't understand, forcing me to believe again in possibilities. So yeah, why not."

Ranma smiled as he tightened his hold on her, feeling the comfort of her warm body, the lushness of her hair, and her sweet peach blossom scent. He was realising all over again in yet another strange moment how this beautiful, crazy conundrum of a woman in his arms –misconstrued once as a Cheshire cat that existed only to torment him when he was still  a boy - was the most precious thing he had ever known.

She was all that he had left of his past and all that he wanted to carry with him moving forward.

"I love you," he told Nabiki.

"And I you," she answered.

By this time, it was late enough that the city street outside his window had turned quiet, and some stars could be seen in the clear night sky. Seeing the Milky Way itself would be hopeless, of course, but he led Nabiki to one of his windows anyway, opened it, and tried for a moment. Privately, Ranma had wondered from time to time what his mother might have thought of him and Nabiki. He thought he knew, but now Nodoka Saotome's kanzashi was there on the table to tell her son from beyond the grave.

Nabiki seemed to know what he was thinking. She was looking back at him with those beautiful, luminescent eyes. The audible growl of her stomach, though, broke the comfortable silence that had settled between them.

"Can I have my cheesecake now?"