[Episode 144968] [Episode 144968]Ahh, the sweet relief as her mother's presence once again spoke peace to her soul! All of the constant aggravations of her idiotic, selfish, brutal siblings and infantile father faded away back into the distance where they belonged and she breathed a sigh of relief once more.
No more desire to strangle them with an apron for skipping out on all of the housework. No rage-driven need to beat their faces in with a clothing iron while they slept through her load of chores, napping past the heat while she did laundry. The urges to scar them or hurt them or poison them for all they'd done to her once again fell under control as her mother's sweet presence whispered to her of love and kindness.
It took a moment for all of the anger and pain to go away though; the hurt she'd felt as they whined in all of their greedy ways for new clothes (Akane couldn't even swim yet she had more bathing suits than Kasumi had outfits altogether), higher allowance (Nabiki scammed and cheated for money constantly yet all she could speak of was her want of toys like a new stereo when her old one worked perfectly fine), or sake (though that came almost as a relief, as it got her father's demands out of the way and he was no more or less useless drugged out of his senses than he usually was) while she scrimped and saved to feed them.
Akane's periodic rages, nightmare cooking attempts that did more damage than any battle, and constant smashing apart of building supplies to prove she was a martial artist too (she used up more of those than the Saotomes did with all of their property damage from fights) combined with Nabiki's bitter greed and refusing to help anyone but herself had given her a brief moment wherein she'd almost, not quite but almost, let her anger surface from within the gentle embrace of her mother's love and sold the two of them to that Yakuza man who had been pressuring her to go into prostitution to pay her family's debts to him.
Still, the image of Akane, tied up with her own weights and tossed into a deep lake, after having been force fed all of her cooking leftovers for a year, Nabiki pictured as stripped and on an auction block, were so appealing! Her father -- her FATHER! The man she'd loved and looked up to died and left them when they'd lost their mother, leaving a weak willed, spineless man who'd have been kinder to them dead as his children wouldn't be constantly burdened with his appetites or stupid plans. It was their so called 'father' who was more of a baby than any of them, Akane included. It was HIS idea to bring in that stupid, never could be fed enough panda man and his son's endlessly destructive rivals (Ranma wasn't so bad alone) It was her father that brought Happosai down upon them by inviting the letch into her household - Kasumi hadn't worn a single article of underwear in almost a year because she no longer had any! Of course her sisters bought new packs, and expensive fashion brands at that, often enough that neither of them ever went without. But Kasumi? Oh, they'd never thought (they never would) to do anything for her, and she dared not buy any for herself for fear of that Yakuza man and his brothel, always lurking, waiting for if their debt ever passed a certain threshold! And the lazy, selfish idiots who made up her 'family' would never even miss her if she still got home to cook dinner and get her chores done!
Once again she resisted the urge to kill them all as she felt once more her mother's love.
But she felt no guilt at all that she'd encouraged those policemen in the assumption that it was Genma Saotome who had been the arson - it was true! Her father couldn't resist a sales pitch from a door-to-door salesmen if he'd been selling beach resorts in the arctic! She had to carefully give him newspapers out of which she'd blotted out the ads for fear of him buying in to some scheme that got them all up in hock to their eyeballs! Or... do it again, really.
Starting as a child herself to deal with these problems Kasumi didn't know of any better way than to simply endure them. She hadn't ever had an example of how to cope or resolve them better and in spite of her mother's cross was getting closer to snapping every day. Yet still she didn't know how to tell anyone without going berserk on them over how wrong everything was, and she couldn't let herself do that, as it was wrong.
Nobody cared about her anyway, especially not her family! And who else would listen or could do anything to help?
That those nice officers now felt, encouraged by those 'womanly ways' her mother taught her, that mister Saotome was a cannibal and an arson as well as a thief was only justified by his actions. He was all of those things! It was only right his deeds get him the reward they deserved. At least it could get him out of the house for a while, and if it did that their food budget would drop to a third of what it was now.
Soun went onward, rubbing his shin occasionally, but the only one who'd seemed to notice was Nabiki. Still, the middle Tendo daughter's reactions were limited to subtly checking her sister's hair for horns, or seeing if she could spot anything else out of place, like fangs or a barbed tail, that could give her a clue as to what supernatural menace had possessed her sister so she could slap a patch on the problem and have everything go back to normal.
Nabiki, if she could have overheard her sister's thoughts, would have been torn between self doubt and horror as she scrambled to pull things back together and fix everything. But she didn't know because Kasumi didn't know how to tell her and she'd always assumed the house finances had been handled by daddy and were firmly in the black, stock certificates or a trust fund adequately paying for bills plus living expenses or something.
If she'd thought to check, she'd have been ever more bothered by the state of their affairs than Kasumi.
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(Posted Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:47)
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