Chapter Text
Today had started off almost normal, passed through strange, and was rapidly approaching completely surreal. Oh, there was the usual tide of perverts that didn’t understand what ‘no’ meant, but it was at home that things really started to get bizarre. First, her dad had happily – happily! – announced that some stranger would be coming over to marry one of them and take her dojo. Then when the stranger had supposedly arrived…
Why was there a panda? Pandas weren’t native to Japan! Pandas didn’t walk on two legs! Pandas definitely didn’t get that big. Pandas didn’t whip out signs to answer questions like “are you Saotome Genm” or turn them around to say “I lost Ranma”.
So while dad was entertaining the panda claiming to be his long-lost training buddy, Akane was rapidly considering that maybe she’d taken a hit to the head too many. She didn’t think anyone had made it through her guard but the world was rapidly making less and less sense…
But if she was suffering from head trauma, or dreaming, or just going mad, that was no reason to shirk cleanliness after getting some more practice in. Making her way towards the furo, through the laundry, she briefly looked over at the shelf of neatly folded towels and–
A fox?
Sure enough, squeezed between the towels and the next shelf was a distinctively vulpine shape, curled up and almost protectively hiding behind its bushy tail. While a fox being in downtown Tokyo was much less weird than a giant panda, the fact the fox was behind a shut door only raised further questions.
But it was also a white fox. The supernatural wasn’t something that Akane regularly thought about beyond her own ki and her dad occasionally taking requests to deal with monster hunting, but white foxes were supposedly Inari’s messengers.
“Can you understand me?”
The fox unfurled itself slightly, vibrantly pink eyes not quite meeting hers as it gave a very jerky looking and thoroughly humanlike nod.
If the fox was intelligent enough to understand human speech, then it must be smart enough to know what a furo was for. That meant there was only one reason it could possibly be hanging around here, even though the Tendo Dojo was an odd choice:
“Do you want to have a bath?”
The fox gave its head an adorable tilt as if it needed to think the question over before it gave a second nod and uncurled, perching expectantly on the edge of the towels. Maybe it was waiting for Akane to hold her arms out, but the blue-haired girl instead went for just picking it up.
Unlike a wild animal – and further proof that this must be a messenger of some sort or at least some sort of youkai – the fox didn’t claw back, bite, or try to escape. It just let out a sort of frustrated yip at being hoisted aloft and inspected. After all, if it was that intelligent, Akane didn’t want a boy fox getting an eyeful. But this one was obviously a girl, which made it much better.
It seemed that she needn’t have worried, as the fox did everything she could to avoid looking at her for the entire time she – or Akane – was washing, only seeming to relax once they were seated in the hot water. Or, to be more accurate, when Akane was seated in the hot water and holding the animal instead.
“If you’re this smart, I can’t keep calling you fox,” she said, scratching away behind the fox’s ears to the occasional (happy?) little sound, “If you’re going to stay around for a while then you need a name.”
The fox gave a more definite yip at this, correctly deducing that Akane wouldn’t have been able to see a nod from this angle.
“Are you going to be around for long?” One of Inari’s messengers might be pretty busy, after all.
There was a long pause before another affirmative yip. Now this just left the hard part: picking a name. It wasn’t something that Akane had ever had to do before, and it was surprisingly difficult – she didn’t want to just name the fox after one of her friends, what if they met? But she kept coming back to what she was: a fox. Fox… or in English, fox…
“What about F-chan?”
That got an almost immediate growl. No good? Well, she could stick with Japanese just fine, maybe that would be more to her tastes? “K-chan?”
Another pause before a satisfied yip. K-chan it was!
As nice as it was to enjoy a bath with her new guest-slash-pet, there was still the matter of the panda waiting downstairs, and thoroughly drying off K-chan before the mixed smell of wet fox and shampoo got everywhere throughout the house. Almost long enough to think of a plan to make sure she was allowed to stay – but Akane hadn’t got further than ‘asking nicely’ before she was finished.
Heading downstairs revealed no trace of panda. Just her family, seated expectantly around a table with a kettleand already beckoning for her to come over, and an unfamiliar middle-aged man who seemed inexplicably happy to see her – or maybe the fox nestled in Akane’s arms?
“Ah, I see you found Ranma.”
It took a moment to place the name as she took a place opposite the man and that raised only more questions. Ranma was, supposedly, the son of Genma Saotome… and the fox in her arms was clearly a girl. On top of, obviously, being the wrong species.
“Ah, is Ranma cursed like you?” her dad asked.
“Cursed?”
“He means that fox you’re carrying might actually be a boy,” Nabiki answered, “Daddy’s friend here picked up a water curse in China: pour on a little hot water and poof! Instant animal-to-human transformation.”
For a second Akane was worried but as soon as there was a mention of hot water, she gave a relieved smile back, “Oh, there’s no need to worry, I gave K-chan a bath and she didn’t transform.”
“Ah, no, Ranma isn’t cursed,” the man – implicitly Genma – explained, for some reason now looking very awkward, “He just isn’t human.”
“Isn’t Ranma your son, Mr. Saotome? I thought you had only had your curse a few weeks, for Ranma to be part panda…” Kasumi sounded shocked by the potential scandal.
“Of course he’s my son! He just takes after his mother. You remember how much my wife liked to make shrine visits, right, Tendo?”
There was a look of dawning understanding on the other man’s face and confusion on Akane’s.
“But this is a girl fox.”
Genma frowned, looking down at the frightened animal as if he might divine her current sex entirely by the fluff that wasn’t buried entirely in Akane’s arms. “Yes, the boy has some bad habits that he still needs to be trained out of but–”
Between one second and the next, Akane’s arms got very full. Not of fluffy white fox as she had been, but instead a very small, very well-endowed and cute girl. A fully dressed human girl, from her toes up to her braided pink hair and the strangely white fox ears on top of her head–
Fox ears?
“I am a girl,” K-chan – Ranma? – insisted, squirming free of Akane’s stunned arms and choosing to hide behind her, making the occasional glance over her shoulder at her annoyed father.
“You were born as a boy–”
“An’ She says I’m a shrine maiden–”
“And the honour of the Saotome School and our lives demand you fulfil your duties.” There was an almost-a-staring match between the two, Ranma never quite looking straight at her father, before the girl deflated entirely and shuffled around the table.
“Lives?”
“It’s a family matter,” Genma shared a look with her father before continuing, “Now, to introduce ourselves properly, I’m Saotome Genma…”
The obvious fox girl from before was gone, having grown into what Akane supposed was a reasonably attractive looking young man who found the kettle on their table terribly interesting. “Saotome Ranma. Sorry ‘bout this.”
Akane was barely paying attention as the conversation turned to explaining their training journey – some cursed springs in China that couldn’t curse a natural shapeshifter as it turned out – and how Ranma’s being a fox wasn’t really an issue for this arranged marriage. Or even how it should obviously be Akane because she’d already shared a bath with the strange wandering martial artist.
She was trying to muster all the righteous indignation that a pervert boy deserved, especially one that crept into the bath with her! Being a shapeshifter didn’t mean that you were allowed to sneak in like that even as a wild animal!
But something in how Ranma had insisted she was a girl had just seemed so desperate and defeated, an argument that had been had a dozen times before and lost each and every one of them. Sure, someone – was all her thought about Inari correct then? – had said Ranma was a shrine maiden but her father insisted that the fox couldn’t be on pain of death. Both of their deaths.
Maybe it was too like kicking a puppy. Or fox kit, as the case would be. Or maybe she wanted to believe Ranma over Genma.
Of course her lack of objection was taken as an endorsement, with both her sisters congratulating her and their fathers celebrating the eventual joining of the schools. That was – okay, being engaged without a choice was making her angry, but it was something that she could be angry at later.
Ranma didn’t look to be enjoying it any more than she was, shrinking away from Genma and Nabiki’s teasing about how every boy at school would be super jealous until it was physically impossible to do so any further.
At least, not without turning into a fox outright. A rare option that most people didn’t have – but Ranma did, scampering under the table immediately and leaving Nabiki temporarily speechless at the rather unexpected response to her teasing.
“The boy does this sometimes,” Genma said, shrugging, “He’ll come out eventually.”
As if that was totally normal. No wonder he’d arrived saying he’d lost Ranma if he just shrugged off his own child turning into a fox and running away to hide. Not that this time was much running away but…
Looking under the table, there was an almost pure-white fox, curled defensively and looking out at her. One that she really wanted to ask a few questions in private.
“Do you want to see our dojo?”
She barely waited for the nod before scooping fox-Ranma up and walking off, hoping that they wouldn’t be followed. Genma and her dad had already gone back to celebrating, Kasumi had dinner to finish preparing, and Nabiki – well, she hoped Nabiki would just get bored.
There wasn’t much in the dojo proper to make a tour of it and she soon came to a stop, sitting down and absent-mindedly scratching away again until she remembered this was a person. Yet as soon as she stopped, Ranma pushed back against her fingers. So… keep going.
Eventually, the wriggling fox in her arms signalled for Akane to let go and Ranma jumped free, turning back into a human. More importantly, the cute fox girl she’d briefly gotten to hold seen before her father insisted she change back.
“Sorry ‘bout all of this, especially the furo. I just wanted somewhere to hide an’ then I didn’t know how to say no an–” The girl immediately launched into an apology, fiddling with her braid.
“Ranma, stop. I’m not mad,” the yet went unspoken. “You really meant what you said earlier? About being a girl?”
“Oh, uh,” the girl turned a weak smile at her, “I’m not s’posed to be accordin’ to Pops, but it’s felt more right ever since I could do it. Even if he wants me to be a guy, I don’t go all the way…”
That was a relief, then: the reason Akane wasn’t angry at the pervert boy was because there was no pervert boy – just a weird shapeshifting girl that almost looked like a boy but wasn’t quite. It all made some sort of sense now!
“Well, if you’re a girl, we can’t really be engaged. But we can be friends,” Akane gave the pinkette a brilliant smile of her own, “I’m Tendo Akane.”
“A-Ah, Saotome Kei–”
“Isn’t it Ranma?”
“I’ve wanted another name for ages! I can’t be a fox with horse in my name!” after how reserved Ran– Kei – had been all night, the surprisingly enthusiastic response took Akane completely off guard. “An’ when you picked a name earlier I thought it sounded really nice – like the character for ‘blessing’, right?”
She shouldn’t tell her that she’d just picked the first Roman letter for fox.