Make Me Feel… Ch 2

Joy.

Disclaimer: I claim the right to diss you. The disclaimer is I.

Oh, and the characters don’t belong to me, nor do most of them situations, names, and curses. But one of them is mine und mine alone. MINE! MY PRECIOUS.

Recap of past chapters: It is only chapter two. Read the first chapter, dolt. After this chapter I guess I will recap at chapter 3.

CHAPTER TWO STARTS HERE FOOLS! IT IS CALLED JOY!

“You… made… me… angry…” I said slowly, and heard the panda faint from disbelief and fright.

“Oh yeah? So what?” Akane obviously didn’t know… but then I had never told her, had I?

“You don’t understand,” I said, “I…”

But the person annoying enough to make a man without emotion angry could not let me finish a sentence.

“What, you gonna hit me? You already beat me at sparring.”

Genma awakens when Soun pours boiling water on him.

“Hot water! It needn’t be that hot, Tendo!” he yelps.

“You have some explaining to do, Genma! Two curses?” Tendo managed to look menacing. I pictured him crying and fainting. The two images made quite a picture together. I didn’t laugh. I hadn’t laughed in eleven years.

“This is… amazing!” I almost yelled, and everyone turned to look at me, see what I meant. “It has been eleven years!”

Genma paled at the mention. He is always scared I will kill him when he runs out of special moves for me to learn, and if I am capable of anger toward him I most surely will. Especially if anger is all I have.

Lucky him, all I feel is toward Akane… and the bringer of this feeling, even a bad one, is welcome. With a start, I realized something else. I was almost happy at feeling something. She had accomplished two things that no one else had done it eleven years.

Pity it had to be through anger. I wonder at the person who could make me feel love…

“You are very lucky this has happened, Tendo Akane, or they would be scraping you off the wall.” I whistled a happy tune as I went up the stair to the guest room where I had left my pack before bathing. Of course, I could only show it, not feel it. I was almost happy, not happy. This day is still quite the day for me.

Of course, I’m sure they hate me now. Pity I can’t say the same for me to them.

I sat on the small futon they had provided and felt the rush of anger, savoring it, feeling the adrenaline, feeling the anger. After eleven years of nothing there, it felt good to have anger again.

It felt good…

I awoke the next morning before even noticing I had fallen asleep. I quickly went and changed to a guy again in the bathroom, before anyone else awoke. I feel more physically comfortable when I am a guy.

No one had disturbed me. Perhaps they were afraid of me. I know the old man was. He was getting much more daring until three weeks ago, when we were still leaving china.

We were walking the Chinese forests with the guide when we came upon the strange village. The guide proudly announced, “Here we are, sirs, Amazon village Joketsuzoku!”

“Ah good! Maybe they have some food.” My father had always been hungry, his whole life. He tried to make me hungry too, but I always managed to eat until my stomach no longer sent me messages of hunger. Something to do with Ki-claws and Neko-Ken.

He ran up to a large table covered in food, and began to stuff his face. I just watched and sighed. We were about to get in trouble, and I would have to get us out. Since this village was ‘amazons’ I decided that being a girl might be a good idea. I poured a glass of water over my head before I was noticed.

Sure enough, the winner of some sort of contest came over to our table and started screaming in Chinese about how we were stealing her first prize.

<If this is the prize>, I said (Author’s NOTE: Yes. Ranma speaks Chinese. He is not so dumb in this version.), <Then if I can beat you, I can have it, right? >

Of course, what I was after was not saving my father but getting the food. We had had little for quite a while.

<Very well, > she said, <I will kick your puny outsider butt. >

We climbed onto the log arena and faced each other. She was armed with rather large maces. No big deal. I toyed with the idea of testing first, but decided the matter was too important and immediately went for a kick to her chin.

She fell off the log in under 2 seconds after the start of the fight. Not bad for me. What was surprising was that after this, she got up, weakly, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

<That is the kiss of death! > Said the guide, frantically, <Run Mr. Customer! She is going to try and hunt you down and kill you! >

<No. She is not. > I grabbed the surprised Amazon by the arm and twisted her around. With a quick and strong kick to the middle of her back, and a loud snapping sound, the threat was over. I still don’t kill if I can avoid it, but paralyzing? No problem.

That brought back the fear of god, not to mention myself, to my old man’s heart. Good. He was getting a little too courageous anyway.

The rest of the amazons, a stunned silence among them, had left us alone.

I smile at the memory… because that’s what I’m supposed to do. I never feel it. I never felt anything until now. Just thinking of Akane makes my blood boil. It is amazing. It is a beautiful thing. You may not think anger is so great, but try going without any emotions for 11 years. You’ll find even disgust is welcome.

I go down the stairs and wait in the kitchen, alone with my thoughts. I think of how my life has been.

I think mostly of martial arts. The last time I fought an opponent almost as good as me was the last time I came near happy… perhaps if I could fight someone to a stalemate I would find that emotion was still within me.

His name was… hmmm… Hibiki. I wonder if he has trained to my point. It has been 8 years since that fight. I don’t think he could keep up. He can’t have learned the Neko-Ken, and it is practically unbeatable. He would have had to be in bad situations or hard training the whole time… he would have had to never go home, as I had, to always be needing food, as I had, to have always been in trouble or in training, as I had… if no one took him on a training trip, he would have had to be lost for eight years.

There is no chance of that, is there?

Then again, I don’t think I waited in the empty lot behind his house for four days for no reason… I hope I find him again sometime. Hope… maybe I still have that.

Maybe.

I hear a noise from upstairs. One of the girls must be awake. Kasumi comes down the stairs and looks at me. “Oh, Ranma, you are awake. I will make some breakfast right away.”

“Thank you,” I say. Politeness is important to people you live with, especially if they are providing you food, or if they could kick you out of where you are living. I have no desire to be sleeping on a bench somewhere; therefore I am nice to Kasumi.

Why do I have to keep reassuring myself I am not feeling something? Or am I testing to see if I am feeling something? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t care. Maybe.

Maybe.

As I wait, my thoughts wander again, this time to a nicer time. Ukyo Kounji was a friend of mine, when I was seven. Not that I enjoyed having her around. But my father told me to be nice to her, and feign happiness. I guess I overdid it. Next thing I know she is in love with me and her dad is offering an okonomiyaki cart in exchange for my engagement to Ukyo.

While we were together, I could tell she was pretty happy. She would give me free food after we fought each day. I made sure never to hurt her, just to win, and I smiled all the time. I would even compliment her from time to time. Too much it seemed. She must have fallen in love with me.

The day we left, my father stole the cart. I sat on top and watched as Ukyo ran after us. “Stop her, boy,” my father had said, and I flicked a rock in her way with my ki claws.

She looked so hurt. She cried as we went out of sight, and I think she hurt her ankle badly.

Akane coming down the stairs stirs me from my thoughts. “Hello,” I say, but she doesn’t acknowledge me. I begin to get angry again. She is incredible that way.

“Breakfast is ready!” Kasumi says from the kitchen. Akane sits down next to me. She scowls, and I scowl back. I am actually feeling the anger this time.

Kasumi serves the food and I begin to eat slowly. I speed up when my father comes down and mentions that I must go to school. Especially that it is in 10 minutes. Don’t wanna be late. Don’t wanna not be late. But other people want me to be on time.

I finish fast and catch Nabiki going out the door. Akane shouts, “Wait up,” after Nabiki, but she responds, “You walk with Ranma, he is your fiancé anyway.”

Good, I needed a guide to school. As Akane grumbles and begins to walk, I jump to the fence and walk there. “Wha- What are you doing?”

“Walking. Same as you.”

“Not the same as me! I am walking like a normal person. How do you walk on a fence anyway?”

“It’s easy. Jump up here and I’ll show you.”

“No way! I’ll fall!”

“Suit yourself.”

She doesn’t talk much after that, but picks up the speed a little, perhaps thinking I might fall off if I run. Silly girl.

We make it to school uneventfully, but when we are within a block of the school, Akane begins to mutter under her breath. Something about hating boys. Lunatic.

When we get to school, however, I realize why. There is a large gang of boys from the school waiting, their poses suggesting they mean to ambush us.

“Stay out of this, Ranma. It is my fight.”

“Hmm. Sure.”

I leap off the fence, and onto the head of the first boy. I take a small hop to the next, land hard, and continue in this way until I am at the door to the school. I wait there to see the fight… and also to admire my handiwork. A straight line of them down the center have been knocked out. Not bad, for me.

Akane clenches a fist when I do this. Oh, my, she is mad. I take a bow, and then straighten to watch what is left of the fight. The boys are too stunned to even try anything until Akane is right next to them, and it is easy for her. Half the boys in the school are down, lying about the grounds in various mangled positions.

Akane stands there, panting. All of a sudden, a red blur streaks through the air towards her. She catches it, and looks at it. It is a rather large rose. Seeing this, Akane mutters, “Not now…”

From behind a tree, a tall boy with a very bad haircut steps out. “Truly, such a boorish lot.”

The entire school stares at him as he begins to spout rather bad poetry, intermixed with Shakespeare references. I jump over next to Akane.

“Last time I looked,” I say, “It is improper for a man to give flowers and love letters to another man’s fiancé.”

“Fi- fiancé?” he stutters, “Who are you to talk so about Akane?”

“I’m-“ I begin, but he cuts me off.

“Ah, but is it not customary to give ones own name first? Very well. I am Tatewaki Kuno, The rising star of the high school fencing world, the Blue Thunder of Furinkan High School!” Thunder crashes in the background.

“Huh, I thought he was calling himself Shooting Star,” says Nabiki from the window of the third floor.

“Hmm,” I continue, “I am Ranma Saotome, of the Anything-Goes school of martial arts, and a master of the Neko-Ken.”

“Fencing indeed,” I add as an afterthought, and spit as punctuation.

“Arg.. I challenge you! Here and now you shall pay for that!”

“Very well.”

I am in a hurry to enter the school, so I decide to end it fast. I gather my ki into the claws of Neko-Ken, and immediately go for the stupid wooden sword he carries. Strangely enough, he is able to resist its immediate destruction with a ki move, but it is shredded a second later.

“I win,” I say a second later.

“You… sorcerer! You have magicked away my sword! You shall pay doubly for this!” He draws another sword from.. somewhere… and charges. I wave my hand and it is gone, along with half his clothing. The front half.

As it begins to rain, I am already in class. Akane sits next to me, staring in disbelief.

“That was amazing, Ranma! You took down Kuno without touching him!”

“Um.. I guess…” I trail off, not really seeing the point to talking.

“Ranma! Akane! No talking in class. Go stand in the hall!” I had forgotten we were in class… Sigh….

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