Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

Disclaimer part 2: This chapter contains frank discussion about sex as a part of relationships. It is not a lemon or a lime, and is certainly no worse than anything you'd get in a middle school health class, but be forewarned. If you've ever laughed at a dirty joke, you'll be fine.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 4: The Scarlet Path From Heaven

Akane drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly before she spoke again. "Well... she said. "To be honest, I'm here hoping to find peace, like I said." Ranma blinked.

"Peace?" she asked. "Are you sure you're Akane?"

"Jerk," Akane deadpanned, and flicked her on the nose. "I'm thirty-one. Did you really expect that I'd be the same hothead you knew when I was a kid?"

"Well... yeah," Ranma said. "I mean, you've got that anger ki attack."

"It's not exactly anger," Akane grimaced a bit. "At least, not like you're thinking. It's a long story."

"I'm starting to guess that," Ranma said. There was a long silence. Akane eventually met Ranma's gaze, albeit a bit sheepishly.

"Ranma... before I tell you this, I need to say something," she finally said, and keeled next to the table. Ranma sat down across from her. "What you did was wrong... That's not what I meant to say," she shook her head. "What you did hurt me terribly, right or wrong, but what I did afterward was unforgivable." Quickly, Akane leaned forward and prostrated herself in front of the shocked redhead. Her voice a bit muffled by the floor, she continued, "But I want to tell you how sorry I am anyway. You didn't deserve what I did."

"Get up," Ranma said, tugging at her shoulder. "It was a bad day for everyone, and Mousse made everything worse. I understand." Akane rose slowly, almost reluctantly, and met Ranma's gaze again. For some reason that Ranma couldn't understand, she was blushing.

"No, you don't," Akane said. "But you deserve an explanation, at least." She sighed. "But for that I'm going to have to start at the beginning." Ranma nodded. "You see, the day you first showed up at the dojo-"

"Nah, I got all that," Ranma interrupted her. "Pop and your dad were tryin' to make you marry some weirdo you didn't know the first thing about. Of course you were pissed. I was too" She shrugged. "Not a very good way to get things started." Akane shook her head slowly.

"No, you really don't," Akane said. "You see, when Daddy told us about the engagement, I was annoyed, but only kind of angry. It wasn't right for him to spring that sort of thing on us, but even if I got stuck with some boy I didn't really like, I thought that at least it'd be helpful, in a sense."

"Oh, the perv squad!" Ranma grinned.

"Yeah," Akane agreed. "If I was engaged, they'd have to give up on me. It's not right to try to date someone who's got a fiancee. But..." she hesitated. "There was another thing. You see, by the time you showed up, the boys at school had been at it for months, and when a girl just keeps shutting them down like that, rumors start to get around about what kind of person a girl likes. I thought that, worst case, being engaged to a boy would stop that." Ranma nodded, and Akane took another deep breath.

"The rumors..." Akane trailed off and but her lip. "Ranma, do you remember the stuff I told you when I first got here?" she asked. Ranma thought for a moment. "The stuff I told you in the bathroom," she added. Ranma froze, remembering how Akane had scooted across the floor of the bathroom, a towel across his waist, in an effort to hide a particular part of his body.

"Oh," Ranma said, and then, because she decided that it really wasn't enough, added another, "Oh." Akane stared at the floor, her face looking as though it had been sunburned.

"I needed some way to show everyone that I wasn't really interested in girls," she explained. "I knew that I actually was..." she bit her lip. "But how do you tell your best friend that you want to drag her off the the janitor's closet and rip her dress off? And that if her boyfriend came along, that you'd be fine with it? It was... so confusing."

"Yuka?" Ranma asked after Akane didn't continue. She nodded.

"She was the first girl I had a crush on," Akane said. "And it was only a year or two after I got a crush on Dr. Tofu. It was awful." She took in a slow breath. "And I knew what kind of life those girls had to lead. It's not like it used to be, but..." Akane didn't continue. Ranma nodded. After a minute, Akane met Ranma's gaze.

"And then there you were," Akane almost whispered. "I was annoyed that I might get engaged to a boy, but then there was this short redhead with this body..." Akane bit her lower lip again, but smiled this time. "I think I had it bad the moment I met you. It was partly relief, because I was pretty sure that Daddy wouldn't insist on an engagement with another girl, but partly... something else." Akane paused. "And then we sparred, and you dodged that punch by leaning sideways, and I saw you checking me out, and my heart just stopped. I couldn't breathe. When we finished, I saw that you were just as embarrassed as I was, and I knew that it wasn't just me." Ranma blushed, then nodded slowly and smiled a bit.

"So you went off to have your bath, and I thought to myself, Akane, the girl of your naughtiest dreams just showed up, and she likes you back. Are you going to just stand around, or are you going to do something about it?" Akane said. She sighed faintly. "And right then and there, I thought that I was ready for the life, the embarrassment, all of it. I decided that I was going to join you in the furo, and ask you straight up, and if you felt like I thought you felt, I was going to ask you out, and to hell with the consequences.

"And then you saw me," Ranma said. Akane nodded.

"Yeah... I saw you," she agreed. "I walked into the furo, and I took a nice long look at you, and..." She paused. "Ranma, you need to understand that I walked into the furo expecting to see the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, naughty magazines included, and instead I saw the most handsome man I'd ever seen, naughty magazines included. I was so out of it that my brain just shut down. I panicked. I grabbed a rock, and I figured I'd just drown you so I could forget about the whole day. I was terrified that everything was going to suddenly spill out into the open. I..." she closed her eyes, "realized just how far from being ready for a relationship with a girl I really was." Akane paused and, for perhaps the first time in Ranma's life, the redhead had absolutely nothing to say.

"And then I found out about the curse," Akane continued, "and we got engaged, and you turned out to be a loudmouth, but the most casually sexy loudmouth I'd ever seen. You'd walk around topless as a girl with the most incredible chest, and then you'd tease me because mine were smaller. You'd work out shirtless as a guy, and you were just so much better than I was. My dreams turned into a nightmare in an instant, and it was a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from. I was turned on and angry all the time."

"So..." Akane said, sighing again. "I did the only thing I knew how to do. I fought it, tooth and nail, every bit of it. I decided that the only way to make sure that you never found out about how I felt was to make sure that you didn't like me back.. As things got worse between us, I got pretty sure that I'd been wrong about our first fight in the dojo anyway."

Akane stopped here for a while, marshaling her thoughts. Ranma, meanwhile, tried her best to sort through what Akane had told her; in some ways, it contradicted everything that the redhead had ever assumed about Akane, but on the other hand, it made an awful sort of sense. Ranma had always taken the fact that Akane was just an angry person as an article of faith—after all, her anger characterized almost every interaction that the two had ever had. On the other hand, Kuno was the only other boy that Akane had ever directed her anger at in the way that she so frequently had vented it at Ranma. Ryouga was a dear friend. Mousse was a weirdo, but Akane had always treated him decently, even after he had kidnapped and almost cursed her to become a duck. Even Happosai was simply malleted and disposed of, a nuisance, but not a target of real anger. Perhaps most damning, Genma, with an attitude even worse than Ranma's and who was actively trying to get Akane married against her will, hadn't merited the acrimony that Ranma had. She squirmed at the thought. Ranma had gotten the same treatment as had the only other person that Akane had categorically rejected, and even if, as Akane claimed, it was for rather different reasons.

"Akane, you don't hafta keep going," Ranma said eventually. Akane rubbed her forehead and sighed.

"Yeah, I do," she said. "Part of it is that you deserve to hear all this, but part of it is that I need to tell you, for my own good. I've been keeping these feelings stuffed away inside of me for almost half of my life, and nobody can ever really understand what I'm feeling except you." She blushed a bit at this, but charged onward. "Ranma, I need to put this behind me. Everything's been resolved except for you and me, and it's been driving me crazy for years." She sighed. "And you're hiding on a mountain. I think you could probably stand to talk some of this through too." Ranma pulled at her pigtail in embarrassment, and Akane was suddenly struck by how little the redhead had changed in all the long years that they'd been apart. She was older, certainly, more set in her ways, and definitely a better martial artist, but Ranma was still very much the bullheaded, stubborn young man she'd been in her youth. Akane shook her head; the way Ranma had set up the pickle-selling trip to dig through her guest's things was exactly the sort of thing she would've done when she was sixteen. Ranma realized that Akane was staring at her as she tugged on her pigtail and stopped.

"Sorry," Ranma said, sheepishly.

"It's fine," Akane said. "Anyway, then Shampoo showed up, and Ukyou, and everything got even crazier, and I was sure that it'd just been me, you know?" She smiled a bit. "So I kept everything up, and I figured that you'd pick one of the other girls, and that would be that. I went to Ryugenzawa partly hoping that you'd make your choice while I was gone." The silence after this was cavernous, and when Akane spoke again, it was barely a whisper. "It didn't exactly work out that way, did it?" Ranma shook her head.

"Ryugenzawa changed everything," Akane admitted. "For the first time, I knew for sure that you felt something for me, and since you were fighting the engagement just as hard as I was, it was a good bet that what you felt was more than friendship. I was so happy, and excited, but I knew right then and there, when you held my hand while we were leaving the forest, that I was in really big trouble." Ranma fidgeted at this and opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind.

"What?" Akane asked.

"Nothin'." Ranma said, and shook her head. "It can wait 'till you're done."

"Are you sure?" Akane asked.

"Look, you said that this is about you figuring stuff out for yourself, right?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded. "Well, you've probably been thinkin' about what you were gonna say for a long time. I got stuff to say about all this too, but I can wait my turn." Akane blinked in surprise.

"That's... I never would've expected something like that out of you," she admitted. Ranma laughed.

"Hey, if there's one thing you learn from farming, it's patience," she replied. Akane smiled.

"Well, anyway, Ryugenzawa got me thinking," Akane continued. "About you and me. I... I knew that I wanted both of you but..." Akane winced. "You probably don't even remember—you got changed so often those days. A car splashed us, and you changed, of course, but I didn't take my hand back. I didn't want to. We walked through two towns and got a train ticket before I finally did, and the whole while, I didn't care in the least that everybody that saw us probably thought I was a lesbian." Akane sighed. "When we got onto the train, you still weren't talking much, so I just sat there and thought. The more I thought, the more scared I got." Ranma's face screwed up in confusion.

"Who cares? It's just holding hands," Ranma protested. "Nobody's gonna freak over a coupla girls holding hands in public."

"Yeah, it was just holding hands," Akane admitted. "That time." She looked at Ranma directly. "Ranma, I don't do things by half-measures. When I decided to track you down, I spent nine years at it and risked trapping myself in a man's body forever. Every time I got some kind of trick to beat you up, I didn't show you the least bit of mercy." She paused, and laughed. "Hell, you ate my cooking back then. You know how I am."

"Yeah," Ranma agreed, laughing nervously. A faint part of him expected Akane to bash him for doing so, but no blow was forthcoming.

"I realized on the train ride home that if I decided to be with you, for real, that I wouldn't stop at holding hands in public," Akane continued. "And that whatever gender you were wouldn't matter to me. Everybody would know how I felt about you. Both of you." Unable to stay silent, Ranma spoke.

"How did you feel about me?" she asked softly. Akane sighed.

"Honestly? I loved you," Akane admitted, then smiled wryly. "And hated you," she amended. "Usually at the same time, too. When you smiled at me, though... it was like the whole world stopped, and my insides would just melt." Ranma blushed, and suddenly found her thumbs, which she'd begun to twiddle without noticing, to be incredibly interesting. Akane sighed.

"Phoenix Mountain was..." she trailed off. Ranma froze for a moment, then continued to twiddle her thumbs.

"Yeah," she agreed simply.

"That moment when I woke up, afterward," Akane said. "I would have done anything if you would've asked me. It was all sort of fuzzy and distant, but I knew what you'd done for me. How you'd fought Saffron... how you killed him. Then after, the water was going back to Jusenkyo, and I realized that you could be cured. I could have you, even if it wasn't quite the way I'd hoped. Well, that didn't work out either." She laughed sadly to herself and shook her head.

"And then there was the wedding," Akane said. Ranma finally summoned the courage to look at her again.

"Was it just the nanniichuan?" Ranma asked.

"The nanniichuan and you, together," Akane replied. "I wouldn't have agreed to Daddy's plan without the water. It was like Jusenkyo after Saffron. I thought I could finally stop fighting how I felt if you were cured. When Happosai drank it..." she shrugged. "Well, let's just say I was relieved that your other fiancees crashed the party." Akane smiled at Ranma, who returned the gesture briefly.

"Well, then... you left," Akane said, parsing her words with deliberate care.

"Akane, look, I-" Ranma attempted, but Akane held up a hand.

"Ranma, you had a right to choose her," she said sadly. "I had to come to terms with that a long time ago."

"It aint like that!" Ranma cried. Akane laughed bitterly, scorn clear in her tone.

"Whatever," she said, trying not to sneer. "Are you going to let me finish?"

"Hell, no!" Ranma growled, and rose to her feet. "This is bullshit! You never let me explain then, and you're not letting me explain now!"

"Explain what?" Akane roared, leaping up. "Ranma, you slept with Shampoo! No potions, no magic, no nothing! Mousse saw everything, and he told us!"

"It wasn't like that!" Ranma protested.

"Did you sleep with her?" Akane demanded. Ranma didn't answer immediately. "Ranma," she roared again, "did you sleep with her or not?" This time, when Ranma didn't answer her, Akane let the silence stretch until it was uncomfortable.

"Yeah," Ranma finally admitted, her voice soft.

"No magic or anything? You did it of your own free will?" Akane asked. Her voice was calmer, but it wavered just a bit. Ranma bowed her head in shame, then nodded it once.

"There's more to it than that," Ranma added weakly. To her shock, Akane smiled, just a bit.

"And I promise that I'll hear you out this time," Akane said. "Just... let me finish first, please? I don't know if I can do this again." Ranma thought about this for some time before she finally nodded. She flopped back to the floor sullenly, then crossed her arms and legs, waiting. Akane, for a moment, considered relenting, and allowing Ranma a chance to tell her side of the story, a side that Akane desperately wanted to hear. That, however, was the problem; Akane knew that she'd never finish if she let Ranma have her turn now, and Shodai-sensei had told her that she must tell Ranma everything if Akane was to find the peace that she so desperately hoped for. Slowly, Akane sat down.

"So, I'm gone," Ranma prompted. Akane nodded.

"I was so confused," Akane said. "I thought that I never wanted to see you again after you and Shampoo... I was hurt in a way that I'd never been before, and I latched on to Yuka." Akane blushed. "I told you how that ended up last week. After that, it was like a dam burst. I couldn't stop. I just went on and on..." Akane shook her head. "It's strange, you know. I'd tried so hard for so long to keep my bisexuality a secret, but everyone in school knew within six months of Jusendo." Ranma's brow furrowed in confusion.

"I don't get it," she said. "Why'd you stop caring, after you fought so hard?"

"I didn't understand either, not for a long time," Akane said. "It was like it just didn't matter to me anymore, with you gone. Shodai-sensei—I'll get to him in a minute—helped me figure out that what I was trying to do was prove to myself that someone, anyone besides my family, still loved me." Ranma nodded in cautious comprehension after a moment's thought.

"Anyway, that sort of thing kept going when I went to college," Akane continued. "At one point, I realized that I was on my third girlfriend in as many weeks, and it didn't even bother me. I learned a lot about math, physical education, and, umm...," she blushed, "anatomy at college." Ranma, despite the seriousness of the situation, couldn't suppress a laugh.

"Akane," she said, shaking her head. "Look, if you've had as much sex as you say you've had, why are you so embarrassed about it? Shouldn't it be kinda no big deal?" Akane's blush deepened.

"I'm not embarrassed about the sex," Akane said. "I'm embarrassed about the pervert thing."

"The pervert thing?" Ranma asked.

"Think about it for a minute," Akane said. Ranma obliged her.

"What, that you used to call me a perv all the time?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded.

"I feel like such a hypocrite," Akane admitted with a sigh. "With everyone else, it's just sex, and you're right that it starts to lose its importance after a while. With you... I made your life hell for a year because I wanted to hide how I felt about myself. That's just wrong."

"Aww, it's no big deal," Ranma said. "Pop called me worse all the time. You get used to that kind of crap after a while" Akane's jaw dropped a bit in surprise.

"Really?" she asked, amazed.

"Yeah," Ranma said. "I mean, I didn't exactly like it, but it's not like it really bothered me or anything." She shrugged. "Part of the Saotome school is tossin' and taking insults. Hell, we've got kata for it. Don't worry about it." Akane smiled fully, for the first time that night, and felt as though an enormous weight that she'd never noticed she was carrying was lifted from her.

"Well, I knew that my sleeping around was getting out of hand during my senior year at college," Akane continued. "I caught Ryouga changing back from his cursed form in my bathroom for the first time, and my only thought then was 'what's one more guy?' It took me a week to realize it, but I knew then that I had a problem." It was Ranma's turn to be surprised now.

"You mean you caught him red-handed and you didn't slaughter him?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded. "Damn, the only reason that I didn't tell you was because I thought he'd never survive, and it turned out to be no big deal."

"I probably would've killed him if I'd caught him before college," Akane admitted. "After all that I'd been getting into, though, what he did really wasn't that big by comparison."

"Oh?" Ranma asked. Akane laughed.

"If you ask me nicely sometime, maybe I'll show you," Akane grinned, a disturbingly feral twinkle in her eye. Ranma blushed, and Akane couldn't resist continuing. "You probably haven't even heard of some of the stuff I tried in college. It was pretty wild." Ranma squirmed, and Akane couldn't suppress her laughter any longer. She laughed a huge, openhearted belly laugh, the sound of it unlike anything that Ranma had never heard her make.

"Oh, my," Akane managed as she came down off of the laugh. She wiped her eyes a bit and took a breath. "How could I have ever called you a pervert? You're such a prude." Ranma, feeling a bit petulant, stuck her tongue out. "Don't stick it out unless you plan to use it," Akane taunted. The tongue vanished faster than Akane's eyes could track with a muffled 'ulp.' Ranma clapped her hands over her mouth, and Akane laughed again.

"After college, I told Daddy about everything," Akane said after calming down. "He was surprised, but he took it better than I thought he would. He introduced me to Shodai-sensei."

"You keep mentioning this guy," Ranma said. "Who is he?"

"Shodai-sensei runs a little Shaolin monastery near Fukuoka," Akane explained. "Daddy met him when he was out training with Happosai. I..." she paused. "I think he's a sakadagami."

"Wow," Ranma said. Akane nodded.

"It's so hard to explain what Shodai-sensei's like," Akane said. "It's like he's made of serenity, and because he's so still, he can see into all the ripples that you're made of. He saw through me the minute he met me." Akane paused. "Daddy sent me to Shodai-sensei's temple so that he could help me come to terms with myself. Everyone else thought it was just to learn kung fu, but what I spent most of my time doing there was meditating. Shodai-sensei tried to help me cut myself away from my shame and guilt, but I wasn't ready to give it up."

"Guess you're not ready for Nirvana," Ranma panned.

"Not this lifetime," Akane agreed. "Shodai-sensei helped me learn a lot about myself, though. He helped me understand why I had been so afraid of my sexuality, and how tightly I'd tied that to my sense of romantic love, after living with you for so long. It's really no surprise that I slept around so much after you left. I spent a year and a half trying to find serenity in his temple."

"And you're still looking for it?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded.

"The more I meditated, the more we realized that I'd bound myself up with how I felt about you and I," Akane explained. "It went all wrong, and it ended worse, but I'd still loved you more than I'd ever loved anyone else. It was like a hole in my soul, warping everything around it. Shodai-sensei eventually decided that the only way that I'd be able to heal was to find you again and talk my way through my feelings. So... here I am."

"With what? A nine-year gap?" Ranma asked.

"You're not an easy person to find," Akane shrugged. Ranma thought about this for a little bit.

"You must think a lot of this Shodai guy to follow his advice for that long," Ranma said.

"He was right," Akane admitted. "I'd known that you were my problem for months when he told me that I needed to find you. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do." Ranma thought for a while more. It had been almost an hour since they'd returned to the house, and the moon had crossed the sky quickly enough that a sliver of it could now be seen through the window next to the table. Its pale light danced around the outskirts of the warm, yellow light that Ranma's camp lantern shed, and left the room looking like it was cast in gold and silver.

"This is a lot to take in," Ranma finally said, and scratched the underside of her jaw. Akane nodded in sympathy.

"I understand," Akane said. "I had years to figure all of this out. You just got dumped on with it all. If you need time to think about it before you want to talk about Shampoo, it's okay."

"I probably should," Ranma agreed. "Part of me wants to just tell you everything now, but I'd probably just screw it up if I did."

"I can wait," Akane said. "Another day's wait isn't going to make any difference after this long."

"Thanks," Ranma said. Akane patted her on her shoulder and then, after a moment's hesitation, pulled Ranma into an embrace. The redhead only hesitated a moment before returning the gesture.

"Thank you," Akane said softly. "For listening. I can't tell you how much it means to me." Ranma nodded, her hair rustling in Akane's ear.

"Don't worry about it," Ranma grinned, releasing her and leaning back. "I did make ya a promise, though."

"You can wait with Shampoo," Akane repeated.

"And I will," Ranma nodded. "But I made a promise to explain the girl in the picture, and I'm gonna. You're gonna have to wait till tomorrow for the whole story, though." Akane nodded. Ranma took in a deep breath, then sighed mightily.

"Her name's Tao Hua," Ranma said. "She's my daughter."

--A/N--

And now we finally get to the crux of things. As I promised, the girl in the photo's really at the heart of why Ranma left Nerima; if you're patient, you'll get the rest of the history shortly. If you're bothered by the heavy dialogue format of this chapter, I'm sorry. I needed to cover seven years worth of information that was pretty well spread out, and doing that in a series of flashbacks would have been a nightmare. You'll get a nice, long flashback in a chapter or so.

And yes, Tao Hua is an Amazon name. The bastardization that you'd see in the manga would be 'Towel,' though the name has a real meaning in Chinese. See the Translations section below, if you're interested.

I'm finally pushing through the worst of my end-of-semester work; I've got (in addition to my 'fic writing here) over forty pages worth of draft to sort through and revise, but that's light work that I'll be done with fairly shortly. After that, it's just finals and whatnot, then the finish line. Given as I suspect that I'm over halfway through this fic as things now stand, that's probably pretty good progress.

I want to say something now that I noticed after posting the first chapter of this fic, and have been really humbled by. I've gotten over 2,000 unique visitors on this fic so far, which is nice and all, but 's ip tracking feature is approximately the coolest thing ever. I've got fourteen people reading from the Russian Federation, two in Romania, and some brave soul from Brunei Darussalam—literally, people from every continent on earth. If that's not the coolest damn thing ever, I don't know what is.

--Translations--

Tao Hua: Blossom of the Tao. Note: This is Chinese, not Japanese.

-If you don't know what the Tao is, go Google it. It's the central concept of Taoism.

Nirvana: A state of full enlightenment, where one is freed from the cycles of reincarnation.

Sakadagami: A person well down the Buddhist road to enlightenment. Such a person, in the Buddhist tradition, will likely only need to be reborn once more before attaining a state of Nirvana.

Note: This word comes from Pali, the ancient Indian language that most Buddhist texts are written in.