Chapter Text
I was walking along, minding my business
When out of an Orange-Colored Sky
(Flash! Bam! Alakazam!)
Wonderful you came by
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Akane pinched the bridge of her nose.
After yet another long and trying day of various insults to her feminine pride and her very sense of agency, there still appeared to be no end in sight to all the various misfortunes and indignities that were being slung in her direction.
For now, she was trying to put things out of mind with the tea that she was trying to brew in the kettle of boiling water, rhythmically dipping and stirring the gossamer cloth bag of crushed leaves in and out of the bronze kettle while holding the handle steady. She might be a tomboy, she thought with no small amount of irritation, but at least she could do this much in the kitchen.
She let herself reminisce about, as a young child, watching from the doorway as her mother had taught Kasumi how simply letting the bag alone in the kettle gave the tea a better taste, but actively stirring the bag around helped it brew faster. Even at that age, Akane hadn’t been particularly interested in cooking, but she had coveted the attention that her eldest sister was receiving from her mother at the time. With their mother’s health deteriorating, she’d had less and less time to spend doting on Akane and teaching her about rudimentary martial arts, so on that day she’d decided to snoop around to find out what her mother was spending time on.
As it turned out, their mother had been imparting onto Kasumi all the practical skills that she would need to keep the family alive. The illness ravaging her body had already robbed her of all her extra time and energy by that point; teaching little Akane how to high-kick had become a luxury that she simply could no longer afford.
It had taken several years after her mother’s death for Akane to come to realize and accept that. Her mother hadn’t forsaken her to shower her other favorite child with praise and attention. It was just practical, really: A dying woman doing what she’d needed to secure her family’s future. She got it, she really did.
Akane sighed and stirred the tea bag with renewed vigor in the kettle.
It wasn’t the first time that the kettle had been used for that purpose this day, nor the second, nor even the third. She lamented quietly that her foreseeable future now suddenly included far more trips to the kitchen to see to the filling and heating of this humble bronze vessel. If it weren’t for the obnoxiously over-bearing panda and his sleazebag slut of a son and the revered spot within the household just handed to them on a silver freaking platter-
A sharp “krick!” sound drew Akane’s attention, and she looked down to realize that her iron grip had audibly deformed the bronze handle of the kettle, leaving a very distinct impression of her knuckles within the simple metal loop.
She sucked in a breath, closed her eyes, and began counting to ten.
Before she got to nine, however, the phone began to ring.
Since she was the only one in the kitchen, Akane popped the bronze lid back onto the kettle (taking care to make sure the string of the tea bag was snagged on the OUTside of the lip) and walked over to the phone to answer it.
“Hello, Tendou household?”
“Ah, Akane, is that you?”
Akane’s brow lifted, and -much to her continued frustration- she could feel her cheeks begin to warm. Shaking her head briefly, she replied, “Yes, it’s me, Dr. Tofu. Why are you calling us?”
“Ah, well, you see, I’m at a bit of a loss at the moment. I lent a book on the human brain to your sister recently, and I suddenly seem to have a patient who might benefit from some of the information contained therein. I was wondering, if it’s not too much of an imposition…”
Hrmm. Akane glanced out the window of the kitchen and saw the golden light of the setting sun filtering through. As much as she still secretly coveted getting to spend time with the good doctor, no matter how ill-advised, it would be dark by the time she got back from his chiropractic office. Taking a breath, she gently answered, “Dr. Tofu, I’m sorry for your patient, but it’s getting late and-“
“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME OLD MAN?!” The indignant voice rattled throughout the house, followed shortly thereafter by the sound of someone splashing into the koi pond again. Meaning that someone would need to use the kettle to boil a fresh batch of hot water again.
“-So I’ll make sure to get there as quick as I can.”
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The sun had already set beneath the Nerima skyline by the time Akane -book in hand- made it to Dr. Tofu’s chiropractic office, and the sodium streetlights were already beginning to flicker on even as the gloaming of the fading sun’s light still illuminated the city around her.
Thankfully, the front door to the office was unlocked, so Akane let herself in.
The reception area of Dr. Tofu’s office was humble: A small room with maybe a dozen folding chairs and a table with some registration paperwork and a pen, a lone-planted Ficus tree in the corner adding a splash of green to the beige wallpaper, a water cooler gurgling quietly beside the table with a sleeve of paper cups ready to be dispensed. Predictably for this time of day, the room was empty, so Akane felt no compunction in breezing right past it and into the hallway where she knew the good doctor’s personal office lay at the end.
As she stood before the portal, she steeled herself, wrangling her poor misguided maiden’s heart out of her throat and back down into her chest where it should stay there like a good organ. This was genuinely a mission of mercy, not a flimsy pretext for leaving the chaos of her home and spending time with a kind and handsome man instead. It wasn’t!
For what felt like the fiftieth time that day, Akane sighed. Then she plastered a pleasant smile onto her face and rapped her knuckles on the simple wooden door with the modest placard of “DR. TOFU – CHIROPRACTOR AND MEDICAL PRACTITIONER”.
Akane heard a muffled, “Come in!” and opened the door. Dr. Tofu’s office, much like the rest of the facility, was small and unpretentious: A square floor plan with the same beige wallpaper as the lobby and a single modest window letting in the dying light of the sun. A simple rectangular wooden desk sat in one corner of the room, with two folding chairs opposite, while a large metal filing cabinet and several bookshelves lined the other side of the room. The good doctor himself was seated at his desk, hunched and pouring over no less than four different tomes, all strewn somewhat haphazardly at odd angles over the surface, with a clipboard and some paperwork attached laying amidst the center.
“Dr. Tofu,” Akane began, and tried to ignore the way her heart skipped a beat when he looked up from his work, his face lighting up in recognition at her face, “I came with that book that you wanted.” She lightly motioned the textbook The Human Mind: Anatomy, Function and Common Injuries in her grasp.
“Ah, Akane!” Dr. Tofu exclaimed softly as he straightened up in his seat and regarded her properly. “You are a very sweet and dedicated young woman, thank you so much for taking the time to help me with this matter.”
She walked over to his desk and then extended the book to him, and he eagerly took it, immediately opening it at the back and looking something up in the index. As he searched through the various entries, she let her curious gaze travel over the other books open on the desk, but most of the writing may as well have been in Greek for all the technical terms which made absolutely no sense to her. She did, however, recognize at least one diagram of the human skull, annotated with some hastily scribbled pencil markings which she could only assume were Dr. Tofu’s barely legible cursive script.
When Dr. Tofu’s face began to pinch as he quickly scanned through the index of the book, threatening to turn into a scowl, Akane coughed gently. “You said you had a sudden patient?”
Without looking up from the book, Dr. Tofu distractedly answered, “Yes. Not less than an hour before I called you, I was taking the trash out to the dumpster in the back when I almost literally stumbled across a poor woman laying face down in the alley.” Akane’s eyes widened in alarm. “She was breathing, but otherwise unresponsive, and had numerous contusions and lacerations over much of her body.”
“Including her head?” Akane guessed.
“Quite severely, yes. I brought her into the clinic immediately and rendered all the aid that I could. Ah,” His finger tapped on a particular line in the index, and then he began rapidly flipping through the book to a particular page. When he found the target, he continued, “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I’m not specialized in cranial medicine, so I wanted another resource to consult before I tried prescribing her anything other than bed rest.”
“Is it possible that she might need an X-Ray? Or something more advanced?”
Without looking up, Dr. Tofu lifted a hand and gave a middling gesture with it. “That might be difficult, seeing how I wasn’t able to find any identifying information or proof of medical insurance on her person.”
Akane’s brow furrowed. “How strange.”
He nodded absently, still engrossed in the tome. “Doubly so, considering you don’t see very many redheads in this city.”
That piqued her interest. “Redhead?”
He hummed in the affirmative. “Like the imperial sun.”
Akane’s mind raced. Neither the panda nor the slut had mentioned anything about a Saotome sister, yet it was the only possible explanation that came to mind. “Dr. Tofu,” she asked, silently dreading the fact that she’d apparently already made up her mind on her course of action, “Would it be possible for me to see her?”
Dr. Tofu stopped scanning the page of the book he was on and looked up at her with a completely open expression. “Whatever for, Akane?”
She silently scrambled for an answer before settling on something that was largely the truth. “My family recently took in some visitors from out of town, including a young redheaded girl. This woman might be related.”
A single, elegant brow rose on Dr. Tofu’s face. “How fortuitous.”
Akane merely shrugged. Stranger things had happened in Nerima, after all.
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Dr. Tofu, clipboard in hand, guided Akane back down the central hallway of his building, stopping in front of a closed wooden door marked “PATIENT ROOM B” in slightly faded white paint.
“Now Akane, I must stress how important it is not to touch her too roughly, or even at all. She’s suffered a very serious head injury, and we must take care not to aggravate it.”
Akane, her face stone cold with seriousness, nodded gravely at Dr. Tofu. He merely regarded her for a second before opening the door.
Looking into the room, she spotted one of the few medical examination rooms that she and her sisters had been inside of many times over the years, complete with 70’s-era furnishings and medical posters. Lined up along the right side of the wall was a medical examination bed that she had been on several times, a stiff teal green polyester cushion covered with a thin wax paper liner, on top of which lay…
“Ranma!” She exclaimed, quickly rushing inside.
However, the certainty with which she’d uttered the slut’s name faded with every step she took, and by the time she was standing by the redhead’s side, she was no longer sure about anything.
Even swaddled in bandages and an IV drip as she was, Akane could spot clear differences between this extremely vulnerable woman and the brash, obnoxious teenager back home who only moonlighted as a girl. This woman was older, taller, had less youthful padding and more defined features in her face, and her shoulders were a bit broader as well. She was a Saotome, there was absolutely no doubt about that, but she clearly wasn’t Ranma’s twin, either.
“So, you do know her then, Akane?” Dr. Tofu asked as he silently came up beside her to look upon his patient.
“I know her sister.” Akane replied, before hastily amending, “briefly, that is. She only just arrived yesterday. But this woman is related to her, I’m certain of it.”
“Did she somehow get lost or separated from the rest of your… visitors?” Dr. Tofu continued with his questions as he moved to check the IV bag and its myriad connections to the quiescent body before them.
Akane could only lamely reply, “I’m… not sure.” She watched him fiddle with the IV bag a moment longer before turning back to the Saotome woman properly. She looked so small, so weak like this. Akane briefly flashed back to a familiar memory of her mother in the hospital before shaking her head. “I wasn’t told that my guest had any additional relatives,” she said, as she watched her own hand, rather unbidden, reach out for the unresponsive patient’s slackened hand.
When she made contact, she curled her fingers around the other woman’s hand, feeling the soft warmth of the flesh underneath, and she rubbed her thumb across her wrist, feeling for the pulse that she remembered from a first aid class should be there.
At first, nothing happened, just as Akane expected. But after a moment of this motion, she felt a twitch beneath her, and then quite suddenly the other woman’s fingers were weakly curling around her own.
“‘Kane?” She barely heard the name uttered as a question, the “k” slurred rather badly and the rest of it so weak that she could barely make it out, but she was quite certain that this woman had just spoken aloud her name. She looked up into her face -half completely covered in bandages- and saw her single bloodshot blue eye lazily flutter open.
“Ran…chan?” She hazarded a guess as she made tentative eye contact.
The corner of the other woman’s mouth not covered by sterile cloth twitched into a faint smile. “You’re… here.” The words sounded relieved.
Sparing a glance at Dr. Tofu, who was even more shocked by this development than Akane felt, she decided to just roll with it. “Yes Ran-chan, I’m here. Are you alright? What happened?”
The other woman’s eye seemed to lazily drift around the room for a moment, before she settled back to look at Akane. Then her brow quirked. “Your… hair?”
Akane blinked, then reflexively touched the long, dark ponytail -tied in two places with bright red bows- that was currently slung over her right shoulder. “What about my hair?”
Dr. Tofu chose that moment to pop out a tiny flashlight from one of his pockets and lean over to shine it briefly into the woman’s eye. It was at that point that Akane realized just how widely blown open her iris was, and when she didn’t immediately flinch away from the light, Dr. Tofu turned it off and hummed to himself in a concerned pitch. “Miss, can you tell me today’s date?” He asked in a sharp, clearly enunciated tone.
Her brow furrowed further. “I don’t… I’m not… sure.”
Dr. Tofu regarded her silently for a long moment, his eyes darting back and forth over her body and occasionally casting a glance at Akane, before he announced in the same clear voice, “Miss, you’re in a hospital, you’re safe, and you’re receiving medical care. Miss Akane and I need to have a word,” he said this part giving Akane a pointed look, “but we’ll be right back, I assure you.”
Akane felt the fingers in her hand curl just a little bit tighter before releasing. “Don’t… be too long…”
But it was only as she moved to stand up and turn around back towards the door that she could have sworn that she heard from behind her, “…tomboy.”
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Dr. Tofu closed the door behind him, and then ushered her towards the lobby.
“What just happened? What’s wrong with her?” Akane asked, her mind a whirlwind as she was guided to one of the folding chairs.
“Honestly, I was hoping you could tell me.” Dr. Tofu confessed as he sat down in a chair sitting orthogonal to her own. “Between her pupil response and her disorientation, it’s clear that she has a moderate concussion, and she’s also lost some fluids. With a traumatic injury like this, it’s even possible that there might be some brain damage or memory loss. She’ll need to stay here over night to make sure that she doesn’t slip into a coma or encounter additional complications.” At Akane’s glimpse of alarm, he added “Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on her, and worse comes to worse I’ll call the prefecture hospital to take her to emergency services, insurance or no.”
He sucked in a breath. “But Akane… it seems pretty obvious that she recognizes you.”
Akane nodded dumbly.
“I’m guessing you don’t recognize her?”
Akane shook her head, equally as dumb.
“Do you think she has you confused with someone else? She did seem surprised by your hair.”
“But how would she…” Akane spoke up, before considering. She’d only met Ranma the previous day, and tomboy was only one of a litany of insults he’d showered her with since then. And yet…
Dr. Tofu said nothing, only looking at her patiently.
“I think…” Akane started, before stopping. None of this made any sense, and the more she thought about it, the more it hurt her head to think.
He sighed. “It’s getting late, and I can’t ask you to stay here.” He began marking the paperwork on his clipboard with efficient movements of his hand. “She’ll need to stay the night regardless, and there’s not anything more that either of us can do. Why don’t you go home and get some rest, and then come back in the morning? Hopefully by then she’ll be a little more lucid and able to answer questions.”
Akane nodded dumbly, again. “Thank you, Dr. Tofu.”
His smile briefly distracted her the way it always had. “Not at all, thank you for coming out all this way to see her.”
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Exactly as she’d feared, it was completely dark by the time Akane made it back to the Tendou property, and she was darting between the intermittent islands of illumination beneath the streetlights out of a lingering fear of healthy respect for the darkness. But she made it to the gates of their property unscathed and found much to her relief that they were still open. Locking them behind her, she walked up to the main house with far less alacrity, giving herself a chance to catch her breath.
“I’m home,” she announced as she slipped inside the main entryway and removed her running shoes. There weren’t any immediate sounds of strife from their new guests, and indeed the only sounds she could make out was the clatter of dishes being cleaned in the kitchen -Kasumi, no doubt- and the soft notes of a radio playing gently from the main sitting area. Padding past the staircase and into the main room, she spotted Ranma, in his boy form, lounging by their table and idly reading a book, one which she vaguely recognized from her father’s collection.
He glanced up at her before focusing back onto his book. “Where’d you go?” He asked, feigned disinterest coloring his words.
She eyed him cautiously, taking a breath and resolving not to rise to the bait he was clearly trying to lay for her. She didn’t have time for such petty games. “Ranma,” she asked, carefully examining his facial expression, “Do you have a sister?”
That got his attention. His brow furrowed and head jerked back slightly, confirming what she already suspected. “Sister? What are ya talking about, Tendou? I ain’t got no sister.”
She sighed for the fifty-first time. “I’ll need you to come with me to a doctor’s office tomorrow morning.”
Ranma’s eyes narrowed. “Doctor? What for?”
Akane shook her head. “It’ll be simpler to show you. But…” she took in a breath, then added, “I’ll need you to come in your girl form.”
His brow shot up into his dark hairline. “My girl form? How come?”
“Please, Ranma,” she pleaded softly. As she saw his expression widen slightly in surprise, she added, “It’s not for my sake.”
He studied her for another painfully long moment, his eyes darting over her face and posture, before he shrugged and returned to his book. “Alright, but I expect a decent meal out of this, Tendou.”
She narrowed her eyes menacingly. “You’re already eating Kasumi’s meals.”
A hand not holding up his prized book waved dismissively. “That’s different. I want something fancy, something sweet.” He briefly looked up to the ceiling and mused idly, “Maybe a parfait, since I’m gonna be all girly and whatnot…”
Akane ground her teeth together before snorting in irritation. “Fine. Whatever. Just be ready by 9:00.” Then she turned around and moved towards the staircase.
As she walked away though, she heard a lackadaisical voice answer from behind her, “Sure thing, tomboy.”
Akane stopped.
For a moment, the whole world quietly turned on the back of a great turtle beneath her feet, hurtling through the endless chasm between the stars.
Then she resumed walking towards the staircase, resolved to take an extra-long bath.
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I was walking along minding my business
When love came and hit me in the eye
(Flash! Bam! Alakazam!)
Out of an orange colored, purple striped
Pretty green polka dot sky
(Flash! Bam!) Alakazam and goodbye!