Ranma felt trapped in the fog that was his consciousness, feeling as if he had missed something very important. There was something he was supposed to be doing right now, something not terribly significant to him other than...

What? What was it?

Akane's guilt-ridden face flashed in his mind, reminding him of how she had blamed herself for Mousse's plight the night before. But... why did the sight of her heart-shaped face suddenly make him feel terribly irritated? Why didn't her face settle him like it normally did?

Why did it almost make him angry, really and truly mad at the girl in question?

"Akane hovering," a familiar, snarky voice stated baldly. "Discussion with Mousse not Akane's business."

"You didn't know anything, did you?" Akane sighed, barely contained fury clear in her voice. "Where in the world did you think he was?"

"Mousse sometimes... not come home," Shampoo admitted slowly, the volume of her voice suddenly low.

"I wonder why," Akane harrumphed. At the thought of the young Amazon and his fiancée together, Ranma struggled through the fog that surrounded him again, only expecting their interaction to turn ugly.

"Akane-chan, he's waking," Doctor Tofu's voice warned suddenly.

"Ahh." Despite his intense battle to reach full consciousness, Ranma could tell that Akane sounded somewhat... disconcerted by the doctor's proclamation. "If he's hurt any more, I'll fully hold you responsible."

Shampoo merely harrumphed at Akane's statement but made no further retort.

It was then that Ranma opened his eyes, seeing his fiancée's guilty brown eyes hanging above him, and he suddenly remembered the reason he should be angry. "You drugged me! You went without me!" He frowned at him, pinning her form with his blue eyes. "You promised," he added harshly.

If anything, the level of guilt her face showed only increased, very nearly exponentially. After a brief moment, her brow furrowed into an expression of determination and she just stated, "It was necessary."

Ranma scoffed immediately. "I doubt that," he muttered. "You're an idiot if you believe that," he declared, raising his voice just loud enough to reach the ears of Akane and the doctor beside him. Though he didn't miss the way her fists clenched dangerously at her side, he couldn't stop himself from continuing. "You're not strong enough to fight them, you know that. I'm supposed to protect you."

"Did you use the right words?" Tofu asked, his gentle voice slicing neatly through Ranma's accusations.

Because he had witnessed it before, the martial artist was not surprised to find that the doctor's question had the uncanny ability to calm Akane. The tension flowed out of her shoulders like water and her hands relaxed into open palms. "I did," she answered. She narrowed her eyes for a moment at Ranma. "His banishment has been reversed."

Even though he was about to retort, likely with words that not even Ranma himself could guess he was about to use, they were all distracted by the sound of a soft groan. With one look over Akane's shoulder, it was obvious that Mousse was waking up. "Akane, can you fetch the spirometer and the topical analgesic for me?" Tofu asked kindly.

She glanced around, obviously searching for items that Ranma certainly would not have been able to identify. "In your office?" she asked after a moment.

The doctor nodded and the dark-haired teenager could only watch helplessly as she turned sharply on her heel and left the examination room. "But... but I wasn't finished..."

"Ranma, look at me." When he turned to look at the doctor, Tofu used two fingers to put a medium amount of pressure on a point near the high center of his forehead. Almost immediately, he felt a cooling pressure wrap around the crown of his head, a sensation that had the additional effect of distraction.

"What did you just do?"

"You need to cool your head," the doctor answered instantly, the words meaningful even though his tone never strayed from professional friendliness. "You have to know Akane well enough by now to know that she wouldn't do something that would anger us both without a good reason."

"Anger... us... both?" Ranma echoed, his tone full of uncertainty. It took him a long moment but then he understood fully. "She didn't have your permission, I guess?"

"I didn't," Akane answered crisply, her clear words slicing through their conversation. Handing a small plastic device and a glass jar to the doctor, she grabbed his wrist, a movement which Ranma followed by getting to his feet. While there were times that he would fight against her, now did not seem like a good time to do so.

"Where are we going?" He had gentled his voice immensely, realizing suddenly that he could question her more extensively out of the earshot of the others.

"Home," she said immediately, the tone of her word somewhat curt. Still, because he was watching, he clearly saw her toss a significant glance in Mousse's direction, to which the Chinese boy answered with a very brief nod.

Good, he thought to himself. He had to admit to himself that he hoped to play on the guilt that she obviously felt about what she had done, not only leaving him behind but drugging him in order to do so. Ranma knew something had happened, something he didn't quite understand, and he needed to know.

As soon as they left the clinic, he began the interrogation with a single question. "Why did you drug me?"

"It was necessary," she told him, repeating verbatim the reason she'd given him previously. Just the words themselves made him angrier than he had ever felt in his life, leaving him floundering in helpless waves of frustration and agitation.

"What could that possibly mean?" he asked purposefully through clenched teeth, doing as much as he was able to rein in his emotions.

Akane sighed and stopped their ongoing path back to the Tendo compound, her brown eyes staring at him with the same intensity that always seemed to unnerve him. "I'm sure you've noticed that fighting doesn't really do anything to resolve the situation – well, any situation – with the Amazons?"

Ranma just nodded, having to concede the point to his fiancée. It was certain that in all his encounters with the Amazons, fighting had done little more than strengthen their resolve to continue the chase. Even in his most retrospective moments, he knew that the fact that he had been taught so many Amazon techniques meant something significant.

When he focused on Akane again, she continued. "Reversing Mousse's banishment couldn't be left to chance. I just thought that where you seemed to have failed with fists, I might succeed with words. If you were there, there would have been a fight, no doubt about it." Her point made, she continued her trek home, some anger of her own still clear in the lines of her body.

Despite all of that being valid points, Ranma thought he knew what it was she refused to say. The truth was that Mousse was her friend, not his. She had worried that Ranma would not fight as hard as he could for the Chinese boy, someone who had always posed some sort of rivalry for the pigtailed boy. And maybe she was right; even as little as a few days ago, he had argued with him over honor and responsibility. In what way would Akane have ever believed that he cared for and would fight for Mousse?

"Akane? I'm gonna go for a walk."

At that, she stopped, twisting her upper body to look at him, concern flooding her chocolate eyes. It was that expression that made him aware that his anger had dissipated in the face of the fact that maybe she had done the right thing by taking him out of the equation. "Are you sure?"

He nodded decisively. Giving him a wry smile, she took two long strides forward and left him with a kiss on the cheek. Before he could even begin to react, she was walking away again, her regular bounce back in her step.

Smiling, proud that they had managed to defuse their respective anger without resorting to violence or needless insults, he began walking in the other direction, letting his mind wander and untangle the knots of his emotions.

As such, he never saw the blow coming and never had the chance to fight the darkness that pulled him under for a second time that day. But when he woke up, he would know who to blame for the blossoming bruise in the shape of the top of a knobby cane.

"You can't do this!" Mousse declared, his voice outraged but his physical reaction still cowing from years of ingrained habit.

The look that Cologne shot at Mousse made him cringe further, knowing by now that Akane had invoked the Right of the Matriarch to restore his standing within the Amazon village. In the mere hour that he had returned to the Nekohanten from Tofu's clinic, he also knew that his friend had admitted to some truly awful concessions, considering that the Amazons had now gotten desperate. They had finally resorted to unsportsmanlike behavior, reduced to kidnapping the boy and probably keeping him drugged throughout the trip back to China.

He took a deep breath, trying to instill some level of calm in order to settle his nerves. "I didn't realize the deadline was already so close," he stated, trying his best to keep his voice even. In order to achieve that, he decided to inject derision into his tone, something that was not all that difficult, considering his real feelings concerning this entire situation.

The elderly Amazon merely snorted, though his recent clarity revealed to him that there was something a little bit forced about the sound. "There are a great many things you do not know, Mousse, despite what knowledge you may have deemed fit to offer a female that is neither family nor clan." He could hear her outrage in the simple statement and confirmed his suspicion that Akane had succeeded in striking a nerve earlier that day, despite his own opinion that she had given too much in exchange for ensuring he could see his mother once more even if he decided to leave the Amazons.

But he could never forget those words – you are dead to your mother and her mothers before her – or the fact that they had been uttered in a moment of reactionary anger. Because he had dared to "rise above his station", because Akane had encouraged him to question his reality and to see the truth of the answers he was given, he had enraged Cologne, inviting her wrath and the full weight of her authority.

Now, though, seeing the wrongness of what she was doing now, of the reality that she was forcing upon Ranma without his consent or knowledge, he had to wonder about the other matriarchs in the village. Would they have gone to these lengths? Even before now, the oldest woman in their village had tormented the martial artist, challenging him at the best times and very nearly crippling him at the worst. Would they have approved these actions? Would they have encouraged Cologne to go even further than she had now, all for the sake of new blood?

If that was so, Mousse realized he could no longer be a part of it, even if that meant that he would have to lose the love of his life to his own convictions.

Sighing, knowing that he couldn't dissuade them with words and that his likelihood of defeating them in battle was slim to none, he turned away, forced to take a step back when he came face-to-face with Shampoo. For a moment, his firm stand faltered at the sight of her beautiful face, a beauty he could now see so much more clearly with his new corrective lenses.

"Mousse, this must happen. Ranma must be husband. It is law," she murmured, some sincerity in her face gentling its normally determined lines. "Mousse must understand."

Then, as if someone splashed him with a bucket of cold water, he felt his reality reassert itself, his conviction pushing through the pink haze of love. He could see Akane's reaction – her sadness, her fury, and... her understanding. While it was obvious that their elder believed that the girl had learned Amazon knowledge merely to achieve an advantage over them, Mousse knew better, knew that her compassion and curiosity were the only driving factors behind now knowing the Chinese village so well.

"No, I do not," he stated, glad that his feelings made his voice far harsher than normal. "This is wrong, worse than anything either of you has done before, and I cannot condone it." With that said, he took long strides out of the restaurant, eager to be gone before either of them could respond to his declaration.

He had someone to tell about this unfortunate event and he hoped that they could figure out some way to fix it together.

Akane was sitting very still in the dojo when Mousse arrived, her brown eyes conveying to him that she somehow already knew what he had come to tell her. "How?" he whispered, watching as she slowly folded herself out of the lotus position in which she had been sitting.

"He skipped lunch," she answered simply. Standing up now, she moved to a far corner of the still-broken dojo, where the Chinese male could now see sat a medium-sized canvas pack. "Other than that, Cologne was too relieved when I made those so-called 'concessions'," she added, using her fingers to air-quote the word.

"Were they not concessions?" Mousse asked, confusion thrumming through his voice.

"Not as much as she thinks," she told him, her lips quirking into a half-smile. "But I didn't realize the deadline was so close."

"Neither did... I..." At that, Mousse was distracted by the canvas pack through which Akane was now rummaging. The confusion only increased further when her hand emerged with what looked like two plane tickets. "Are we going somewhere, Akane?" he asked, now dreading the answer that he knew would follow.

She tilted her head at him. "Yeah. China," she told him, her voice making it obvious that she found his question to be particularly idiotic.

At that admission, Mousse could feel himself immediately backpedal, though some distant corner of his mind could see the point of this plan (whatever the plan happened to be). "Why would you want to go back there?" Obviously, the answer had to do with the Amazons, so he didn't even have to look at her to know the answer to his largely rhetorical question. But then he remembered suddenly their most recent trip to China and the trauma from which Akane still suffered because of it. "Akane, there has to be another way."

When his fervor transitioned to real concern, the lines of Akane's face gentled and she gave him a real and genuine smile. "There is no other way," she assured him. "You are the one that told me that when the time came, they would do something unforgivable. With the way things have been going, kidnapping and drugging him seems like an adequate last resort." She sighed, closing her eyes for a long moment and then holding up the tickets. "But because of that, we can get to China before them."

He frowned at her, his eyes darting uncertainly between the tickets and her face. "How do you figure?"

"Ranma metabolizes things very quickly, even for a martial artist. Part of it is being a teenage boy but another part is his childhood and the trials Cologne has put him through since her arrival." She stopped, smirking as she let silence stretch between them for a moment, perhaps hoping that he would understand fully on his own. "She'll have to have constant access to him to keep him drugged. That's not really an option on an airplane, so their only other option would be to travel by ship. Additionally, dragging an unconscious Ranma through mainland China will slow them down even more. Even without luck, we should be there a few days before them."

"But what about the promises you made?" Mousse asked, knowing how much weight words could carry in their culture. "Cologne said you promised not to interfere."

"I promised not to interfere with them and I have no plan to interfere with Cologne or Shampoo," Akane asserted. "I am not seeking to interfere with their plans. I will not even interfere with them once they've returned to the village."

"Then what do you plan to do?" Mousse asked, needing to know how Akane planned to fix this.

"I plan to address the matriarchs of the village. I want to ask if they will absorb my clan, to give me Amazon rank. Most of all, I hope to show them that there is no way they will ever control Ranma."