ass. I blur, and before he can cry out Wantanabe is once again trapped beneath my boot. I loom over him, my eye blazing with black fire. I lock my hand around his throat and squeeze.




“Don’t call me that,” I hiss to him, as his eyes bulge and he struggles against my grip. “Don’t ever call me that again. Ranma Saotome is dead. He died long, long ago. I am Okami-sama – the Wolf Lord – the Lord of Hate. Do you understand that, you fat fool?”




He nods desperately. I shake him, cracking the back of his lard-filled skull against the concrete before I let him go. I step away, and he scurries back, hyperventilating, putting as much distance as he can between us. I watch him, but find no pleasure in his fear. My anger is too great. He stops some ten meters away, his back against the stair house.




“Do you… ah… do you treat all your clients in such a deplorable manner?” He asks shakily, rising to his feet, using the house for support.




“No. Only the ones who don’t know their etiquette.” I pause, my eyes narrowing as I watch him. “I accept your commission. In three days the Kunos will be dead. In three days you will meet me here again with my payment…” I name my price. He starts to protest, but I cut him off with a slash of my hand. “A fifth of it is your original offer. The rest is for the dubious privilege of knowing my past. You have no choice in this. You will have the money for me, or else I will make you rue the day your mother gave birth to you.” With that I don the Silent Thief’s Mantle, vanishing from sight. Wantanabe gasps. His eyes roll back, and he slowly slumps to the concrete in a faint.




“Fool…” I mutter, and I leave this forsaken building, heading back to my lodgings.








**********








I stand beneath the spray of my hotel room’s shower, the water washing me scalding hot to the touch. I’ve stood beneath it for twenty minutes now, hoping that the pain would drive away these memories trying to fight their way up into my consciousness. I should of known better. Damn that fat fool. I turn the shower knob, lowering the temperature. The spray slowly cools. My body instinctively flinches from it. Another reminder of my past, my body still dislikes cold water, even though I haven’t suffered from the indignities of the Junsenkyo curse for some sixteen years now. I shut off the water, step out and towel off. I wind the towel around my waist and step to sink, leaning on it with my hands, staring into the porcelain basin. Slowly, wearily, I look up into the mirror.




An old man stares back at me. Thirty-seven. I’m only thirty-seven, yet I’m old before my time. My face is worn and weathered, the toll of twenty years of fighting, atrocity and bloodshed quite evident. The left side is a ruin, a great white scar cutting straight down across it, starting from my brow, over the blind, white, eye, down to the corner of my mouth. The rest of my countenance, time-etched, scar bitten, is scarcely better. My hair, still thick and full, is flecked with gray, and with each passing day the gray becomes more and more prominent. I think I was handsome once, but any comeliness I had is now long since squandered.




I slowly close my eyes and breath in deeply. I let the breath go, and I stop fighting. I’m too tired to keep fighting. I find this funny. I, who can fight and kill for hours on end without even breathing heavily, drained into submission by the effort of keeping thoughts and memories of a distant past repressed.




I open my eyes. I can see that my good right eye is blazing, an azure firestorm, as the thoughts come, the memories flood.




(They claimed that the young man was… ah… burakumin…) It’s been a long time since I even thought of that word, let alone think of MYSELF as that. Burakumin… people of the hamlet… a polite euphemism for what most people really think. A less conscientious man would simply cut to the quick of the matter and call me eta… much filth. Of course, such a man would find himself on his back, dead, his still beating heart aflame in my hand; calling a burakumin eta is akin to calling a black man nigger…




Burakumin. The word rolls in my mind; the unhappy descendants of the people who did all the spiritually dirty work in Tokugawa era Japan: the tanners and the butchers and the torturers and the vulgar executioners, and because of the occupations of ancestors ten times removed, burakumin are treated like garbage. I lost everything I cared for, because I was burakumin. Ranma Saotome died, and Okami-sama was born, because I was burakumin.




I lean a little closer to the mirror, my eyes narrowing. So Kuno was the one who spread those notes that day. A childishly simple deduction, in retrospect, but at the time I was no condition to make such a conjecture. Perfectly in character for Kuno - if he couldn’t win something by fair means he would use foul methods, rationalizing his treachery away. He could never truly defeat me honestly, so he dug into my past and used a stupid, age-old prejudice to take everything from me. And like his cousin said, he probably didn’t give it a second thought. Perhaps he even thought it to be his duty to warn people that they were risking spiritual contamination by being so close to me.




My grip on the basin tightens, my knuckles going white. I’m trembling, my eyes closing shut as flashes from that day crowd my mind. I’m at the altar, and I watch HER approach. I remember how perfect she looked, how much I wanted to be with her, how much I WANTED her, how much I….




I take her hand, and the priest begins. I start to lose myself in her eyes, but I hear flutters, then gasps from the assembly. I see old man Tendo approaching us, his face white, expression carefully neutral, a note crumpled in his hand. He quietly, politely tells me that I cannot marry his daughter. Incredulous, I hold her hand tightly, demanding why not. The neutral mask slips, his face contorting in rage and disgust, as he shouts at me to keep my filthy hands off his daughter. He thrusts the note at me, and I see…




I’m on my knees; staring at the floor, praying silently that this is all but a nightmare and that I’ll wake up and it’ll be my wedding day… I hear the tumult behind me. I hear my father make lame excuses, as usual, and my mother’s wrath, screaming how dare he taint her son like this. She chases him out of the chapel, katana free and bloodthirsty. I hear Akane’s shrill protests, saying that she doesn’t care if I’m burakumin; she loves me and wants me. I hear her family beat her down with words and arguments; Tendo saying that he won’t allow his house and blood be tainted by such filth, such dirt; Nabiki with her cynical, self-serving rationales. But it’s Kasumi who defeats Akane, who twists the knife in my dying heart. She asks her what their mother would think if she hurt the family by marrying something like me. Something… like… me… Kind, sweet Kasumi doesn’t even think of me as human, can’t even call me a person.




That’s what breaks Akane. I hear her last words to me, “I’m sorry, Ranma. Please don’t think of me with bitterness!” She runs from the chapel weeping, her family slowly following. I don’t think they deign me a last look…




I’m alone. Alone with the pain, alone with the loneliness I thought I would banish forever this day. I look at my trembling, clenched hands. My palms are bleeding from where my nails had dug into them. I see swirling about my arms a heavy, lead gray aura, streaked with red and black. I shut my eyes and begin to scream as I concentrate the shi-shi-hodoken perfect on myself, determined to obliterate myself from the face of the planet. Something touches the back of my neck, and blackness falls over me…




I start from my memories as I hear a crack and feel something bite into my hands. I look down to see that I had crushed the basin edge, porcelain shards cutting my palms.




I slowly let go of the basin and lift up my hands, looking down at my calloused palms, watching with indifference as my blood begins to bead up in several spots. I wash and bind them with bandages, then retire to bed. I lay naked beneath the sheets, contemplating the dark that surrounds me, before I allow sleep to take me.




But my past is not yet done with me. It comes to me in dreams…








**********








Cologne had been the one who saved me on that miserable day. The Amazons had been waiting outside the chapel, wanting to talk to me one last time before I left on my honeymoon. They had witnessed everything, and Cologne managed to strike the sleep point on the back of my neck before I released my energy. I woke up hours later, laying in a bed at the Nekohanten, Cologne and Shampoo watching over me.




I was not grateful. I cursed them, raving and screaming as my grief, anger, and death wish roared back to consciousness. For the next five days I was insane, restrained in my bed to keep myself from suicide. Cologne had to keep an eye on me constantly, continually re-applying shiatsu points that prevented me from tapping into the shi-shi-hodoken perfect. Shampoo and Mousse took turns taking care of me, both treating me with a gentleness and kindness that I never knew they possessed, and I repaid them for it with curses and threats. On the sixth day my rage guttered and died, having finally consumed itself. I wept, and Cologne and Shampoo held me as I cried in agony and pain. I slept again…




With my rage gone, Cologne let me out of bed, but only after I swore on my