Cave-In
A Ranma Nibun no Ichi FanFic by Anansi42
Disclaimer - This is a story based on characters created, owned and copyrighted by Takahashi Rumiko, Shogakukan Publishing, VIZ Communications, Kitty Film, Fuji TV and other various parties. I'm only borrowing them for a bit without permission. This story is written expressly for entertainment purposes.
Synopsis - Saotome Ranma and Hibiki Ryoga are trapped in a cave-in caused by their latest fight: unable to move and with nothing to do until a rescue party finds them, the two adversaries can only sit and… talk.
For those who have forgotten their Fodor's Guide to Nerima and Assorted Strangeness let me mention that both our players have been cursed at a Chinese training ground called Jusenkyo and now when splashed with cold water they change into a teenage girl and a piglet. Hot water gives a respite to the curse but only until more cold water comes along.
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"Hey! Wake up!"
"Huh?"
"You passed out again. Try to stay awake."
"Okay. Try talking, maybe that'll help."
"Sounds like they're getting closer."
"That isn't digging. That's water dripping on the rocks. I just wish we had some light."
"Even if we had the wood, we couldn't start a fire. Our air would run out."
"I suppose so. It's a shame that you can't form a ki charge, that might give enough light."
"My arms are pinned, so it wouldn't work anyway. Why aren't you making one?"
"I'm trying but the room needs to stop spinning first. I took one too many rocks to the head to focus properly."
"This is all your fault, you know."
Oh, Kami-sama, not again! Even concussed I'm not as loopy as you. "You keep saying that, but exactly what is supposed to be my fault this time?"
"Everything! But most recently our being stuck in here."
"You're telling me you wanted to fight in the rain?"
"What?"
"I know you get really focused on your revenge - sorry, I mean your REVENGE - but didn't you bother to check today's weather?"
"I never check the forecast. Besides, it's always wrong."
"That's only because you never stick around long enough for local weather to apply, but what keeps you from just looking up once in a while? Those storm clouds were as plain as day!"
"I was preoccupied."
"You mean obsessed."
"Because everything wrong in my life is your fault!"
"Hey! We're not starting that again! Besides, all I did was keep us from getting soaked and changed; you're the idiot who got us stuck in here when you broke the cave."
"And how did I break a cave?"
"With that stupid, triple-damned, Bakusai Tenketsu 'breaking-point' technique of yours, numb-skull! Even you should have clued in by now that it doesn't work on people, so why do you keep using it?"
"Because it does work. The flying rock shrapnel hurts you much worse than me."
"'Breaking-point' technique, hah! More like a 'broken-record' technique if you ask me, the way you use it all the time. I'm almost tempted to ask the old ghoul to teach you something useful for a change."
"Oh sure, run to a woman for help again!"
"And just what is that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, please! You're surrounded by them all the time! They're always training you or feeding you or sparring with you and always, ALWAYS fawning over you. I don't think you manage to do one thing in the day without help from at least one of them.
"You've got a real weird idea of 'help' if you think that's what they're doing. Hmm, I can see the ghoul for the training part but that's only a side effect of her schemes to get me hitched to Shampoo. The feeding part would be Ucchan and Shampoo's department. The fawning is something I really could do without from any of them. I won't fight girls, so I don't get the sparring part."
"What would you call Akane?"
"A kawaiikune tomboy with a mallet fixation! That isn't sparring, it's cruel and unusual punishment!"
"Which I'm sure you deserve!"
"You're as bad as she is. Is there anyone who'll look at things from my side, or at least rationally, before jumping to the worst possible conclusions?"
"If you're that fed up with it why don't you quit bothering her and take up with one of your other women?"
"They're not my women you pig-headed dolt! They're headaches caused by my idiot of a father!" Damned arranged marriages
"So he set you up with Shampoo?"
"Well… not directly, but it was his fault that I wound up fighting her in that stupid Amazon tournament and had her chase me here." Greedy panda, eating their first prize
"And Kodachi?"
"Hell's florist? Not even my father would be stupid enough to set someone up with that psycho!" Brrr
"But you expect me to believe that he'd be stupid enough to set up marriages between you and three different families?"
"No, he was stupid enough to do that with at least three different families! I halfway expect a fiancée to show up every other week."
"And with all those options you refuse to make a choice, or maybe you're just afraid to make one?"
"Care to explain that?"
"It's simple, you won't honor any of the promises your father made and you're scared to make a choice of your own. You're an honorless coward."
"I'd pound you senseless for that but I don't think it would make a difference. And before you throw words like 'coward' and 'honorless' around, just who is it that's been sneaking off to sleep in Akane's bed?"
"She loves me!" I hope
"She loves her pet! If you had any courage at all you'd tell her the truth about P-chan and if you had any honor you wouldn't need me to tell you this!"
"You don't understand what I've gone through. Thanks to you, I have seen hell!"
"How did you manage to even find the place?"
"What's that?"
"Please! You couldn't find your own backside with both hands and a flashlight! Or is that my fault too?"
"Maybe it is!"
"Incredible. That sounds even more stupid than your usual. Well?"
"Well what?"
"When will you do the honorable thing and tell her the truth? When are you going to fess up, P-chan?"
"I told you never to call me that!"
"Whatever you say, Charlotte."
"RAARGH!"
"Careful! You'll cause another cave in!"
-rumble/splash-
"Ranma?"
"Yeah?" Ryoga no baka
"Sorry about the water. Can you at least free yourself now?"
"Oof! no. Now my hips are pinned instead of just my foot. Did the rocks shift enough for you to move?"
"…No, I'm even more stuck than before."
"At least you didn't get splashed, so we can still talk; and you shouldn't be able to cause more trouble stuck like that."
"Well, I'm sorry that my cursed form is such a problem for you."
"It isn't that. In fact you're usually a little easier to deal with like that; but I'd rather not try to talk with someone whose only argument is 'bwee'."
"When we get out of this I'm going to make you pay for these humiliations!"
"You're welcome to keep trying; but don't make me lose my train of thought. So when will you tell her?"
"When the time is right."
"You mean when she finds out on her own and you have no choice?"
"You planning on telling her?"
"Not that I don't want to, but I made a promise to spare your dignity: I won't tell her about your curse." Though if I can expose P-chan to Akane some other way…
"That promise is the least you can do for me. This curse is your fault."
"Is it my fault that you went to China? Is it my fault you stumbled off the cliff?"
"Yes! It's because you ran out on our duel!"
"Aargh! How many times do I have to tell you this? I waited for you behind your own house for THREE DAYS!! I would have kept waiting for you if my idiot father hadn't dragged me off on his sick idea of a 'training' trip."
"You should have told him about the duel."
"I DID tell him about the duel. The problem is that he won't listen to anyone unless he's beaten near unconscious or scared senseless and even then he'll be stubborn. While we're on the subject of being stubborn, why did you follow me anyway? The training trip wouldn't have lasted forever, so why didn't you wait for me to come back?"
"My honor was at stake."
"I don't buy that. You could have told everyone that I ran out and was a coward or you could have just trained and waited for me to come back. Why did you follow me?"
mumble mumble
"What?"
"I missed my friend, alright? In school you were the only one who didn't pity me or laugh at me for always getting lost. You actually helped me, getting me to school, home, and around town. The bread thing was annoying but I really just wanted to test myself against you, even then you were good in martial arts. Then you broke your promise."
"My idiot father broke my promise when he carted me off!"
"Still, you betrayed my trust when you left. I was abandoned again. When I caught up with you at Jusenkyo only to be knocked into the springs I was devastated. When I learned it was you who had knocked me in I felt betrayed again! The person I thought was my friend had abandoned me to a fate worse than death."
"Not to spoil your pity party, but I think I got the worse curse."
"At least people don't treat you like dinner!"
"That's better than being thought of as 'dessert'!"
"You… have a point. Maybe your curse is worse."
"Thank you… I think. If it's any comfort I thought of you as a friend, too. I still would if you didn't try to kill me or humiliate me every time we met."
"You earned that by breaking your promise."
"I keep my promises!"
"Riiight, you keep your promises. So what about the fiancées?"
"Do you even listen when I talk? I already told you that those are Pop's fault. He was always engaging me or even selling me for food or to make some quick yen or whenever he'd get wasted with his old drinking buddies, then he turns around and says that its my duty to uphold 'family honor'."
"Respecting your parents is important."
"Not when it comes to Genma-baka! My old man wouldn't know honor if it bit him right in his fuzzy panda butt!"
"What about Ukyo?"
"Ucchan was the only friend I made while on the road and back then I thought she was a guy. I didn't even know she was a girl until after meeting her in Nerima. I look at her now and only see a friend: I just can't think of her as a fiancée, it would be like being engaged to my sister."
"What about Shampoo?"
"That glomp-happy Amazon? She's only after me because I knocked her out by accident and that damned Amazon law says she has to marry me!"
"'Has to'? It doesn't look forced to me."
"You're not on my side of the glomp. I don't want to be forced into marriage, not by my idiot Pop or by someone else's rules."
"What about Kodachi?"
"Refusing her is just good sense coupled with a strong survival instinct."
"And Akane? She's one of the arranged fiancées."
"She's… different."
"Because she mallets you across town on a regular basis?"
"No… well, maybe that's part of it… but at least she doesn't force herself on me. When I got to town she was the first person I met in Nerima that was nice to me. I hadn't realized until then that I hadn't had any real friends since before the training trip, except Ucchan, and how much I missed having one."
"I suppose I can understand that. She was the first person who liked me in my cursed form."
"Remember, she doesn't know that it's you. What'll you do when she discovers your secret?"
"Deal with it then, I guess. I love her."
"Don't take this too hard, but she doesn't love you. She's fond of P-chan but is that really love? The love you're after?"
"And what about you? You say that you missed having a real friend but I've heard her crying herself to sleep whenever you pull one of your classic bonehead plays or get caught having a fling with one of your other fiancées and hurt her feelings. Some friend you are."
"I hate myself every time it happens; but she could take time to see what's happening instead of jumping to conclusions. I'd explain things to her but I always manage to make things worse instead of better when I try."
"So why do you keep trying?"
"In between the times when she mistakes what's going on or when I'm actually being an idiot - and NO, that's not as often as you think! - she'll sometimes look at me in a certain way and smile. When she does that everything just feels right. At those times I even want to know if we can be more than friends"
"And is that love?"
-Sigh- "I don't know if it is or if it isn't. Kami-sama knows I didn't see many examples of love growing up with Pop. I just know I want to make her happy."
"All you'll do is hurt her."
"And what you're doing now won't?"
"Doesn't really matter while we're stuck in here anyway."
"And whose fault is that?"
"It's all your fault!"
Oh, Kami-sama, not again…
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Author's Rant (March 14, 2004)
I'm including this note as a response to some of the reviews for 'Cave In', especially those that seemed unhappy or miffed that this was just a scene with no setup or conclusion. That's all that it was intended to be: no character-altering changes, no earth-shattering surprises, just a quick few pages of dialogue that went to great pains to not solve or change anything. As I told one reviewer in an e-mail, I may choose to incorporate this scene in a future fanfic; but only if it is appropriate to that story: 'Cave In' is a scene that I feel can stand alone.
If you're reading this fic for the first time, thank you for your interest! If you're reading this story for the twentieth time, seek help. I'm biased, but even I don't think that it's that good. I do hope that you'll leave a review telling me what you think, and that you'll have a look at and review the other stories I've written. I don't write strictly for the reviews (and the authors that put out something like 'I won't write any more unless I get another twelve reviews' just annoy the living hell out of me) but I do like to know what people think: it's the only way I can improve.
When I wrote this particular fanfic (boring meetings can do so much to stimulate a healthy imagination) I had been thinking about a similar story I had read years ago, where two characters were trapped and had to talk about their problems but didn't come to any resolution about them. The fact that the author of that story (I sure wish I could remember his name) didn't try to solve the characters' problems impressed me to no end, and when I replayed that story again in my mind (like I said, boredom does wonders for the imagination) I suddenly put Ranma and Ryoga into the picture. I had just finished watching the first two seasons of Ranma ½ as well as the OAVs and, for some reason, the unending argument/grudge-match between two former friends seemed be the perfect setting for a similar story. For the first time in years, I put pen to paper and began to write what was playing through my head.
Needless to say, I left everyone highly impressed with my 'note-taking' for the day. Poor shmucks, if anything interesting had been said in the meeting I wouldn't have written this story; but being there wasn't for a grade, so who cares? It was a choice between writing feverishly or letting my head hit the table when I passed out from boredom, and that would have left a mark not to mention that the noise would have woken the other poor victims.
Let this be a warning to others: business meetings are a horse tranquilizer if the only thing you have to do is sit and listen. Classes are nothing compared to a business meeting: classroom boredom is merely amateur level ennui; once you hit the workplace you've entered the professional leagues. If you ever have to present at a business meeting my advice to you is to BE INTERESTING. I don't care if you have to go through your charts dressed in a clown outfit but you'd better do something to keep your audience riveted because I guarantee that they are not there because they want to be: they're probably there for the food. I'm there for the coffee, anything to help me stay awake; hell, I'd do amphetamines if it were legal…
-deep, cleansing breath-
Anyway, I don't know if I would have posted this story or not (I had only discovered FanFiction.net a few months before and was becoming an avid reader) but someone wondered what I was writing when I was polishing up the basics for 'Cave In' during lunch after the meeting. That in itself was odd, not that someone would talk to me during lunch but that I was writing something instead of eating with a gusto that could rival certain Neriman martial artists. She asked to see what I was writing when I was done and, since I knew that she also liked anime, I figured I could do so without getting funny looks from her later on.
To my surprise, she liked it. The words for the story had flowed onto the page (first time that ever happened) and they actually met with approval. I decided to submit the story and the rest was… well, not quite history but the start of a new and interesting hobby at least.
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