DISCLAIMER: Ranma 1/2 is property of Rumiko Takahashi,
its use in this original work of fiction generates no
profit and no infringement is intended.  Definitions
are taken from _Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged
Dictionary of the English Language_.

RATING: R

For previous parts - email me.

On a side note: http://ling.anifics.com is no long
"fractured" as my friend likes to say.  I uploaded all
the available files and pages I have on hand, and was
generally NOT lazy today.  On that page, parts a-c of
Catharsis:Hubris is available.  Part D ought to be out
before the end of this week.  Thanks for putting up
with me, everyone!

=====

CATHARSIS
- by ling

=====

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| tragedy (traj'i de), n., a lamentable, dreadful, or
fatal event or  | | affair; calamity; disaster.  [ME
tragedie < ML tragedia, var. of L  | | tragoedia < Gk
tragoidia, equiv. To trag(os) goat + oide song (see  |
| ODE) + ai -Y^3; reason for name variously explained]
               |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

=====
PART TWO: Tragedy/God's In His Heaven, All's Right
With the World
=====

She'd pulled out her books several weeks ago, but had
not had time to go over them before being pulled in
one direction or the other over the case.  Now, Ranma
had generously 'volunteered' his spare time to work
off any excess paperwork that their outside caseload
involved, and she had an opportunity, one that would
prove to be rare in the upcoming months.

They were not the simplified, translated, and trashy
mass-produced books that Kazuaki had been bringing to
her apartment and purchasing in enormous quantities -
these were her old textbooks.  She flipped through
each of them leisurely, stopping to reread sections
that she found interesting and idly noting all the
doodles in the margins of the pages.  'What a waste,'
she thought briefly.  All those years she'd spent
memorizing how to save the living, and she'd ended
working with the dead, lost causes each and every one.

Her parents had never understood why she'd chosen to
work with the police, and how she'd let herself become
amalgamated into some sort of
psuedo-pathologist/investigator.  Their daughter had
so wanted to save lives when she was younger, what had
changed?  And aside from all of that, they could not
remove the Old Ways from their minds: Michi was
voluntarily making herself an untouchable, and it
drove her mother up the walls and completely insane. 
The arguments over her decisions would never fade from
her mind, as they had been long, loud, and drawn-out,
involving tears and curses.  It was an emotional exile
from a family to which she'd never quite belonged,
though even that fact had not lessened the hurtfulness
of her parents' words.

Her fingers lingered upon the images of first
trimester babies, wrapped in their mothers' wombs,
already so delicate, like tiny, dollhouse models of
people that she saw every day.  She remembered having
loved children, the thought of children, at one time
in her life, and could not fathom why she was not
overjoyed at the thought of having a baby now.  Maybe
it was because she was past her prime, or that she
knew how difficult it was to give birth after thirty.

Maybe it was because she had her own life now, and
didn't want to give herself unto a child, to leave
behind her own identity to foster one completely
separate.

Yes, she concluded, she was just too selfish to have
offspring.

'But,' she added, 'that is something to worry about
later.'

Removing that from her mind, the first thing that
arrived was the ongoing argument with Kazuaki over her
professional decisions.  She had an appointment with
Human Resources later that week to discuss her
employment options with Special Operations after it
became unsafe for her to work the beat.  Would she
simply allow herself to be transferred into something
safe?  A lab position?  It didn't sound too terrible,
but there was no way that she could go gentle from her
post, not when her partner depended upon her ability
investigate.  'I can't quit,' she thought, 'but
eventually, I'm going to have to remove myself from
the line of immediate fire.'  It seemed the least that
she could do for her child: a concession to all the
abuses that her progeny had been suffering so far: the
incessant travel, the sleepless nights and her
carelessness in proper nutrition.  Hell, Michi had
entirely ignored any logos that demanded she slow
down.  Somewhere, deep inside, she wondered if she was
hoping to lose her child, but always banished the
questioning voices; she might have been resentful, but
she was not a murderer. 

She wished that her life was less complicated, but
that had ended along with the life of her first
husband.  Sometimes, she wondered what would have
happened if he had never committed suicide. 
Eventually, their financial problems would have come
to a head: she would have probably dropped out of
medical school to obtain a position until they were
out of the hole.  Life might have been less frivolous,
more stressed, but hardly miserable.  As long as
Takashi had remained faithful to her (and he always
was), as long as he still loved her as fiercely as he
had when he had asked for her hand in marriage, Michi
imagined that she would have suffered anything to make
it work.  She would have gone back to medical school
eventually, and would have eventually worked in a
hospital, probably in the emergency ward.  They would
have a baby, maybe two, and by that time in their
lives, they'd be more comfortable, happier, and she'd
have warm, comforting arms about her when she went to
bed, instead of being surrounded in compensation forms
from work-related excursions and autopsy photos, the
first phone call of the morning from her partner about
lab results.

This, unsurprisingly, did not cheer her.

The phone rang, and distracted, she answered with a
vague, "Hello?"

"I've been thinking, Michi, let's name her Suu,"
Kazuaki said, excited.

"It might be a boy," she replied, tired, resting the
phone between her shoulder and ear and flipping
through a few more pages of her book.  "The male
hormones could be attacking the womb right now."  She
decided not to tell him that the baby already had a
gender, one that would be revealed next Thursday after
she went to her OB-GYN.

"They wouldn't dare!" Kazuaki squealed.  Michi had to
grin: protective of his daughter prior to birth - what
a dad.

In the end, she found herself reading up on symptoms
to pregnancy, and how to deal with them in extreme
cases.  With some distaste, she realized that some
women's nausea just never went away, that they spent
the entirety of their pregnancy on nutrient drips that
doctors had to wheedle away from comatose patients,
bedridden from weakness.  That, and they started to
smell funny from being too weak to move, much less
bathe properly.

With a frown, she shut the book, leaving a paperclip
on the page that started with labor complications,
deciding that dread would do her no good.

=====

To: nerriy@tech.co.jp
From: michi107@yahoo.co.jp
Subject: general discontent

Nerri -

Ugh, urgh, and uauuugh.

The hospital called with my lab results, I'm still
malnourished and frightfully anemic, or so they say. 
If I was so damn malnourished and anemic, why don't I
*look* any thinner?  Oh, God, I've lost my mind.  I�m
at the end of my first trimester and I'm worried about
looking fat.  Save me, please.  This can't go on.

Anyway, I'm happy for Tomo, though I can't imagine
*why* the company is promoting him anywhere above
'peon.'  No, really, I'm thrilled.  Don't worry so
much about the move; it's only going a few hours away,
big deal.  We still have telephones and emails and the
postal system.  And if all else fails, you can always
steal Scottie's matter-transporter-thingy, you
insufferable Trekkie, you.

Anyway, call me tonight, I wanna throw you a going
away party.  If nothing else, it'll be a good excuse
for you to get sloshed and me to eat like a pig.

Later - Michi

=====  

Ranma decided that paperwork was hell, and that it was
simply unfair that while he and Michi shouldered
primary responsibility for an enormous case as it was,
that they ought to have to fill out forms.

Rather, that *he* had to fill out forms.

It was his own fault, naturally, for running out on
his job and whining to his partner.  It was also his
own fault that he hadn't done any of the paperwork
earlier.  And it was undoubtedly his fault that he'd
allowed Michi to talk him into doing the paperwork to
begin with.   

He scowled, realizing that if he sat there long
enough, memories of his fight with Kodachi would come
again, unbidden.  They would flood him, and he'd end
up depressed, lonely, and over-thirty; though the last
point had more to do with time being a son of a bitch
than Kodachi being a whore.  He had refused to
apologize to her, both in his own mind and aloud to
his bathroom mirror.  As such, he also refused to
waste his time thinking about it.

What distracted him?

He dialed Michi's number (now #5 on his phone's
memory).  

They'd come to a decision about his curse after she'd
been allowed to test it several more times with
various sources of cold and hot water.  In the end,
she'd thrown up her arms in frustration, proclaimed
him a medical ("Not *magical*!" she'd insisted)
miracle and decided that he needed to be dissected
right there on the spot.  She'd taken urine, blood,
hair, and skin samples, sent them out to labs, done a
couple of DNA tests on her own time, and driven
herself positively mad with curiosity.  There was no
interlacing of genes, nothing out of the ordinary at
all.  In fact, all that she'd derived from her efforts
was that in male form, Ranma was distinctly male and
very healthy; in female form, she was distinctly and
separately female, with the *exact* same DNA, save for
a few minor differences allowing for ovaries and the
such.  Finally, Michi had made grudging acceptance,
and they'd stayed at that comfortable stage for almost
two weeks now, ever since their return from Osaka. 
Still, his partner would occasionally fly into a panic
and beg to allow her to dissect him, just a little,
for the sake of science.  It always unnerved him,
despite how she claimed that she was joking, when they
were in an autopsy bay together: Michi just looked too
friendly with those scalpels, and far too curious.

She picked up abruptly, in the middle of the first
ring, and with an irate trill in her voice, she said,
"Look, you can't force the baby to be female just so
can name her Suu.  I don't want to hear one more word
about it, so if that's why you're calling, you can
just hang up and go back to filling out tax forms for
fat, ugly - "

"Suu?" Ranma found himself saying in disgust.  "That's
an awful name!"

Michi paused in surprise before saying, "Ranma?"

"Are you *honestly* going to let him call it that?" he
asked in a huff of fatherly concern.  There was no
doubt in his mind that it was that Other Guy that
would have cursed the baby to such an unforgivable
moniker.  Ranma quietly fancied *himself* to be
Michi's baby's father, despite biological evidence to
the contrary and the overwhelming knowledge that it
was a stupid daydream.  At least on some distant, very
indistinct sort of level, Ranma felt he had a right to
claim paternity, if for nothing other than caring, in
which he had indulged a great deal.  He'd been
watching the baby grow ever since he had discovered
that she was pregnant.  In some ways, he was more of
an expectant father than Kazuaki, as he spent more
time with Michi and fed her more often than her fiance
did.  "Have some ramen, it's got carbs," and "Are you
okay?  Do you think you can keep some broth down?"  It
had reached the point that her standard answer to such
questions was an annoyed variation of, "Shut up or
I'll hurt you."

His partner laughed softly, tension dissolving from
her tone.  "No, Ranma, I'd never let him *actually*
name her Suu."  There was a brief, comfortable pause
before she asked, "Why are you calling?"

He played with his pen.  "I was bored."

She laughed, more loudly this time.  "Well,
unfortunately, I don't think that I'll be much more
interesting."  In the background, there was the sound
of pages being turned.  "Hmm.  I was reading over the
lab results again.  The first four victims, they'd
been roughed up, but ultimately, the causes of death
were heart attacks for all of them."

"Yes," Ranma said, curious.  "Inexplicable, or so you
claimed earlier."

She made a noncommittal noise before saying, "Well, I
was thinking..."

Ranma waited.  "...And?"

"I'll need to check the bodies again," she said
studiously, and he could almost imagine her eyes
focusing on an indistinct point on the other side of
the room, clouding to a dark gray color, very intense.
 "But maybe it was insulin."

Ranma blinked and set down his pen.  "Insulin?  How
can that kill anyone?"  Hiroshi had been a diabetic,
and Ranma had spent at least five minutes of every
lunch period waiting anxiously for his friend to stop
stabbing himself with an impossibly sharp-looking
needle filled with some questionably dingy and yellow
substance which he claimed to be absolutely necessary.
 It did not sit well that Michi thought insulin was a
possible poison.  Ranma fought an urge to run to
Hiroshi's house at that very instant.

"Well, for diabetics, people who don't have enough, or
even just regular folks," she said breezily, "insulin
isn't harmful at all.  But injected in large doses,
one is likely to suffer from it, with results like the
cardiac arrest we saw in our first three victims."

Now Ranma made the noncommittal noise.  "Should I meet
you in the morgue tomorrow then?"

"No, I don't think that'll be necessary.  I'm sure
you're swamped as is," 'Lady,' Ranma thought, 'you
have *no* idea.' "so you can just go on into the
office.  It'd be an external exam; I can get someone
big to flip him for me."  Ranma suddenly had the
mental image of his partner wearing a ridiculously
large pair of thick glasses, staring at the very
unpleasant backside of one of their victims, making a
face and poking it in disgust.  He was unable to hide
his snort of amusement.

"What's so funny?" his partner asked.

"Nothing, don't worry about it," he answered
cryptically.  "D'yah have plans for dinner tonight? 
Or is Kazuaki still at that conference?"

She sighed.  "It's an out-of-town consult, and yes,
he's still there."  There was a brief, noisy pause
where it sounded like she struggled to her feet and
then banged around some pots.  "And...yes!  It looks
like I'll be having frozen, prepackaged sashimi from
the vendor downstairs.  What about you?"

Ranma looked at the sea of paperwork around himself. 
"Ramen."

"Excellent choice," Michi said languidly.  "God, are
we boring."

Ranma didn't think so.  Nor did he think that having
raw seafood would be healthy for the Baby That Would
Most Certainly Not Be Named Suu, so he invited his
partner out for the evening, and told her that he'd
pick her up in half an hour.

=====

To: kasumi@nerimaclinic.org.jp
From: rsaotome@police.go.jp
Subject: Re:[Christmas]

Kasumi -

I would LOVE to come by for Christmas dinner, however,
I'm not sure if my partner will be able to.  She's got
her own family, and other stuff, besides that.  Still,
*I'll* definitely be there.

- RS

=====

They were sitting around an old, kitschy family diner
twenty minutes away from Ranma's apartment complex. 
He'd discovered it about a week after he'd moved in,
and had been a faithful customer ever since.  The menu
wasn't exactly creative, but everything that they did
offer was wonderfully flavorful and warming.  It was
decorated with old family photos, knick-knacks, and
lots of mismatching tablecloths.  Ranma liked it for
all these things: the restaurant was comfortable.

"Do you ever think about what you would be like if you
had chosen something else?" Ranma asked.

It seemed like the perfect sort of question to
follow-up what they had been talking about.  Earlier,
when he'd knocked on her door, he'd asked her all
sorts of things about the baby, hungry for
information, consuming every bit that she was willing
to share.  And it seemed that Michi was glad to tell
him, to tell *someone*.  She had a wealth of
knowledge, of inane fact and triplicate versions of
her earlier ultrasounds, just waiting for someone to
see.  "Didn't Kazuaki ask to see them?" Ranma had
asked, curious.  Michi had shrugged off the question. 
Ranma decided not to probe any further.  

He had realized quite a while ago that Michi treated
him differently than she treated her other coworkers,
or her other friends.  He didn't bother to hazard a
guess what exact amalgamation of significant other he
had become, but assumed that she liked him, if she
were to accept his dinner invitation.  Ever since the
nausea had started to fade earlier that week, she'd
been ravenous, and he'd been delighted to watch her
eat, to see the sallow glow fade from her skin.  "I
must be acting like a total pig," she'd mourned
earlier that day, on her third bowl of Cup Ramen. 
"No, not at all!" he'd countered.  "This is a lot
healthier; you ought to know that.  Besides, it's sort
of cute."  She'd grinned shyly and dug back in,
satisfied by his words.

Michi looked far away, her eyes growing very pale in
the dim lighting, and lips shining with her newly
applied coat of chapstick.  "You never use lip gloss,"
he'd pointed out.  "No, it's all fruity-smelling and
girly," she'd replied, and made a face.  Ranma decided
that he found this charming.

"What kinds of things different?" she finally said.

He shrugged.  "Like if you'd never gone to med school
or something."

His partner stiffened, and Ranma felt the tension
rise.  Before he even had time to apologize, she
opened her mouth, and said, "Lots of things would be
different if I had never gone to medical school." 
Without another word, she reached for her and her
chopsticks, and poked idly at the sukiyaki that was
quietly grilling before them.

"Oh," was all that he managed, mystified, but
cautious.  Finally, he added, "I wonder what would
have happened if I never went to Kyoto."  Michi looked
at him sharply, but allowed him to continue.  "I
mean," he mused, "I wouldn't have this stupid
reputation following me around."

Michi shrugged.  "Even I was almost called onto that
case; who's to say that you wouldn't have been
dispatched anyway?"

Her partner, holding a piece of beef between his
chopsticks, and ready to chew, bit his tongue hard
instead and yelped in surprise.  "Whahj?!"

She raised her eyebrows at him.  "You didn't know?"

"Gno!" he retorted, trying to move his tongue as
little as possible.

Chuckling, she handed him a napkin.  "Blot.  You're
bleeding."  He made a small, panicked sound in the
back of his throat.  "Don't worry," she said
soothingly.  "In the entire human body, the mouth
heals the fastest.  It's all those incisors; our
physiology isn't dumb enough to pair up a lot of
pointy protrusions unless the soft surroundings had
great regenerative powers."

"Wha goo oo gneam 'bout ah cayh?" he demanded, holding
the napkin to his injured tongue, valiantly pressing
forward.

"I was almost sent to Kyoto to assist.  That's all,"
she said plainly.

"Why weren't you?" he asked gingerly, removing the
paper and wincing.

She averted her eyes from his gaze and picked at the
food on her plate with sudden and great interest.  In
a voice that was so quiet he barely knew she had said
anything at all, Michi whispered, "You."

=====

To: aoi120690@hotmail.co.jp
From: mhirugashi@police.go.jp
Subject: Re:[Mom]

She's fine.  It's normal.  They had her on a
painkiller that behaves (vaguely) like a drug.  Think
of it as Mom going through withdrawal, and you guys
are the methadone clinic.

Oh, and if all you're going to do is call my office
when you know *specifically* that I'll be out *just*
so you can hear my partner's voice, more power to you,
but *he's* getting annoyed, so stop it.

For God's sake, Aoi, you're 23 years old, act like it.

=====


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