Anger By Kyokukou Disclaimer: Believe it or not, writing this actually helped me get rid of some anger of my own. I feel a lot better. Oh yeah, the disclaimer; don’t wanna get sued. –Ahem- I do not own any of the characters, plot elements, catch phrases, comedic romantic situations, big ass mallets, et cetera ad infinitum that are in and of Ranma ½. All rights should be reserved by someone with big scary lawyers. “ Ohhh he makes me so ANGRY!” Akane growled as she stormed off, leaving a regular victim twitching on the backyard grass. “ I’m going to a friend’s house.” Akane announced as she started putting her shoes on at the front door. “ Which one?” Kasumi called from upstairs. “ I don’t know,” Akane called back. “ one of them!” She finished an instant before the front door slammed behind her. Nabiki decided that it was safe to move from her seat on the veranda. She had frozen in place when Akane had stormed past, Mallet of Doom™ in hand. It was best to blend in with the wall in such situations. To avoid an accidental wacking. “ Ranma?” She called to the still figure on the grass below her. “ She gone?” Came the muffled reply. “ For now.” To the tune of many, many popping joints and creaking ligaments Ranma brought himself to a sitting position. After gingerly shaking his head and patting off most of the dust he stood and sat down a conversational distance from Nabiki on the porch. “ You stated down longer than usual. Are you alright?” Nabiki asked. “ She didn’t hit you that hard.” “ Yeah.” Ranma agreed. “ But earlier today I ran into Ryouga, Mousse, the old Freak, sparred with Pops, and the old Ghoul wanted to test my endurance to rapid changes of my curse.” “ But it’s only eleven in the morning!” “ Had worse days.” Ranma mumbled as he made sure his jaw was in proper alignment. “ Sometimes just can’t believe you.” Nabiki snorted. “ What? Do you get off of getting smacked around by everyone?” “ Hey? What’d I do?” Ranma looked at her in indignant surprise. “ Ryouga has had it in for me since junior high. Mousse just finds it easier to get his ass kicked by me than go and try hitting that bimbo. The Freak needs no explanation. Same with that damned old Ghoul.” “ Ranma, I’m a smart girl, even I know that if you wanted to you could really avoid Ryouga, whip Mousse so bad he’d need a bodycast, use your curse to take out Happosai, you’ve surpassed your father, and you could match wits with the old Amazon woman any day. Don’t give me that bull shit.” Ranma looked at Nabiki as if she had spoken blasphemy, he edged away from her a few centimeters. “ Woke up on the wrong side of the bed?” “ PMS. Deal with it.” “ Oh.” Nabiki let that sink in for a few moments as she entertained the fantasy of trapping Ranma in his cursed form for a month so he could feel the monthly curse himself. “ Why aren’t you pissed about all this?” She asked him. “ I’ve seen you put in mortal danger by someone and the next day all is forgiven. Akane bashes you around over and over again and you only grumble about it like it was just a papercut or a reoccurring pimple. Even when you do get pissed you just calm down a few fricking seconds later. You know, sometimes it pisses me off that you can’t just get fed up with this whole situation. Go out one day, kick ass and take names and solve a whole hell of a lot of problems. Kick the Chinese trio back to China. Hospitalize the Kuno clan. Throw Ryouga into the flipping ocean. Entomb Happosai for another ten years. Tell off your father and Akane both! For someone who’s so damn strong, and so damn brave you really are a coward about yourself! You could save Akane from hell itself with a cocky grin in place the whole time, but refuse to stick up for yourself when it would require you to get pissed and do some damage! What the hell is wrong with you?!” Nabiki put a hand to her chest to calm herself after the outburst. Ranma had put both hands over his head and taken the classic air raid cover position. He peeked out from under his hands at Nabiki fearfully. “ So answer me.” Nabiki ordered in a much calmer tone. Ranma sobered up abruptly. He sat up straight and looked at Nabiki critically. “ Do you really care, or is this a hormonal thing?” “ Does it matter?” Nabiki folded her arms. “ Whether I’m being hormonal or I really do care won’t change the fact that I’m about ready to use blackmail to get an answer.” To Nabiki’s surprise, Ranma did not even flinch at the threat. “ You’re not going to like the answer. And I don’t want to talk about it here. That is, if you really want to hear it.” “ Spill it Saotome.” “ Not here.” Ranma shook his head. “ Here.” She shook hers in return. “ Not where Kasumi could overhear.” Ranma insisted. “ I don’t want her to hear any of it.” “ Huh?” Nabiki took a moment to study Ranma. The boy never had much of a poker face, and never acting skills that she had trouble seeing through. Which made the solemn sincerity in the condition all the more potent. “ Fine. Where?” * * * Nabiki looked around at the Dojo. They sat in the center, with all the doors shut and the lights off. The only light came through the rice paper, bathing the room in an ambiance like twilight. Ranma stared at the rafters with an expression she had rarely seen on his face, sad reluctance. Like a doctor trying to word how he was to ‘break the news’ to a patient’s family. “ You know Pops’s temper.” Ranma began in a voice so soft it was barely louder than a whisper. “ Quick, vicious, defensive, and short-lived. That’s not something I inherited from him. It’s something he tried to instill in me since I was five. “ From what little I know from Pop, I got my temper from two people. My grandfather, Pop’s dad, and my mother. My grandfather had a slow temper, but it was very long-lived. Pop tells me that if you crossed him a year ago he’d still be ready to take up the old argument in a heartbeat. But it took a hell of a lot to get him even annoyed. Mom, however, she has a temper kina like Akane’s but much more…damn I wish I was good a words…much more sharp. Akane’ll hit you for ticking her off, Mom’ll do something to you that was twice as bad as what you did to her, no more, no less. “ I got both of their tempters combined, my grandfather’s and Mom’s. It takes a lot to actually piss me off, but once you do I’ll pay you back twice as much and twice as long, and I’ll be twice as unforgiving about it as almost anybody else. My mother does not like her temper and has spent most of her life building control over it. Which is something that my Pop said he always admired, and that he came to an agreement with her about mine. One of the things he was training me for was to have a temper more like his. One that will allow me to really ‘stick up for myself’ like you want me to, but one that fizzles out easily enough. Pop also stressed not holding grudges more than almost anything else. ‘A true martial artist always must accept the possibility that today’s mortal foes might become tomorrow’s greatest allies, and that the opposite can sadly become just as true.’. “ I know that having that hammered into my head for alla’ my life is one of the reasons why I’m too scared to really get close to anyone but Kasumi. Deep down Pop has me convinced that at any moment anyone could turn on me in every way I used to trust them. Right now a little instinct in my head is screaming for me to shut up. Screaming that you’ll tell this to everyone. Tell this and more, tell this and make up lies. All for spite. Pop taught me to be paranoid about the world in a big way, but not to ever hold a grudge for anything but a murder. Not to allow myself anger over anything but murder. “ I love Kasumi to pieces, but there is that little fear that outta nowhere all of that love and niceness will turn around one eighty. I’m always wary of your motives Nabiki, even when the obvious one would be profit. But I can’t distrust you completely in case you one eighty. Then there is Akane. I think she already one eighties on me every damn day.” For a moment Ranma stopped, as if to check what he had already said versus what he meant to say. Then he nodded to himself and continued. “ When I was really young I used to look up to my father as a demigod. Five meters tall and bulletproof, able to anything if he felt like it. So when he kept drilling me on how to get angry, how to calm down, and when to do which, I put all my heart into it. But nature versus nurture don’t always balance out, Nabiki. A little kid’s will against a huge temper really won’t make a dent. So I had a few episodes where it came out. Like I said before, it takes a lot to even get it pumping, but once it does… The first instance I remember was when a little boy a few years older than me, maybe he was six or seven. Anyway, that little boy heckled me at school for not having a mother. He did it for more than two weeks before my temper came out. I came to school one day and he and his friends started jeering me. So at P.E. I stole their uniforms and put them in their desks. The next day I stole them and threw them all over the roof. Then in the air vents. Then in the street. Then I burned them in the furnace. I would have kept going but Pop heard of the missing clothes problem and knew it was me immediately. I don’t think that you have much of a high opinion of my Pop, but remember that he never punished me as harshly for anything as he did my temper. At the time I didn’t understand. After one incident when I was thirteen I did understand. That’s one of the only reasons why I still have any respect for my Pop. He understands what my temper unchecked could have led me to do with all my training. “ The next big incident that really sticks in my mind was at the beach. I wanna say I was seven or eight at the time. I was swimming and Pop was working some bars with a scam he had cooked up. He would bet the people at the bar that he could drink three beers before another guy could knock back three shots of saké. The catch being that Pop couldn’t touch the shot glasses, and the other guy couldn’t touch the beer glasses. Pop would gulp down one glass by the time the other guy had one or two shots done. Then Pop would slam his glass over the last shot. Guy couldn’t touch the beer glass so Pop always won. He just never could do it twice in the same bar. “ Anyway, while Pop did that I would swim at the beach. I loved swimming before my curse. A lot of my training was with water. Get down in water up to your neck and do a kata, slap all the water out of a huge cistern. Stuff like that. So I was having a great time taking a break from school and training to simply swim at the beach like anyone else. Then there was this really fat kid. I mean clinically obese at twelve. He was in inner tube and knocked me down underwater after one wave. I got up and demanded he apologize. The kid laughed and with the help of his friends and the next wave he knocked me down and sat on me. I was underwater, with all the sand rushing up over me and down over me as the waves went by. In all that water the fat boy didn’t weight much, but he had his friends on his shoulders. With just sand under me I couldn’t get any leverage. I just sunk in further if I struggled. I don’t know how long they were planning on keeping me under there. I know that they really didn’t want to drown me, but when I finally freed myself they had yet to make any effort to let me up. From the knockdown and the struggling I didn’t have much air, and before things started to fade I was reaching up past those fat thighs to pull him off me by his unmentionables. At seven I was pretty strong, I heard his scream even under the water. The second I got my head out I was swinging. Both of the fat kid’s friends ran off with black eyes and bruises everywhere. The fat boy himself was too slow to get away from me. I had to drag him out of the water after I was through pummeling him. “ The kid may have been in the wrong, but no damn twelve year old deserves to have nearly all of his teeth knocked out and most of his face busted up. At twelve, he probably has scars on his face and all of his teeth are fake. No twelve year old deserves that for simply being a mean brat. “ There are more instances, but as I got older they were less frequent. I got older and my will got stronger and Pop had trained me about my temper for one year longer. Most of the outbursts were against my Pop, which at that age just meant that I did a whole lot of nothing and he waited until I had tired myself out. Then he would critique my attacks as he punished me. “ I guess as everybody grows up there are certain instances that kina spur us. Incidents that are so shameful to us even at that age that we have to grow up a little to avoid another one like it. I know I have a lot of little shaming memories that spur me on, but this is the one that killed my temper. No, it didn’t do that. It made me kill it myself.” Ranma did not look down from the rafters as he asked: “ Nabiki, can you swear to me, on Tendo honor, that you’ll not pass this on to anyone without my knowledge and permission?” Nabiki swallowed hard. Stuck in between figuring out a loophole for future blackmail and actual loyalty to someone who could become family. “ A nod will do.” Ranma prompted. She nodded. “ Nabiki, do you think that Akane is the first arranged marriage that I have been in?” “ No, there’s Ukyo.” Nabiki answered automatically. “ I understand that Shampoo was an accident, but her too, and-“ “ No, I mean the first one that I knew about. That I was introduced to my future wife and told to get to know her.” “ Oh no,” Nabiki shook her head slowly. “ Genma’s done this whole bit before? Don’t you dare tell me that he’s playing Daddy for a fool.” Ranma closed his eyes and rolled his head about slowly, to ease some developing cramp. “ No, Pop’s deadly serious about his promise to his best friend. The engagement I’m talking about wasn’t Pop’s idea. He was more or less coerced into it. When it comes to Akane, Pop is very much looking forward to calling her his Daughter. Hell, he practices it sometimes with a picture of her. Just to cheer himself up on bad days.” “ I had no idea.” Nabiki said. “ Pretend you still don’t.” Ranma muttered. “ Pops likes Kasumi and you too, but he’s kinda scared that you’ll scam him out of his money while he’s trying to scam you out of yours. He’s really looking forward to being a formal part of the Tendo family as an in-law.” “ But you’re not?” “ Never was my choice, and a lot of my reluctance about girls and anything romantic goes back to this. The girl that was my first love.” Ranma stopped rolling his neck and sat with his shoulders slumped. His eyes staring at the floor in front of Nabiki. “ I had just turned thirteen when Pops brought me to this Dojo northwest of the Nagasaki area. It was on that rough border between civilization and the mountain forests. The master there was famed for his prowess with the kama, the bo, the sword and the Goju school of karate. He wasn’t a young man, I guess he was in his late fifties, but he had a daughter my age. Almost my age to the day, I think her birthday was a week or two behind mine. Her name was Kioko and she was grace in motion. “ I walked into the Dojo with my Pop and there she was, practicing with some thirty other people, but even at her age I could spot her from the crowd simply by her being so much better than any of them. Pop introduced us and arrangements were made for the two of us to stay there if we did this and that. The sort of arrangement that we made just about every time. The master noticed who I was watching, of course. All he did was chuckle about it and go on. “ So more than a week passed and I fell deeper for her every day. Pop knew it, anybody who was over sixteen knew it with a glance, but she didn’t know it and I was too scared to say anything about it. After all, we would be leaving in soon anyway. But the more time I spent with her, training, talking, walking together, heck I even did homework with her and her older sister helping us. “ One day her older sister just couldn’t stand us any longer and went to the master. She told him about my feelings, and about Kioko’s feelings towards me, which I was unaware of. The master thought for a while and observed us for a day or two before deciding that if one of us would have the initiative and bravery to confess to the other, then he would step in to help things. I didn’t find out about this until afterwards. “ So finally I get up the guts one day to tell her how I felt about her. I spend the morning looking in books for the right line to express how I felt. I found it in a haiku about love and its suddenness sometimes. So when I got her alone with me I confessed with that line. I expected to be laughed at or hit. Instead she hugged me and cried with relief, because she had been trying to get up the courage to tell me her feelings. “ I was in heaven. She was too traditionally modest to kiss me or do much more than hold my hand, but I would have fainted if we had done any more. As it was, I usually got a little giddy when we held hands. Life went on, but with the change of us sharing each other’s feelings. I don’t think I had ever been that happy in my life as I was those weeks except for a few fleeting moments. After a week or more the master had watched enough and he approached Pop with the proposition of betrothing the two of us. Now, Pop always remembered his promise to your father. As such he only engaged me when he thought there wasn’t going to be much of a problem escaping the whole thing. My feelings for Kioko made for a serious problem in escaping. So Pop refused, a little to vigorously. The master was insulted and demanded an apology. Pop refused to grant one. Which pissed off the master enough for him to imply that he just might let slip to Kioko how she could entrap me into such an engagement. Sleeping with me. At such a young age it would be a scandal to shame the family of the boy who must have forced such a young innocent. Pop gave in. Of course the whole time since that day he was plotting some way of escape. “ None of that reached Kioko or myself. I only found out the whole story a year ago. We were just told one day that we were betrothed to each other, and that when we turned eighteen we would be married. Kioko was ecstatic, I was scared, but not too much. At thirteen, eighteen seems a lifetime away. So I was happy too. “ As silly as it may sound at this age today, the only thing that we did different physically was that she permitted herself to kiss me on the cheek now, but demurely refused to let me return the favor. I have a obsession with being the very best at all aspects of martial arts. Kioko had a similar obsession with being her own definition of a perfect female martial artist. Demure, proper, strong and elegant, dignified and quick in all respects. We enjoyed each other’s obsessions and kina fed off them. They crossed and overlapped without the competitive rough edge that Akane and I run into. Akane and I are after the same thing, Kioko and I were after different but similar things. So we spent even more time together than before, she helped out with my training to Pop wouldn’t mind, in theory. And I helped her train in every way I could think of. “ Nabiki, if you ever find someone that makes you happy simply by being in the same room as you. Keep an eye on them. If they make you dizzy with happiness by simply touching you. Hold on to them. If there really isn’t much problem with the two of you together in either of your lives. Grab them and hold on with all the strength your heart has. “ Only a few days after the engagement was official a guy named Makoto showed up. He was older than me, sixteen or seventeen. But he had known Kioko for the whole time he had studied under the master. Makoto studied Goju for hand to hand and classic kenjutsu under the master. Both since he was very young, but not as young as five years old like me, his parents weren’t nuts. “ Makoto had liked Kioko ten times longer than I had know her. He had liked her for years, but age difference stopped him. He was always waiting for her to get older before he made his declaration. Then he came back from a trip to visit relatives in California to find his love not only engaged to someone else, but very happy about it. Makoto hated me from that day on, hated me in a way that not many people can hate at that age. “ Every day he would do everything in his power to make my life miserable. Which drove Kioko away from him very fast. He knew it would happen, but why not? She was already lost to him because of the engagement. Still, the day she screamed in his face that she hated him was the day I think that he consciously resolved to kill me. “ After that day Makoto spent more time training than he did anything else, school, sleeping, even torturing me. In our inexperience we thought that Kioko had won. That she had gotten him to leave me alone for the most part. I merely took his extra training as the same reaction I had when I lost something. I threw my frustrations into training. I had no idea that he practiced at home with a real sword, or that now he only chose sparring partners of my size and build. “ Weeks went by and one day it happened. Makoto decided that he was ready, or maybe it was that he couldn’t wait any longer. Now, Makoto was not stupid, he was smarter than any of the people here in Nerima, except you Nabiki. He did not just challenge me. He spent a few days setting things up so that the master was out of town at a meeting. Kioko’s mother was off with relatives. Pops was buying supplies for the Dojo and that Kioko was at school in detention. The last thing was known only to him. Everyone at the Dojo wondered what had happened to her. “ Just as I was starting to get really worried about Kioko when a phone call came. I answered. It was Makoto, and he sounded like he was panicking. He told me that she had gone into the woods by Miyamoto falls for some meditation time, but a rock had dislodged and she was hurt bad. He kept stressing that she was asking for me, calling for me, begging for me. If I had been smart I would have told him I was coming, called a rescue service and then went out. Instead I panicked and ran from the Dojo to the damn falls more than four kilometers north of the dojo. I ran the whole way. “ When I got there I was out of breath and met with a sight that I had never before imagined. Makoto stood on the bolder that he had said fell into the falls pool twenty meters below. But there was blood on the top of the bolder, and blood on the cloth he held in his left hand. In his right hand he held a katana stolen from the dojo. “ He had set it up perfectly, but I still did not want to imagine what had happened, I did not want to believe the obvious. Then he said the words that I will always remember. ‘I didn’t lie to you Ranma, she did fall, but it took me two swings.’. Then he jumped down and charged me. Normally my real temper took a while to rile up, but this was the one thing that my natural temper and what my father taught me agreed on. No forgiveness for a murder. “ So I met his charge halfway. Something that he never expected. But Makoto was older than me, bigger than me, stronger than me, tougher than me, and almost as angry as me. It was one of the longest real fights I’ve ever fought. Even longer than some of the real fights Ryouga and I have had. Before I was able to send the sword over the falls Makoto managed to stab me three times and slice open my back a little. Before he lost the sword I had broken a few of his ribs and at least cracked his left ulna. After Makoto lost the sword he had lost the fight, and he knew it. But he wasn’t about to let me do any less than kill him. He wanted to kill me even if it was the last thing he did. So when he had the chance Makoto took the both of us over the falls. Neither of us hit anything in the fall, but we were separated just before hitting the water. If I had the temper of my father I would have escaped then. Instead as tired as I was, and as injured as I was, I still fought the current and swam to the shore he stood on. Somehow he had found the sword again, it must have landed nearby. We fought again. I took a few more sword wounds from him, he took a few more broken bones from me, but I ended up finally beating him unconscious. I would have cut his head off with his own sword if a few people from the Dojo hadn’t finally showed up to stop me. I fought them when they tried to stop me. Thankfully the worst damage I did was a few bruised ribs to two of the students. “ If it hadn’t been for them I would have killed Makoto. Then I would have bled to death from my wounds. They saved both of us.” Ranma ran a hand over his face and was silent for a moment before leaning back and laying down. Eyes closed, Ranma continued. “ Makoto lived, but he had to have some surgery after some of the things I had done to him. They almost had to amputate his left arm, because I had shattered the humerus so badly. But in the end it just took some emergency surgery, casts, and a blood transfusion and he was on the road to recovery. But his left arm would never be the same again according to the doctors. All I needed was some stitches and a blood transfusion. “ Thankfully enough of the phone conversation was overheard that the police pieced together what had happened even before they got around to questioning me. Pops snatched the opportunity faster than I could have imagined. He wrote a letter to the Master that day breaking the engagement on grounds of emotional trauma to me. The moment I was released from the hospital Pop had me in a cab. I fell asleep from the painkillers I was still on, that was when he changed the destination to the local train station. By the time I woke up we were in Matsuyama. Still in shock, and disorientated by the whole thing I wrote a letter to Kioko, thinking that we’d be back to her in a few days. I still did not know that the engagement was broken. “ Before we left Matsuyama I got a letter back from Kioko. Pops burned it before I could even open it. Then he told me about the break off, and that supposedly the master would be furious at me if I ever returned. And that the best thing for Kioko was that I did not return. At the time I wanted to fight him, I wanted to get up and fight him with the power I had when I fought Makoto. But the horror of my last sight of Makoto stopped me. He had been on a gurney, blood soaking through the sheets as they wheeled him to surgery. That stopped me that night. That was the night that, although I did not know it, I did my best to kill that part of myself, that anger. I had nearly killed someone over a lie. The blood had been from a boar that Makoto had killed only moments after calling me. I had almost killed a young man over a lie. My temper had ruined not only Makoto’s life as a martial artist but my relationship with Kioko. If I had left after that fall and left Makoto on the rocky beach I could have returned to the dojo and found Kioko there. She had arrived only a minute or two after I had run out of sight of the dojo. “ I blame more than my temper, my anger, for what happened. I know that it was all Pop that took Kioko from me. Later that year I ran away to find her, only to find that Pops had really pissed the master off to no end. That letter had been designed by Pop to ruin all hope of me ever getting back in the good graces of the master. The man almost beat me senseless just for showing up. “ The last time I saw Kioko, she was fighting against her older sister and brother, trying to get past them, to get to me. She was crying as she called my name over and over again. Then her father shut the door in my face after telling me that he would never forgive what my father had done. Since then I have been more than a little reluctant to ever entertain any thought of really letting myself get angry. Ever.” Quickly, Ranma rolled onto this feet without a sound and walked to the door. “ I was thirteen then. If I ever got angry now. I would literally tear whoever it was limb from limb. I couldn’t live with that, not with the possibility that it might be undeserved like the others. So don’t tell me to tell off Akane and Pop, or rage at Mousse or Ryouga. I couldn’t forgive myself. I only hope that Kioko never forgave me…” “ Don’t say that Ranma.” Nabiki was surprised at the tearful break in her voice. “ Nabiki, I’m going out for a walk alone for a while.” Ranma said as if he had not heard her speak. “ Tell Kasumi not to stay up late waiting for me.” In two movements the door was open, then shut and Ranma gone like a gust of wind in the night. Leaving Nabiki to sit there on the floor and think about what Ranma had done, and what she had done in her own anger. So she wept. For those that were hurt, and those who were left with those deeds forever on their hands.