Disclaimer: UNBETA'D. I own nothing. Recognizable characters and events belong to other people. Together with the original characters and events, they collectively own my soul.
Ranma stumbled upon the Estate while looking for a safe place to sleep; safe being a relative term with all the weirdness around. A rogue samurai or rampaging dinosaur could attack any peaceful spot without a moment's notice. A solid, well-furnished house might change into a crumbling ruin or empty meadow while he slept.
He had been pretty lucky so far—if you could call it that. Ranma had been sitting down to eat with the Tendos when whatever had happened struck. It had felt like the Jusenkyo curse when he first gained it—as if his entire body was stretching out of shape and at the same time being pushed into a little ball. It wasn't real pain, but it still hurt like hell trying to hold on to his sense of reality. When he snapped back into himself, he lifted his head from his bowl to ask if anyone else had felt it as well. He really hoped it wasn't something to do with the curse—unless it had worn off or something which he didn't really believe. Hope was long gone ever since the whole wedding disaster.
No one answered his question and looking over at Akane, Ranma froze. She was haloed by a battle aura; resigned to the inevitable, he put down his food and waited for the mallet to smash into him. Nothing happened. Looking up again, he found that Akane still looked the same. She hadn't moved at all. There was something weird about her aura too—usually it flickered like an angry fire, but now it stood still as if it was part of a painting someone had attached to Akane.
Leaning over to check if she had a fever or something, Ranma froze. When he moved his hand towards Akane, that weird not-pain feeling came back. Pushing forward, he found that his hand started moving slower and slower even though he was pushing it with all his considerable strength. He tried to yank it back but it moved ever slower until suddenly there was a kind of pop and he fell backwards as his arm rocketed back into his chest. What the hell was going on?
Picking himself up warily he found it wasn't just Akane. All the Tendos were motionless, not even their eyes were moving. It was like he was standing inside a picture and anytime he tried to touch one of them, the picture started grabbing back at him and trying to turn him into one too. Running through the possibilities in his head, Ranma figured it had be something to do with the Amazons. Or maybe Kuno—he came up with some pretty weird mystical shit every once in a while. Like that dumb sword. Stupid wasted wish. Stupid perverted idiot. Ranma kept mumbling to himself as he ran to the Nekohanten.
Something was wrong. Even moving at his usual high speed through Nerima, he could tell the whole area was affected by whatever happened at the Dojo. Nothing was moving. He saw a couple people out on the street, frozen as still as the Tendos had been. Whatever was going on was big. Or maybe it was just affecting him—maybe he had finally gotten so fast that it only seemed like the whole world was at a standstill? He preened a bit, thinking of it. Then he stopped. It would drive him crazy if he had to move as slow as when he tried to touch Akane every time he wanted to talk to someone. This had to be something Ku Lon could fix. Had to be.
His hopes were dashed when he got to the Nekohanten. The building was gone. The lot where it was supposed to be was a forest—an untouched forest with no signs that people had ever been there at all. If it wasn't for all the buildings around it, he would have thought that he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. But this was definitely where the Chinese restaurant was supposed to be. He ran for the Kunos'. Whatever that idiot had found was really nasty; Ranma would make him regret whatever it was.
The Kunos' estate was in ruins. Kodachi stood, lifeless as any statue over a pond filled with black sludge, an alligator carcass rotting on the bank. He found Kuno and Sasuke in a thicket of saplings that were sprouting out of what he thought was a table. The roof was completely gone and most of the walls were fallen in. Ranma took off, praying desperately to all the gods he had ever heard of while staying in the shrines his pops liked to mooch off of.
Ukyo's restaurant was gone—replaced with a futuristic looking skyscraper. He trashed the laser guns at the entrance but couldn't find Ukyo or Konatsu anywhere in the building. The school seemed fairly normal—until he tried to go in it and felt that weird thing running through his body again. He left it alone and wandered around for a while before returning to the Tendo Dojo—he didn't see any people moving, but he did see some animals roaming around. So it wasn't just him.
He stayed at the Tendos' for a while, sleeping in his room and running a patrol of sorts, the Dojo to the Nekohanten to the Kunos' to Ukyo's to the school to the park to Tofu's old place. Every place that had become familiar to him in the years he had stayed in Nerima. Things changed—but never in a good way. The skyscraper where Ukyo's had been got even more futuristic and the plants at the Nekohanten started to take over the surrounding buildings and creep onto the street as well. He never found Ukyo or the Amazons.
He couldn't say how long he stayed at the Tendos'. The sun rose and set a few times, but that wasn't any help. Once he saw the sun rising in fast-motion, so he counted to himself, measuring his heart rate. 160 beats later, the sun had set again. Another time, the day was long enough that he was exhausted by the time the sun was overhead. When he woke up, it didn't seem to have moved at all.
Eventually he decided it was time to leave. Somewhere, there had to be a way to fix this. And if there wasn't, he still needed to get away from this place and the loss of every person he had ever cared about. He grabbed his backpack, scrounged some food from the kitchen, and set off.
Traveling through the mess of forest and buildings and ruins that Tokyo had become, Ranma did run into people occasionally. If they noticed him at all, they tended to attack him on sight, which was fairly normal, but the clothing they were wearing was all weird: some of it was really old and some of it was just plain weird. Many of the people disappeared before they got to him, some of them moved right through him like ghosts, and a few of them he had to fight off.
He slept when he had to, in buildings that seemed relatively normal. He couldn't quite shake the feeling that something would happen while he slept—the roof would fall down and kill him or one of those slow spots would creep up and he wouldn't be able to leave. Still, he had to sleep sometimes. Part of him hoped that he wouldn't wake up again to this frightening, lonely world. But Ranma Saotome didn't lose and didn't give up, so he kept going. He found that while minor changes happened all the time, anything major that could transform a house to ruins or create a spot where time moved differently caused that stretching, squeezing sensation and gave him enough warning to move somewhere else. He started to think of these events as storms—they came through like tsunamis and messed up most of the stuff in their path.
It was right after one of these storms that he found the Estate. Surrounded by the chaos that the storm had left behind, the Estate looked pretty peaceful and he figured a roof over his head would be nice. One of the things the storm had dropped off was a foot-deep layer of snow, although it had been a warm spring-like day before it hit. So he walked through the open gates, past the gardens and outlying buildings, and into the silent main house—where he hoped some food might be.
Wandering around, looking for something to eat and the best place to sleep, Ranma found that the place was not as empty as it had seemed. In a small room on the upper floor, there was a girl near his age standing in front of a window with her raised hands cupped above her head, holding some sort of glowing thing. Her eyes were closed and she looked pretty weird. She was wearing a long white dress and a gold tiara and her pale hair fell nearly to the floor in two pony-tails sprouting from round buns on the side of her head.
Watching her carefully and not seeing any movement, Ranma figured she must be one of the people who had been frozen in time. He backed out of the room warily. The statue people always creeped him out and he didn't want to get too close and risk being trapped with her. If he was going to give up like that, he would've done it at the Dojo with Akane.
He decided to camp out downstairs and move on in the morning, but he wanted to scout out the rest of the house first. It was always best to know where weird shit might come from and that girl was one of the weirdest things he'd seen yet. There was something about her that made him feel peaceful and relaxed, like this was the first time he'd been safe since all this started. He didn't trust it at all.
Two rooms down, he found another strange woman. This one was older, with long green hair—she reminded him of some of the Amazons from the village in China. She was holding onto a staff and kneeling in front of a big mirror. Ranma noticed a flicker of movement inside the mirror and he whirled around falling into a defensive stance. Most of the weirdoes and creatures that had attacked him had fought to kill instead of for fun and practice or a little harmless maiming. There was nothing behind him. Scanning the area, the only life he could sense was the woman peering into the mirror. Relaxing slowly, he studied the mirror and found that all of the movement was contained inside the glass. Fascinated, he watched as images of various disasters cycled through the mirror: flooded cities, frozen people, dinosaurs pushing over semis, knights having pitched battles with Indians, scenes of the messed-up world where time had stopped working right.
"Why won't they stop?" Ranma jumped backwards into a battle-ready position once again at the woman's despairing whisper.
"Who're you?" He asked, and then again more belligerently when she didn't answer. She didn't seem to notice him at all, not even flinching when he darted a quick palm strike past her head. He frowned and asked "Why won't what stop?"
"The Time Storms."
Ranma's eyebrows arched up in surprise. He hadn't expected her to answer him after ignoring the first questions. He tried again to find out who she was with no luck. Experimenting, he found she'd only respond certain questions and even then her answers tended to be vague and absent, as if most of her mind wasn't present.
"Who are you?" "Where are you from?" "What are you doing?"—got no response.
Questions about the other girl did get something. "The Queen must be protected—it takes all of her strength to hold back the Time." Any more questions about the girl just got the same response. Ranma eventually gave up and headed out into the gardens to think. Running through simple katas that didn't require any of this attention to do, Ranma considered what little he had learned. The woman at the mirror knew something about what was going on but she wouldn't or couldn't tell him. Touching her gave him the same weird feeling he got in the bad areas outside—with an added shock of pain. It didn't seem to affect her at all. The other girl—the "Queen"—was doing something to protect the house from the mess outside. Probably she was protecting the whole Estate grounds, he decided. The gardens looked fairly normal though in need of a good weeding and the buildings were all in good repair.
If there was any chance to fix whatever had happened, it seemed like these people were it. The Queen might be able to keep out the storms—but she was vulnerable to any of those freaks the storms dropped down. Would the only chance to save the world be lost if some scared and confused bandit came by and cut her down? Ranma couldn't risk it. His decision made, Ranma scouted the area more thoroughly. He closed and barred the gates and did a patrol of the surrounding wall—it seemed in pretty good condition. He found the kitchen and checked on the food. The place was pretty well-supplied—they should be able to last a while. Assuming the two girls ate anything. It didn't seem like they had. He wondered how long they had been here.
Wandering around once he left the Tendos', Ranma had purposely kept his mind blank, concentrating only on survival. He rarely ever let himself think about what was happening or what he could do. He had gone through everything at the Dojo and he wasn't ready to try again. It was too painful.
On the Estate, he had a bit more time to think although he still tried not to. He moved into the room next to the Queen's, close enough to hear if anything attacked but away from her disturbingly pleasant presence. When he was awake, he patrolled the Estate, occasionally checking on the Queen and the woman at the mirror. He started leaving the grounds as well, patrolling outside the walls and using tools he found to cut back brush away from the walls. Bored and desperate, he even tried to take care of the gardens a bit, but he didn't really know how to. Most of his time he spent on katas or looking for someone outside to fight.
A few days after stumbling upon the Estate, Ranma found the Queen crumbled into a heap on the floor. Her lips were white and cracked and for the first time he noticed how thin she was. Standing tall and holding up that glow, she had seemed ethereal and magical. Now, she looked sick. Cautiously moving to her, Ranma found that she was burning up. He dragged a Western style mattress in from another room, and carefully picked her and put her on it. In a corner of the room, he found a bowl of water. It was lukewarm and there was dust and bits of leaves floating on the top. He noticed it was half-empty and wondered if she had drunk from it before. Disgusted, he went and grabbed her some more water.
There was no running water anywhere Ranma had been, but the Estate had an old well he had been drinking out of. The water was clean and sweet and he hauled a bucket up for the girl. He found a glass in the kitchen and managed to get to drink some, though her eyes never opened. She murmured a bit when he lay her back down but he couldn't make out any words.
Another frustrating questions and occasional answer session with the lady in front of the mirror gave Ranma some ideas about what was going on. The glowing thing the girl had held up was a kind of magical crystal that only the Queen could control. While she was holding it, it built up enough power to last on its own and then she collapsed to sleep and get some water. "Why's she doing this?" didn't get any response.
Not in the least satisfied, but aware it was the best he was going to get, Ranma went back to the Queen's room. He wished Nabiki was there—she would have known what kind of questions to ask he was sure—but then he pushed back that thought. Wishing wouldn't help and thinking about how much he wanted other people around just made it harder to do what needed to be done.
The girl—it was hard to think of her as Queen when she looked so weak and helpless—was still unconscious. Ranma did his best to get some more water in without choking and then went downstairs to find some food. Kasumi had always fed him broth when he was sick (usually from Akane cooking and that one time that Happosai had made him so weak). He shook his head. Why was he suddenly missing people so much? He had learned on the road not to think about people once he left them. It kept him sane and let him be content even though he left every friend he ever made behind. Why wasn't it working anymore?
He didn't find anything for soup, so he made rice and pickles instead. Maybe if he helped her sit up she'd be able to eat something solid. Later he'd go out and try and find a store or something. Upstairs, he found that she was standing up again, holding up the crystal. He guessed the couple hours he had spent moving the bed, talking to the mirror lady and tracking down lunch had revived her enough. Like this, she looked more like a Queen and less like a girl. Still, he couldn't erase the images of her weak and sick. He thought about the dirty water that had been in the corner, about how light she had been when he moved her to the bed, about the soft whispers she murmured into the pillow. She needed to eat. Whatever she was doing, however powerful she was, it was taking too much out of her.
Frustrated and upset, Ranma stomped over to the Queen. He grabbed the chopsticks, picked up some rice and held it up to her mouth. He stopped to think about how he could get her to chew. He had some experience in force-feeding people, but usually they were already eating or at least capable of chewing on their own. Pushing the food into her mouth, he was surprised when she suddenly chewed and swallowed it on her own.
He found that she could eat and drink while standing as long as her held the cup or food up to her mouth. Every once in a while she would collapse for a short period of time. He moved the mattress directly behind her and covered it with a fat quilt and plump pillows. Red-faced and clumsy, he spent some time thinking about what he would do if she had to use the bathroom, but somehow it never happened. She started to look healthier with regular food and water.
Something about the mirror lady made him wary of trying to feed her. She was a little more mobile anyways—he tried leaving some food in front of her. He never saw her moving, but sometimes when he came back in the food would be gone.
Feeding the Queen meant he had to spend more time with her. Rather than just check on her quickly once during his patrol cycle, he had to come in three or four times and spend at least fifteen minutes feeding her. The feelings of serenity and safety that radiated out from her started affecting him more and he found himself relaxing when he was near her. He had to force himself to leave the room sometimes.
Ranma had spent most of his life on the road, leaving friends and enemies behind him scattered across the country. He had never been lonely—he had never let himself be lonely. It wasn't worth it and besides, he always had pops, right?
On the Estate, he didn't have anyone. The mirror lady was more like a talking doll than a person. He couldn't spend much time near her without wanting to hit her or melt that damn mirror with a ki blast anyway. It wasn't just the way she only gave vague answers to certain questions and ignored the rest. Something about her just really rubbed him the wrong way.
The more time he spent with the Queen though, the easier he found it to relax. Everything outside her room made him tense—patrolling and even doing katas, he had to stay alert for possible predators, human or otherwise. Random memories of Nerima would ambush, and he found himself wishing he could taste Kasumi's cooking, or pay Nabiki to tell him what the hell was going on, or spar with Ryouga. Thinking about his friends made him angry at whatever had taken them away and more and more lonely.
In the Queen's room it was different. Somehow he seemed to think about the people he knew even more, but it never made him upset. Instead, he found himself talking to her. Filling up the silence of the room with stories of his life, he talked more than he ever had to anyone before.
"This one time when I was nine or ten, we at a karate dojo, right? And the master had a lot of his own students so he couldn't teach me much. He gave me a bunch a scrolls, 'cause he said I was good enough to study them and figure out what to do. Then he'd watch me and correct me. But there was this one move I couldn't get it right. I kept trying, you know, 'cause Ranma Saotome don't lose, but it just never worked. I did everything just like in the picture. So his wife, she was really nice and man, she made the best baked fish ever—better than Kasumi's even. She tried to help me, looking over the scroll and all, and then she pointed to one of the sentences and said why I wasn't shifting my weight like it said. The picture didn't show that and it wasn't real normal. So I hadta admit I couldn't read it—all the rest of the moves I figured out from the pictures by themselves. She was real mad, but she spent the rest of our time there teaching me ta read and she gave me a bunch of books to help me practice when I left."
He told her about meeting Ryouga while he fed her a dinner of rice and pickles; his pops had been in jail for a while and a police man had escorted Ranma to school every day. Made him wear the uniform and everything. It had been the only regular schooling he'd had before Furinkan. He didn't think Furinkan really counted though, it was pretty weird—so he told her about old pineapple head and Ms. Hinako and all that.
"It was really different, you know. Staying in one place all the time like that. I got to know people who wouldn't'a talked to me at all if I was on the road. I guess pops and me looked pretty dirty most of the time. At Furinkan, I could count on people being there most days. And pops wasn't planning on leaving, so I could count on me being there. WE even there long enough for people to catch up to us, like Ryouga and U-chan, you remember I told you about them? 'Course, some people I didn't really want to catch up."
The more he talked to her, the more he found himself saying things he hadn't even known himself until he heard his voice saying them. He told her how excited he had been to see his old friends, and how it had hurt when they had been so mad at him. It wasn't like he had ever wanted to leave. That's just how things worked. He told her about Akane, about how cute she was when she smiled and how she could be a pretty decent martial artist if she worked at it instead of working on homework or going out with her friends. He told her what it had felt like, to have that offer of friendship taken back violently just because he was a boy.
The day the Queen opened her eyes and looked at him, in the middle of his story of Phoenix Mountain and how scared he had been that he wouldn't make it in time, it was like it was the first time anyone had ever looked at him. It was like she could see his soul—as if he had given her the key to it. He hadn't meant to say all those things, he had just been trying to fill up the silence. She had made him comfortable, made him feel like it was okay to say anything. Had she really heard him? Did she think he was stupid and weak. Even as she smile at him and closed her eyes again, he was wondering if she hated him.
The next day, someone else wandered onto the Estate looking for a safe harbor. Her name was Hitomi and she had been in Shinjuku when the first storms hit. She had some experience fighting—Ranma judged from her ki and the way she moved that she was probably at Ukyo's level. Even so, it was mostly luck that helped her stay alive and make it to the Estate. She was amazed to find a place like it and to meet a real person once again.
She broke down crying when Ranma told her that the storms didn't affect the Estate. He'd never known what to do with a crying girl, so he panicked and babbled for a while. Some of his nonsense must have gotten through to her though, because she started laughing through her tears and eventually calmed down. She was a pretty sensible girl.
Ranma fed her before showing her around the Estate. Food, he firmly believed, tended to make everyone feel a little better. As he showed her to the Queen and told her how he took care of her and the mirror lady, Ranma suddenly realized that this was his chance. Hitomi could take care of them, and he could leave, get away from the beautiful, magical girl who knew all of his secrets.
He left saying that he needed to go find more food. The Estate was pretty well-stocked, but it couldn't last forever, especially if anyone else showed up. Time had little meaning anymore and Ranma had never paid all that much attention to keeping track of it anyways, so he didn't know how long he had been on the Estate, spilling out his soul to a stranger. He figured they had gone through almost half the supplies though. Hitomi saw him off, promising faithfully to take good care of the others until he got back.
Part of him, a large part of him, wasn't planning on coming back.
Somehow though, he found himself gathering food anyways. The Queen needed to eat, and the new girl would too. He couldn't just abandon them to starve. Maybe he could leave the food inside the gates and then leave, content that his responsibility was done.
Ranma had spent time in the country, earning money as a migrant farm worker when he and Pops were desperate and living off the forest when they were even more desperate. That experience came in handy as he wandered around a devastated Tokyo. He pulled vegetables from healthy fields, gathered wild nuts and herbs from forest groves and grabbed packaged foods from empty grocery stores. He found an old fashioned cart and dragged it along rutted dirt roads and crumbling city blocks, filling it with anything that wouldn't rot too quickly.
Occasionally he saw people, but the number of ghosts compared to people who noticed him was even higher than during his first trip. When the cart was almost half full, he ran into a wandering Buddhist monk.
A light rain a while back had left Ranma female. There wasn't much point in trying to change back out on the road, and there was no around to care anyways. The monk, smiling cheerfully, had clasped her hands and gazed deeply in her eyes. "Please, beautiful lady, do me the honor of bearing my child." Ranma, predictably enough, had hit him.
Somehow, and Ranma was never quite clear on exactly what happened, they ended up traveling together in spite of the inauspicious beginning. Ranma found something about the monk calming and comfortable. Even as she dodged the occasional grope, Ranma found herself talking easily to the cheerful man. It seemed that she had gotten in the habit of saying whatever was on her mind back at the Estate. He didn't judge her for it, but instead kept smiling, even when she hit him to remind him to keep his hands to himself.
It was a good time. Traveling with a companion was a lot safer and more relaxing that moving alone. They took turns standing watch when they needed to sleep, and watching the cart when one of them went off to grab something. The monk added some clothes and tools to Ranma's load. It hadn't occurred to Ranma to look for anything other than food, but she found herself grabbing soap and other supplies when she went into grocery stores.
Ranma thought about traveling with the monk forever. The cart was almost full; they could drop it off at the Estate and then keep going on down the road. Of course, she would have to tell him she was really a man, but she thought he'd get over it. Maybe one day, they would even go back to the Estate and she would have new stories to tell the Queen.
She imagined it, the monk hitting on Hitomi while Ranma told the Queen about the dinosaurs they had seen grazing on a grassy plain, strange flying machines zipping around over head. He could tell her about the strangeness, the danger, and the wonder of the outside world, and not have to talk about himself at all. He'd show her he was brave and strong, telling her about fighting off the bandits and wild dogs that tried to make off with the cart.
Ranma continued to daydream through setting up camp for the night. Right up until the monk disappeared before Ranma's eyes.
The next day, the gender-cursed martial artist made his way back to the Estate.