*I don't own Ranma or Naruto!*

Mother/Son Talks

Nodoka sat at the table as Ranma was busy boiling water in an attempt to make tea. He knows how to use a stove well enough, but from what Nodoka is observing, it doesn't look like he's ever had to cook anything more complicated than roasting it over an open fire. As proven by how her son was staring at a box of tea leaves in his hands.

"How many leaves do you use to make tea?" he asked himself in a low voice. "We have plenty of tea leaves here, but I don't know how to make tea. I've never had to."

"Ranma, sweetie, if you need my help you just have to…"

Nodoka was cut off from finishing her sentence when Ranma turned around with a measuring spoon in hand. But it had almost the entire box of tea leaves poured into it. Clearly, the boy has no idea how to measure ingredients.

"This much?" he asked.

"Actually, that would be considered too much…" Nodoka said with an anime sweat drop on the back of her head.

She knew that Genma was never really one to actually do the cooking, preferring to do much more of the eating, actually, but she didn't think her husband would be so focused on teaching their son how to fight that he'd neglect teaching him basic culinary arts. Sighing as she stood up, the Saotome matriarch walked into the kitchen and began to help her son make the tea. She thought it was too bad that there don't seem to be any snacks to go with the tea, but she doesn't mind since she gets to spend some time bonding with her child for the first time in eleven years.

"So tell me, Ranma, how was your training trip with your father?" Nodoka asked genuinely curious. "After the first month of your trip, your father stopped sending me letters and I got worried about whether you were alive or not. The only reason I knew where to find you was because I heard about Genma living with the Tendou family from a friend of mine who owns an ice cream shop here in Nerima."

Ranma scoffed as he sipped his tea, relishing the warm yet slightly bitter taste, and said "Training trip? Please. It was more like a mobile homicide scam attempt!"

"Ranma…!" Nodoka gasped at her son's words. "I understand that the training may have been harsher than it should have been, but that's no reason to use such words! Your father…"

"THAT BASTARD DON'T DESERVE TA BE CALLED A DAD!" roared Ranma as he slammed his fist on the table, scaring Nodoka at just how much anger she was feeling from the young man. "You have no idea what I've been through because of Gemma and his plotting! Did you know that not even one day into our 'training trip' he sold me to some guy for a bowl of rice, two fish, and a few pickles? And then stole me back that same night? Or how about how he engaged me multiple times to different girls under varying circumstances? Oh! Wait a minute! How about the time he took me to the cursed Jusenkyo hot springs, thinking they were a secret training ground because he didn't bother listening to the translator, and causing both of us to fall into different springs and become cursed to change into different things with a splash of cold water!"

Ranma was huffing and puffing at the end of his little outburst, not caring that he'd just poured his heart out to his mother like he just did. He just chalked it up to his female half managing to break through for just a moment, as she's more emotionally sensitive than he is. Nodoka had a look on her face that was one of fear, surprise, anger, and confusion all rolled into one. The woman, though mostly calm on the outside, took a moment to calm her raging emotions and placed a hand on her son's shoulder.

"Ranma, sweetie, I think you should tell me the whole story. If what I'm hearing is true, then your father is going to be in for real hell when he gets back." Nodoka said.

Calming himself down as he understood that acting out of anger was not going to help him in this situation, Ranma started to explain the whole training trip to his mother, and the multiple scams his father pulled. From stealing food and techniques from various other martial arts schools, to engaging him time and time again to various women. Nodoka looked like she was going to have a heart attack when Ranma mentioned how Genma trained him in endurance and stamina by having him continuously chased by a cannibal when he was eight years old, and it was just as bad when he mentioned the Neko-Ken training which resulted in Ranma having a crippling fear of all things feline. When he got to the Jusenkyo part of his story, Nodoka was just plain curious about one thing. The cursed themselves.

"You said yourself and your father transform as a result of cold water being splashed on you, yes?" Nodoka asked, getting a nod from her son. "What exactly do the two of you transform into?"

"I fell into the Spring of Drowned Girl while Pops fell into the Spring of Drowned Panda Bear. So cold water will make us turn into a girl and a panda respectively, and hot water turns us back to normal."

Upon seeing the skeptical look on his mother's face, Ranma knew that she wanted proof of this. So he got up and went to the sink to fill up a cup with cold water. Then he dumped the whole thing over his head and transformed right before Nodoka's eyes. The older woman couldn't believe her eyes! Her son has just transformed into a young woman with beautiful red hair, and a figure that reminds her of her own when she was that age.

"Is this proof enough?" Ranma, or rather, Ranko, asked.

Nodoka just nodded numbly as she watched the girl take the kettle off the stove, which was being used to boil some water, but she was able to react quick enough to prevent her from dumping the scalding hot water all over herself. Goodness knows that would be a very painful experience. One that Nodoka is assuming her son has gone through multiple times since receiving his curse. Instead, she took the kettle and poured some water into a glass before dropping a couple of cubes of ice into the water. This helped it to cool down to a point where it wouldn't be scalding hot, but would hopefully be warm enough to reverse the effects of the curse.

Fortunately, it seems like she guessed right, much to her child's relief as the warm water helped to reverse the curse and turn Ranma back to normal.

"Well… I can see that you're telling the truth. But this poses a slight problem." Nodoka said.

As her son looked at her with a questioning look, she reached into her kimono and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper. The paper itself looked to be very old and worn out. She carefully unfolded the paper to reveal what looks like a contract. Though Ranma can't make out the words very clearly he can very well see his father's signature as well as a small handprint. The signature looks to be written in blood while the handprint is clearly fingerpaint.

"What's that?" Ranma asked.

"It's the reason your curse has made this a little bit difficult. You know how Genma took you on that training trip, but what you don't know is that I didn't want him to take you. You were only a small child at the time of his idea to take you on that trip, and I wanted you to be able to experience a real childhood with all of the things that come with it. And yes, this would include that whole childhood cliche where you accidentally break someone's window with a baseball. But Genma was adamant about making you the strongest man alive, and convinced me to let you go on that trip. However, I added a stipulation to his little trip." Nodoka explained as she handed the paper to Ranma. "What I have here is a Seppuku Pledge that your father had signed in order to take you on your training trip. The stipulation was that he would use the trip to turn you into a man among men, or commit seppuku to restore his and our family's honor. But once you two had left it wasn't a month before he mailed the pledge back to me with your handprint on it."

Ranma grew ghostly white at the implication of what this meant. He turns into a girl when splashed with cold water, which means he can't fully hold up his end of the pledge and will be forced to commit seppuku because of his cowardly excuse for a father. Nodoka was quick to reassure him though.

"Calm yourself, Ranma. The seppuku pledge never applied to you. You were only five years old at the time and didn't even know what it was you were signing. I'm not going to bind you to a contract that your father had no business making you sign in the first place!" Nodoka said before smiling and running a hand through Ranma's hair. "Besides, as far as I can tell, despite his deplorable methods, Genma did succeed in turning you into a man among men. Although, we will need to make him pay for his numerous crimes against you, the martial artists of the world, and everyone else he's ever scammed in life. That will be the tricky part."

Standing up, Nodoka smoothed out her kimono and made for the door.

"For now though, it's getting close to lunch time. Why don't you show me around town and show me where to find a good meal around here?"

Ranma grinned and nodded. If there's one thing he knows, it's that food fixes everything. He's definitely going to enjoy bringing his mother to his favorite places in Nerima. Namely Ucchan's and even Shampoo's restaurants. He just hopes that the two of them can stop fighting for one day. He doesn't want his mother to get caught in the crossfire if they do, much less have to run into crazy Kodachi and her equally loony brother.

After all, it's like trouble just continues to follow him wherever he goes.

Like some kind of sick joke the universe makes just to get a laugh.

***To Be Continued…***

I know that I said the Naruto portion of this story would show up in this chapter, but I wanted to show more of Ranma's interactions with his mother instead. But anyway, if you enjoyed the chapter, be sure to fave and follow the story and I'll see you all in my next update! Buh-bye now!