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PILLARS OF SALT (SIXTEEN DAYS)
DISCLAIMERS
I do not own Ranma 1/2 or any of the related characters. The Ranma 1/2 series was created by Rumiko Takahashi and is owned by Shogakukan and Viz Video. This fanfiction is intended for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from this story. All rights to the original Ranma 1/2 story belong to Rumiko Takahashi.
One minute I held the key.
Next, the walls were closed on me.
I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand.
— Chris Martin and Coldplay, Viva La Vida
The Nerima Spring Festival had operated at the same shrine for as long as anyone thought to track. The vendors had long since settled into territorial arrangements. The Nerima ward office had stopped mapping them.
Instinctively, Nabiki had recognized the opportunity. Ever since she was fourteen, she had been filling in the void. Partly as an intellectual exercise. More because information was always worth something. She had been selling premium viewing coordinates for the fireworks ever since.
This year, she had marked the corner behind the taiyaki stand. Elevated, clear sightline east. Sheltered from the crowd’s worst eddies.
In the end, however, she decided not to sell it. Maybe something to do with her graduation. Maybe not. She tried not to interrogate the reasons too closely.
Still, the ceremony, which took place a few weeks back, remained fresh in mind. A Thursday in early March under a sky that couldn’t decide between winter and spring. She had received her diploma with all the dignity she could muster: with both hands and a slight bow.
The thing had been lighter than she’d expected. She handed it back when they asked. Stood after in the Furinkan courtyard while her class dissolved around her into the particular theater of ending. Girls weeping into each other’s shoulders. Boys performing stoicism with variable success. The second-button tradition observed or not with equal amounts of drama in either direction.
She had finished ranked first in her year.
The class representative, however, had been a girl named Chie Yamamoto. Ranked fourth. Her voice carried well across the courtyard. Clear diction, appropriate pace, competent breath control. The speech ran four minutes and nine seconds. Nabiki counted. Foundations. Futures. Gratitude to those who had made them possible.
The speech. They had cheated her of it, vindicating in that act every yen she had ever made off the faculty and the better part of the student body. She had endured the rest with the flat affect of someone compiling a record.
The faculty applauded.
Nabiki felt that applause in her back teeth.
Her father, not surprisingly, had wept.
Kasumi had stood beside him with a hand on his arm, steady in the way she was at everything. From across the courtyard, she had looked at Nabiki with an expression that didn’t require translation.
Akane too had appeared at her elbow and said something. Nabiki caught the shape of it, though not any actual words. The crowd was too loud. Akane had followed her lost words with a hug. Once, hard, briefly in the way Akane put her whole self into things she couldn’t say. Then it was over with Akane stepping back and blinking.
Ranma had come too. Not for her, exactly. He lived at the dojo as Akane’s. The family lines had already blurred years ago. A graduation was a thing the household attended.
He stood at the back with his hands in his pockets, not doing any of the things for which the occasion asked. He had watched her through the speech. Nabiki felt the look more than saw it. Once, flat, accurate, the only one in the courtyard other than her sisters who also found the result wrong.
Whatever.
Now she was here on another day under a different sky, one a little more decided this time between winter and spring. Languishing in the shadow of three weeks of limbo with sixteen days still left until her move-in date at the Todai dormitory in Komaba.
Sixteen days until Nerima became a place she was from rather than a place where she was. The distinction mattered to her in ways she hadn’t fully articulated even to herself. She felt its shape clearly. The way one felt a wall in the dark.
The kimono was her mother’s. Heavy navy-blue silk, plain but perfectly cut. White cranes mid-flight across the fabric. Wearing a dead woman’s clothes tonight had been a choice. Like the corner she hadn’t sold, it was not one she intended to open and examine.
Kasumi had altered the kimono once before for herself years ago. Now again for Nabiki’s different proportions. Sometime in the last few weeks, Nabiki had asked in words she could not now reconstruct choosing.
The changes were invisible. So very Kasumi. Just as much as how she had not once asked why she was making them in the first place. Or how she had offered the blood-red obi to complement the kimono. Wide and crisp, tied in a severe, perfect knot that cinched everything into a clean line. Nabiki had stood still while Kasumi tied. Not something either of them usually did.
The kanzashi too belonged to Akiko Tendou. Silver wire wound into plum blossoms, slightly tarnished at the base where the lacquer had worn through from the habitual press of someone’s thumb. Kasumi had wordlessly handed the piece to her sister without preamble. Nabiki had worked the ornament into her hair with hands that were steadier than she felt.
After, she had remained in front of the mirror longer than she could justify, sending everyone else ahead. The face looking back at her possessed her mother’s cheekbones but her own eyes. She looked like a woman. Not a high school student. Nor the girl who had mapped the vendor stalls at fourteen.
Something between what she had been and whatever she would become. The distance between those two kept her rooted in place. Only the solemn ring of the clock striking the hour finally moved her.
When she arrived at the festival grounds, Akane found her first. Her younger sister’s expression went through several calibrations before settling on, “You look really nice, Oneechan.”
“I know.”
Akane, however, had already been pulled away by the particular current of feeling she generated wherever she went.
Naturally, Ranma trailed behind Akane. Nabiki could read his performance of indifference the way she read a balance sheet. Line by line, the real numbers visible under the presentation.
He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking at the cherry trees. He wore the expression he always wore when pretending not to pay attention to anything — which meant he was paying attention to everything.
Nabiki made note and moved on.
The early evening went as it always went. Soun and Genma located the beer stall with the unerring radar of their mutual interests. Kasumi accepted a compliment from a vendor whose family she apparently knew. Akane ate two sticks of yakitori and argued with Ranma about whether the goldfish-scooping game was rigged.
“Everything here is rigged,” Nabiki said, passing without stopping. An unwanted snippet of Yamamoto’s speech rang out in her mind’s ear, unbidden.
“She’s right,” said Ranma.
“She’s always right,” Akane said, meaning it more than she knew.
Nabiki moved away through the crowd with the ease of long practice. Exchanged a few words here, accepted a skewer of mitarashi dango from a second-year boy who wanted something from her. She hadn’t decided yet what it was worth.
She ran four transactions in the first hour. Two involving festival photographs. One involving information about a test that wasn’t her concern anymore but whose value she had still accurately assessed. Another involving a debt owed since January.
She told herself she was not performing for anyone. She was good at this. She had always been good at this. At most everything she ever did. Not her fault if people didn’t notice or care.
Fuck them.
Just like the goldfish game, which, as it turned out, was indeed rigged. Ranma won four of them anyway. He had no idea what to do.
As Nabiki came back from her second circuit, she found him standing at the edge of the path. He was holding the fish in a small plastic bag of water. His expression was a naked admission of his complete tactical bewilderment.
“Akane?” she asked.
“Went to find a restroom. Ten minutes ago.” He looked at the bag. “Whadda I do with these?”
Nabiki recognized the register. Not a question. He was thinking out loud. Something he only did when he’d forgotten to perform the indifference.
“The Suzuki family is set up two stalls east of the beer tent. They have a pond.” She held out her hand. “Give me those.”
He looked at her. “You’re just goin’ to take ’em.”
“I’m going to facilitate a transaction. Stay here.”
He transferred the bag to her hand. The plastic was cold and wet. His hand was warm. Their fingers overlapped for less than a second. Even then, she felt the specific warmth of his touch against the cold of the bag.
Then it was over. She was already walking east. The classification she’d already started—static electricity, the dry March air, the particular charge of festival crowds—felt, by the time she reached the Suzuki stall, like something she’d had to work for.
The Suzuki girl was seven years old and wore a red jacket. She accepted the fish with the gravity of someone conducting important business. Nabiki came back with a modest amount of cash. She found Ranma where she’d left him, Akane standing beside him, recently returned. Akane looked between them with an expression Nabiki catalogued and set aside.
“Goldfish?” Akane asked.
“Handled,” Nabiki said.
“She sold ’em,” Ranma said.
“I facilitated a transaction,” Nabiki corrected. She reached out and wordlessly handed Ranma half the cash as a matter of fair principle.
Akane linked her arm through Ranma’s and pointed toward the main path. The old custom of walking the shrine road at dusk under the lit paper lanterns. The cherry trees on either side released petals into the slow movement of people. The procession was about to begin.
Nabiki watched them go, standing alone in the space they left.
Sixteen days.
By the time Nabiki reached the shrine road, the procession had already begun its first pass along the cherry path. She had never walked it. Merely watched the way she watched most things. As an external operation, trackable and assessable, the sum of its parts knowable.
The lanterns cast a particular light against the blossoms. Pink mixed with white and the warm orange of paper flame. The whole tableau possessed a quality she had only ever read about in poems. She had always considered such things an exercise in collective self-deception.
Now, however, she wondered if the poets might have had a point. Just for a moment. Then, just as quickly, the thought was gone, receding back into only the tangible fact of the procession. Loose, informal. Families and couples and clusters of friends finding a pace as quickly as abandoning it.
Somewhere in the middle, she could see Akane. Earnest the way she was at everything. Petals catching in her dark hair.
Ranma too but at the edge, not walking. Watching the feet of the older people with the focused, unconscious assessment of someone who learned with his body. Then eventually stepping in, moving as though physics were a suggestion.
The procession was not martial arts. It was the opposite—pace, community, the submission of individual motion to shared pattern. Yet, he had fallen in with the same unselfconscious exactitude he brought to everything physical. By the second pass of the lanterns, he had found the rhythm, settling into it the way water settled into a form — without effort.
On a turn, he happened to catch Nabiki looking on from the sidelines. Something passed between them. A strange thing for which she had no name. In reply, he angled his head toward the procession. A question.
She looked once more at the moving line of people. The lantern-lit faces. The petals falling through orange light.
I’m leaving in sixteen days.
I’ve been leaving since I was fourteen.
I’ve never once walked this path.
She stepped in.
The pace was slow. Her body found it without her permission. Bodies worked like this. Learning without being asked, stored without being told. Producing knowledge at inopportune moments. She had watched this procession for eighteen years. Apparently, her feet had been paying closer attention than she had.
Ranma was a few people ahead of her. She could see the set of his shoulders. The particular stillness he carried even in motion. Once more, she could not help noting how very precisely he was himself.
Even here.
Even in a form that asked for dissolution into the collective.
The petals fell steadily. The path curved. The slow movement meant that eventually the spacing resolved. Now he was beside her. Not because either of them had arranged it. Simply because the geometry of paths was what it was.
“You’re walkin’,” he said.
“I’m observing from closer range.”
He looked at her sideways. Said nothing. Which was, she supposed, also an answer.
They moved along the path without speaking further. The lanterns swayed in the light wind off the hills. Cherry petals settled on her shoulders, in her hair, against the silver wire of her mother’s kanzashi.
Nabiki would not do the stupid thing and be sentimental. She knew this was simply seasonal. Mere happenstance of the particular conditions of late March.
Still, she found herself aware of his arm. The distance between them of twelve centimeters. A thing she measured without deciding to. At that distance he smelled of cedar and sweet pine. The smell of the dojo, she had always assumed — old wood, years of it. Tonight it came off him instead.
The filing in her mind held for approximately four seconds—proximity, festival crowd, shared path—before slipping. Only the awareness remained. Plain and unprocessed, vividly present with nothing left underneath on which to stand or hide.
They lost the others somewhere after the second circuit. The crowd reorganized itself the way crowds always did. Individuals surfacing and submerging according to their own orbits.
At some point, Nabiki discovered herself at the outer edge of the festival grounds near the shrine steps. She had no recollection of the steps that had brought her here. Disconcertingly unusual. She tracked steps, counted them — always. Yet, this time, the counting was conspicuously absent.
Ranma materialized at her elbow with two paper cups of amazake, holding one out. Without thinking, she took it from him. The act felt surprisingly natural.
The sidewalls were warm. A welcome fact, eliciting the realization that the evening had gone cold at some point. The sweet smell of the cup’s contents rose in the air between them.
“You’re actually goin’.”
“Sixteen days.”
He nodded, looking at the paper lanterns strung between the shrine trees rather than at her. They were swaying in the gentle breeze coming off the hills. The light fell across the cherry blossoms in a way that—
She cut off the observation before it could be allowed to finish.
“Ya ain’t comin’ back.”
“I have to. For holidays.”
He said nothing for a moment. A petal fell between them. Neither of them marked it.
“Ya had your bags packed for years.”
Not a question. Not a probe. Rather, the flat, accurate observation of someone who had been watching without being credited for watching. She felt the revelation arrive in her chest before she could decide what to do with it.
He stayed quiet for a moment longer. Then, “They shoulda given ya the speech.”
Her throat closed briefly. She reached for the appropriate deflection. “Chie Yamamoto was a perfectly adequate choice.”
“She was ranked fourth.”
“Graduation ceremonies aren’t meritocracies.”
He said nothing. The lanterns continued to sway. He had made his point and was simply letting it stand there. Worse than anything he might actually have pressed. She felt it in her jaw, in the back of her neck. Most of all, in the very specific effort of not doing anything with her face.
“Ya hate it,” he said. “Furinkan. This whole place. All of it.”
“I’ve been planning to leave since middle school.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I get it.”
She looked at him. Not sideways.
He had not used her acknowledgment as leverage. Not pressed or softened or tried to fix what wasn’t fixable. Simply said the true thing and stopped.
Lantern light caught the lines of his jaw and his hands around the cup of amazake. The specific way he held things. Lightly, with absolute sureness, as though objects understood they would not be dropped. She could feel the warmth of him beside her, mingling with the specific quality of his attention. Something that had always been there, a thing which she had always filed under proximity, dojo, and unavoidable.
Now, however, the filing in her head felt woefully inadequate, even inaccurate. She felt something move behind her sternum. Frantically, she kept reaching for the assessment in her ledger. Yet, the column refused to fill. The evening remained cold except where he was sitting beside her.
“Nerima,” he said.
Just the word. Just the one.
She understood, however, what he was really asking. She was eighteen years old. She could not make any of it mean less than it did.
She could have deflected. After all, she had whole architectures of deflections in her pockets, the language of assessment as its own kind of armor. She reached for it. Found, however, that the will for it had abandoned her, specifically here, specifically tonight.
“No,” she said.
A pause.
“Yes.”
By now, she had finished her amazake. Was holding the empty cup and not noticing. He took it from her hand without comment. Set it beside his on the shrine step. His fingers brushed hers in the passing.
She felt that too but again did not manage to classify it.
The fireworks started at nine-thirty. Of course, Nabiki was at the taiyaki-stand corner when the first one went. The vantage point she had not sold this year without examining why.
The sound came after the light. Always after the light, physics making its insistence felt. She felt it in her chest before she heard it with her ears.
Ranma was still beside her. She didn’t know at what point between the shrine steps and here he had simply remained. Only that he had.
Akane would be somewhere in the crowd also looking east. Kasumi would be with their father and Genma. Their father would weep the way he always wept at the end of things. Genma would be beside him with another beer. Kasumi would accept all of it with the same grace she accepted everything.
This was the family Nabiki would be leaving in sixteen days. She looked up at the sky. Felt the specific weight of that realization. Refused to give it a name.
The second firework: a chrysanthemum, blue and white, its petals reaching and then gone.
“I was going to sell this spot,” she suddenly blurted.
“What changed?”
“I don’t know.”
Something was wrong. Nabiki Tendou did not say such things. Still had her arrangements for not knowing. Compartments, deferments, the language of assessment. The way one could rotate a problem until the unknown was behind them.
Yet, she had just said I don’t know and meant it. That meaning lodged in her chest. Alongside all the other strange things that had been accumulating tonight since the goldfish bag.
A third firework, gold, spreading slow.
“Ranma.”
“Yeah.”
“When I leave….”
She stopped. The sentence had no ending she was willing to attach. Above, the sparks fell at 9.8 meters per second squared. She was going to study supply curves, market failures, and capital allocation. None of that touched what was in her chest.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Still, she turned to look at him. Found him already looking at her. Another firework burst overhead. Red this time, illuminating his handsome face for one second, his eyes on her. She felt a shiver start at the back of her neck and move down the length of her spine. Frantically, she grasped for a classification. Found nothing.
The light went out.
The dark came back.
Then came the final salvo, the largest of the night of course. This was the contract, the known ending. The burst charges exploded and the shell casings burst. The stars, comets, and crossettes within blazed across the visible entirety of the whole night sky, blindingly white at the center, ringed with a brilliant spectrum of colors. The crowd made the sound that crowds always make for such spectacles.
As Nabiki watched, she briefly felt like water—formless within the vessel that contained it, taking on a shape that was never truly its own.
The silence after the last burst charge roared proved the loudest yet of the year.
“Nabiki.”
She turned.
He was contemplating her the way he had the procession. The way he regarded things when he was deciding to take them seriously. When the performance fell away and what remained underneath was just this — attention.
The half-second their hands had overlapped over a bag of goldfish. A hundred such half-seconds before it, in the narrow places of a shared house. Each one logged as static, as dry air, as proximity.
She knew that she could price this present moment too. Make it something manageable and safe, correctly filed and leave for Todai in sixteen days carrying nothing. She knew that she should.
Instead, she said, “I know.”
He blinked.
“I know,” she said again. The words had escaped her the way held breath leaves—not chosen, just released. She could feel the space they had made.
She could not, however, locate when or where the holding had begun. Only that he had closed the distance between them and that she hadn’t moved back.
His hands were warm. One at her jaw, the other at her waist over the silk of her mother’s kimono. The obi kept everything contained, even though nothing about the moment felt that way.
He kissed her once, properly, amidst the noise of the crowd, the last remnants of the fireworks smoke, and the cold March air. She could taste the amazake still on his tongue, still sweet and warm, more alive than she could ever have imagined. The scent of cedar and sweet pine swirled all around her now. Unlike earlier, the shiver that followed now never fully settled. He was so damn beautiful – every last living, breathing bit of him.
Her own hands, she noticed, reciprocated and landed on his chest. Beneath, his heart was going hard and fast. Distantly, she registered that her own had matched. Maybe he could feel that too.
Her breath, when she finally exhaled, made a small cloud in the cold and disappeared. This too was physics. She had read the explanation once, found it insufficient.
Suddenly, the crowd was around them, leaving her bewildered, wondering even if this — or anything at all — had ever actually happened. From somewhere, Akane was calling his name, the particular calling-Ranma-name that carried all of Akane’s specific frequencies. Somewhere else, their father and Genma were folding into each other in the complicated way of old friends and old grief and too much beer. From yet another place, Kasumi was already thinking about what needed to be done at home, the small machinery of her care running without pause or resentment.
The sensation of Ranma’s head snapping up toward the sound of Akane’s voice confirmed the circumstances of reality for them both. He turned and looked back at Nabiki, his eyes lingering on her for one more long second.
She understood — exactly why she gave him nothing in return, declining even to assign a name to what had just transpired. The alternative would be too dangerous — for everyone.
This too was a gift, though she wasn’t sure he understood. He was free to go without accruing a debt. Without a record of anything anywhere. At eighteen, at the end of her last Nerima spring, Nabiki Tendou had finally discovered that she indeed was capable of giving.
He went.
Leaving Nabiki alone in the premium viewing corner behind the taiyaki stand, waiting for the crowd to thin. Her hand rose to her hair. The kanzashi was still there. Plum blossoms, silver wire bent ever so slightly at the tarnished spot where someone else’s thumb had once apparently pressed out of habit. She held the tip of her own finger there until the metal went warm beneath her touch.
Even as the chill of the night enveloped her. The entirety of its strange, oppressive weight falling painfully across her whole being with the last of the petals. Even as the lanterns stopped swaying and went out one by one until only the silent, distant glow of city lights remained.
Still, Nabiki refused to cry.
Sixteen days until this bizarre, fucked up moment would safely be three different train lines and thirteen stops away.
Sixteen days until that bitch Chie Yamamoto and all the shit her presence on that stage signified would become nothing more than a memory — if even.
Sixteen days until Nerima finally became simply a place Nabiki was from rather than a place where she was.
Then the ledger in her mind would balance once more, and everything would be fine.
Sixteen days.