Title: Naked

Author: Trevelyan Duke

Summary: She just wishes to know, you know? She couldn't take it if she died not knowing him. Maybe her true love was dancing naked right in front of her all along, but she was just too caught up with Ranma and his body to notice.

Author's Notes: A couple of theses and physics experiments later, and I'm back. And graduating from high school in two months.

First things first. I fast forwarded the time a bit, and now my two favorite duel experts Ranma and Akane have met over a year ago. So they already know each other very well, period, if you know what I mean.

Disclaimer: Not mine, not yours, but Rumiko Takahashi's. Tada.

o

o

Chapter One: Magic

When there is a woman, there is magic. –Ntozake Shange

o

o

…forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine–

–Wait, I think I counted that one already.

Back, back.

Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty…

"Fifty-one. 'The stars peep behind her and peer; and I laugh to see them whirl and flee, like a swarm of golden bees' starts at line fifty-one."

…fifty-one, fifty-two–

–God, these things keep multiplying like mice.

Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five…

"Very good, Saotome. At least we now know that you have an affinity to Percy Shelley, unlike some people who haven't the attention span to last even an hour of English."

The class turned their heads towards the back of the class by the window where a cobalt-haired girl boringly propped her head on a bored, folded arm supported by a bored, aching elbow. She was palpably oblivious to the surprised faces her classmates wore, not to mention the piercing look the professor was shooting her and Saotome's wrinkled forehead that made him look like he was trying to get her to wake up through mental telepathy (or just plain constipated).

Fifteen minutes more…

The sky was the happiest shade of blue, and the cumulus clouds looked soft enough to sleep on… or eat, especially if a tuft were to be put on a stick and resembled sweet, tooth-decaying cotton candy. The sun was somewhere behind the huge, soft bunches of white, creating a silver lining at the edges of the clouds and making them look like heaven's very own cotton candy empire, complete with bright neon signs and spotlights and angels as haloed salespeople. And–

Ooh, sperm kite!

She absolutely adored those kites with long tails decked with ribbons, the one the kids from a few blocks away loved to fly during windy mornings. They always showed up in the sky to save her from a slow, boring death. Impeccable timing.

"Impeccable participation, Saotome, but this time my question is for her and only her to answer. While I am perfectly aware that you are her fiancé, that does not mean you should save her all the time from the impending dangers that incessantly chase the both of you around the city."

"I hardly call a question about Shakespeare an 'impending danger', sir."

The old professor didn't notice that the reference of respect at the end of the sentence escaped his student through gritted teeth, and so his stern frown slowly twisted into a smirk, one that had terrorized thousands of students since the 1970's.

"Miss Tendo," he repeated for the second time, ignoring Saotome's remark, "would you be kind enough to state lines five to nine of Sonnet 18? I certainly do not want to send a top-ranking student like you outside to carry buckets for the rest of the period…"

"Please, Fukuda-sensei," Sayuri interrupted, abruptly standing up and not bothering to raise her hand, "Let me. 'Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed, but thy eternal summer shall not fade.'"

Professor Fukuda raised a gray, pointed eyebrow in displeasure. "Wanting of two lines. For Shakespeare's sake, what has become of the youth today? Hopeless, insolent, dense…"

The clouds are dense today. Wonderful.

She won't have to water the plants tonight.

And then there were the many little robins she had started to count the moment she became bored out of her wits. Those little flying things might as well have been advertising the great cotton candy empire to all on Earth who care. The soft, cool breeze entered the window and tickled her ears with the twittering of the jovial feathered creatures.

"How are you, little guy?" Akane whispered to the lone red robin that had just perched on the windowsill. She noticed a pretty little black spot on its breast. "Others bullied you?"

It gave a short series of chirps, and she giggled demurely, not wanting to attract attention, especially the professor's. "I'm dying of boredom, that's how I am. They're talking about personification and sonnets and love."

And I beg to differ.

The robin cutely tilted its head in askance, sending bright ideas to Akane's head about taking it home for P-chan to play with. "Well, I just don't feel like talking about love and related crap. And if anyone has a problem with that, he'll have my fist for lunch."

The object of her attention fluttered on its spot, understanding the threat that the girl in front of him was stating. It ruffled its feathers a bit before she gave an explanation. "I'm not… comfortable with the words true and love together in a sentence, or a fragment, or a phrase. I used to be, but that was a very long time ago when I was thirteen and no guy – not a single one – ever called me names. I was the princess and I could have chosen any boy I wanted."

This time another red robin alighted on the windowsill, wanting to join the conversation. Akane, always glad to share with friends who would never divulge her secrets unlike her sly sister Nabiki, happily continued her dialogue. "But I didn't, because I believed in true love. I believed that one day, my prince would arrive at my doorstep and sweep me off my feet and passionately kiss me for the first time and bring me to places and heights I haven't been before…"

The birds' necks were outstretched as they seemed to have immersed themselves into her heightening emotions. Awed with the beauty she showed with just a dreamy smile, they unblinkingly stared at her lovely face and held on to every word she said.

"…and then that damn martial artist stepped into my life, became my fiancé and destroyed all my childhood dreams of an utterly handsome, intelligent, gentlemanly, serene, bronze-skinned, stallion-riding, smiling-faced prince knocking on my bedroom door and taking me to the stars."

Her feathered friends' postures slumped considerably, and so did hers.

"I know there's no way out of this, unless one day our stubborn fathers miraculously realize that Ranma and I are as compatible as a saddle and a refrigerator. But I just…" she paused, lowering her voice even more, "I wish that I'd get to find out who my true love is. I know I'm doomed to a life of a forced marriage, but knowing that my true love isn't as tactless and rude and horrible as Ranma could be sometimes, I'd feel a little better. Then I could just let the whole thing go and marry the gender-switching ape."

The cool wind blew a little strongly, making her dark blue hair fly behind her before resting just a little below her shoulders. "I just wish to know. I mean, maybe I've known him all this time! I can't take it if I died not knowing who he is, not noticing that he's been dancing naked right in front of me while I just passed him by."

Delighted tweeting answered her as the wind blew harder, making the papers inside the classroom tousle violently in their place, threatening to scatter across Nerima. The harsh current of air was also the cause why Akane's two little friends were blown off the windowsill, leaving her with her own bored musings.

Her self-worth wouldn't have been affected if she were whispering to her seatmates, Akane realized. But NO – she had to engage in a secret talk with the red robins because they were the only ones willing to listen.

My life is as exciting as a dust bunny.

If her true love were here, they'd be joining martial arts tournaments together and winning and dining out and running through a field of lavenders and–

"–sleeping! Not to mention talking to those birds like some lunatic. Wake up, drool face, you're drowning the planet. And wipe yourself first before facing me because I don't wanna hang around with someone whose mouth is frothing. That would injure my social status big time, and it's gonna be your fault, you drooling personification of a mule!"

Akane slowly lifted her head from her desk and arranged her windswept hair.

"As if you have a social life, stupid," she droned, groggily looking around the classroom and finding nobody except an unimpressed-looking Ranma standing beside her. "Where's everyone?"

"Oh, they left fifteen minutes ago, because that's when class ended," he replied mockingly, wiping the side of her lips with his handkerchief.

She smacked his hand away. "I don't drool, unlike you." Rubbing her temples to reduce her lethargy, she started packing the disordered books and notes on her desk. "So what were you doing for the past fifteen minutes with only a boring, sleeping me as your company in the room?"

He turned around, determined to hide the traces of a light blush that had begun to spread across the bridge of his nose, and leaned on the door's frame after a few hasty steps across the room.

"Hurry and stand up, you drooling snail. It's bad enough that I saved your ass during English time, so don't let me carry it all the way home."

Zipping her bag close and roughly standing up, she made her way to the door and stopped right in front of her fiancé, less than an inch of space separating their bodies as she stood on tiptoe.

"Ranma," she whispered softly in his ear, her sleepy voice bordering on unplanned seductiveness and making the hairs on his neck stand on end in excitement, "you are…"

Her body sagged against him and her hand traveled to the back of his neck, gently drawing spirals with her finger and in the process sending shivers from Ranma's spine all the way down to a twitching cluster of muscles below him that he had been miserably trying to control for the past couple of weeks whenever she did things like this.

Damn women and their seductive voices and knowledge on the male anatomy…

"Such an IDIOT!" she screamed, disabling his auditory nerves, taking out her omnipresent mallet and hitting him hard on the head, causing him to fall into a twisted heap on the floor. "DUMMY! TACTLESS FREAK! BAKA!" For every word, her mallet struck the previous bump on his head, making it more bruised than ever and causing his sight to swim and darken.

"God, woman!" he yelled spitefully as he managed to pull himself up despite the almost unbearable throbbing in his cerebellum. "We've known each other for a very long time, and that's the way you treat me after saving you from an overnight stay in this pervert-infested school?"

Akane rubbed her bleary eyes and stared at him blandly. "Thank you, then, for saving me from the school perverts and making me come home where you can perform your perversions on me."

Before his open mouth could shoot a harsh name in defense and his shaking fist could punch anything hittable, she had walked down the corridor, leaving him to continue his incoherent, angry stuttering until he decided to follow his punisher.

Because, of course, he had no choice.

o

o

She was stuck, and she had no choice.

She was in a car traveling down an unpaved road under the rain when suddenly her front wheels fell into a pool of mud. Her car refused to budge even when she reversed it, so the wheels created a rut.

She was stuck in a rut, of all things. Why couldn't she have been stuck in a beach resort instead? The gods were cruel enough to trap her in a bloody rut.

And although at first she felt totally mad and stupid and destructive, she soon enjoyed Norah Jones on the stereo mingling with the rhythmic pitter patter of the rain against the roof and the windshield of the car. Maybe she could have gone on this way until the sun finally decided to stop playing hide and seek and dried up the mud for her easy maneuvering, if the rain didn't act like a bitch and ruin her life.

That was exactly how Akane felt about her life.

Her love life, so to speak.

She was stuck with Ranma, and she had hated it down to the last word their fathers exchanged when she and Ranma weren't born yet. She hated the way arrogance radiated from him, the way he drew girls to himself like he were a magnet and they were paperclips twisted in different manners to show him how flexible they were, the way he could come up with names to call her whenever they had petty arguments that grew to the size of the Eiffel Tower…

And then she puzzled over it.

At first she wondered how peculiarly her anger would abate once he knocked on her door, entered her room and muttered a sincere apology (but not before she directed the remains of her fury by hurling her books at him). After that, she realized that she has grown to love it when he grabbed her hand and walked her home or to the fish ball stand where he'd treat her once or twice a week if he felt guilty about making her feel bad.

More than occasionally since two months ago, she enjoyed seeing Ranma's tense reactions when she whispered things in his ear, held him and stuck herself to him in the right places to have him stutter like a gauche idiot. In return, Ranma began doing the same – he never failed to make her gasp when he came out of nowhere and held her from behind, muttering things she wouldn't even dream him of saying while he teased her lips with kisses that always brushed, but never fully touched.

And she didn't love Ranma.

There were countless times when she felt like she did, when she felt like he had loved her, too. Of course, that was before she decided to grow up and make her mind up about him. He was just a guy whose hormones were raging uncontrollably, and she was the main object of his awareness plainly because she lived with him, making her very… convenient, unlike his friend-only Ukyou, his deranged admirer Kodachi and his killer bitch Shampoo. And same went for her as well – it wasn't just the guys who had those urges in the middle of class. So both of them did these things to each other simply because… well, they had no one else.

After more than a year of being with Ranma, she was smart enough to believe this.

"Roof shingles perfectly fitting your crooked spine, dear?"

She didn't look away from the twinkling stars scattered across the dark sky.

"No, but they will after I put your skin underneath me. And don't dear me, jerk."

"Hey, what's with the hostility?" Ranma asked, his voice sounding hurt and defensive. "And if you wanted to lie down on my faultlessly muscled chest and abs, why didn't you say so earlier? You can lie down on me all you want…"

"No, I meant skinning you alive and then putting your skin under me to serve as a comforter," she explained flatly as if she were stating the Theory of Relativity. She got up. "And for future reference, your faultlessly muscled chest and a– ah…"

She trailed off, her mouth hanging slightly open as her eyes landed on a half-naked Ranma, his faultlessly muscled chest and abs greeting her with full strength, definition, maleness and utter gorgeousness as it glistened with sweat.

He snapped his fingers just in front of his abdomen and brought her attention to his smirking face. "You were saying?"

She shut her mouth and narrowed her eyes. "I wouldn't have sex with you in a hundred years."

His smirk mingled with surprise. "Whoa, who said anything about having sex? You're getting a little naughty, Akane, and I don't think you would've said that if those thoughts didn't occupy your dirty mind earlier…"

"You were being suggestive," she morosely mumbled, quirking an eyebrow at his torso.

"Don't you think your hormones and temper are a little outta control? I wasn't being suggestive with my perfect body – I just wanted to get some fresh air up here after sweating it out in the dojo. And since you mentioned it… if not in a hundred years… dya believe in future life? We can have sex a hundred and one years from now, if ever we meet again and you're not a rough, grouchy tomboy."

Ranma laughed at his own daringness in using the three-letter word in front of her, especially when the act involved him and her. He was never this daring until a couple of months ago when he figured that they were mature enough to talk about it without ignorance and immaturity butting in. Besides, she was his fiancée, and they're going to have to do it someday, right?

"I'll have sex with my true love and not with a pompous ass like you," she sniped, passing him and entering her bedroom window. "And we'll call it making love, because of obvious reasons!"

"Well goodnight to you, too!"

Irritated, he plopped on the spot where she previously lay and frowned at the stars.

What the hell's wrong with her today?

First, she drifted off in the middle of Fukuda the Terrible's class. Akane Tendo never drifted off. Then she was too morbid with the skinning alive thing – she could be violent sometimes, but not morbid. They haven't been this harsh with name calling since half a year ago! She wasn't the sweet looking, peacefully sleeping Akane he was staring at during dismissal time… the real Akane had been abducted by aliens while he wasn't looking.

And to make things more peculiar, what was with the making love with her true love thing? He's her fiancé and she'll do it with him, not with her true love! And–

Shit, the stars were laughing at him.

SHIT!

A terrible realization giving him a headache more painful than when she pummeled his head five times this afternoon, Ranma landed right outside Akane's window in one jump and knocked loudly against the glass.

Akane almost fell off her seat in front of the desk where she had been studying. Ranma's face was tinted with impatience, frustration, and wanting an explanation. She slammed her book close and flipped the lock of the window to let in a storming Ranma.

"Whaddya mean you'll have sex with your true love and not with a pompous ass like me?" he demanded.

She stood up from her chair and fearlessly faced him, matching the volume of his voice. "I mean I'll have sex with my true love and not with a sex-starved, Hiroshi-and-Daisuke-influenced, hopeless, pompous ass like you!" Her last word came with an accusing finger that poked hard at the middle of his chest.

He was speechless, and his irate face diminished to an unintended, childish pout.

"I ain't your true love?" he asked, his voice subsiding into that of a seven-year old who had just found out that Santa Claus didn't give him any presents for Christmas.

The anger vanished from her features to be replaced by a pink blush as her eyes focused on an unpaired white sock on the floor.

"I ain't sex-starved," Ranma muttered after a minute of silence. "I'm saving my first for somebody special. I just act that way because… you act that way sometimes, so I think there's nothing wrong about acting like it when you're acting that way, too. And it's just the hormones, just like you said a coupla months ago. Hiroshi and Daisuke ain't bad influences, and you know that 'cause you grew up with them. I may be pompous and an ass sometimes, but I ain't hopeless." His expression softened as his voice mellowed down. "And you know that too, don't you?"

She didn't have to think.

"Yes, I know that. Please leave now."

His other question unanswered, Ranma walked towards the window, closing it and securing its lock before walking across the room. On the doorknob his hand rested weakly before finally turning it with a disenchanted sigh and closing the door behind him.

Maybe it's her time of the month.

That's why she was moody, because all girls are like that just before they turn into not-game, abdomen cramp-suffering killjoys. Tomorrow, Ryouga's going to try harder to kill him because when he sees the blood on Akane's sheets, he'd think that Ranma had sex with her without her consent. The brainless pig.

o

o

Maybe it's my time of the month.

Akane opened her window to let the warm evening breeze in and collapsed on her bed, where her pet piglet P-chan was already fast asleep.

Why the heck did I start on this whole true love crap, anyway?

That was such a long time ago, some silly childhood dream. She knew she didn't have to apologize to Ranma for being grumpy because he knew she could be like that sometimes, but maybe baking him a cake will make things better between the two of them.

No, of course he wouldn't eat it.

Who was she kidding? After more than a year of vainly making him eat her cooking, she's given up. He said that her food will make him bulimic, and she didn't want his barf all over the house. Poor Kasumi will be the one to suffer the most.

A sequence of soft chirps made her turn her head towards the window.

What in the…

She got up and hurried to the little figure on her study table. "You followed me all the way here!"

The red robin fluttered animatedly on the spot. Akane knew that this was the same robin because it had a black spot on its breast, unlike the others in the flock that didn't. "How did you know that I live here?" she asked in awe, scooping up the little ball of red fluff with her hands and sitting on the edge of her bed.

Her newfound friend didn't answer but instead held out a thin leg, where a small rolled-up note she didn't notice earlier was tied. "What's this?" she muttered in curiosity, untying the white string, putting the bird on her bed and wondering who could have sent the letter. She opened the light brown parchment and she found it small – in fact, it must have been only about four inches long.

She gasped in awe upon reading the tiny, scrawny script:

"For years you have searched for the one

Until you believed that he was indeed gone.

But heaven smiles, your dreams are not dead;

Emotions of childhood are just hidden in your head.

Because of your heart's desire and Fate's deviousness

The gods will not make you wait for him to confess.

He whom you are looking for will show up one day

Bare, clear, and open – so to say.

Only you will know who he is and his true form

For in others' eyes, he follows the covered norm.

Thus, fortunate being, with the message from this dove,

Believe… and you shall know your one and true love."

"Oh. My. God," she mumbled in disbelief.

It simply couldn't be. She knew what she was doing in pouring her heart out to this robin during Fukuda's lecture, but it wasn't for the reason that she wanted it to actually understand her human words and reply in the form of a piece of parchment! She just wanted to talk to somebody – anybody – because her boredom made thoughts fizz randomly around her head, and if she didn't talk about them, she'll end up screaming things on impulse during class hours.

"B-but…" she stuttered, reading the poem for the sixth time and focusing her eyes from the innocent-looking bird to the poem, and back to the waiting robin. "But you're not… you're not a dove," she said stupidly.

The red robin froze in incredulity. It might have thought that the human girl in front of him was being unintentionally stupid, or it might have thought that she was just a slow-minded twin of the one from this afternoon. And so, in an effort to appease Akane's growing confusion, the feathered messenger lifted its left wing and pointed to the lower part of the parchment.

Akane didn't see it before. How could she not, if it was as small as something written in Vladimir Script size six? She had actually brought it really close to her eyes before she could read the same pointed writing that said, as if the sender had expected her to not understand the poem:

"Your true love will be naked when you see him."

"Oh," Akane mouthed, finally getting the meaning of it. She was always good at analyzing summaries, whether it was Homer or Chaucer or even Dickens with his freakishly long and wordy stories.

Just as her bafflement about the poem was disappearing–

"Who sent this?" she asked, more baffled, resting the paper on her lap and looking at the robin that was comfortably making itself home on her blanket. "And why?"

The bird twittered shortly, as if to say that it had no idea, or if it did, it wouldn't tell her. Before she could ask for an explanation, it stood up, flapped its wings and flew out of the room.

Mouth agape, she stared at the open window with her mind swimming with confusion.

She believed in magic. Of course, how could she not, when she grew up in one magical mess of a cockpit called Nerima? There simply was magic – good and bad – brewing everywhere, from the big clock in school to the cash register in the bookstore… and heck, there was definitely magic even in their own toilet bowl!

But somehow, she found the recent event hard to believe. It was too much of a coincidence that the same bird listened to her crappy rants, followed her home and gave her a poem about finding out who her true love is. The fact that he would be naked the moment she saw him didn't help, either – her true love will never be a naked pervert, or a guy who simply didn't want anything to cling to himself and ignored the scandalized looks of the people around him.

Akane finally made up her mind.

"Crap," she snorted.

Taking a deep breath, she closed her window and inserted the small parchment under one of the schoolbooks on her table. After switching the lights off, she snuggled beside a still sleeping P-chan (who miraculously showed no signs of having been disturbed by the little red robin and the conversation Akane had with it) under her yellow blanket, gazed at the multicolored glow-in-the-dark stars plastered on her ceiling and tried to recall the quadratic formula she was studying before Ranma had interrupted her. As she expelled the rest of her thoughts about the letter the robin gave her and drifted off to sleep, her mind buzzed with dreams about radical signs, pigtails, and red feathers.

o

o

Loud, quick rapping on wood awoke Akane with a start.

"It's your turn in the bathroom, Akane!" the morning-hoarse voice of Nabiki Tendo half yelled from the other side of the door.

"I'm still slee– whoa!" Akane's elbow hit the floor as she fell off the bed. She struggled to get out of the blanket that had slowly constricted her overnight. She cursed a few times as she rolled on the floor to unwind the blanket around her. And, of course, as sure as she was that the sky is blue because its wavelength enables it to be the most scattered color in the atmosphere, her day was not going to turn out good. It never did whenever she had to do the rolling routine in the morning and ended up with her hair all over her face.

Something kept nagging from the back of her head as she got up from the floor. She tried to dismiss it, convincing herself that it was just a dream, but for some reason she looked under the thick mathematics book on her study table. It wasn't like her brain told her to do so; in fact, it would have made more sense if her hand had a mind of its own, like it had looked under the book for a very important reason – one that had stayed with her throughout the dreams she had last night – only she couldn't remember.

She didn't find anything and found herself feeling very disappointed.

Her eyes landed on the mirror that stood on her desk… and that one thing she found brought back all the memories of yesterday that seemed to exist only in her dreams if she didn't see…

A tiny red feather on the tip of her nose.

Bloody hell, Akane thought bewilderedly, picking the little thing and holding it in front of her eyes. That wasn't a dream?

She fumbled under the other books on the table and didn't find the small brown parchment from last night. No, that couldn't be – she was so sure that she inserted it under her math book! Where the hell was that poem, the one that told her that she will see her true love naked?

"C'mon, ya slow-witted chick!" Ranma's voice rang from the hallway. "Wake up before I decide to go first!"

She yanked the door open and found herself face-to-face with Ranma who happened to be standing just outside her door. Her eyes narrowed, but then she remembered the shouts they exchanged last night and quickly let go of the thought of greeting him with her mallet.

"Morning," she mumbled, calmly walking past him towards the bathroom like he were a harmless statue with his mouth shut. Ranma could only blink after her, wondering where her vehemence last night went.

Maybe yesterday was the last day of her time of the month, he thought hopefully. Maybe today her female hormones wouldn't be as brutal as they were, and she'll be back to the nice Akane.

Ranma went back to his room to steal a few snores before Akane finished with her bath.

A puzzled Akane, still in her yellow pajamas, scratched her head on the way to the bathroom down the hallway. Was she losing her touch? Had hanging out with Ranma finally revealed its side effects – delusions, hallucinations and the like? Was last night just a dream, and the fingernail-sized feather she found on her nose was just a nasty, rebellious pimple?

She touched her nose in panic. It was as smooth as her unblemished cheeks.

Oh God, what's happening to me?

With her eyes directed at the floor in deep thought, she was about to open the door to the bathroom, when someone opened it first – from inside.

She saw a pair of wet feet.

Her eyes traveled up to the legs. Judging by the muscles and a few battle scars, the person in front of her was positively male. Beside his right thigh, a yellow shirt, a pair of dark green trousers and a patterned bandana dangled from his hand.

Her eyes went higher for a fleeting second – and it took that fleeting second to absorb and embed that image permanently in her mind – and quickly moved up to a dripping, muscled torso… up some more to a jaw that had fallen significantly… and finally locked with the man's shocked brown eyes.

"A-Akane-san!"

She didn't know whether to scream or faint.

And since was too indecisive, the gods made the decision for her.

Halfway through a deep breath that prepared her to scream, Akane Tendo fell unconscious on the floor.

o

o

Author's Notes: Yes, him again. It's always him first, then the other guy – what's his name again? Ran... mo? mi? me? mu? Ah, ma. Ranma. Because, of course, Ranma loves Akane, and Akane loves Ranma forever, and they have no choice.

And I just love it. Dontcha?