Chapter Text
When Akane first met Ranma, she was certain her heart was about to stop.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, the sight of her. Her father had spent most of the day ranting discussing his old friend and his son, of the duty of her and her sisters to marry him, unite the art and inherit the dojo.
He hadn’t had much to say about the boy himself, but Akane thought she had a decent image of him, based on the way his father was described. Proud, arrogant. Genuienly skilled, most likely, because for all of his father’s faults, he was rarely wrong about the Art, but ultimately no better than any of the boys Akane fought at school.
She had thought—hoped, at least, that would be the end of it. That the interest Kasumi and Nabiki had shown would pan out, that the boy would be old enough, or handsome enough, and Akane could have been left alone. It was a bitter hope—she had always dreamed of taking over the dojo, always dreamed of being the next Tendo master—but Akane was a practical girl. If she had to choose between her dream, and being married to some stupid, arrogant, pathetic boy—
Well. She made her choice.
So, she tried to ignore the fact that his boy, Ranma, was most likely her age. Tried to ignore the sarcasm in Nabiki’s voice, the deeply, deeply buried anger in Kasumi’s. Tried to ignore how her father had looked at her first, when the letter had arrived, tried to put it all out of her mind.
And so, when the day wore on, and the rain increased, beating against the walls of the house with a machine-gun tempo, Akane didn’t think about Ranma Saotome.
That was, until she was standing outside, the exterior wall behind her as she stared into the street, watching as a girl and a panda battled for their life. She wasn’t alone—Kasumi and Nabiki, her two older sisters, were there as well, both as enraptured in the battle them as she was.
At least, that’s what she assumed was going on. She didn’t know much, if any context—she had only come out due to her eldest’s sister scream and had half-thought they were dealing with a burglar. She had run as fast as she could, hoping she could get there in time before the intruder got too badly hurt, and—
Well. Now she was here. Watching the most gorgeous girl she had ever met fight a near monster.
It wasn’t something Akane would normally admit.
Finding a girl pretty, that was.
Oh, sure, she talked about it with her friends at school. Joked about which one of them she would rather date, instead of the mass of boys that harassed her. She knew—and she was certain they knew—that her interest went a little deeper than most, that the way her eyes caught on a girl’s bust, her hips, or her legs wasn’t quite friendly, but they didn’t make a big deal of it, and so neither did Akane. She could live as “plausibly straight”, and didn’t have to think about marrying a boy, or even a man, because honestly, why would she pick anyone here?
None of those excuses held up now.
The girl was small, for a start. It was hard to tell, given how quickly she was moving, and how much time she spent in the air, but Akane was a trained expert. She knew how to estimate a girl’s height, and she could tell that she was short. Shorter than her, and she wasn’t a particularly tall woman. Short enough, Akane knew, that it would be easy for the other girl to lean in, her head on Akane’s shoulder.
She had long hair. It was tied back, bunched up in a ponytail that whipped back and forth with each movement the girl made, but it was still long, and thick. It looked black, but Akane thought that was at least partially a trick of the still drizzling rain, because she could see some slight red highlights piercing through the soaked mass.
The girl was strong. Not just physically, although she was that too. That was obvious from the way she balanced on her hand after dodging the panda’s latest attack, deftly leaping over a stop sign.
“Oh, come on!” the girl said, popping up onto her feet with a flex of her arm. She was facing away from them, but Akane still caught a glimpse of her face, of the casual, calm smirk on her lips, so at odds with the life or death battle she was seemingly facing. “That the best you got, old man? I coulda dodged that when I was eight!”
And there was that. It hadn’t been said, hadn’t been made clear, but Akane knew this girl was a martial artist. She couldn’t be anything else—not with the way she moved, not with the clothes she was wearing, a set of red and blue silks, well-fitting and yet remarkably unrestricting.
The panda—and a part of Akane’s brain still hadn’t really registered that she was looking at a panda fighting a teenage girl—gave a sudden roar, then surged forward. Akane recognised the move—it was the start of a kick. Nothing fancy, but the reality was you didn’t really want to get too fancy with a kick.
Nor was it done all that well. The panda’s leg didn’t get far enough off the ground, its center of gravity still too high. It wasn’t a lack of training, Akane thought—or at least assumed. The panda’s body simply couldn’t move the way it was trying to, and she could see the frustration on the beast’s face as it realised that.
And isn’t that interesting, how you so quickly assumed it was trained?
She pushed the thought away, focusing all her attention on the fight as the girl before her stood. The redhead put her hands behind her back, grasping them just above her rear as she, rather casually, stepped aside from the man’s attack.
A short, bubbly, and yet brutal laugh slipped from her throat. “Aw, wow. Now I’m starting to get why you wanted to get this fixed—you’re slow, Pops!”
Part of Akane noticed the word choice, questioned it. Why call a panda “Pops?”
The rest of her was too distracted by the glimpse she caught of the girl’s eyes.
Blue. A bright, vibrant blue, like the sky itself.
Akane raised a hand to her mouth, biting down on a knuckle hard, before she could make any embarrassing noises. Her body felt electric, wired in a way that wasn’t unfamiliar, but had never been so intense.
The panda growled, then looked down at its paw. It seemed as if it had only just realised it was still holding a weapon—a battered, dented stop sign, that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland—but a weapon, nonetheless.
It growfed, then stepped forward, gripping the sign in both hands and swinging it, like a baseball bat.
Again, Akane saw the flaws immediately. Swing a blunt weapon like that didn’t require the epitome of martial arts excellence, but it did require a degree of skill. Your arms alone didn’t have enough strength to make the blow meaningful, no matter how strong you were. You had to engage your core, your hips. Had to throw your body into the blow.
Merely waving your arms around, like the panda was—well, that was as likely to hurt you as anything.
The girl, the red head, seemed to realise the same thing Akane did. She didn’t move, not at first, waiting as the sign approached her head.
The sign slowed, the panda’s strength deserting itself as it’s arms stretched out—second mistake, a basic mistake, you never over-extended yourself, especially not with so little prompting—and then the girl struck.
Akane imagined, to someone else, what happened would have looked like little more than a blur. To her, however, the girl’s movements might as well have been in slow motion. It was obvious she felt no need to rush, or even to try all that hard—the fight was over.
She ducked, again, under the sign, but instead of popping up on the other side, she reached up and grabbed the stem of the sign with both hands. She dropped, feet leaving the ground as she used her strength and gravity to yank the sign down, almost—but not quite—pulling it from the panda’s hands, and then—
Her feet stomped back into the ground, mud and grass splattering to the sides with the force as the girl pushed the sign forward.
That might not have done much, normally. But the panda had lost its grip, and so when the girl pushed, the sign slipped from its hands, the butt end falling to the ground, where it sank, and stuck.
The girl again changed stances, pulling back briefly and shifting her grip on the sign, hands further up. She took a step forward, then a second, until she was fully upright, and then jumped.
No.
She kicked.
Her hands still on the sign, the girl twisted in midair, barely losing a hint of momentum as the pole shifted in the ground beneath her. Her two bare feet hit the panda face first, smashing into its eyes and jaw. Then, before it had time to scream, she launched off its face and twisted around the sign, crouching on the battered remnants of the stop sign, and then leapt off.
Suddenly accelerated, the stop sign crashed into the panda’s face. Akane heard a muffled yelp, before the panda toppled over, crashing to the ground in a cloud of water, mud, and dirt.
The girl all but flew through the air, gliding gracefully before, gently, falling to the ground. Through sheer skill, she managed to drop onto the pavement, just in front of Akane, neatly avoiding any of the rain-soaked ground just around her.
There was a moment of near silence. The girl stood to her full height (and yes, she was just a little bit shorter than Akane) and dusted herself off, giving extra care and attention to her hair and clothes. It helped less than it might have, in better circumstances—she was soaked, hair clinging to her face like thin, limp slugs, and her clothes—while handling the rain better than Akane’s cotton gi—were still weighed down with caked in mud, grass stains, and what looked alarmingly like blood.
She looked, Akane thought, like the most beautiful woman in the entire world.
The girl looked up, meeting Akane’s eyes with her own.
Akane forced herself to look away, knowing the head in her cheeks betrayed any attempt she might make to pretend she hadn’t been staring. To her surprise, however, the girl’s only response was to blush in turn, soft lips slightly parted as she continued to stare at Akane.
Thankfully (for a given definition of the word), her father stepped forward, having at some time come out to join the three of them. “I’m… I’m so, sorry, young miss, but you wouldn’t happen to be… Ranma Saotome?”
The name seemed to unlodge something from the girl. She turned to Soun, eyes wide, then laughed again, rougher and darker than before. “Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’m… I’m Ranma. Sorry ‘bout this.”
The girl’s head hung, slightly, as if the confession embarrassed her.
The reaction to her confession was instant. Akane saw the moment of despair overtake her father’s face, watched the dreams shatter on Nabiki and Kasumi. This was a worst-case scenario for them, she knew—Kasumi and Nabiki would never agree to marry a girl, wouldn’t want to, didn’t want to. Nabiki wanted someone handsome, Kasumi, someone older. A wild, violent girl, short and cute, her hair a soaking mess—how could they not despair at the sight of that? How could they not feel cheated of some mystical romance, some teledrama excitement.
In another circumstance, Akane might have felt something similar. She might have at least put on a show of it or focused on her relief to avoid a boy. She would have fit in, would have left the three of them to grieve a broken, if stupid dream, but today—
“I’ll take her.”