Nabiki stared morosely at the ceiling. Before today, she was untouchable. She was the almighty Ice Queen, for Kami’s sake! She so cool under fire and calculating, even the mightiest of martial artists were under her power…
And all it took to defeat her was an elbow in the face from some terrified nobody in Juuban...
Then there was whatever possessed Gosunkugi…
She remembered the scene like a lucid dream: Gos, with his demonic features leering at them, at her, as if she was a sex slave, ready to be violated. The undead army, rotting and ready to drag her off to her horrifying fate…
…And Ranma, red hair blazing in the sun, chasing them off. Ranma, revealing the demon behind the pale-faced boy…
…Ranma, whose face appeared above hers like an angel, healing her wounds and comforting her when the pain started to become too much…
Nabiki remembered all this, and wished it were a dream. If it were, she could at least delude herself into thinking everything was normal, that the Ice Queen of Furinken was still on top…
That she wasn’t developing feelings for an aqua-transsexual martial artist.
She remembered the day she first saw him/her. Her first thoughts when she saw the redheaded girl was of a lonely kid, lost in the world around her, needing a friend. She was too disappointed by the lack of a fiancé to really offer, but Akane stepped in for her.
Then she turned into Ranma, a cocky, slightly-misogynistic martial artist without a care for learning or common sense. The transformation was so abrupt that Nabiki had forgotten of the lonely soul she had once glimpsed in the boy. She was just glad that it wasn’t her stuck with the engagement.
…Now she was starting to wonder if that was a mistake.
Sure, the boy turned into a girl. Sure, he was an uneducated fool who thought with his stomach instead of his head. Hell, he was entirely too focused on fighting to even pay attention to anything else…
But how much of that was because he had nothing else to turn to? How much of his attitude was real, and how much of it was a coping mechanism to try and deal with a father who put him through hell and only cared about the future his son would provide for him. What was Ranma, and what was his mask?
Throughout the past year, she had seen glimpses of what lay beneath the mask, but she had never cared to really look until now. When the curse was locked, Ranma showed how much his male identity meant to him, but at the same time, he seemed so much freer as a redheaded girl than as a man; she smiled more than he did, and seemed freer with her emotions. When he suffered from the Ultimate Weakness Moxibustion, he seemed completely without purpose, as if his martial arts was all that he ever had from day one… but what if it really had been? Genma did seem like the type to ensure that it was all Ranma could ever have…
And then, two months ago, Ranma started changing. He started paying more attention in class, and had managed to drag Kasumi out of the house and into the world. He started waking up earlier, and had even started to play along whenever Nabiki made her do a photo shoot. She even started to give her pointers, trying to encourage her talent for photography.
Nabiki had always planned on going into business, but she also loved taking pictures. As a child, she would take pictures of nature and her family, and when her mother passed on and they needed money, she’d take pictures as a source of blackmail; to build up the funds needed to keep the household going. It was only when Akane caught Kuno Tatewaki’s eye that she started making enough money to build up a big enough surplus to splurge on other things.
And now, taking pictures of a more photogenic redhead, she started to remember how much fun it was before, when her mother let her play with her camera, taking pictures of the world around her.
How much of that Tendo Nabiki was lost when the Ice Queen was born? How much of her was still left, now that she was melting?
A sudden knocking on the window jolted her out of her brooding thoughts. She got up and let the slightly damp redhead into her room. “Found more water, Saotome?”
Ranma snorted, “Yeah, it never fails… almost like Akane getting pissed off at me, for some reason…”
Nabiki winced, “True; you OK? I saw what happened earlier…”
“Yeah, I’m OK. I’m just not sure what’s going on with her. I’m trying to be nice! Isn’t that what she wanted?”
Nabiki sat back down on her bed, “I’m not quite sure… but I think I know someone who could explain it.”
The redhead looked up at her, “Really? How much will this cost me?”
The middle Tendo winced, “Let’s just call this a freebie, Ranma-kun. Looking back on it, if I had listened to Hiroki-kun, things might have been different…”
The Saotome girl leaned up against the wall, waiting for Nabiki to continue.
“When you first came here, a friend of mine who was interested in psychology warned me that Akane might start being threatened by you. Akane was at the top of the food chain here; the best martial artist, the most desired girl in Furinken… and then you showed up, and she became second fiddle. Never paid attention to any of that psycho-babble stuff, but I’m starting to think maybe he was on to something there…”
“Wait, so Akane thinks I’m trying to one up her or something?”
Nabiki shook her head, “I don’t know; I’m a businesswoman, not a psychologist. All I can do is analyze what she’s doing; I’ll need to talk to Hiroki-kun to get a better idea of the why.”
Silence reigned for a few minutes, and then Ranma asked, “How ‘bout you? Are you OK?”
Nabiki sighed, “I’m not sure yet. Physically, I feel better than I have in a while. But emotionally…”
“You’re shaken and feeling lost?” At Nabiki’s startled look, Ranma shrugged, “I think I’ve started developing some kind of empathy thing. Might have to with some of my new training regiment, I guess.”
Nabiki felt a bit of her old curiosity come back into play, “And what training regiment is that, Saotome?”
Ranma stared at her for a moment, and then asked, “How much do you want to know?”
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(Posted Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:05)
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