Disclaimer- Somebody much better than me owns Ranma. I own nothing but Hikari and a block of moldy cheese. Oh, wait. I ate the cheese... I was hungry, and it was really good on Ritz crackers. Guess that means I only own Hikari. Unless Ranma finds out, then I'm mud unless I can convince him otherwise...

Sister, Sister

It was the early hours of the morning, and Ranma was caught in the throes of a bad dream. In this dream, he was again getting thrown into the pit with the cats…

"Oh, no, the cats. Not the cats again. " Images of the deep dark pit filled Chibi-Ranma with fear.

"No, daddy, not again. " He told his father just as his father picked him up, along with something else, and threw them both in the pit.

"We don't want to go back in there again… " Ranma is standing between his father and a small shivering form on the ground.

"Why do you keep throwing us in there, daddy?" Ranma said, as yet again, he is thrown into the pit with the other form.

"Wait a minute," Ranma thought, as he woke from the dream. "We? Us?"

Ranma lay there for a while, trying to remember what it was he had seen in the pit this time that seemed different than the last times he had had this dream. It wasn't the pit, since the pit was always the same. It wasn't the c-c-c-cats, since they always seemed to change in the dreams anyway.

Then one image from his dream hit him. This time, he wasn't alone. Oyaji, had been outside the pit, not in it with him. Someone small, with long brown hair so light as to almost be red, and bright blue eyes, like his. Someone's eyes who were just as filled with fear as he imagined his own to be.

He spent most of the rest of the night trying to remember who this could be, or if it was just a dream, but he could not shake the feeling that this was not only a real person, but someone he felt he knew very well.

Meanwhile, in a room whose silence was only disturbed by the steady beeping of a heart monitor, a single blue eye darted open and a small panic-filled voice rang out. "Rrrranma?" The room was soon filled with the sound of a young girl crying, alone and utterly terrified.

Over the next week, the dream repeated itself every night, always leaving Ranma wondering why his dream changed now, and who the young girl could be. It was also wearing on him. If he was lucky, he would get a few hours of sleep each night before the dream popped up. As a result, he spent most of the day in school trying to remember the dream, and his afternoons in the usual fights with his various suitors and rivals, only to get malleted into the ceiling or through the floor in the evenings and spend the night again with the same dream. His temper soon came to a head with a phone call he would never forget.

That Saturday evening found Ranma again in the dojo, going through Kata after Kata and trying to remember the girl from his dream. There was a sense of familiarity about her, but after 10 years and the horror of the neko-ken, his memories of his early childhood were mostly gone. At first, he thought it was Ukyo, but the eyes were wrong, and he felt he knew this girl better than that. Akane yelling from the house broke his ruminations about the girl. "Hey, Ranma, you have a phone call!" Instead of answering, he simply walked inside to the phone.

"Hello? This is Ranma." He spoke into the phone.

"Hello, Ranma, this is Doctor Tofu."

"Hi, what's up, Doc?" Ranma replied with a smile.

"Glad to see you are in a good mood today, because I have some news for you. You see, I found someone that may be of interest to you."

"Huh?"

"Ranma, do you know anyone by the name of Hikari?"

At the mention of the name, Ranma had an immediate image of a young girl flash through his mind, and immediately recognized the image as the girl from his dreams. Ranma dropped the phone in shock as the name echoed through his head. "Hi-chan..." With the name came other images... Images of Chibi-Ranma and a small brown-haired girl playing together... Images of that same girl running after Ranma and Genma as they left on their training trip. Images of Genma stopping long enough for her to catch up and telling her to go home. Later images of the same girl training with Chibi-Ranma because Genma refused to train Hikari.

Ranma's memories of the pit were foremost in his mind as he remembered the last time he saw his sister. She was lying on her side, curled into a fetal position and holding her badly bleeding face. The look of fear on her face, as well as the presence of the blood flowing through her fingers, was enough to raise a feeling that Chibi-Ranma had never felt before, but that Ranma knew well. The next few seconds of his memories played out like his dreams, complete with Genma towering over the both of them, then picking them both up and dropping them into a dark place, both physically and mentally.

As the memories continued to burst over him, he found himself remembering being thrown repeatedly into the pit with his sister, each time coming out wanting it to stop, not for himself, but for Hikari. Remembering the pit brought on, not the normal fear of cats, but anger at a level Ranma had seldom felt. That anger was directed towards the one who brought his sister such pain, and Ranma would make sure he paid for it. As he decided this, he felt an answering yowl from deep inside his mind as the walls he had carefully constructed to hold back the neko-ken were dropped. They were both agreed. It was time to punish the panda-man.

A loud growl rang through the hallway as Ranma snapped out of his memories and flexed his fingers a few times. In a deep growl that seemed to vibrate from the foundations of the house, Ranma told Tofu to bring bandages, then hung up the phone. Then there was complete silence as his hands clenched into fists and four claws, glowing red from the rage supporting them, popped into existence an inch from each knuckle of both hands, and spreading to a length of nearly 10 inches.

It took a few minutes for Ranma to locate Genma, but this was only because he was slowly and silently stalking through the house, hunched over as he was, with a set of red glowing claws coming from each hand. Genma, being busy playing go with Soun in the back yard, didn't notice the slow approach of his son, which was hidden from Soun's sight by the fact that Ranma was hunched over and, ironically enough, by Genma's girth. Genma's first clue of his son's presence was the deep animalistic growl that echoed from seemingly all around him. His next, and more painful, clue was the presence of eight deep slashes in an x pattern across his back, flaying the skin almost to the bone. The only thing that saved him from permanently losing his ability to walk, and quite possibly his life, was the extra weight he had built up in his training.

A moment later finds Genma being held up by the massive amount of rapid slashes and blows being rained on his body by a red fury named Ranma. Within a minute, Genma was embedded up-side-down in the wall with his limbs all twisted in the wrong directions. He was also covered from head to toe in bruises, cuts, and lacerations. Ranma was holding him in place by his neck, with his hands at shoulder height. This is when Akane and Nabiki came out of the house, just in time to hear Ranma growl out, "Talk, panda. Now."

At first, Genma looked to be passed out, but a deep growl caused Genma to open his eyes. "What do you want to know, boy?" Genma mumbled out through several broken teeth.

In a voice deeper than before, Ranma ground out, "I want to know what happened to my sisterrr after you so carrrelessly tossed us back into that pit with the cats, and I want to know NOW!" The final word was punctuated by Ranma bringing his claws within a quarter of an inch of the older martial artist's throat.

Genma's eyes went wide as he tried to come up with any lie to save his own skin. But looking in Ranma's eyes, he knew that lying would only make the boy madder and risk his cowardly neck, so he decided the truth would suffice this once. "I dropped that worthless screaming brat off at the local clinic, since she couldn't learn the neko-ken and wouldn't stop crying from her little cut. Her crying was getting annoying, and since I had a bad hangover I decided to get rid… of… her..." He knew instantly that this was the wrong thing to say as Ranma's eyes flared red to match his claws and Ranma drew back his arm to end the life of the worthless panda-man.

Doctor Tofu's calm voice cut through Ranma's rage. "I think you should stop beating on your father so I can have a look at him, and while I'm at it, Ranma, I'll tell you what I learned about your sister from the doctor that contacted me yesterday. You see, Ranma, I got a call from Nerima General hospital since I am listed in your records as your family doctor. Seems that doctor was looking for the family of one Hikari Saotome, since she awoke from a coma about a week ago. The doctors there were confused because she was acting like a cat, but able to communicate her name, and a desire to see her brother. She said his name Ranma..."

As Tofu said this, he walked over to the wall and none-too-gently pulled Genma from the wall and lay him out on the ground. "Would you mind helping me set these limbs, Ranma, since you were the one that broke them?" Tofu looked up to see Ranma was gone from the backyard, leaving only Akane present, and Nabiki just walking back into the yard. "I think he took off as soon as you said where she was," Akane said as she walked forward to help.

-A few moments earlier-

When Doctor Tofu mentioned that Hikari was awake and where she was, Nabiki was sure he would take off like a shot. But something was odd. Ranma was still there, looking a little desperate and a lot confused. 'I'll do my one good deed for the week.' She grabbed Ranma by the arm and lead him to the gate, then pointed towards the hospital. "It's that way, Ranma." She was rewarded with a smile and a hurried, "Thank you, Nabiki." Then he was gone, taking the Rooftop Express at a speed that left him out of sight when she blinked. As she was unlikely to get the answers she wanted from the now missing Ranma, Nabiki decided that she would get answers from the only other available source... Tofu.

By the time Nabiki was back in the back yard, Ranma was coming to a stop in the front lobby of Nerima General with the plan of not leaving until he found Hikari. At first he was unsure of what to do, so he just grabbed the first doctor he saw and asked," Where's my sister?" His immediate answer was, "Why don't you ask at the information desk? It's right over there." Ranma relaxed his grip as he turned to look and his eyes fell on the sign over the desk immediately behind him that said 'Information'.

He glanced back to the doctor and offered an apology, but the doctor just pulled his arm free and continued on his way. Ranma turned back to the desk behind him to find a young female receptionist looking at him with a smile.

"Is there someone I can help you find, sir?"

Ranma's answer was a rushed "Where'smysister? Yougottatellme! Issheokay?"

The young nurse was used to people coming to her and asking all kinds of questions, and at many speeds, but even she could barely keep up with the speed of Ranma's questions. "If you will just slow down and take a breath between words, I will be able to answer your questions. Now, what is her name?"

Something in the way the nurse was speaking got through to Ranma, so he took a second to calm down before answering, "Hikari. Her name is Hikari."

The nurse suddenly took on a businesslike attitude as she typed the name into her console. "Last name?"

"Saotome."

The nurse paused for a second, then instead of continuing her typing, she picked up her phone and dialed an extension. A short hushed conversation later, she hung up and turned back to Ranma. "Doctor Kishiro will be right down. Please take a seat in one of those chairs over there, and I'll call you when she gets here." With that, she pointed to a small bank of plastic chairs in the nearby lobby, then turned back to her terminal and began typing again.

With nothing else to do, Ranma sat down in the chair, hoping that this doctor would hurry. Ten minutes and as many comments of "Please sit down," later, a short, elderly doctor came up to Ranma and introduced herself as Doctor Kishiro. "Ranma, please follow me. I'm sure you have someone you want to see..." A moment later, they were in an elevator heading for the seventh floor. Ranma broke the silence with, "How did you know it was me?"

"Doctor Tofu's description of you was dead on. A young man, wearing red and black Chinese-style clothes, with a pigtail and likely to be unable to sit still for very long." This brought a smile to his lips as he thought about how accurate the doctors description was. Just as he was about to ask more, the door to the elevator opened and they both stepped out into a somewhat darkened hallway.

Doctor Kishiro lead the way down a long hallway and right up to a door before she stopped Ranma and, in a quiet voice said, "Ranma, she's in here, very likely asleep considering the time. It's past normal visiting hours, but it's been a while since you last saw her, so I'll make an exception this one time. Give me just a second to make sure she's presentable, okay?"

Doctor Kishiro could tell that Ranma wanted more than anything to tear that door down in his rush to get to his sister, but after a monumental battle, he got himself under control and nodded. Doctor Kishiro slipped inside, and Ranma couldn't hear anything going on inside. He was just considering opening the door anyway when it opened. Doctor Kishiro told him she was still asleep, then motioned him into a darkened room and to a chair set beside the rooms only bed, which he was quick to sit down in.

His eyes scanned the contents of the room, noticing that there were several machines in the room, with a few of them hooked up to his sister. The low amount of light was enough that his eyes couldn't make out many details at first, but soon enough he could. The first thing he noticed about her was the fact that her hair was nearly the same color as he remembered, just a little bit darker. Then came the patch placed over her left eye. He also didn't remember the mass of scars that marred her cheek and ran from above her hairline, under the eye patch, and down her cheek to her chin. He then noticed that her body had a frail quality to it, like something broken and just now put back together, and rather poorly at that. For a while, all Ranma could do was sit and stare at his sister, trying to take in all the details he could of the sleeping girl before him.

The silence in the room, only broken by the occasional beep from one of the machines, caused Ranma to look around. He noticed that the doctor was gone, leaving him alone with his sister. After a while of Ranma just sitting there watching her, Hikari started to toss and turn in her sleep. She was also making odd noises that sounded kind of like words, but had an odd almost-rumbling to them.

It took him several moments to decipher what she was saying, which turned out to be "Rrrranma". It was about the point that he figured out what she was saying that her tossing suddenly stopped. Hikari's nose twitched a few times, and Ranma could swear she said his name again before she seemed to calm into a much deeper slumber. Ranma stayed in the chair watching her sleep for nearly an hour before his recent exhaustion caused him to drift into a deep sleep.