Hello -

Understanding that there are (based on a recent email)
technical flaws (*cough*) regarding certain things
like firearms, I'm still posting because there's not
that much...firearm-age in this section.

I do, however, push the limits in suspension of
disbelief.

I don't actually know how well this works out. 
There're a few sections I *really* like, and a few I
*really* hate.  I wrote this very quickly (for me), so
there are still LOTS of flaws.  Please, pick this
apart, and don't worry about being gentle.

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_.

ARCHIVE: Phu, Rakhal, and Reddeath have my express
permission; everyone 
else, please ask first at lifebounce@yahoo.com before
archiving my 
work.

RATING: R

SUMMARY: What if something happened that made *none*
of the fiancees 
want to marry Ranma any more?  What if he was
abandoned, and the home 
that he'd so desperately needed and had later grown to
love in his 
youth became too hurtful to think of?  And then - what
if - years later 
Ranma returned to Tokyo's embrace and fell deeply into
something he 
could not control?  First Hubris, then Tragedy, then
Catharsis.

=====

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 (c)
=====

It must, at some point, have been just as lushly
beautiful as any other part of the house.  The
gloriously carved crown moldings along the floors and
ceilings seemed to be showing scenes of angels, and
the walls were a pale red color, like faded blood. 
The curtains were white linen, and the chairs used to
be cream-colored.

Everything was destroyed.  

The walls were decimated either by ("*Holy shit*...")
fingernail marks or through holes punched into the
drywall.  Every single window had been shattered, and
the glass remained on the floor.  ("God on high.  Is
that...fuck, is that *dried blood*?")  The rooms
reeked of human feces and rotting food.  From the
elegant bookshelves, still stacked three-deep with
volumes by Sappho and Plato and Tolstoy, hung tattered
shreds of cloth, some knotted up like nooses, and
others just fluttering gently in the chill breeze. 
("What the hell happened in here?")  From the left
corner, just up ahead, Michi thought she could see
what looked like a jungle of overgrown greenery:
enormous ferns, unidentifiable flowers; great,
frightening, waxy green leaves ate into the ceiling
space and consumed all the oxygen and space in the
room.  They blocked out the light and from that edge,
there was an eerie, dark silence, as if though the
plants flourished, all life had ended in that corner.

They saw all of this from the doorway.

"Oh my God," she whispered, frozen.

She recognized this room.  She did.  

The little details that had not been destroyed, the
unusual colors of the walls, the way the moldings were
hand-made.  "We had the artist killed afterward," a
woman had joked once, in an architectural magazine
from nearly twenty years ago.  "We wanted them to be
one of a kind."  The magazine added that she needn't
have worried about it: those moldings took longer and
cost more than anyone in their right mind would have
offered for a border around a coat of paint.  Those
linen curtains had been draped luxuriantly about a
beautiful woman with dark, lustrous hair; she'd been
embracing a girl in that image, preteen, uncomfortably
beautiful, too-young, and too-fast-grown.  The caption
had read, "Mrs. Kuno poses with her most prized rose:
Kodachi."

Michi, in the voracious manner she went about all of
her research, had searched so long and so hard and so
deep for every iota of information on the Kuno family
that she'd unearthed a veritable mountain of
decorating and architectural magazines from two
decades back that sang their praises.  "Brilliant!"
and "Decadent!" and "Lustfully lush!" was what they
called the rooms of the northern wing ten years ago. 
She remembered all of these things from midnights two
weeks prior, idly flipping through and pausing each
time a photograph contained the face of Ranma's
current flame.  

Kodachi Kuno was a startlingly beautiful woman even at
the bud of her womanhood.  She seemed distinctly
unsettled by her own attractiveness, as if she'd never
been made aware of it until just prior to the
photograph, and its existence was strange, and almost
unwanted.  But that was to be expected, Michi had
rationalized; as a young girl, she hadn't really
understood that she had in her capacity to be
beautiful until it had overwhelmed her in the worst
way.  Pressed up against the back wall of a dance club
in Kyoto, a hand up her skirt, confused and
disoriented and more than slightly drunk, the words
finally sank in: "God, you're beautiful." 

It was as a result of these wonderings that a theory
had begun forming in Michi's mind about the nature of
the killings.  Contractual and distanced, clinical as
they were, it was not beyond the realm of extreme
possibility that someone with a motive outside of
money had done it.  And with the prostitution charges
so fresh in her mind...

She'd simply pushed it off to the side, waiting until
she had more evidence to back up her
not-so-fantastical claim.

It was only a matter of time, she had known.  And now
time was up.

She forced her legs to move, and took one aching step
forward, followed by another until she was entirely in
the room.  Her entry seemed to act like a trigger, and
soon, the other six officers entered as well, guns
cocked, expecting an indescribably frightening
*something* to burst out of a shadow as soon as they
let down their guard.

Michi spoke in a hush.  "Search every inch of this
hellhole."

She didn't see the tiny movement from the corner of
her eye.

=====

To: t_eda@police.go.jp
From: rsaotome@police.go.jp
Subject: [blank]

what the hell is happening?!  

=====

It was sort of a big thing, but she forgot.

It wasn't, as she would explain to God and everyone
later that afternoon, an intentional thing - she just
*forgot*.  

As far as eleventh-hour memories went, this was the
worst type.

But to be fair, her pregnancy had done damn little
that day to remind her of itself.  She hadn't vomited,
been hungry for stupid combinations of bizarre, ethnic
food, and she hadn't felt the insatiable urge to find
a man and do awful, awful things to him until he was
too tired to move, either.  All it *had* done was
that...making her abdomen stick out thing, which she'd
gotten acclimated to and was no longer effective: she
could *sort of* see her shoes (which looked fabulous).
 

Which her pregnancy should have known, really.

But she was alone in a corner of the mess of greenery
in the northern wing and no one was going to listen to
her frantic explanations *then*.

It was also, she'd reflect, the fault of her
subordinate officers for being greatly lacking in
reproductive plumbing, because if they'd been brave
enough to accompany her to the darkest part of the
rooms, then it wouldn't have come to this.  They were,
instead, wandering about the well-lit areas, taking
samples, flipping through magazines, kicking at
things.

And, just a little, she blamed her mother, for giving
her slightly nearsighted vision.  If Michi had been
able to see a little better, she might have noticed
the outline just over there, hiding near the enormous
rhododendron.  

For the split second she retained consciousness before
she felt the blow and the ground, she reasoned with
herself that at least she wasn't scared shitless and
peeing in her pants, which was more than she could say
for the less-than-organized chaos that was five
officers between the ages of 25 and 42 waving their
guns and running toward the rapidly-blurring woman
before her.

Then it all went dark, and very quiet.

=====

To: press@police.go.jp
From: t_eda@police.go.jp
Subject: [blank]

You think I won't take your firstborn, but I swear to
*GOD*, I will.

I don't care what anyone tells you:  SHUT THE FUCK UP.

=====

Ranma, being imperfect and prone to fits of mass
destruction, arrived at the hospital in a roaring bad
mood.  

"Where is she?" he found himself growling at the first
person he recognized.  They pointed down the hall
wordlessly, three doors down on the right where a
small army of police officers had gathered in small
groups.  They all looked up and scattered like
frightened animals as Ranma barreled past them,
radiating anger.

He wasn't sure who he was mad at right then.  It
seemed to be at the officers Michi had taken with her
to the Kuno mansion; then alternately, he'd find
himself ready to wring Michi's neck for having gone
and done such an incredibly stupid thing so goddamn
pregnant and...and...not telling him what she was
doing.  "Hey, aren't you coming with me?" he'd asked
earlier that day, about to go off to look up the
financial records of any people pertaining to the
case.  She'd simply smiled and said, "No, got
something else I've got to do before the day's out;
personal, you know."  He *thought* he knew; Ranma had
been expecting to see another sonogram by the end of
the week, not his partner's black eye.

The hospital room, like any other, was unbearably
sterile, white and gleaming and totally impersonal. 
Michi had been hauled into emergency room several
hours before with a broken wrist, a severe concussion,
and countless cuts and bruises.  Her heart rate and
blood pressure were dangerously high.  

Ranma was angrier than most people on the scene
because he knew something that most people there
didn't.  It had come along with the news that Michi
was injured at all.  "God, I was so scared!  That Kuno
woman!  She was crazy!  I mean, God, if we hadn't have
stopped her, she was about to kick Detective Hirugashi
right in the stomach, and - "

But he couldn't think about that right then.  Because
if he did, he'd think about "that woman," and how she
was actually Noriko Kuno, and how Michi had been
investigating his ex-girlfriend deep cover and how his
partner had almost been killed/lost her baby in the
process.  He didn't know how to feel: angry or guilty
or bitter or sad or worried, all of those emotions
seemed halfway, as if he wasn't trying hard enough.

Ranma settled on almost-mute frustration, and stared.

He'd been forced to make The Phonecall to Michi's
fianc� just half an hour prior, and his brain was
still stinging from the words that he'd heard over the
line: venomous, imbued with equal parts hatred and
terror.  He did not blame Kazuaki for his reaction:
the man was being threatened by a double loss.  On the
contrary, his loathing of Kazuaki was beginning to
lessen with an understanding of why Michi seemed to
think the man was worthy of her time: though the tax
lawyer might not have looked it, he was all poison on
a sword, protective knight, and Dangerous when the
situation called for it.  'Don't worry, Michi,' he
thought hatefully, 'your white knight of W40 forms is
on his way.'

"Shit," he said, pausing at the door.

The doctor inside studiously ignored the comment and
continued to shine his penlight into Michi's dilated
eyes.  The nurse stood primly at his side, a stocky,
thirty-something year old woman with a
perfectly-pressed uniform and cocked hat, so
outstandingly contrary to the disheveled, bruised, and
essential woman lying on the bed.  "She's not in any
immediate danger," the doctor said to no one in
particular, though at least four people released a
grateful breath at his declaration.  "We're going to
keep her for observation."  He glanced up and over his
bifocals straight at Ranma, a disapproving expression
all over his face.  "It is appreciated here," the
doctor said, "that some people have delicate
conditions that require they don't gallivant around
with guns and criminals."

It felt like an accusation.

Ranma winced, taking responsibility for the collective
stupidity of everyone there who had been daft enough
to ignore Michi's pregnancy simply because she said
they should.  So *what* if she thought she could do
the work and be a mother-to-be at the same time? 
Wasn't part of a partner and friend's responsibility
to tell a partner or friend that they weren't superman
or woman?  Didn't Ranma have the obligation to pull
Michi aside, frown at her, and say, "No, not anymore"?

He would have made a comment along those lines in
apology to the doctor, but a sudden rush of expensive
wool flew by him in a fit of panic and fatherhood. 
"How is she?  Oh, God, she's so pale!  What the hell
happened here?  What stupid fuck let her do this? 
God, hey, doctor, doctor!  What happened?"  Ranma
blinked and finally registered Kazuaki's presence, his
hand holding Michi's as he stood by her bed, brushing
his free fingers over her shoulders, her hips, her
swollen stomach.  They tangled in her hair.

The door eased shut, and all Ranma could see then was
a sliver of activity from the reinforced window.

It seemed fitting, somehow.

=====

To: t_eda@police.go.jp
From: press@police.go.jp
Subject: Re:[blank]

If we cared about our firstborns, we wouldn't be in
media.

=====

"'It's okay you know,' because even if it isn't, it
will be.  Someday," Michi had read somewhere, and
believed it fervently.  

She just hoped that those around her did as well.

It was her fourteenth hour at the hospital, and
Kazuaki was gone.

When she'd just woken up, there'd been tearful presses
of lips on lips and whisperings of comfort,
preliminary affection to soften the blow of cruel,
cold honesty.  The transition had been palpable, and
she'd felt herself stiffen as that first pause of
silence overwhelmed them, and then ate away at the
warmth until all that was left was hateful anger.  He
hadn't yelled at her, as it would improper in a
hospital, but his low, edgy tone had almost been
worse.  Michi had the distinct feeling that if the
baby was already born, Kazukai would have taken the
kid, packed a suitcase, and gone back home to his
mother.  As it was, the only thing the man could do
was go back to the office and tell his secretary to
hold all his calls.  "I can't believe you," he'd
hissed, tears in his eyes.  "I can't believe
you'd...you'd jeopardize this life you carry because
you don't want to lose."  Michi had reached out and
touched his hand, as if to pull him back, but he'd
only flinched and backed away, glaring at her.  "Don't
you understand what almost happened today?  What we
almost lost?"  She didn't, not yet.  "I can't be here
right now," he'd finished, and left, without another
word.

In a way, it still hadn't hit her.

Sure, she was achy and a bit tired from the day's
ordeal, but her baby was still shifting happily in her
belly and the ceiling of the hospital was painted an
interestingly piss-yellow color.  She understood that
she was in terrible trouble, but it wasn't really
processing, not while her wrist was itching
uncomfortably from the cast.

There was a knock on the door, and absently, she said,
"Come in."

Ranma had been living self-imposed exile from her
hospital room for the entire duration of Kazuaki's
visit.  He'd walked up and down all twenty-six flights
of steps, drunk about half a pot of coffee, harassed
one of the grizzled old nurses until he feared she
would suddenly explode in a violent shower of "I'm not
allowed to say!"s.  All in all, he'd made his presence
known, much to the disenchantment of the hospital
staff.

But none of that was of any great importance as he
entered Michi's room, settled by her bed, and *stared*
at her with a great and accusatory intensity.

"So," he said.

His partner glanced at him and winced at the
expression in his eyes. 

He leaned forward, and Michi pushed herself deeper in
the pillows.  "Last I heard - and this might be a
rumor, so correct me if it is - partners did stuff
together," he said darkly.  Michi shrunk back even
further, but her expression betrayed no guilt, no
wariness, no fear, just an inclined dislike for
remaining so damnably close to Ranma's presence.  The
heart rate monitor sped up, both of them.  "Like, you
know, solving cases and stuff."

"We made a deal," she finally found it in herself to
say.

He frowned.  "Yeah?  And I broke up with her."

Logic, Michi cursed, would be her undoing one of those
days.  It seemed unfair to her that Ranma would throw
that horrible little fact in her face.  She was
uncomfortable: hooked up to IVs and two different
heart rate monitors; her fianc�e couldn't even look
her in the face.  In college, Logic had seemed like a
good thing, some sort of scientific flow chart for all
the shit that seemed to fly her way: her husband, and
her irrational like of him.  During the first weeks of
her first real courtship, her roommates had found more
than one scribbled mess of arrows and words.  Now,
logic had her lying impotently in bed, trying to glare
down one of the most dangerous men in the world, and
feeling distinctly queasy about the prospect of
losing.  She was fairly certain that Ranma wasn't
going to hare out and break her arms, it would be
redundant and pointless, but there was no guarantee he
wouldn't crush her ankles and make her resign her
post.

"Note," Michi said, seemingly unaware of the circus of
media, the immediate danger of her actions, and the
nature of the conversation in general, "you didn't
"break up" with her; you yelled at her and you guys
made each other cry.  That doesn't constitute
"breaking up."  That means you had a fight."

Ranma hated logic, too.

"Well, fuck you," Ranma seethed.

They glared at one another severely.

"What's going to happen to me?" Michi asked quietly.

Ranma shrugged, leaning back in the chair, playing for
time.  "Your transfer papers are already in.  I think
you're going back to the lab."

She would die if she went back to the labs.

"And you?" she continued.

He, Ranma knew, was going to be asked to bend over and
grab his ankles while being slammed back to being a
patrolman.  "Demoted."

Michi raised her eyebrows.  "Ah.  Sorry."

"Yeah, so am I, actually."

Michi stared curiously, not so much concerned with the
fact that she was being forcibly removed from her post
(the idea was too abstract to process - her desk was
still in the S.O. department, wasn't it?), as she was
bewildered.  "Why is Eda in trouble?"

Her partner frowned, gray-blue eyes shining and
managed a low, "You *are* pregnant, Michi."  He turned
away, those same, wonderful-and-horrible eyes focused
on the window, and Michi followed his gaze.

Outside, the world was an orange-red hush of
pre-twilight.  It seemed as if no one had informed
night that neither Michi nor Ranma was ready to face
morning, and could it oversleep so that they could
hang here in the comfortable medium of afternoon a
while longer?  Morning would bring with it more
in-depth professional inquiries, more reporters;
legitimate newspapers would call in their favors at
the police department and with politicians to whom the
police department had to listen.  Morning would make
Michi understand what she had risked, and over what
she had risked it.  Morning would have her curled up
in a ball, sobbing violently over the possible
repercussions of what she'd done.  Morning would make
Ranma question the intensity with which he worried
over Michi's health, and drive him slowly mad with
those same ambiguous lines of affection that had
worried him for weeks already.  

Morning would bring disharmony.  

Yet as invasive as the evening was, it was undeniably
beautiful: the dark blue sky still had faint edges of
cream and pink and red, diminishing with each passing
moment.  Stars began to appear and all the trees faded
into the darkening background of the hospital grounds.
 The damnably chirpy birds outside went to sleep.

Michi observed all of this at a calculated distance.

She had no conscious knowledge of it, but when she'd
stepped into the Kuno mansion early that morning,
she'd detached herself from her mind.  Oh, she saw
everything, but was removed from it: recording a
sequence of events, a series of feelings, a collection
of images for future reference, but while and during,
she'd been far, far away.  She had intended to turn
herself back on after collecting whatever
incriminating evidence must have been lying about the
Kuno estate, but then the accident and the hospital
had happened.

The internal review board was probably digging through
Michi's desk as the partners sat there, silent and
still, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Soon, they
would find them out: the Plan that they had hatched
would be revealed, and they'd both be fired and
secretly killed.

"Do you think they know?" Ranma asked. 

Some part of Michi wants to ask, "About what?"  The
others, the more rational and adult pieces, want to go
back home, to rewind to six months ago and to decide
not to have sex.  The others parts want her fianc�e
and comfort, not her friend and consequence.

Suddenly, and without thinking of the significance of
such action, Michi reached out, hands frantically
scrabbling along the blankets to find Ranma's fingers
where they lay near her feet.  She needed contact, the
warmth of another human being very desperately then;
she felt so terribly cold inside, and fear ate into
her chest.  He just stared at Michi and felt his
fingers tightening about hers of their own volition.  

Akane once, in a fit of anger just a few weeks before
they were married, said that no male-female friendship
was simply that, and Ranma had called her paranoid and
a liar.  So he found himself wondering then, clinging
to his partner's hand as if it was his last tether to
earth, whether or not he'd spoken too soon about being
"just friends."  Some part of him knew that what his
ex-wife had said was an exaggeration, part truth and
part anger that all of his friends seemed to be
female; part of him knew that it was absolutely true. 
He wasn't too sure which side to believe more at that
moment.  

But then again none of that mattered.  Not really. 
Michi was engaged, a week and a half away from being
married: it didn't matter if Ranma spent more time
with her, cared for her.  It wasn't that there was a
line there, just that volition did not mean intent,
nor did it infer a future.  They understood one
another, and were close to one another, and that was
enough to spark some sort of chemical reaction that
both parties found agreeable.  This did not mean that
they were...more.

Volition, he'd see in the next several days, was a
funny thing.

=====

To: press@police.go.jp
From: t_eda@police.go.jp

Fuck.  Fuck you *and* your grandparents.  Fucking
hell.

====

Ranma stepped out at about four A.M for a can of hot
tea on an inconspicuous street corner, picked up a
copy of the Tokyo Herald, a few technogeek magazines,
and a candybar.

He had to fight a war to get back into the hospital at
four fifteen.

The debacle at the Kuno mansion had not only made the
eleven o'clock, ten o'clock, and nine o'clock news,
but it had also earned itself an emergency
interruption of all the afternoon TV shows.  Tokyo PD
lawyers started writing briefs, making phone calls,
and asking questions as soon as they'd heard whisper
of what happened.  The hospital steps and grounds were
teeming with reporters; any avenue of entrance that
wasn't completely sealed or that could be scaled was a
hazard area.  They were vultures, flies, maggots or
some other horrible, parasitic variation.

To make matters worse, the hospital security, having
to deal with the ravenous reporters generated by Tokyo
PD's statement, coupled with those spurred by Ranma's
incidence, were near homicidal themselves.  It was
only a matter of time, Ranma figured, before one or
another of the junior officers burst onto the
fifteenth floor and cold-cocked him with the butt of
his gun.  

When he got back to Michi's room, she was still
asleep, curled up small and innocuous under the
too-white sheets of the hospital bed.

She looked so young.

Sometimes, Ranma forgot how young she really *was*. 
In between watching her curse a blue streak and
pulling rank and slicing corpses with deadly accuracy
and not batting an eye, it was easy to imagine that
she was older than him, that she knew what she was
doing.  But now, watching her tangled in that hospital
bed, clutching her pillow, one hand placed
protectively on her distended belly, black hair
splayed against the sheets...

He could feel the guilt overwhelming him then.

"Do you love her?" she had asked, her voice deathly
solemn.  And he must have had an expression on his
face because she immediately switched gears and told
him she would investigate the Kunos on her own.  He
hadn't been certain - out loud, anyway.  He had wanted
the *hope* for something better so badly that
he'd...he'd made an enormous error in judgment.

And she had let him.

Why?  He didn't really know.  Maybe she cared, maybe
she cared *too much*.  Whatever her reasons, they'd
gotten her here: afraid, ostracized, and broken.

He reached out and touched the crown of her head,
warm, soft, and silken with dark strands.  It was the
main difference between Michi and Akane, he decided
some time ago.  Akane had lustrous hair, beautiful and
dark, but it had been rough to the touch, slightly
dry; she'd been a martial artist more than a woman,
always preoccupied with the dojo.  She liked her hair
pretty, but didn't look too deeply into the details. 
Michi was a woman above all things, even if she didn't
know it consciously.  She was one those girls who gave
themselves a once-weekly protein treatment with egg
yolks while indulging in a do-it-yourself manicure,
all the motions and quick, deft little tricks of the
trade written into her memory.  She'd admitted it once
during a particularly boring afternoon, just another
snatch of conversation, an unintentional revelation
that had stuck with him like a million other things.

He wanted to crawl inside of her, to be safe from
himself.  And he wanted all of this without a loving
gaze in her eyes, he wanted the same
caring-without-consequence that she'd given for so
long already; only he wanted it *more* than she'd be
able to offer.  Love was complicated; friendship, he
used to think, was not.  That view was starting to
change.  Maybe friendship was the most complicated
type of love of all.  

He lingered there, letting his fingertips play along
the softness of her, and thinking to himself quietly.

This was not allowed.

"I see I'm interrupting."

Ranma whirled around, frighteningly fast.  The paper
he'd been reading flew off the nightstand and landed
on the ground in a conspicuously loud rustle of
newsprint and shock.  His eyes landed on a familiar
grin in the doorway, familiar eyes, familiar face and
figure.  

"Nabiki," he breathed.  He was surprised he still
could.

She smirked and closed the hospital room door behind
her, tossing an interested look toward Michi, still
asleep on the bed.  "Your partner?"

Ranma nodded tightly.  He wasn't sure if he liked
this.  Nabiki was part of another life, one Michi
really didn't know about.  She was, if not a clean
slate, one that was slightly less dirty.  He wanted
her protected from his past, enough so that she would
never look at him with vague, calculated affection,
and not true friendliness.  That had happened too
often already.

"She's pretty," Nabiki said soothingly.  "Is she all
right?"

He felt himself relax slightly.  "She will be."  A
short pause, and then he pointed at a chair.  Nabiki
sat down, and looked at him intently, more than just a
bit curious.  "Why are you here?"  He didn't bother to
ask how she'd gotten in; it was Nabiki, she probably
owned the hospital or held the guards in monetary
peril or something equally illegal and heinous.

His ex-sister-in-law smirked.  "I was concerned."  She
allowed herself a brief pout.  "And you missed my
wedding."

"No shit?" he muttered, honestly surprised.  

"Yeah.  So, I figured that I might drop by and check
on you."

Nabiki looked around the hospital room appraisingly. 
It was nice, private, and pale yellow.  There were
prints of beaches and sand dunes on the walls.  It was
blandly attractive, like Michi had commented in
disgust earlier that week.  There were flowers on the
nightstand, from her fianc�e.  He still cared, Ranma
knew, even if Kazuaki couldn't bring himself to stay
and look into Michi's eyes, the trespass still too
fresh in his mind.  There were cards from her family,
baskets of oranges from her friends.  

Nabiki's eyes flashed.  "You look cozy."

"*Don't*," Ranma hissed, a knife edge in his voice:
raw.  "Don't say it."  The woman across from him
looked startled, and in the background, Michi made a
soft, whimpering noise, her fingers reaching out
blindly again.  He hesitated, seeing Nabiki's
oh-so-curious eyes, and then Michi made the noise
again: low and desperate, sad and all "Ranma?  Where
are you?  You got me here, take me back."  'Fuck my
reputation,' he thought, and took her hand, fingers
twining in fingers.

"Just friends?" Nabiki asked more seriously, eyes
shining.

He thought a moment.  "Complicated, but yeah."

Nabiki smirked, a bit of her old self leaking through
the newly galvanized kindness, topped off by a gold
wedding band.  "The wedding was great, you know. 
Akane cried.  The kid lived up to his name."

Ranma raised an eyebrow.  "Tako?  Still a
klepto-perve?"  The first time he'd met Akane and
Ryoga eldest child, he'd thought it was strange the
parents would nickname their kid octopus; then he'd
been randomly grabbed and watched with horrified
fascination as a four month old baby tried valiantly
to steal his watch.  It began to make sense.

"Getting worse.  We think he goosed Mrs. Takano,"
Nabiki confided.

Ranma smirked, and then stopped, growing puzzled. 
"Why aren't you on your honeymoon?"

Nabiki rolled her eyes.  "Corporate takeovers.  You
know."  Ranma didn't, and didn't know if she was
kidding, either.  Better not to ask, he decided.  She
looked him, a faint expression of worry on her face. 
"You can...you can still call, you know.  Just
because..."  

Just because you're sterile, and my sister accused you
of being a burakumin and you divorced her and half of
Nerima hates you now doesn't mean you can't call me.

Ranma didn't answer: it would have been a lie, anyway.

Michi stirred, and Nabiki glanced at her watch.  The
older woman pressed a comforting hand to Ranma's cheek
and gave him a once-over before leaving.

"It's a little strange," he'd tell Michi later.  "I
didn't know they cared anymore."

=====

To: mhirugashi@police.go.jp, rsaotome@police.go.jp
From: t_eda@police.go.jp
Subject: [blank]

Meeting, 4 o'clock, on whatever day Hirugashi gets out
the hospital.

Sorry in advance.

Eda

=====

Removal from the case was strange.

Michi got out of the hospital a week and a half after
the Kuno incident.  They'd been dragged into Eda's
office, summarily emasculated by the Internal Review
Board, stripped of their positions, and then sent on
their merry way.  Michi finished packing up her half
of the office within two hours, and was gone to a
building two and a half miles away to run lab results
a monkey with decent typing skills could have done. 
Ranma hadn't been slammed back to patrolman like he'd
thought, but he was reasonably certain that it was
only because the general populous would not at *all*
have been reassured by Ranma's presence in a police
booth: they still remembered him from the horrible,
grainy photos of a Kyoto afternoon.  He was just a
desk-jockey for the moment though, until they could
find him an acceptably harmless assignment and someone
willing to be his new partner.

Ranma bit his lip, wondering what Kodachi was doing
that night.  He'd had half a mind to go and seek her
out, speak to her, placate her, and knock her out,
drag her to his apartment.  Dash his job and what
little of his reputation he'd been able to piece
together again - they were all overrated.  Those
people who mattered would still believe him, even if
they refused to speak to him.

He had not spoken to Michi in nearly a month.  

They didn't meet each others' eyes when they passed in
the halls.

They exchanged phone calls once or twice, to tell each
other that someone or another wanted their old files
from the case.  They were close, claimed the rumors
around the office, to finding the killer.  The
financial records that Ranma had dug up were damning,
apparently.  Of whom?  Neither of them knew: Ranma had
never taken the time to look at them.  His partner was
in the back of an EMS truck, he could hardly be
bothered with anything more than ill-defined terror
and vague plots for homicide of whomsoever had done
it.  He didn't, at that time, *know* who had done it. 


The knock on the door was sedate and quiet,
unobtrusive, like a rustle of wind on a lukewarm
autumn day, almost welcome.  Ranma glanced up from his
security reports, feeling odd.  He looked briefly to
the clock: eleven thirty three, hardly time for
callers of any kind.  Frowning gently, he stood and
walked toward the door, hesitating before reaching the
knob.

He smelled her before he saw her.  He'd never really
noticed Michi's distinct scent before, but in some
distant part of his mind he'd remembered; he supposed
that separation had sharpened what memories he kept of
her.  It was a mix of honeysuckle and rain, a hint of
Shalimar and the slightly bitter aroma of freshly
brewed coffee.  She in no way maternal, what with the
Jungian unconscious' plumes of floral smoke and sweet
air, but Michi was welcoming in her own way.

As the door revealed her, standing at his apartment,
one hand clutching a purse, the other nervously
twirling a strand of her dark hair, Ranma felt
something in himself break.  It had been strained for
days, weeks, months, maybe.  He realized in that
moment, having her again, how much he'd missed her. 
It wasn't that she was particularly charming on most
workdays - in fact, she'd always been rather aloof -
or that he'd allowed himself unprofessional feelings
regarding his coworker...

Or maybe it was.

Friendship was out of line in some respects, wasn't
it?

She opened her mouth to speak, and for a minute or
more, no words came out.  Finally, gathering herself,
Michi whispered, "I ran out of tea."

She looked like hell.  Her hair was a mess, her
clothes were disheveled, and she was clutching her
cell phone with a slightly manic glint in her eyes. 
She looked thinner, paler, and more fragile than when
Ranma had dropped her off at her apartment nearly five
weeks prior.

It was apparent that Kazuaki had still not returned
home.

One part of him, the wildly protective one, demanded
that he find out where the bastard was hiding, beat
the shit out of him, and make him apologize to Michi
for turning her into this tragic version of herself. 
Another part, one that understood exactly what
*lunacy* Michi had given into when she went into the
Kuno mansion, knew that Kazuaki was well within his
rights to hate her for life after the spectacle and
subsequent terror there.  She'd almost destroyed her
own baby, *their* baby, and she *still* hadn't gotten
it yet.

Mute frustration, Ranma found, was his *best fucking
friend*.

Ranma blinked at her.  "Well...that's not good."

"No, it's not," she agreed.  "It's not good."

He took her arm gently and led her into the apartment.
 Without analyzing the familiarity with which he went
about the motions, he took away her purse and started
to strip away her thick sweatshirt, letting his hands
linger about her belly, feeling the small, fighting
kicks of her child within.  "You'll have to stay," he
said conclusively.  If he let her go back to her
apartment, she would just eat Pocky until she passed
out on her sofa and woke herself up crying.

"Yes," she answered slowly, dreamily, as she allowed
her shoes to be taken off and put away.  Where?  She
didn't care.  Tonight, she didn't need to worry.  It
would all be taken care of.  Tonight, at least.

"Because," Ranma continued, "you have no tea."

She nodded.  "Yes, because I have no tea," she
parroted.

He led her gently to his bedroom, lowering her to the
mattress and wrapping his comforters about her, seeing
her eyes droop with exhaustion.  He stared at her for
a moment before the temptation overwhelmed him, and
with careful fingers, he stroked her hair.

She watched him, her police-trained eyes taking in his
every detail even at the edge of sleep.  It gave Ranma
the unsettling impression that should she be called
upon to be an eyewitness in any case involving
himself, her testimony would be eerily accurate.  

"I don't have tea," she whispered again.

"No," he answered.  "You don't."

There was a short silence.  "I don't have anyone," she
said.

He hesitated before answering, "That's not true."

She closed her eyes.  "Then stay."

Ranma found himself frowning.  He'd walked right into
that one.  "I don't think it's a good idea, Michi," he
replied, his voice raspy.  Was she begging for him to
be with her?  Would he become nothing more than an
object for comfort sex?  The idea did not sit well
with him.  And besides, as atrociously rude as it
sounded even in his *own* mind, she was six months
pregnant; were pregnant women even *allowed* to have
sex? 

She whimpered, her eyes still closed.  "Ranma, just
sleep next to me."

He flushed red; he was glad that it was dark, and that
her eyes were closed.  "Oh, well..." he stammered. 
She cracked open one dark-gray eye and pierced him
with an expression that rendered all argument useless.
 He stepped into the bathroom and changed into
standard sleeping attire, and stood next to the bed
for a minute.  Michi was turned toward his window, her
back to him, taking slow, steady breaths.

He put one knee on the mattress, but stopped.  

He hadn't slept next to a woman for years.  He wasn't
sure if he remembered how to do it without getting
himself into all sorts of embarrassing situations, and
there were so many of them to worry about, too! 
Morningwood, grabbing her inappropriately, having her
hands where they shouldn't have been, and a thousand
other things flashed through Ranma's mind.  'This is
ridiculous,' he berated himself, stepping back. 
'She's already asleep.  It doesn't matter if you stay.
 Go to the couch, you'll both be thankful in the
morning.'

And he would have made it if it weren't for Michi's
tiny, pleading whisper, muffled by the blankets. 
"Please."

It was the first time that Ranma had ever heard anyone
beg that sadly.

He crawled under the sheets and tried to fall asleep. 


Surprisingly, he did.

He'd woken up in the morning to Michi's cheek pressed
against his collarbone, her face pallid, and her lips
slightly parted.  Her right hand was laid gently
across his chest, over his heart.  Her legs were
tangled in his own.  He could feel her belly pressed
against him, and again, he marveled at the feeling of
something that small protesting so violently to being
trapped within its mother; her child was going to be a
fighter through and through, no doubt about that.

He noticed as he disentangled himself (with no small
measure of regret) that she looked less sad than she
had the night before.

She slipped out of the apartment while he was in the
shower.  

=====

To: t_eda@police.go.jp
From: mhirugashi@police.go.jp
Subject: I resign.

=====

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning when he got
the call.

"Hello?" he asked, half asleep.

"I'm getting married today."

Ranma blinked slowly.  "Okay."

"And I quit.  Will you come?"

He grew more awake at this.  "Come where?" he asked,
bewildered, working through all of the information as
quickly as being sleep-deadened allowed at ungodly
hours of morning.

"To my wedding," she said impatiently.

It was, Ranma thought crazily, okay to assume that she
and Kazuaki had kissed and made up, or at least were
sleeping in the same house again.

It finally registered.  "Wait a second, you quit?"

"Yes," she said matter-of-factly.  "Are you coming?"

"Like, your *job*?"  Ranma was not processing well *at
all*.  The Logical Thought fairy had clearly ignored
him on her nightly rounds, and had left him with only
the help of the Stupid, Repetitive Question fairy, who
was a useless bitch, anyway.

Michi sighed in annoyance.  "Yes.  Are you coming?"

"To the wedding," he said tonelessly.

"Yes."

"I guess," he answered, stupefied.  It would make
sense, he consoled himself, when there was more
daylight.  Really.  There was a long silence before he
found himself asking, "What do you want?  Like, as a
present."

"I'm kind of scared."  About getting married, Ranma
knew.

"It's okay.  We all are," he said, as comfortingly as
being a horrible divorcee allowed him to be to someone
about to commit themselves for better or worse,
sickness and health, and all that other maudlin crap. 
"Where's Kazuaki?" he suddenly asked. 

"At his mom's house," she said casually.  "I want a
new laptop."

Ranma rolled his eyes and lay back in bed.  "Something
I can afford."

A long silence.  "Paperclips?"

He decided not to rise to the bait, and asked instead,
"Are you actually quitting?  What are you going to be,
a housewife?"  The very idea seemed foreign to him:
Michi would never content herself to sitting around
cleaning and cooking and *waiting*.  It wasn't her
style.  She would spontaneously combust if she ever
tried to be a housewife.

"Yes, I'm quitting, and no, I haven't decided yet,"
was her reply.

He thought about this for a second.  "Can I go back to
sleep?"

"No, you jackass."  There was fire in her tone, and he
found it wonderfully comforting to know that some
things didn't change.  "I've just quit my job and I'm
getting married in less than twelve hours.  *Pretend*
to care."

Ranma did.  He was extremely concerned.  

In fact, when he woke up more, he'd be extremely
concerned about a lot of things.  Not the least of
which was the case, the connection between the deaths
and the Kuno family, and how Michi was getting married
and that reminded him of his own doomed romances.  But
all of that was highly suspect in his sleep-foggy
brain.  He just couldn't tell Michi because he
couldn't string together the sentences to say it. 
Ranma surrendered himself to listening to her.

"Okay," he acquiesced.  

And he listened to her chatter in his ear until
sunrise.

======



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