NeriMAn DIStortion
a Boogiepop Phantom/Ranma ½
fanfic by Zorknot
DISCLAIMER:
Boogiepop Phantom is owned by Kouhei Kadono, Mediaworks, and the Right
Stuff International. Ranma ½ is owned by Rumiko Takahashi, Fuji TV, and Kitty
Film.
“Pone,” created
by Rei Harakami, “Unstability,” created by Hidenobu
Ito, “Torso,”
created by Sadesper Record, and “Penalty Taker,”
created by Audio Active are all copyrighted for the Boogiepop Phantom OST by Mediaworks.
~~~~~[BEGIN]~~~~~
NABIKI TENDO-a
girl on a mission
AKANE TENDO-a
girl possessed
TOFU
ONO-a man searching for himself.
~~~~~Scene
001:
Water drips from a drainage pipe,
plunking into a pool of water below. The rain has come and gone, leaving the
acrid smell of wet asphalt. The moon and stars are shrouded in clouds, and the
streetlamps in the area do little to penetrate the night.
It is dark, and someone is screaming.
The terrible sound comes from above and
weaves around the dripping and splashing in the walkways of the high school. It
could be the wind playing through an open pipe, a small animal mewling
pathetically for food or shelter...but it is simply too human. Or maybe more than human.
Maybe it is the sound of every man and woman,
every nuance of the human species crying out in sadness...in fear.
The sound rises in pitch and then... a
grotesque splattering noise. A beam of light shoots from the
roof of the high school. A high-pitched buzzing now makes the terrible
screams of seconds earlier seem like silence in comparison. Steel supports
buckle, windows smash into the puddles of the street, a spray of blood that may
have once been a man stains the wall of a nearby building... all from a wave of
energy that radiates out from the beam. The lights in the windows of homes and
businesses, hovels and skyscrapers go dark even as far as twenty kilometers
away.
The beam of light dissipates.
Gradually, power is restored to the
surrounding buildings. Lights return to office windows, computers flicker back
on, their monitors glowing balefully in darkened labs.
You could almost believe nothing had
happened...that it had all been a bizarre hallucination. But computers show
error messages that were not there before, glass shards glimmer in the light
from streetlamps as they wink back on...and on a neon sign of an otherwise
unremarkable pharmacy, an arc of electricity sizzles along the bend of one of
the characters.
It’s tempting to believe in illusion, to
discount what has occurred as something less than paranormal, but you must
accept it. For in this world, everything exists. Anything can happen at any
time.
And everything does happen...all the time.
~~~~~Vol. 01: Portraits From Memory~~~~~
~~~~~Scene 02:
St. Hebereke High School ~~~~~
“It appeared.”
“What?”
“The death kami”
“Ohh... I broke a
nail in Gym!”
“When?”
“About a month ago. That
strange light that appeared...”
“Oh yeah! That was
the same night as the explosion at the Nekohanten!”
“Weren’t you working there?”
“Yeah, but I took the night off. The owner
was really freaking me out.”
“And all those kids disappeared at the same
time...you know, the senior, the otaku, and...”
“Disappeared?”
“They were taken.”
“By whom?”
“Baka,
by the death kami of course! Are you even
listening?”
“Death kami?”
“BOOGIEPOP!”
~~~~~faucet~~~~~
My classmates leave me in the bathroom. I’m
washing my hands. The water pours over my palms and through my fingers in
rivulets, inexorably pulled to the drain by gravity, taking away the grime that
comes with the day I’ve lived.
I want it all gone. I want all of the past
washed away. But no matter how long I rub my hands under the stream, the past
won’t leave me. I’m haunted by it.
I splash my face twice with the cool water,
shake my hands dry and turn off the faucet. I look in the mirror, at my modest
features, my wide face, my hair styled in a double ponytail, which on me
somehow seems conservative. The only thing really remarkable about me is how
unremarkable I am. In that way, I’m a perfect aberration. I look exactly like
everyone else, but I’m really nothing like them. I spend so much time trying to
fit in...that no one ever notices.
Maybe that’s okay.
Those girls...they were talking about the
past. That light a month ago, the disappearances...they have something to do
with my encounter last night I know, but I don’t know what. Last night’s
encounter... and the one the night before.
I remember...
That was when I still hated myself.
~~~~~St.
Hebereke High School: Sophomore, Class2: Moto
Tonomura~~~~~
The day before yesterday, I was walking down the
school hallway, invisible.
I’m not invisible to everyone, just most
people. Most people don’t notice me at all. They walk right toward me going
down the hall and then they act surprised when they bump into me. Maybe its
some aura I emanate. Something that tells people
subconsciously that I’m not worth their attention. If it is some power
of mine though, I still haven’t found a way to control it.
I was just stepping out of the way of two senior girls who were
too busy talking about what score they got on their last test to notice me,
when Yasuko called out. “Hey, Moto! Where were you? We have to go soon!”
Yasuko is a thin girl. She has one of those metabolisms that lets her eat anything and not gain weight, while I’m always
a parfait away from needing new clothes. She has stylish short hair and she
always seems to be smiling. Until she saw me, she was walking with Junko who is
a little taller than Yasuko and I, with her black hair in a perky pony tail.
“I don’t know if I’m
coming,” I tell Yasuko, “I think...”
“Come on! You said you would yesterday!”
Yasuko took my hand. She’s thin, but her hand isn’t bony. Her skin is smooth,
aside from the small calluses she developed from Rhythmic Gymnastics.
My skin is rough, rubbed raw.
I do fairly well in Gymnastics-- not the best
or the worst, but average. We had a match with Furinkan the next day...without
the Black Rose. Junko is the team captain now, and everyone is glad Kodachi’s not around anymore. The team was planning on
going to a karaoke bar after class with some boys for a pre-game
celebration.
I hate Karaoke.
“It’s fine,” Junko
said from down the hall, punching buttons into her uber-cute
pink cell phone. It had a little yellow teddy bear figurine dangling from the
antenna along with a strange little wooden one. “She doesn’t have to come...
Then again there’ll be eight boys and only seven girls...the balance will be
off...”
The boys were from Furinkan. Which is perhaps
a little odd, but where else are you going to find dates in an all-girl school?
Many of my team mates take great comfort in the fact that they have “stolen”
the men from the girls of Furinkan. They often laugh and talk about how weird
Furinkan girls are.
Sometimes I wish I could go to Furinkan.
“Wait a second,” Yasuko held up her hand to
Junko, “Come on, Moto, we’re doing this for your sake. You’ve got to get used
to them some time. Boys I mean.”
“Yeah...” I muttered. Yasuko’s been my friend
since grade school despite our rather different dispositions. She’s the reason
I joined the Rhythmic Gymnastics club. She’s really the reason I do almost
anything.
“Great! We’ll meet you at the gate okay?”
Yasuko turned to Junko with a hand on her hip. “She hasn’t changed since junior
high. She still won’t go anywhere unless I drag her!”
Yasuko has a habit of talking about me as if
I’m not there, which I consider a step above not noticing me at all, but I find
it annoying all the same. She’s different when her friends aren’t around, but
it’s one of the reasons I sometimes wish I could disappear for real. Like the
senior, the otaku, and Kuno “The Black Rose” Kodachi.
I wished then, as I had before, that
Boogiepop, the kami of death, would come for me.
I was enthralled with the recent stories of the
spirit that roamed the alleys and darkened streets of the city in human form,
whistling a haunting tune as he looked for his victims. He would send a glowing
string of thin material into their bodies and suck out their life’s energy. The
victims would then convulse and gyrate as if dancing to a frenetic beat and
then disappear in a shimmer of light. This spirit, this mysterious death kami that killed with dance soon became known as Boogiepop.
That’s how I always wanted to die...to
disappear in a shimmer of light. Some said that when Boogiepop used his glowing
string it did not kill people, but sent them to a better place, that they
became kami themselves. Before last night, I really
didn’t care either way. I just wanted to leave this world.
Now though...
~~~~~faucet~~~~
I’m washing my hands again. I don’t even know
when I turned the faucet on. Sometimes I spend hours in the bathroom without
realizing. I’m strange that way.
I watch the water for a few moments as it
pours down the drain. When I get in this state of mind, everything seems
profound, like I’m seeing it for the first time, or as if the random patterns
of the water in the sink might at some point coalesce into some vision of the
future. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just crazy.
Looking back at it, at the encounter, I
suppose it must have been aftereffects. The aftermath of something much bigger
that happened earlier. Looking at the world as a whole, the incident was really
only one piece of a much larger puzzle, but it’s the pieces of the puzzle that
form the picture.
As far as I’m concerned, I just want to find
out what the encounter meant to me personally.
~~~~~gachatsu~~~~~
I had to get my bookbag before I could leave the
school with Yasuko. So I went to my classroom, used a tissue to slide the door
back, and entered the room, throwing the tissue into the wastebasket by the
door.
I suppose at some point in my life I must
have decided that I didn’t like germs, but I really can’t say when it was.
These things I do...using tissues to touch foreign objects, rubbing my hands
with antiseptic wet wipes every night before sleeping, washing my hands perhaps
a little too thoroughly...I’m not really thinking about germs when I do them.
Mostly it’s just that not doing them would be breaking some kind of contract I
have with myself. I guess I’m really just afraid that if I stop these rituals,
I might lose control. Or maybe it’s something else...
The classroom was empty. I was pretty much
the last one to leave school. That day, the teacher had us sit in a circle for
discussion; so the desks were all pushed back toward the walls. Mine was the
only desk that didn’t have to move. On my desk, all by itself beside the window, was my bookbag. There was a tiny figurine attached
to the handle. Everyone on the Gymnastics team has the same one. I had one
because Yasuko had one.
I didn’t use a tissue to pick up the bag,
even though of course it had sat there on the desk unsupervised, and who knows
what might have happened to it since I left it. Germs really have little to do
with my problems, and so I just picked it up and headed for the door.
I stopped before leaving the classroom to
look out the window at the sky. Ever since that light shot from the roof of
Furinkan, the sky has had this strange aurora. I found myself staring at it
then, much as I’m staring at the water in the sink right now. I remember
saying, oddly, “It’s all distorted.”
It seemed to sum it all up. Not just the aurora
itself but everything else that had been going on at the time. Certainly Nerima
has always had a reputation for being strange, but lights in the sky,
unexplained disappearances...that’s strange on a different level entirely.
I was able to break my reverie in time to
meet Yasuko at the gate, and before I knew it, we were at the Karaoke bar.
~~~~~mori no kuma-san~~~~~
When we met the boys there, the other girls
on the team quickly found members of the opposite sex to converse with, and we
separated into two groups. This was because the Karaoke booths could only hold
eight people and the boys made us sixteen. The boy that was left for me,
Yasuhiro, surprised me by being somewhat attractive, although he could have
stood to lose a few pounds.
I wasn’t really interested. In fact, it was
worse that he wasn’t a total loser because I didn’t have as much of an excuse
to ignore him.
Our half of the group sat in a room with a
large TV on one end attached to a karaoke machine, a table for snacks and drinks
along the center and vinyl couches along either wall. Junko had just finished
her song when I heard about what happened to Ranma Saotome.
“So who’s next?” Junko asked as she sat down.
All of her height is in her legs. Sitting down, Junko is as tall as I am, but
her legs always seem a little awkward.
I looked down at the floor, hoping my
invisibility would kick in.
“I don’t know, let’s see...” Sachiko said, flipping through the song book on her lap. Sachiko was supposedly pretty popular in school, but I knew
little about her outside of Gymnastics. She had streaks in her long flowing
hair and a slightly European cast to her face. I think her father was French or
something. She was one of the ones I could beat in a match.
“You don’t want to sing?” a male voice asked
me. I shouldn’t have looked up but I did. It was Yasuhiro, the leftover boy. He
spoke cavalierly, the straw hanging from his pudgy mouth. “That’s kind of the
idea here you know.”
“Give her a break!” Yasuko chided, “she’s not used to going to these kinds of places!”
“Hey, Sachiko,”
Ichiro, one of the other boys began sitting across from Yasuko and I. He was
dark-complected, and had his hair shaved to bristles on his head “Did you hear about Saotome?”
“Wha?”
Yasuko exclaimed in surprise.
“What about her?” Sachiko
asked, flicking her hair back.
An odd wrinkle appeared in Ichiro’s
bristles. “Disappeared about a month ago. No one knows
why.”
“Is that so?” Yasuko said. Her smile was just
a little too big.
Junko clapped her hands over her legs. “Good!
That means we might have a chance against Furinkan tomorrow!”
“I don’t know,” Yasuhiro noted, pointing with
his straw, “Saotome might just be on a long training trip or something. That’s
happened before.”
“Who’s Saotome?” Eriko, who had transferred
recently from
“Saotome Ranma” Junko informed, “She was the
first person, maybe the only person, to beat the Black Rose in the ring...She’s
one of those strange Furinkan girls that like to pretend they’re guys.”
“Hey, Saotome is a guy.
I took gym with him and I know for a fact that nothing’s missing,” A boy on the
other couch, with a mussed-up mop of black hair— I think his name was Niro—, said.
“Oh you do eh?” Sachiko
teased, curling a lock of hair around her finger.
“I saw someone snag him in the crotch okay?
Jeez! I wasn’t stalking the guy or anything!” Niro
was a little small for a boy and seemed a little younger than he was. He seemed
to be making up for it by being macho.
Junko nodded. “Word is that Ranma has a twin
brother who’s also named Ranma for some reason. They have this little game they
play where they pretend to be each other. Really weird if you ask me.”
“So which one’s missing?”
Eriko asked, the smallest of frowns appearing on her pouting face.
“They both are,” the baritone voice of the
rather muscular Satoshi boomed from the other side of Yasuko. In a
conspiratorial tone he added. “Believe it or not, a lot of people think they’re
actually the same person.”
“Weird,” Yasuko said and took a sip of her
soda.
Satoshi asked, “You seemed surprised when you
heard his name. Did you know him from somewhere else or something?”
“Huh? No! Not at all!”
Yasuko lied.
“Are you sure?” Satoshi asked teasingly.
“Yes of course!” Yasuko gave Satoshi a peck
on the lips. “I never met him,” Yasuko assured, and she and the boy started
tongue wrestling. Yasuko was so thin in comparison to Satoshi she almost seemed
to disappear into him...
I turned away from the scene in disgust. Maybe I just never grew
up romantically, but that kind of sloppy-faced kissing just never appealed to
me. I hadn’t even seen Satoshi before that night.
“Yeah, Saotome was kinda freaky,” Niro admitted, scratching the back of his head with a
scrawny arm, “I didn’t hang around him too much.”
“Did you know him, Tonomura?” Yasuhiro asked
me suddenly. I had to hand it to the pudgy boy, he was
intent on starting a conversation.
“Um...yeah...” I said.
Sachiko waved Niro off with a flick of her hair, ignoring me. “We have
freaky people too. I mean take Kodachi for example. I’m glad she disappeared.”
Ichiro leaned forward, his head shining
through his bristles, “What’s really freaky is I heard someone saw Ranma’s
ghost the other day.”
“Her ghost?”
“Yeah. Well...his ghost really.”
Niro snorted, “I
think I like him better as a ghost. At least a ghost can’t beat you up, right?”
My attention veered to Yasuko’s smiling,
laughing face as she giggled at some joke that Satoshi made. Then I noticed the
karaoke machine clicking into another song. “He was probably taken,” I muttered
to myself, “by Boogiepop.”
“Huh? Boogie what?” Ichiro asked, his
bristles wrinkling.
“Oh it’s just a silly rumor...an urban
legend.” Junko assured. She crossed her legs nervously.
Yasuhiro pointed the head of microphone to me
insistently.
“That’s right! It’s Moto’s
turn!” Junko squealed, and I took the mic from
Yasuhiro’s meaty fingers with a grimace.
I really hate karaoke.
~~~~~faucet~~~~~
After I was forced to sing “Mr. Bear of the
“Moto!” Yasuko
interrupted my woolgathering. I don’t know how long she was standing behind me
in the restroom. I have no sense of time when I’m like that. I turned toward
Yasuko to let her know I heard her. “You understand, right?” she asked, “I
don’t want Satoshi to know about Ranma. He gets really jealous, and anyway that
whole thing was a little weird. Just keep it a secret okay?”
“I understand” I said.
“Good” Yasuko said and turned toward the
door. She paused. “Moto...” She turned to face me. “You and I...Are we still
friends?”
“Eh?”
“It’s just I don’t know sometimes if we’re
really...”
“Friends? Of course
we are, right?” I tried to sound convincing.
“You’re right! Why did I even ask?” Yasuko
said with a nervous giggle, and then shut the door.
I looked at water coming out of the faucet.
Much as I am doing now. I looked at the white, clear organized chaos as it fell
predictably from the faucet to the sink yet never quite hit the same spot in
the same way twice. I looked at this steady stream of distortion and thought
about the past.
Ranma Saotome gave Yasuko her first kiss.
~~~~~Scene003:
Junior High Summer~~~~~
Yasuko used to be a lot like me. She was a
pretty quiet girl till two years ago, the summer after our last year of junior
high. One day, we were walking from school when Saotome approached us,
pigtailed and in a red and black Chinese outfit. He had a slightly dazed
expression on his face...and a pink band-aid on the bridge of his nose.
Before either of us knew what to make of the
strange boy, he took Yasuko’s hand and said, “My name is Ranma Saotome. You’re
very beautiful, is it okay if I kiss you?” And then he did.
Yasuko melted into it, and I stared, shocked, as it happened. Then
a very angry girl with short black hair and wearing a blue Furinkan High
uniform yelled “Ranma no baka!” and kicked Saotome
high into the air.
Until that point, neither Yasuko nor I had
ever imagined we’d have any romantic relationships until we were something like
thirty-five and had respectable jobs doing... whatever. I suppose it’s strange
enough that we were still virgins going into High School, and even stranger
that we weren’t even looking for sex. But that’s how we were. It all seemed
pointless to us. But then Saotome kissed Yasuko.
She developed a major crush from that, and she spent the rest of
that week finding out all she could about Ranma Saotome. Unfortunately, she
found out fairly quickly that he was already engaged to several girls, that the
only reason he had been so forward in the first place was that he had a cursed
band-aid on his face that made him be affectionate to whomever he saw, that
this sort of thing was normal for him, and finally that Kuno “the Black Rose”
Kodachi was already in love with him.
Yes, he was THAT Ranma-sama.
Ranma was completely out of Yasuko’s league,
but still, she absorbed every rumor and story that she could about him. She
would press anyone from Furinkan for information about Saotome, both boys and
girls. Gradually, she asked less and less girls though, and soon, she was
actively dating. She started to become more confident, while I...I became even
less comfortable around boys.
~~~~~childhood~~~~~
When she lost her virginity, she became more
of a free spirit.
She flirted with guys all the time. I asked
her once if she had found anything out about Saotome and she gave me an odd
look. She said she was completely over him.
But...
~~~~~pone~~~~~
I was walking alone back to my house one day
after school. I was in my first year at St. Hebereke. Often when I don’t have
company, I take the scenic route alongside the canal. I like hearing the sounds
of the water, watching it sparkle in the sun. That day though, it was overcast.
It started to rain, and I didn’t have an umbrella; so I jumped over the fence
and ran under a bridge to wait it out, thanking my Rhythmic Gymnastics
training.
I sat there for a while, watching the water
pass by and thinking about Yasuko and how much she had changed. But then I
noticed a figure silhouetted against the pale sky. A
pigtailed, red-headed girl carrying some kind of dead animal in her left hand.
“Um...sorry,” the figure said with a bow and
turned away.
I just sat looking at the water as the rain
came down in sheets outside the shelter of the bridge. The figure returned.
“Look, what’s wrong? Cause this is my place to sulk and it’s really no fair you
stealing it.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said with a shrug.
“Right. Not gonna be easy I guess. Then again, nothing is I s’pose.” The small girl walked toward me and sat down,
throwing the animal on the ground next to her.
I could see her face then. It was the girl
that beat Kodachi in Gymnastics. I was still in junior high during that match,
but I had seen the game. Ranma Saotome. And although it was the female Ranma,
if Yasuko’s stories were to be believed, she was really close to the male
version.
“Look, I can’t have other people sulking in
my spot. Either tell me what’s going on or leave.”
“You’re...Ranma...”
Ranma raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah. You’re from St. Hebereke, right? Musta
made an impression at the match...what’s your name?”
“Tonomura...Moto.”
“Moto, huh? So
what’s up? Your boyfriend leave ya
or something?”
“No. No boyfriend.”
“Oh. You feelin kinda lonely then, is that it? No
friends, no one understands you, you feel completely apart from everything but
people still expect you to participate?”
I didn’t say anything. People don’t
understand that just because I’m a little pensive from time to time it doesn’t
mean that I’m sad. Still, Ranma was hitting a little too close to the mark for
me to deny what she said.
Ranma sighed. “Well, join the club. You got
it better than me I bet.”
“Eh?”
“You scared of cats?”
I shook my head.
“Guess how I got this.” Ranma picked up the
dead animal...it was a rabbit.
Yasuko had told me almost all the stories she
heard about Ranma. There were a few about this strange mental problem she had
with cats. Ranma was extremely afraid of them, but if there were enough of
them, or she couldn’t get away, she would actually start to believe she was
one. “Nekoken?”
“Yeah. Nekoken. Guess you know more about me than you let on.
You’re not engaged to me or anything are you?”
I shook my head. I was a little confused. I
remembered suddenly that it was the male
Ranma that had the Nekoken training. But it was so hard to keep track, what
with the names being the same and all.
“Oh right. I’m a girl right now. I forget, you
know.” Ranma picked up a pebble and threw it into the canal. “I guess if you
were engaged to me you wouldn’t be saying you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“Eh?”
“Forget about it. It’s just...” Ranma looked off
into the rain, clenching a fist. Suddenly she slammed it into the ground. “It’s
just I got a lot of people who want a piece of me. I’m sick of it. Even Akane. Especially Akane. I
mean what does she care even if I DID want to go shag every girl that I ran
into? Don’t get me wrong, Akane’s great. She’s helped me out of more fixes than
I can count and she’s actually pretty fun most the time...but the girl’s got
problems you know? Not that I don’t have my own but...”
It was a tad surreal to be hearing all this
from a busty red-headed girl, and I guess I must have stared or something
because Ranma paused.
“Hey, stop looking at me like I just grew a
second head. I got a curse in
“You...you change with water?”
“Yeah.” Ranma
scratched the back of her head. “I guess that might actually be stranger than
the second head scenario.”
She and I were quiet for a while. Shivering,
Ranma squeezed the water out of her shirt. She stared at it for awhile as it
dripped. “You know, ever since Jusenkyo I’ve had this fascination with the
stuff? With water. Most normal thing in the world and
yet...”
“It’s always changing, flowing, going somewhere.”
“Yeah. How does it
do that?”
I shrugged and just watched the surface of
the canal. I was sitting next to Ranma Saotome. It was THE Ranma Saotome. The
one Yasuko had wanted, the one the Black Rose was in
love with. I wanted to say something... to acknowledge that somehow with words,
but I just couldn’t think of anything appropriate.
“So what’s the deal? You’re not ugly or
anything, how come you don’t have any friends?”
“I have a friend.” I found myself saying.
“Then leave. You should be with your friend.
This is my spot.”
“It’s raining.”
“Yeah. Well you ain’t that sweet; you’ll live.”
I didn’t move. I really didn’t even think of
moving. I felt like I needed to be there somehow.
Ranma took in a breath and let it out. “If
you were Akane, I’d have a concussion by now.”
I nodded. I figured that was the girl who
punted Ranma that one time. The one I heard about from Yasuko’s stories.
“So what’s your friend like, Moto?” Ranma asked.
I shrugged.
“You have a falling out or something?”
I hesitated for a moment, and then I nodded.
That was more or less what happened.
“That’s rough. I had a friend when I was a
kid, we did everything together, and then my Pops made me leave. Five years
later, I see him again, only I find out he’s a girl and engaged to me. How’m I supposed to deal with that, huh? I just about gave
up on trying to be friends with her again. All she
wants is to marry me now. I’m seventeen! Why can’t they cut me some slack? I
mean just today...I’m walking with Akane, and we’re actually almost getting
along, and then Shampoo jumps out and gives me the Amazonian embrace of death.
Then Akane goes ballistic and douses both of us with a hose. Shampoo turns into
a cat, which of course makes me go into Nekoken, and the next thing I know it’s
raining and I’m carrying a dead rabbit in my mouth. I mean really. Has anything
like that ever happened to you?”
I shook my head.
“Exactly. It ain’t normal. I can’t even be friends with any of them
without the others getting suspicious, and they all expect me marry them...to
love them? I have enough trouble convincing myself that getting a period
doesn’t make me any less of a man!”
“You...you get periods?”
“Yeah. Mostly I just
make extra careful not to be a girl during them and it’s fine but...yeah. It
freaks me out.”
A barge passed by us under the bridge. Ranma
and I both watched it in silence. It was funny, but I hadn’t thought of Ranma
as a real person until that point. All those stories that Yasuko told me...they
were like tall tales, almost like the stories about Boogiepop. It made me
wonder if maybe Boogiepop was a real person too.
“You know this is the first time I killed
anything?”
“Eh?”
“This rabbit. It didn’t
do anything to me. I wasn’t hungry or anything. But I killed it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No. No, it is my fault. All of it. I should have
never allowed any of it to go on. I just...I just want everyone to be happy. I
just want them to...I don’t know, get along. Be friends. Damn that sounds
sappy. Heh...I’ve been trying to give everyone what they want. Pops, Akane,
Ukyo, Shampoo...and all this time I’ve really been selfish. I should just let
them hate me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense...”
“Maybe
it doesn’t. I’m just babbling here okay? But...maybe it does.” Ranma picked up
the rabbit by the ears. She turned it around looking at its open mouth, the
jagged wounds in its side that made smudged bloodstains in the once snow white
fur. It looked like it might have been someone’s pet at one time. “I
wonder...why do they even bother to live?” Ranma said. “They all die anyway.”
I looked at the rabbit, then at the canal,
moving eternally without ever going anywhere. “Yes,” I said, “you’re right.”
That was when I knew that Ranma didn’t really
love them. Her fiancées. Any of
them.
And then...I don’t know how it started, but I
was helplessly falling for her.
~~~~~Scene:004: The Present~~~~~
The night before last, walking from the
karaoke bar with the others...I couldn’t stop thinking about that day.
I never saw Saotome again, and I kept my
feelings a secret. Not only was it like I was betraying Yasuko, but
also...Saotome was a girl, at least when I talked to her she was. She acted so
much like a boy, but still... I’ve never felt that way about anyone before or
since. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I’m still not sure. Not only that, but
Ranma was the enemy of the Gymnastics team. Female Ranma had beaten our old
captain and male Ranma, well he was the boy the crazy
captain was in love with; so that was even worse.
I didn’t dare share my feelings with anyone.
I suppressed them as much as I could. And I convinced myself over the months
that my feelings for Saotome had started to fade, but that night, less than
forty-eight hours ago...they were back.
The girls on the team and their dates were
walking to a night club where there would be dancing. I fell behind them in an
alleyway. I wanted to talk to Saotome again. I needed to. I started to feel a
strange buzzing in my brain. I began to feel faint. I crouched to the ground to steady myself...
“Moto, are you coming or not?” Yasuko asked.
I didn’t respond. I just knelt there on the
pavement. I sensed something behind me and I turned around...
~~~~~unstability~~~~~
I saw lights in the darkness of the
alley...lots of tiny lights like sparks of electricity, only larger. They came
together growing brighter and finally taking the shape of a person, a boy.
Saotome.
He looked up at me and he drifted toward me.
He looked like he was about to kiss me.
I screamed.
I screamed and ran away. I ran all the way
home, and I spent the rest of that night, through supper and watching mindless
TV shows...just trying to convince myself that what I saw hadn’t happened.
~~~~~beep
beep~~~~~
I woke up yesterday to the alarm and to my
Dad opening my door to check on me. I keep telling him not to open my door but
he still does it. I told him again as I turned off the alarm. I know Dad cares
but...every time he does that I get this compulsion...
I pulled out four or five wet wipes from the
container I keep by my bed and rubbed the handle of my door where my father had
touched. It’s not about germs. I don’t know what it is that makes me do things
like that. Maybe it has something to do with how my father married another
woman after mom died...
Suddenly I remembered seeing Saotome that
night. I pulled out five more tissues and rubbed my hands. Over and over again
I rubbed them, till tears came to my eyes from the pain, till the backs of my
hands were beet red, cracked and bleeding.
I want it all gone. I want the past to go
away...
~~~~~traffic~~~~~
Why?
Why are we alive?
I mean, we all die anyway...
As I was walking to school yesterday morning
in my jogging suit, I passed by a store window. It had manikins, headless and
armless, sporting the latest fashions. I found myself stopping to look. Could I
ever be the type of girl who would wear those sorts of clothes? They all seemed
be geared toward sex. And the only one I ever loved...was he dead? Was that his
ghost I saw?
It all seemed pointless just then...Saotome,
my problems with Yasuko, the match with Furinkan. It was all just a flash in
the pan of a much bigger, darker world.
There was a girl leaning on a railing of the
walking bridge that stretched over the street. She was dressed in a pink skirt
fringed everywhere with lace and giggling as she reached for something I
couldn’t see. She must have been at least fifteen really, but she was acting
like she was five, or even just a few months old. And I wondered why she was
alive. What sort of life could someone like that lead? And what was the point?
I didn’t have an answer. I just walked the
rest of the way to St. Hebereke High School, trying to focus on the match
ahead.
~~~~~torso~~~~~
The team left Hebereke High together for
Furinkan. Even I was excited about it...but I think it was more that I was
going to see the inside of that place as opposed to any school spirit.
I actually won two of my three matches
against Furinkan. The first match was against a blond-haired girl. American, I
think. Poor thing had this haunted expression on her face almost all the time,
like she had no idea what was going on. I’ve heard that, in
I just threw my favorite weapon, the medicine
ball, at her with an underhanded toss, and she didn’t dodge or anything, she
just folded over it with an “oomph” and sailed right
out the ring. Easiest match I ever had.
The next match was more interesting.
The rules of Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics
are rather lax. You simply have to throw someone out of the ring without
directly using your hands or feet. You can use wrists; you can use ankles. As
long as your hand never touches your opponent you can even put her in a choke
hold, though that’s considered rather low class. And you can use just about any
tool you can think of. My second opponent used a metal pole...and a can of termites.
The rings consist of canvas over a wire
lattice connected by springs to a wooden frame. The girl must have been using
mutant termites or something, because afterward all that was left was the wire
lattice and a few boards from the gymnasium floor over the ground below. And
only a few seconds after that, the termites died. Apparently, the girl was to
the field of entomology what Kodachi was to botany. Lucky for me, she wasn’t
all that skilled. When she was balancing on her pole, and I was standing on the
last remaining post of the square ring, I threw a medicine ball at her. She
started to fall and I launched myself at her, slamming into her with my knees.
She landed outside of the ring, and I landed on top of her. Since no part of me
was touching the ground outside the ring and as I was balancing on my knees on
top of her, not using my feet or hands, I won that one as well.
Furinkan High, being no stranger to
destruction, already had a spare ring ready and the tournament proceeded.
In my third match, though, I had no chance.
It was terrible. Not because I lost, but... If I had known who I was going to
be fighting, I would have forfeited. The girl with the long chestnut brown hair
wore a pretty standard blue leotard, but the bandoliers of spatulas complete
with the large one harnessed to the back bothered me. They were odd weapons,
but more than that, there was something about someone wielding spatulas that I
thought I should remember. Then the announcer called out our names. I, Tonomura
Moto was fighting Kuonji Ukyo. Ranma’s childhood friend and
fiancée.
I was so wrapped up in thinking about the
implications that I didn’t see the volley of spatulas headed toward me until too
late. I dodged them as best I could, but I received some pretty deep cuts on my
forearms as I blocked the ones I couldn’t avoid.
I called for my medicine ball, and when I had
it, I threw it with all my might at the spatula girl, but she stepped to the
side and, smooth as anything, brought out her big spatula, swung it, and hit
the ball right back toward me. I jumped away and it broke clean through the
post behind me and into the gymnasium floor. Ukyo meant business.
I called for my ribbon and tried to see if I
could disarm her, but it didn’t work. The ribbon wrapped around the handle of
the oversize spatula, but Ukyo yanked hard and the handle of the ribbon slipped
out of my grasp. Then she started using the ribbon to swing the giant spatula
again and again in a widening gyre. The mass of sharp metal came zooming toward
me at high speed over and over. The posts were all cut down now, and I had to
keep jumping over the ribbon to keep from getting clothes lined. Finally, the
ribbon unraveled and the spatula went flying through a wall.
Ukyo screamed in frustration. I knew it was
only her anger that was allowing me to get as far as I had. But I could not
quite bring myself to end the match by jumping out of the ring. It was the same
thing as watching the water...Ukyo was so angry, yet she also seemed tired
somehow, as if she had been fighting for far longer than the span of the
tournament. Her eyes were strange, focused and distant. Part of her cared so much, and part of her had stopped caring. She was like a
spinning top, somehow staying in equilibrium but at any moment...
She started talking. Grumbling really at
first, but then the words rose in volume and pitch. “Twelve years,” She said.
“Twelve years I’ve dedicated to you. I renounced my womanhood, for a decade I
trained so that I could kill you...”
Her battle aura incandesced into the visible
spectrum. It grew larger, folded back on itself. “Then when I found you, I
forgave you. My entire purpose in life was to kill you, and I gave that up. I
gutted my soul and threw its meat on the dirt to rot. I did that for you. I
thought you would heal the wound, fill my soul with your love. But you just let
it fester. You just ignored me.”
She was crying then, and I was reminded of
those videos they showed us in school about earthquakes, where they have a
building on a shaking foundation, and bits of it start to drop off. “I became a
woman again for you. I thought that’s what you wanted. Do you realize how hard
that was? Harder even than becoming a man. But you didn’t care. I was nothing
to you. Invisible. You just bumped past me and went on
as if I wasn’t there. You left me. You left me for the one woman you swore you
would never love.”
The battle aura turned positively scary. It
was a vibrant purple that kept curling and roiling within itself like a
thundercloud through time elapse. It kept getting darker too. It seemed to
steal all the light from the room. Ukyo looked up at the ceiling. “I’m wearing
a leotard, Ranma, just like her. And I can be every bit as evil. Is that what
you want? Will that be enough?” The girl was barely visible now through her
inky dark aura. It was dark, so dark...and now she was screaming “Will anything
be enough? What do I need to do?”
And then a tendril of that inky blackness
drifted toward me, and I was still transfixed. It surrounded me, suffocated me.
Too late, I started to struggle against it.
“Should I kill her? Will that make you come
back?” Ukyo’s voice was more subdued, but the pain that trilled through made it
even more powerful.
The purple-black smoky tendril of Ukyo’s aura
squeezed harder... and maybe I felt a little of her pain, because I, too, am
invisible, because I too loved Ranma. But I couldn’t succumb to it. I found a
breath within myself and rasped, “All Ranma wanted was to be your friend.” The
aura dissipated, and for a moment, I was free. I didn’t waste any time. I
jumped, backward
somersaulting once in the air before landing on my feet...outside the ring.
I watched the referee lift Ukyo’s hand up,
declaring her the victor. Ukyo was still crying, almost doubled over in tears.
And then I realized...I was crying too. There was no way Ranma would ever love
Ukyo, and there was no way he was ever going to love me.
I needed to wash my hands. To
wash this feeling away. I started walking toward the gym exit, but
Yasuko stopped me.
“Moto, look at your arms! You’re going to
bleed to death if you don’t get some help!”
I looked. The cuts were much deeper
than I had thought. My forearms were covered in blood, and there was a trail of
drops all the way back to the ring. Suddenly I felt faint. Yasuko threw my arm
over her thin shoulder and hurried me to the locker room where there was a
first aid kit.
~~~~~pone~~~~~
“Moto,” She said after we were both sitting
on a bench and she was wrapping my arm in a tight bandage after washing it, “I
want to give you something.”
“Hmm?”
She tied off the bandage and went to her
duffle bag. It was red and the zipper had a little wooden figurine on it, just
like mine and Junko’s. “You know you gave me a scare last night. The way you
ran away screaming. And now what happened with Ukyo, are you sure you’re
alright?”
“I’m fine,” I said, “It was nothing.”
Yasuko shrugged, opened the bag and took out
a wide, pink, three-ring binder. “At first, I was going to burn them all, but
then I thought, maybe someday I would want to remember...”
She opened the binder. Flipping through the
pages of photos, I saw
pictures of Ranma: fighting, half-dressed, even one nude from the
back. Later on, there were pictures of female Ranma as well. Yasuko blushed a
little, “Ranma got a curse. He turns into a girl with cold water. I never told
you because...well it was just too weird and I wasn’t sure if...you know.”
I nodded. Aside from the inclusion of the
female form with the male, I noticed a trend. In each successive picture, he
was angrier, more violent. There was this glint that started to appear in his
eye. It made me think of the dead rabbit. That was the first time he had killed
anything. Had he killed other things since then? If he was this different when
Yasuko was over him, what had happened in the year since?
The last picture was different from the
others. It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t sexual. It was Ranma in female form,
slouched against a doorway during a sunset, one leg out, the other tucked under
her. On her cheek there was a single tear. Yasuko noticed I was looking at it.
“Nabiki made me pay extra for that one. I didn’t mind. It’s beautiful don’t you
think?”
I nodded.
“When I saw it, though, I knew it would be
the last photo I’d buy. I told Nabiki that and she didn’t argue. I asked why
Ranma was crying. Nabiki said...she said she wished she knew.”
“Nabiki?” I asked.
“Tendo Nabiki. Akane’s older sister. I used
to get most my information from her. Sometimes I would tell her things that
were going on in St. Hebereke for money; so I saw her every now and then even
after I stopped buying photos. She graduated last year though, and I haven’t
really talked to her since. I think I might have seen her in the bleachers
today, but I’m not sure. Her hair was different.”
“Did Ranma and Kodachi really...?”
“Yes. You know how she stopped showing up to
class a couple months ago?”
I nodded. That a few weeks
before the giant light shot from the roof of Furinkan.
“I decided I’d do a little spying, so I
followed Kodachi out of her house to see where she went. She met Ranma
underneath a bridge and...I don’t know for sure, I was trying to stay hidden,
but...I think they were selling drugs to somebody.”
I swallowed the growing lump in my throat.
“I always thought, even after I gave up on
him, that Ranma was beyond that sort of thing, that despite his superficial
faults, inside he was a good person, someone with moral integrity. I thought he
had a perfect soul.” Yasuko looked up at the fluorescent light of the locker
room. “I guess I was wrong.”
“I guess...”
“Anyway,” Yasuko shook her head and smiled as
if to say she was just being silly, “I wanted to give this to you. Satoshi has
been coming over a lot recently and I don’t want him finding out. And...I get a queasy feeling every time I think of Saotome
now. I know I can trust you, though, and somehow I just don’t think it would be
right to burn it. Will you take care of it for me?”
I closed the binder and looked at the plastic
pink of its cover. I could see a vague shadow of my reflection in it. Yasuko
trusted me. She didn’t know about me and Ranma. And Ranma...drugs...somehow I
felt like it was my fault.
“Moto?”
“Yes...um...I’ll take care of it.” I got up
and put the notebook in my duffle bag. Then, getting a chill, I decided to go
ahead and put my jogging suit on over my leotard.
“Thanks, Moto, this means a lot.” Yasuko
shook her head and laughed. “Here I am talking about Ranma again, right after
you nearly got killed by one of his fiancées! I’m so sorry. I must be a
terrible friend.”
“No...it’s okay.
Kuonji-san was just very upset...”
“Yeah she took the news harder than anyone.
Did you hear what she did at the failed wedding last year?”
“Failed wedding?”
“Yeah, Ranma had almost been married to
Akane, and Ukyo and Shampoo tried to ‘save’ him from it by throwing explosives
on them both during the ceremony. I met Ukyo a few times at her restaurant. I
always got the impression she was relatively sane, but I guess she came a
little unhinged when she heard about the wedding. I don’t know if she ever
recovered really, and then hearing about Ranma and Kodachi must have driven her
over the edge.”
I pulled my hair out of the collar of my
sweatshirt. “I...didn’t know...”
“I found out from Nabiki. She didn’t ask for
money or anything. I think she was upset...I’m sorry I never really thought to tell
you. You always seem distant when I talk about Ranma, like you’re ignoring me
or something.” Yasuko stood up and stretched. “I should probably get dressed
myself. You did better than I did. I feel like such a loser going out my first
round.”
I nodded sympathetically as I picked up my
bag. New pain flashed across my forearms and I winced.
“You should probably go see a nurse about
those cuts, make sure they don’t need stitches.” Yasuko advised.
“I’ll go now,” I said. “See you.”
“Later!” Yasuko waved.
~~~~~penalty
taker~~~~~
I had to ask someone where the Nurse’s office
was, but I eventually found it. I rummaged in my duffle bag, found my wet wipes
and used a tissue to open the door. “Please excuse my rudeness,” I said as I
walked in and closed the door behind me, my eyes to the floor. When I looked
up, I expected to see the nurse. I saw a pervert instead.
Looking out under the blinds of the office window, was a black-haired boy in a blue Furinkan uniform.
When I came in, he turned around and his eyes went immediately to my breasts.
“The nurse isn’t here,” he said, continuing to stare. His eyes were strange,
manic almost.
I never had to deal with perverts before. I
go to an all girl school and usually people didn’t notice me much at all. While
this boy may not have seen me, he saw my breasts, and I didn’t know what to do.
I stepped back.
He stepped forward.
I had a thought of rushing past him into the
larger examination room, but after I took three quick steps he blocked my path.
He reached toward my chest. “Um...” I said in protest.
“Don’t move!” he said.
My back now to a cabinet
full of medicine, I tried to backpedal again, but I hit the cabinet, knocking
over two bottles of pills. One shattered next to my foot; the other rolled
along the floor. The sound seemed louder than normal, distorted.
The boy came closer, almost touching me. I
gasped.
The boy paused, looked up at my face. “I’m
sorry,” he said, bringing his hand back to his side. “There’s a bug attached to
your heart. I understand if you don’t want me to touch you, but if you let it,
that bug is going to completely devour you.”
“Huh?”
“It’s that knot you feel inside your heart.
I’ve been able to see these things recently.”
I edged toward the door. I was even more
frightened just then.
“You’ve been keeping your feelings bottled
up, haven’t you? For a long time now.” He smiled. “I’m
Daisuke Jounochi, a senior.” He walked to the door
and slid it open. Before he left he turned back to look at me. “Let me know if
you ever want me to grope your chest. It’s better than letting that bug eat you
up, right?” He chuckled and closed the door.
Thinking back, maybe a pervert was all that
Daisuke was, but just then, I thought,
He’s right... For a long time now...
I had to get out of that room.
~~~~~Scene
005:
I wandered the mostly empty halls of the high
school for a long time. I knew nothing would happen, but still, I explored
every inch of that school that I could, trying to get some feel for the places
Saotome Ranma once was.
I tried to imagine Ranma running, Ranma
sleeping in class, Ranma fighting. I knew nothing about her, or him. And yet I
felt like I knew more about Ranma than anyone. I understood her. I knew why she
was crying in the photo. I wanted her so much to be around the corner, to
appear. I wanted...needed Ranma to be
there...to be alive.
But of course she never showed.
When I was finally ready to go back to the tournament, it was
almost dark, and everyone was leaving. In the gym, a throng of cheering
Furinkan High gymnasts clustered around the victor of the tournament, Tendo
Akane. Ranma’s main fiancée. She carried a large blue
duffle bag, not too different from mine.
She was laughing. Smiling.
I found myself walking toward the scene,
trying to figure out how the one who was nominally the closest to Ranma could
be so carefree after her disappearance.
She must have noticed me looking at her.
“Do you need something?” she asked, once she
was back on the ground.
I shook my head no.
“You’re from St. Hebereke right? Hey! You’re
the one that fought Ukyo aren’t you? I’m really sorry about that. Are you sure
you don’t need anything?”
I almost shook my head again, but then I
thought... “Is...is your sister, Nabiki, still here?”
Akane’s eyes widened and she came closer to
me. “You want to see her? I’ll go with you. She can be a little scary, but if
we both explain it to her, it should be alright.”
One of the other girls spoke up, “I think I
saw Nabiki leave earlier. She looked kind of angry.”
“She always
looks angry,” a younger girl pointed out.
Akane turned to me, “Well, what do you want
to do? I’d offer to take you to the dojo, but the girls and I were planning to
go celebrate.”
“It’s
okay,” I said.
“Akane, we might miss the movie!” one of the
girls said and they all started running toward the locker room.
Akane paused. “You’re really okay?”
I nodded.
“Well then...Later!” and Akane practically skipped
after the other girls.
I never felt so terrible in all my life.
~~~~~ cathedral~~~~~
I didn’t go home with the other St. Hebereke
girls. And I couldn’t stay at Furinkan forever. I had nowhere else to go. I
walked through the city in the night. My legs followed Ranma’s trail...even
though there was no trace of her.
I ended up in the alley from the previous
night.
I felt the wall of the alley.
That grimy, germ-infested mass of
concrete, a surface that may well have been urinated or defecated on by some
enterprising vagrant...I felt it with my bare hand.
I needed to feel some trace of Ranma. Anything. I put my hand against the wall, closed my eyes and
didn’t even think of the wet wipes still in my duffle bag.
I felt something...
~~~~~doki doki~~~~~
I looked up, and there was a flash of light,
a sizzle of electricity that moved across a power line overhead.
I didn’t really think; I just followed it.
~~~~~unstability~~~~~
I chased it for at least five blocks, past
store fronts and pedestrian crossings, past police cars and street lights,
until I wasn’t really sure where I was or where I was going.
“Come,” I heard Ranma’s voice, “this way.”
Then I came to a dead end. An
alley that ended with a raised train track, its bed some twenty feet above
where I stood, a chain link fence guarding the drop-off below.
That was when Ranma appeared again.
Just like before, the sparks of light grew
larger, combined. This time it was female Ranma. Just as I
remembered her from that rainy day a year ago.
“I finally found you, Saotome-kun.”
~~~~~traffic~~~~~
A girl in a Furinkan High jogging suit walks past you down the
sidewalk. She carries a large, black duffle bag under her arm.
The girl bumps into a man in a suit, unable to avoid him with her
added girth from the bag. When the bag collides with the man, it makes an odd
jingling sound.
“Excuse me,” the girl mumbles to the man as he looks back angrily
and walks on.
Was that a normal sound to hear from a bag?
Or did it maybe have a strange timbre...some otherworldly quality?
You shake your head and wonder why you would have such a strange
thought. Quickly enough, busy as you are with your day to day life, you forget
about it completely.
~~~~~trains~~~~~
In that dark alley, Ranma appeared.
I didn’t question it. If I let one shred of
doubt in at that moment I might have gone insane. I had to make up for all that
lost time.
“Saotome-kun...I...I wanted to tell you something.
For...for a long time now, but I couldn’t because of Yasuko...but by not
telling you, the knot in my heart kept tightening...So...” I took a breath. A
train passed by, and maybe she wouldn’t have heard my words anyway. But I said
them. “I love you! I’ve always loved you! And I don’t care if you’re a boy or a
girl, I don’t care if you just want me as a friend. I’d be happy to be your
friend and nothing more! You don’t have to have people hate you! I will never
hate you! I...I just wanted to let you know...I’m here for you, Ranma! I’m here
for you!”
Ranma changed forms then. Female
to male. He had a smirk to his lips...but there was a
darkness to his eyes...
“Who the fuck are
you?” He said it casually, evenly... as if amused by some strange, yet
inconsequential thing he found. “Were you a friend of Saotome Ranma’s?”
“You don’t remember me?”
“Well,” he said condescendingly, “I suppose
it doesn’t matter now, hmm?”
I fell to my knees on the grimy
pavement. “I...suppose not.”
It was then that I realized that Ranma was
dead.
I think I died too then. That last remaining
spark that kept me going all these years...it winked out and I was just a husk.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve fed,” Ranma
said, walking behind me and brushing my hair from the back of my neck. “I’m
going to devour you.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. I was
merely curious at that point, no longer caring either way.
“Yeah,” he replied, “you’ll die.”
“That’s good,” I said, “It’s good that you’re
the one that will be killing me.”
~~~~~unstability~~~~~
I heard a squishing sound and felt hot breath
on my neck. Something touched me there, I think it was a finger, but of course
I didn’t know... and I didn’t care. I just wanted to be gone. Erased. To disappear for real instead of
being merely invisible. And if it was Ranma that was doing it, all the better.
Then I heard the words, spoken in a clear,
boy’s soprano, “That is not Saotome Ranma.” I turned to see who said it and Ranma
pulled my hair so that my head came back, making me scream involuntarily. Then
suddenly his grip loosened and I was free to turn around.
I saw a string of light, coming straight out
Ranma’s forehead. Then he started shaking violently, like he had just been
struck by a jolt of electricity or...like he was dancing. He disappeared then,
turning into sparks of light.
I was so ready to disappear... to be
erased...I stared at the ground stunned as the words passed through my ears.
“It used Ranma’s form, but it is not Ranma.
It is a man eater, borrowing his appearance to feed.”
“A man eater?” I
asked, not lifting my head. I didn’t want to see my savior. I think I was
worried that if I did, it wouldn’t be Boogiepop, but some normal person.
“It has lost its earthly form and been
rendered harmless to humans. The problem is when some troubled soul like you
offers it their life. Even if it eats you, it doesn’t mean you were killed by
Ranma.” There was a strange jingling sound, and I heard footsteps as my savior
started to walk away. “Forget about Saotome Ranma,” he said, “He’s dead....I
killed him.”
I looked up then. And I saw the dark cloak, the cylindrical cloth
hat, the floating ribbons with the triangular pattern...it was Boogiepop! But why did he kill him? How did he die? But for
some reason I didn’t think to ask him then. Really, even then I don’t think I
cared. Ranma was dead...after that what was the point? So I didn’t say anything
to Boogiepop, even if maybe I would have liked to. I just watched him fade into
the night.
Then I broke down and cried. I cried for what seemed like hours. Or maybe an eternity.
~~~~~faucet~~~~~
I’m not sure now if that was Boogiepop or
not. I could have...simply imagined it all. But even if it was, nothing much
has changed. I still hate myself. I’m washing my hands now just like I did two
days ago. Still trying to forget the past.
I turn off the faucet and exit the bathroom.
As I’m walking down the hall, Yasuko comes up to me, “What are you doing
today?” she asks, and before I say anything, she says, “Good, I’ll meet you at
the gate okay?” and runs off.
Only marginally better than not paying attention to me at all.
Maybe I should go back to that alleyway and let the man eater eat me. Even if
it’s not Ranma.
I look up, and the fluorescent light above me
starts to flicker.
The thing is, I can’t quite bring myself
to really wish it. Nothing has changed, but for now...somehow...
~~~~~traffic~~~~~
I didn’t meet Yasuko at the gate. She might’ve
brought something up that would have made me remember what happened. I just
want to be alone right now. Right now I don’t mind being invisible so much.
I’m on my way home, but I’ve stopped. There’s
a sharp incline just before you get to the shopping center above the streets.
I’m standing there, my book bag at my feet. The wind is blowing through my
hair. I think I might be smiling. And I try to remember when the last time I
did that was.
I realize what I’m looking at is the same
alley that I was in last night. Except now it’s
daylight and I’m looking down into it over the train track. I could go back
there. I could let the man eater devour me, but for now...I think I’m alive. I
think I’ll stay living for a while...
Maybe.
~~~~~[END]~~~~~
Ever since I
was a kid I wanted to be a hero...I could almost swear she smiled just a
little, as if she thought the whole thing was funny...Thankfully, I told Ranma
where I got the information before he pummeled us into pancakes...Once she was
gone, I bit into the spider with gusto...My father never forgave himself for
letting her go alone...I feel a rush of air and an electric charge as
Boogiepop--or is it the Manticore?-- materializes in
front of me...
Next Chapter:
Light in Darkness
Thanks go to
Black Dragon, Ukie, Nemesis Zero, and Aondehafka for
prereading.
The next chapter
focuses on Daisuke, running from forces he cannot comprehend and remembering
the times he could fight back.