Author's Notes: I know I have a lot of explaining to do. I'm sorry. But there you have it anyway, so I'm pretty sure all is forgiven… right? Eeek.

Disclaimer: So I've been writing for quite a long time now. I know that, too.

Ooooo

The Diary Of Akane Tendo

Chapter Ten: Dealing with Attention

Tuesday, December 14, English

He threatened to sue. He was fuming when he held out an arm in front of me, saying that I should just watch him this time. He said that even though it wasn't mainly their fault, he just wanted to beat the Furinkan High Hentai Horde because they're so stubborn and annoying. He almost killed Kuno because the poor senior was so loud that he became the main recipient of anger and primary punching bag out of the three hundred guys who welcomed us at the gates of the school.

He snatched the wretched sheet of paper from Avery's hand when he saw a flabbergasted Avery looking at it. When I got one off the wall and made it into a paper airplane, he said I shouldn't touch them because… well, just because I shouldn't.

Ranma abhorred the posters.

"Are you serious?" Avery, whose bump on the head (caused by a previous kata blunder with Ranma) had magically disappeared, asked gravely. "You're not really going to kill the school paper staff, are you?"

My fiancé grunted.

"Look, Ranma, as much as I am appalled by these," I tried to explain, glancing at the walls full of the posters, "It's really not necessary to beat those poor people up. They're the media and that's what they do!"

"Poking and prying and taking pictures of us is fine," Ranma said through gritted teeth, "but it's a different thing when they actually place around school a couple of hundred posters of you and me makin' out and lockin' lips in the dance and then putting a damn caption that says 'Ranma Saotome and Akane Tendo: All about love, but unable to contain their passionate surges of desire!' I swear I'll kill them!"

Looking on both sides of the corridor, Avery patted his back. "Cool down, Ranma. We don't want those people ending up like Kuno. He'll miss classes for about a week, poor thing broke a lot of bones…"

I took Ranma's fist in my hand and tried to ease the tension. "It's just the cold," I said calmly. "You feel cold, don't you Ranma? And it's clouding your judgment. You're not a weapon of mass destruction, okay? You're a high school student about to go inside the classroom because homeroom will start in five minutes."

"I ain't going into that room with those media people in it!"

"Now you're being childish. If it makes you happy, I'll talk to them." My hand rested on the door, ready to slide it open, when Ranma furiously shook his head.

Avery sighed. "Okay. I think a… press conference would do us good. I'll schedule for the school paper to meet us at lunch, and then we talk and settle things out." He passed between Ranma and me and entered the classroom.

Ranma looked at me meaningfully. "It's not like the school knowing about us ain't fine, but…" he began, standing up from leaning on the poster-covered wall just beside the classroom door. "They're violating our privacy, Akane. Those posters just… Aagh, it's like… sharing you with the other guys, and I don't like it. Those perverts can't get you off their perverted brains, you know that! I swore I'd protect you, and they just threw in a hitch, damn media…"

And I have to say, even with the terrible feeling I had because of me and Ranma's making out photos around school, that I was greatly moved. And so I smiled, causing Ranma to tilt his head in askance. "Nothing," I answered breezily. "I was just… touched."

His face softened (background music: delighted girly screams from inside the classroom).

"I don't mind being the talk of the school," I continued. "I'm used to that all that time. But what you said just registered into my brain, and… well, thank you."

He flashed me one of his awkward grins. "Welcome, I guess." He tore a poster from the wall behind him and for the first time looked at it closely. "You and me don't look bad."

I giggled. "Of course not."

"And I look good with my eyes closed. I've never seen myself with my eyes closed. I'm more than good-looking! Wow, and you look pretty too. Your long eyelashes just curl up like that." He looked up from the paper and gazed at me (and so I blushed, just like I always do when he looks at me fixedly). "They're even longer in personal." He looked again at the poster and smiled with his eyebrows raised. "Man, we look really good when we're kissing. And is that your… is that your TONGUE?"

My jaw dropped as I hastily grabbed the sheet from his hand and looked at it. "No, baka, it's not!" I roughly shoved it back to him as he was starting to laugh mischievously.

The door beside me opened slightly and Avery popped his head out, looking paler than the usual. "Press conference at lunchtime," he said hurriedly. "Ranma, I suggest you keep your temper down 'til then. Just bear sitting beside the editor-in-chief the whole morning. Don't strangle him in the middle of Math class. And – aaagh – can you two go inside now? The girls are mobbing me again…"

I slid the door fully open and screamed. "STOP CLAWING ON HIM LIKE THAT! YOU'LL RUIN HIS CLOTHES!" I glared daggers at the girls whose greedy hands were all over Avery, and they retreated to their seats with disgruntled looks. "Kami-sama, look at you. You're a mess." I ran my hand through his unruly brown hair in a futile effort to arrange it.

"That's what happens when both of you leave me. I become vulnerable prey. So don't ever leave me alone by myself, okay? My ears hurt from all the screaming. And my body from all the constriction."

Ranma and I laughed. "Sure."

So there. Finally, both of us entered the room. And now I am really nervous, because Ranma's been shooting murderous looks at his seatmate who's been twitching since Ranma sat down. And Avery just passed me note saying that his backmate's violent trembling is disturbing him a lot.

Ooooo

Tuesday, Lunch

I'm so worried. They've been inside the school paper room with the school paper editorial board and staff for half an hour already. I'm getting cold. I wish I'd brought the fur coat rather than a denim jacket. And I'm really hungry; the three of us haven't eaten lunch yet.

Ugh, what's taking them so long? I should have gone inside that stupid room with them! I wish Ranma didn't ask me to wait here. I wonder–

Ooooo

More Tuesday, Study Period

There is now a long, crooked line on the previous page because I was violently pushed aside by the school paper members (all 21 of them) rushing out of the room. They had a really terrified look on their horrifically pale faces, and I'm sure it wasn't just the cold.

After a few moments, Avery emerged out of the empty room, straightening his beige Hilfiger jacket, his emerald orbs shining with amusement, followed by Ranma who was brushing off invisible dust from his shoulder, which I'm sure was just for a just-casually-survived-battle effect.

"Hey there, pretty thang, would you like to eat lunch with us?" he asked suavely, his blue eyes gleaming with sweet seduction and delight.

I raised an eyebrow. "Pretty thang? Ranma Saotome, when did you start saying pretty thang? That's not even in your vocabulary."

Avery chuckled. "I taught him that. Did it work?"

I smiled sarcastically. "No. But I am very hungry, so I very well may be saying yes to Mr. Suave's invitation. And what exactly happened inside, anyway? Why did they run out of the room like they've seen Cologne naked?"

Ranma laughed, while Avery gave me a questioning look. "Who's Cologne?"

"A walking corpse," my fiancé snorted as the three of us started walking towards the cafeteria. "Mummified a century ago and rose from the dead just recently. Family friend."

It was my turn to laugh. "Okay, as tempting as our talk about wrinkled mummies could be, I really want to know what happened. If you did something physically atrocious to them, then–"

I was cut off because three guys from the school paper stormed past us, hurriedly peeling off the posters from the wall. They prevented having eye contact with the two boys with me.

"What's going on?" I asked suspiciously as we started walking again.

"You really wanna know?" Ranma asked, winking and then putting an arm round my shoulders.

I looked at him, then at Avery, who winked as well.

Okay. Getting weird. Ranma and Avery are becoming the Weasley twins, masters of mischief and secrets shared only between them. Is this Fate's way of telling me that she has power over all things on this planet, and if she willed it she can reduce me to a flummoxed heap of cells?

"What, you threatened to strip yourselves right then and there if they didn't remove all the posters?"

"OUUUCH," they chorused, taking a painful verbal blow to their manhood, male pride, physical abilities and looks.

"If we did, then they should have stayed to gawk at the two most handsome naked men they'll ever see their whole lives," Ranma said, casually colliding fists with Avery in approval as if they've been doing it for years.

I released a lungful of air and rolled my eyes. "Kami, what in the world…"

"We didn't beat them up, don't worry," Avery explained as we entered the cafeteria. "But since you don't really want to know, then we won't tell you anymore. What's on the menu?"

"Stir-fry," Ranma replied, taking his arm off my shoulders and taking a step towards the food being served by the cafeteria lady. "Pork adobo, lechon, dinuguan – man, that looks horrible – and fried… c-carp. There's onion soup as well, warm and anti-cold, but it sorta looks… alien."

And so the three of us got our stir-fry veggies with noodles from the obese but jolly cafeteria lady, looked for a vacant table and sat down, being eyed by all the students around us. Having gotten used to the attention, we ate our food and talked casually, like being eyed by everybody while eating was a completely normal thing. Amused, we occasionally looked at the students neurotically peeling off the posters on one side of the cafeteria.

Until Avery dropped his chopsticks and they fell noisily on the floor, since they're not made out of wood. His right hand just stayed numb in the air as he stared at it, frightened. He silently told us that he couldn't move, and I quickly took his hand in mine and rested it on the table before letting go, as to not leak out information about his condition to the many students watching.

"Is that the…" Ranma started, trailing off.

Avery nodded. "It's not the six-letter C-word, though. The other C-word, the longer one."

"The twelve-letter C-word?" I asked, referring to chemotherapy.

He smiled and nodded. I smiled, too. But Ranma didn't, because he was confused.

If somebody was going numb, nobody would smile about it, right? Wrong. Because if the cause of Avery's sudden numbness was the 12-letter C-word, then that would mean that the chemotherapy was doing its job of killing the evil cancer cells in his body. And that was a good sign – a very good one. If he had said that the numbness was caused by the 6-letter C-word, then the cancer has spread throughout his body.

But he didn't say 6-letter C-word. He said the longer one. And that is why I was all smiles for the rest of the afternoon.

ooooo

Thursday, December 16, my room

Avery visited our home for the second time. Actually, he drove Ranma and me home, and since we had lots of homework to do because of the looming exams, we decided to do it here. At the Tendo residence.

4:30 – Niles the butler graciously refused to enter and said he'll just wait inside the limousine, so we let him be. Daddy and Uncle Genma cheerfully ushered our guest inside the house, where Kasumi was serving tea. The whole family already met Avery in the memorial park and found him very nice, so it was certainly a pretty picture. Everybody was asking him all sorts of questions while he politely answered with interesting answers. I saw Nabiki looking at him in a different way, though, and that made me nudge her toes with mine under the table.

6:00 – Dinnertime. Niles joined in because he said that his stomach was complaining. More conversation. Avery proved to be an excellent conversationalist, and he, Ranma, and I cracked everybody up when we told them about our misadventures at school during the week.

6:40 – Studying and homework. In my room. Ranma and Avery situated themselves comfortably on my bed as I sat on the chair next to my study table. We had a hard time concentrating, actually, because we kept on laughing about things. And then Ranma and Avery started wrestling like seven-year olds on my bed, causing a lot of destructive noise that didn't help. I decided that Ranma was a very bad influence to the once behaved Avery as I recalled that Avery wasn't at all hyperactive when I came to study at his mansion. Finally, Nabiki poked her head in and threatened to do something really… er, bad, and that shut the three of us up. Oh, and we are also going to accompany her in visiting Kuno-sempai in Dr. Tofu's clinic. Ranma didn't guarantee that he would apologize, though.

10:30 – Done doing all homework for tomorrow. We were almost done studying the coverage of the exams, and Ranma and I insisted that we could go on until morning to finally finish everything, but Avery gave a flat-out no and reminded us that we still have school tomorrow, and that we still have the rest of the week and the weekend to study anyway. Everybody else at home seemed to have gone to sleep already, so Avery left a thank-you note to my dad and left (he had a bit of trouble waking a freezing Niles up in the limousine).

Now it's about 11 already; I'm still writing on the study table, and Ranma is comfortably asleep on my bed. He looks so naive and gorgeous. He deserves a full page in… Vogue or Cosmo, or something.

"Sleep… tomboy…" he says hazily. I'm going to have to whack his head in the morning the moment he opens those pretty blue eyes of his.

It's really getting cold, even though the window's closed. Now where am I going to sleep? Stupid pervert. If he thinks I love him that much to share one bed–

Oh Kami, he just moved and left enough space for me, as if on cue. Pervert. If P-chan were here, he'd have scratched all the skin off Ranma and he'd emerge looking like a sunburned… pigtailed guy.

But my bed looks so warm and welcoming… and… beautiful, now that I think of it. Ranma makes my bed look beautiful. And warmer and more welcoming.

I'm so sleepy. Goodnight.

Ooooo

Wednesday, December 22, Avery's limo

EXAMS ARE FINALLY FINISHED! I think I kind of botched World History a little… but I know I did very well on the others. Avery was predictably excellent in everything, and Ranma confessed that he somehow managed, thanks to Avery's voice in his head, lecturing about Khan and the Mongols and Mao Ze Dong and Fidel Castro and the quadratic formula and sentence structures.

Ukyou caught up with us just before dismissal time (and thank heavens she didn't challenge me to a cooking duel for Ranma's love, or maybe hit me on the head with that spatula of hers) and informed us that she'll be coming home to the province for the holidays to meet her family. And I think the gods were smiling upon us when, after taking a very deep breath, she apologized to me for her behavior in the past and said that from then on, she and Ranma will be very good friends.

With a last thankful embrace, Ranma told Ukyou to take care. Avery, Ranma and I bade her goodbye after that. And then the three of us celebrated in the ice cream parlor (you'd think that with all the snow going on, we wouldn't even think about eating anything cold, but apparently we all had an affinity to brain freezes and shivering) with Sayuri, Yuka, Hiroshi and Daisuke – we even let our ice cream melt before drinking it all up in a toast for "No more exams, Hiroshi and Sayuri, Daisuke and Yuka, Ranma and Akane, Avery and his fanclub, and happy holidays!"

Drinking frothy ice cream was a new experience. Quite nice, actually… but Hiroshi choked on his cherry, and after panicking to save his life, we all roared with laughter.

This is going to be the nicest Winter vacation ever. Cheers!

Ooooo

Author's Notes: Eeek (again). Forgive the length. Forgive me for… everything! Tsktsk. Fourth year high school schedules suck. I'll make it up to you guys. I WILL.