TCoW Chapter 1

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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

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"Huh, well that's an interesting kind of curse."

Ranma blinked, a little bit confused. "Wha-?" He glanced down, finding the tiny little blonde girl who'd spoken. "What are you talking about?"

"That curse of yours." The girl tilted her head, lips drifting into a lazy kind of smirk. "What did you do? Peep on a witch in the bath?"

"No!" Ranma glared at her. "I fell into Jusenkyo!"

The girl blinked. "Really?" She stared at him for a long moment, before making an annoyed noise. "Okay, I give up. 'Twisted wish'-curse, or 'mean lesson of humility'-curse?"

"Neither!" Ranma continued to glare at the weird girl. "We were just there to train martial-arts!"

"No curse is without reason, boy." The girl frowned at him, her eyes disturbingly sharp. "But if it's martial-arts... Let me guess, personal rule of 'no hitting girls'?"

Ranma didn't answer, but the girl simply made a disgusted kind of face anyway, as if she saw straight through him.

"Lesson of humility it is." The girl glanced him over once more, before frowning thoughtfully. "Then again... might've been a chance at both." She shrugged, dismissing the subject, and then turned to walk away.

"Oi!" Ranma set off after her. "What the hell was that about, you damn midget?!"

The girl froze, head coming around with exaggerated slowness, eyes like icicles. "What did you call me, brat?"

It was the start of a great friendship.

XXX

In hindsight, if Ranma had known that the weird little blonde girl was in fact an ancient evil vampire who'd been imprisoned in the school that he was visiting for the yearly Mahora Festival, he probably wouldn't have been anywhere near as willing to pick a fight with her.

He didn't regret picking the fight that he had, it'd been interesting to see how good she was with Aikido, and she wasn't nearly as scary as she probably should be. She'd killed people, lots of people even, she was apparently the kind of legendary figure that was used to scare small children into bed, but she wasn't-...

Honestly, between which person made him more uncomfortable to be in the same room as, Evangeline had absolutely nothing on any member of the Kuno-family. Or even Akane on a bad day.

Also, her reasoning behind that final 'both' options in regards to why he'd ended up cursed to turn into a girl in particular – rather than some kind of weird animal – was 'hormones'. Which was insulting, and Ranma was absolutely not going to have someone going around thinking that he was some kind of pervert who 'wanted into a girl's pants so badly that they were turned into a girl to make it easier'.

So he didn't regret going after her the way he had. It'd worked out okay anyway, so it wasn't like there was much point thinking about it.

Evangeline had been imprisoned in the school nearly seven years ago, and had been forced to survive through middle school – despite having lived for centuries at this point – ever since. The man who'd imprisoned her had originally promised to come and get her out of it, once she graduated like a 'normal young girl' – making it a merciful kind of childhood-recreation idea – but had then gone off and gotten himself killed somewhere a few years back.

So now she was stuck. Unless she wanted to try her luck with draining basically the entire population of Mahora for blood, which was apparently a ludicrous kind of thing to even consider attempting without the powers that had been sealed away with her imprisonment.

Ranma supposed that he should be a lot more worried about someone talking about massacring people in such a casual way, but it came across more as her whining about things that she wasn't going to do anyway. She wasn't... exactly a nice person, from what Ranma had seen himself, and from what she'd told him bluntly to his face. But she was... not really a bad person either, if Ranma was to explain it.

She'd killed people, because they kept attacking her. Ranma could kind of relate, he hadn't actually killed anyone, but if he hadn't been as highly trained as he was, he probably would've gotten pretty desperate at some point in between all of those crazy ambushes. Possibly desperate enough to resort to lethal force – especially when it was being used against him – and once he'd done it once, it probably would've become pretty easy to justify continuing to do it.

From Evangeline's rants surrounding the subject, it sounded like the man who'd ended up imprisoning her in the end had been the only person who'd been nice to her for... basically centuries. So she'd been very miffed about the imprisonment originally, hurt and confused but also believing that he truly would come back for her, which she was now endlessly bitter about.

It was weird how easily that kind of unpleasant back-story came out, considering how Evangeline didn't seem like the kind of person who'd really tell people much of anything at all about her personal feelings. But then, with the way they'd argued about the specifics of Jusenkyo landing him with a female-curse instead of an animal-curse like basically everyone else, a lot of personal stuff had probably spilled out from both sides of the argument.

Ranma liked girls not boys, he didn't have any particular interests in having kids, he hadn't messed around with his girl-form at all, he'd never really thought about girls until the whole fiancee-situation had reared its ugly head, and girls were supposed to be protected. Also, his father was a glutton, not a pervert, and hadn't in any way been creepy about traveling alone with a pretty daughter.

Ranma guessed that that last comment had been Eva trying to figure out if the curse had been trying to do more than just cause personal misery to himself, but she'd accepted his response without arguing. Normally, curses tended to stick better to people if they were being directly affected by them.

Sure, if all of your friendships crumbled away into nothingness because they didn't want to be around your cursed form, then that'd make you pretty miserable, but it didn't really feed the curse itself as efficiently or something. Which was a bit of a weird concept, because Ranma hadn't really heard anything about curses feeding on people up until that point.

It made sense though. Ryoga who was always trying to be strong, had become such a small and fragile thing, clearly on the menu for basically anything around him. Genma who loved to eat new things, had become a herbivore. Even Shampoo made a certain amount of sense, considering how she wanted to be close to Ranma, and the fact that he wouldn't let a part-cat anywhere near him if he could help it.

Though again, Shampoo's might be explained with something else in truth, seeing as it was such an indirect kind of curse. It could be that it was the only curse Jusenkyo could think of to make her as miserable as possible, but they could've managed that just fine by turning her into a part-boy or something. Maybe it was something about her making a wish of 'being cute' and Jusenkyo giving her a form that she thought was cute, but that'd make her feel stupid because of how it drove away Ranma even further.

In the end, it was the kind of discussion that he'd probably have to include Shampoo in if he wanted any real answers, but there was no way that he was going to do anything like that.

So Ranma had shared a lot about a lot of things that he probably wasn't actually comfortable with sharing with much of anyone, and the same could be said about Evangeline.

In fact, Evangeline had spent a long time blushing horribly and grumbling to herself about her stupid childish biology whenever she calmed down from one of their arguments. Which was-... Ranma wasn't super-thrilled to have the ancient vampire compare his own emotional development to that of a preteen, but he couldn't deny that it'd gotten... pretty childish, there at one point. And if Eva could blame her youthful biology for that silliness, then so could Ranma.

There'd been lots of interesting things that Ranma had learned about curses though. Mainly useless stuff, like how they tended to only last for a couple of centuries at the most – which meant that anyone affected by such a curse would probably be long-since dead by the time it faded – but interesting stuff to know nonetheless.

For example, if Ranma could figure out a way to wholeheartedly enjoy what his curse did to him, it'd start sputtering away and run out of juice... probably within two or three decades. Of course, it would mean spending those years perfectly happy with the curse, which was a level of zen that Ranma would probably need brainwashing to manage, and would probably mean that he was a very different kind of person by the end of those decades, but still.

It was a bit of a shame to learn that Evangeline had studied curses about as much as she'd studied healing-magic. Apparently, there wasn't much use for either of those things when you were immortal and could destroy a whole army in a few minutes.

After having been trapped, Eva had put in some effort to figure out curses, which had been a lot of the reason for her approaching Ranma when she'd spotted him at the festival – Mahora's school festival had the best food for miles, and everyone knew it, so of course Ranma had attended it. Unfortunately, she wasn't really suited for doing much more than poking them with a stick and making thoughtful noises.

Her plans to her own curse mainly amounted to sticking around Mahora for another century or so, and then sneaking a bunch of 'voluntarily' given blood from the student body, before using that magical boost to blast her way through the weakened curse.

A decent enough way to get out of a prison, but not exactly applicable for how to fix someone's biology. Unless you wanted to fix it by exploding them all over the ceiling, which Chachazero had gleefully suggested that they try, 'just to be sure'.

Ranma didn't mind Eva, for all that she was an evil vampire who'd killed people, she was pretty reasonable – if bitter – about life. Better than some of the people around Nerima at least. But Chachazero? Ranma would absolutely kick that creepy little doll into a furnace one of these days.

Just as soon as he figured out a way to not have Evangeline string him up in that training-resort of hers to do unspeakable experiments with his body in retaliation.

He was pretty sure she didn't actually need to do horrific things to people's bodies in the name of 'magical science' or whatever, but Ranma knew her well enough by now to know that Evangeline would absolutely use horrific experiments as an excuse to make Ranma's life a living nightmare, if he destroyed something that belonged to her.

Eva didn't exactly have a lot of things that belonged to her, so even if she wasn't always the most fond of them, she was protective of what she had.

Ranma could sort of relate.

XXX

"Garlic?" Ranma wheezed out, snickering helplessly.

"Shut up!" Eva threw another wave of ice his way.

"He beat you with a pit filled with garlic?" Ranma dodged out of the path of the ice, side-stepped a follow-up blow that would've probably splattered his head all over the wall, and continued laughing.

"Stand still and die, you brat!" Eva yelled at him, her expression wholly into the territory of embarrassed anger. So at least she knew how ridiculous it'd been.

Still, it was a bit disappointing to remember that the Thousand Master was dead. He sounded like he would've been a fun kind of guy to fight.

Not that Eva was boring by any means, Ranma admitted to himself as something spectacularly flashy and lethal breezed past where his head had been moments before, but there was always a certain charm in fighting people who were as deviously sneaky as his old man.

Especially when they weren't actually practitioners of Anything Goes. By now, Ranma had a pretty good idea about how Genma and Happosai and the old ghoul – and pretty much everyone else in Nerima too – fought.

Sure, that didn't mean that he'd know exactly how to beat them, Happosai and the old ghoul both being very much fights that ought to be avoided, for the sake of humiliation or collateral-damage or both. And there might always be a new technique here or there that they'd added onto their skill-set since the last time Ranma beaten the rest of them into the dust, but it was always more interesting to fight someone whose entire style was new.

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"No, it's not another fiancee." Ranma said dully, more than used to this particular song and dance by now.

Nabiki looked about as convinced as she usually did, but didn't try to argue.

If Ranma hadn't known that she was probably going to try to stalk him, he would've been really suspicious just from how easily she gave in. Nabiki had been trying to stalk him through Mahora for ages.

Ranma knew that visiting Eva probably counted as running away from his troubles, but it was still such a weird novelty to be able to actually talk to someone who understood him. Oh, she'd absolutely mock him over it, but it wouldn't be because she really judged him over it. Eva was about as subtle about manipulation as a brick to the head, and had very little interest in sussing out Ranma's secrets so that they could be used against him in the fiancee-debacle.

As far as friends go, the only one better was probably Ryoga, and that was only because fighting Eva was more about running away quickly enough that she didn't murder you on the spot, so Ryoga was a lot more entertaining to fight. Also, they'd known each other for ages, even if that mostly included picking fights with each other, so there was that too.

Ranma was pretty sure that what Eva gave him was perspective.

Nerima wasn't all there was to the world, Ranma's fiancee-troubles were kind of hilarious from a distance, even if you needed a certain level of sadism to properly appreciate it, and even the weirdest martial arts still made more sense than Eva trying to explain magical theory in front of a blackboard.

Also, Eva was kind of shitty at throwing chalk, and it was kind of fun to give her reason to practice, whenever he interrupted her with stupid questions.

So, every now and then, Ranma would take a day off from his fiancees and his rivals and Happosai making a nuisance of himself, and he would go off to visit Eva at Mahora. It wasn't like he was gone for more than a couple of hours at a time.

And the moment Ranma figured out how, he was absolutely making one of those time-distortion training-fields himself. It was probably never going to happen, but it was something worth daydreaming about. The progress he could make if he could just spend a couple of days every day to play around with chi uninterrupted? Oh, but it'd be amazing.

Ranma was pretty sure that he'd lose Nabiki's tail – either herself or whoever she hired – not long after arriving at Mahora Academy. Eva had described the place as being basically a magical fortress of weird wards interwoven and layered every which way, until someone who wasn't invited by a person living there would probably not make it to their destination.

It'd be a bit like putting Ranma into a room filled with water-hazards, and expecting him to make it to the other end without his curse activating. Well, a bit more likely than that, as long as Nabiki didn't have bloodthirsty murder on her mind. Actually, even if she did, as long as she had some pretty high-end magical potential hidden away, then she'd probably manage to bulldoze through most of the defenses anyway.

A magical fortress it might be, but it was a school foremost, and magic was supposed to be hidden from the masses, so they couldn't really include any wards with effects blatant enough to be noticed. Ranma didn't really see why magic had to be kept secret, but then he couldn't deny that he certainly hadn't ever heard of it before getting cursed at Jusenkyo, so it was definitely something they were pretty successful in trying for.

More interestingly, Genma and Soun had both kind of gone a bit green around the edges when they'd heard of the Mahora Festival in the first place, and had refused to attend. Something about Happosai getting them banned for life, only with less words and more sword-swinging.

At the time, Ranma had kind of just shrugged and gone anyway, since nobody would know that he practiced Anything Goes unless he got into a fight – which he'd very deliberately avoided, because he wasn't an idiot – and there'd be lots of good food.

So, the idiot-fathers were cheerfully pretending at obliviousness whenever Ranma decided to take off in the direction of Mahora for a couple of hours, even if Genma had tried to beat it into his head that it was a 'bad place' and that he should avoid it at all costs, there at the beginning. Genma did that about lots of stuff, so it wasn't really worth paying attention to most of the time.

The Kuno-family were also feigning obliviousness about Mahora, to the point where that ninja of theirs had refused all of Nabiki's attempts to cajole him into helping her track Ranma down. Something about an 'ancient truce', which in all likelihood meant that someone had tossed the Kuno-family out of the school on their nose at some point years ago. Which honestly probably said excellent things about their school's curriculum.

Not that Ranma planned on saying that anywhere within hearing-distance of that bomb-crazy Hawaiian-reject of a headmaster.

XXX

"I mean, I get why." Ranma admitted, frowning to himself. "Being followed around like that isn't as great as people seem to think."

Eva made an aggravated noise, sluggishly shifting to sit up in the sand, clearly not appreciating Ranma's opinion.

Honestly though, the Thousand Master had still put her in a pretty miserable situation, and Ranma could hardly blame her for being prickly about it. "It's like... I get where he's coming from and all, but it's just-... I mean, if he was so desperate to get rid of you, he should've just faked his death or something, like a normal person."

"Normal people fake their deaths to get away from stalkers?" Eva sounded a bit incredulous. "What the hell kind of normal people are you dealing with?"

"Lots of people fake their deaths. Usually for tax-reasons and insurance-fraud and stuff, but it's not that big of a stretch to use it against fiancee-wannabes, right?" Ranma frowned at her, a little bit uncertain. He knew he wasn't super-great at social stuff, but he was pretty sure this made perfect sense.

And he wasn't entirely sure if it was Nabiki or his pops that had made him think that faking your death for reasons like tax-evasion was more about common sense than anything else. Probably his pops, because Ranma didn't think Nabiki had ever shed her identity to avoid paying taxes, but then... he really wouldn't put it past her, once she got old enough that she had to deal with that stuff too.

"Oi, don't lump me in with your crew." Eva glared at him for using the 'fiancee' word to describe her relationship with the man who imprisoned her.

"You followed him around 'cause he was nice to you, and you blushed whenever he patted your head." Ranma pointed out, more than willing to use material gained from Chachazero to prove his point – even if the doll still creeped him out. "Pretty sure that kind of stuff is how I ended up with half of my fiancees."

Eva made a noise, somewhere between frustration and disgust, and plomped back down on the sand. "I hate you so much."

Ranma made a vague noise, not particularly bothered by that claim. Eva hated everything at one point or another, and if she wasn't slinging ice-magic after him then she probably wasn't all that upset in truth. Or she was just really exhausted from having failed to hit him for nearly six hours of 'sparring', but in that case she'd probably have time to get over it before she decided to hold a grudge about it.

It was still true though. Ranma could understand why the Thousand Master had done what he had, he could even sympathize. If Ranma had had the ability to put his fiancees somewhere where they wouldn't follow him around anymore, he would at the very least be sorely tempted to use it.

But... Eva was someone who'd been on the road for basically her whole life, hundreds of years spent wandering the globe. What kind of sick bastard would force her to spend so many years trapped in one place?

Ranma wasn't really trapped in Nerima. He could leave any time he wanted, as long as he dodged around a whole lot of trouble that would spring up from it. His pops had decided that he wanted to settle down though, and Ranma didn't really mind following in his father's wake, he'd been doing it for forever, and it'd be weird to take to the open road without having his father's back in front of him.

Not necessarily a bad kind of weird, but enough to make him hesitant about striking out on his own, even on the worst days. Not to mention Akane, and the fact that Nerima was filled to the brim with crazy stuff to keep him entertained.

What would it have been like for Eva, back then? Before she settled into this caged bitterness? Would she have been looking forward to it, to meeting new people and making friends with humans who were so much younger than herself and so woefully untouched by the realities of the world? Or would she have crashed and burned within the first couple of months?

Forcing a second childhood on someone who'd had a pretty miserable one? It sounded nice, on the surface, but-... The more Ranma thought about it, the more it sounded so conceited. A childhood was a childhood. You only got one, and if it was miserable, tough luck. Sure, you could live a happy or unhappy life afterwards, and maybe you could make the choice to experience wonderful stuff – that you didn't have a chance to during your childhood – later on in life.

But you couldn't just... go back. You were different from who you were back then, with different hang-ups and experiences, and ending up in that mess of things in order to 'live better' or whatever? That was just-... What the hell was she even supposed to do? Make friends with lots of girls whose interests were completely separated from her own? Find a cute boy who was either a creep with a thing for a girl who looked like she was ten, or find some brat that was barely hitting puberty himself? Sit through dull class after dull class, when she was used to wandering across continents?

It was just so-... Honestly, it made Ranma want to punch the Thousand Master in the face.

It was like caging someone who'd always been free to roam, just because you didn't really want them roaming in your direction. And yeah, Ranma still thought that faking his death would've been the better move. With him 'dead', Eva would've just wandered off and continued doing her own thing, and if he just kept a low profile for a decade-or-so she probably wouldn't be bothered to track him down afterwards.

Or she'd have just considered him to be enough of a cowardly asshole to wash her hands of him, which was still kind of a win? It'd certainly be less of a dick-move than him trying to justify this particular shade of cruelty as 'an opportunity for living life as a normal girl'.

People with good intentions always screwed everything up.

XXX

"A pit of cats?" Eva laughed, clutching at her stomach.

"It was a traumatic experience!" Ranma yelled at her, throwing a Moko Takabisha in her direction, which she easily sidestepped even when folded over double in laughter.

"That's so stupid!" Eva's laughter was probably more akin to a sadistic cackle at this point, but it certainly wasn't stopping.

"It was pops idea!" Ranma yelled, hurling multiple more attacks her way. "And shut up!"

Eva grinned madly at him, striking a weird pose with her hands in front of her face. "Meow meow meow!"

"Gah!" Ranma shied back from the surprisingly realistic sound.

Eva returned to cackling in glee at his misery.

Sometimes, Ranma wondered why they were friends.

XXX

A/n: There are a total of four chapters to this fic. Which is... honestly rather impressive, considering how I only really started writing it because I wanted to write magical theory about curses.

Also, yes, I'm very much loving how these two idiots interact with each other. Eva and Ranma just... love picking fights, and having them in the same room for any extension of time is hilarious.