Disclaimer: I don't own Ranma ½ or any other character created by Rumiko Takahashi. No suing, please!

Author's Notes: Okay, this is a fanfic based on an RP that I'm doing with LunisTG. So, keep in mind that this is mostly a collaboration. I will inform you when it breaks away from the RP. (Shh, I'm just better than him at turning dialogue into prose.) Here goes:

It all started with her cooking, as many things often did. Akane was well aware of the effect of her cooking. Sometimes, she just hoped that her tastes were too sensitive for her own cooking. She remembered that Ryoga could eat it. However, as Ranma had said many times, Ryoga was nigh indestructible.

Akane had hoped that with the help of her mother's cookbook, her culinary skills would improve. In fact, though, they seemed to be bottoming out. She had cooked something a few days ago that was supposed to be curried rice and fish. However, it resembled a green gelatinous mess with chunks of white throughout. In response to the massive failure, she had covered it with aluminum foil and pushed it to the back of the refrigerator.

She knew that Kasumi would be doing one of her house-cleaning adventures the next day, an expedition that involved many cleaning agents and shining wax for some reason. What it entailed was that everything – absolutely everything – got cleaned from top to bottom. So, her mild-mannered sister would definitely notice this disgusting concoction that had come from her most recent trip into the culinary world.

It was time to take it out. Hell, maybe the two days for storing had caused it to become better, edible even.

Unlikely.

She stripped off the foil quickly, idly balling the material to be discarded, and inspected the food again. It couldn't really be said that it no longer resembled food, for it hadn't really looked like something edible prior to its banishment to foil-wrapped chill. However, the greenish curry (a sign that the curry hadn't come out right to begin with) had taken on a weird brownish tint and the gel-like mass on the plate had more white, as if the chunks of rice and fish had grown to create some sort of infrastructure.

Tilting her head at it, her mind wondered at the changes. She figured it was probably like growing mold and turned away to toss the balled-up foil into a trash bin.

"What is this?" Akane turned to see Ranma eyeing the plate suspiciously. She had honestly thought everyone was gone and was going to try to stomach the days-old concoction herself. However, if Ranma was here, there was no reason to torture herself…

"And why is it eating the plate?"

Akane waved her hand dismissively. "Oh, that's the curry." After a moment, she registered his second question and bent her knees slightly to put her eyes level with the curry. Sure enough, there was a tiny set of fangs and they were determinedly gnawing at the plate.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him giving her that look. That suspicious look combined with disbelief. "Curry eats plates? Since when, tomboy?"

Akane clenched her jaw hard – oh, how she hated it when he called her that – but shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly. "Since now, okay?" She winced mentally at how defensive she sounded.

Ranma narrowed his eyes at the twitching mass on the plate. "And what am I supposed to do with it?"

"Water it and it'll be your friend for life." Akane laughed, most of her light-hearted at the novelty at having inadvertently created a curry monster (for lack of a better term). "Or, you know, you could give it to Happosai." She paused, tilted her head at the wobbling gelatin, and looked sideways at Ranma. "Though, you may want to be a girl when you do."

Before she even finished her last statement, Ranma's features melted in relief and his sigh reflected that emotion. "I thought you were going to make me eat it."

Akane could feel the familiar flash of anger but it was less than normal and she was able to ignore it. "Well, I could," she drawled softly. She bent at her waist to inspect the curry more closely. "But it's kinda cute. I think it's grown on me." Kinda like you that way, she thought to herself.

Suddenly, the curry heaved itself off the plate, finishing the movement with a roll off of the table and a gentle thud to the wood floor. It began moving steadily with the same slow, purposeful actions of an inchworm.

Ranma shrugged, a smile tugging at his lips. "We could let it go."

Akane didn't really mean what she said next but it was something to say. "It's cute. P-Chan could have a friend."

"He deserves it… but it doesn't deserve him," Ranma muttered in a low voice.

Though the comment was soft, Akane still heard. Somehow she knew she should feel anger, if only for her little piglet, but she could only feel confusion. "P-Chan deserves a curry monster?" She eyed her fiancé, wanting to jibe at him a little. "Are you afraid of the curry?"

"No," he scoffed. "But I wish it'd eat Pork-Butt."

Ah, this was familiar territory, arguing about her pet. "Poor P-Chan. What did he ever do to you?"

Ranma sighed. "Wish I could tell you…"

Akane rolled her eyes. This again… "Sure ya do." Another jibe, this one aimed to get some kind of answer out of him finally.

"Hey!" Ranma countered, his defensive streak in full swing. "I promised I wouldn't tell—" He quickly clamped his hands over his mouth, his eyes having become large orbs.

Akane almost smiled. Something, finally to be told something! "Promised you wouldn't tell me what? Come on, Ranma! I wanna know!"

Ranma darted his eyes to the side, avoiding her gaze. "I won't tell ya and you'd never believe me even if I did."

Now she could feel the anger sparking inside. "Yeah? Says who? You?" She scoffed slightly at the last part.

Of course, that was the bad thing about her anger: it caused Ranma to explode as well. "When have you ever believed anything I've said? You even take Kuno's word over mine."

"When have you ever given me a reason to trust you huh? When you save my life?" She scoffed again, even as a part of her was desperately trying to rein in the anger and harsh words. "But hey, you'd do that for anybody, wouldn't you?"

"How can I get you to trust me when everything is my fault, when I'm always the 'pervert' or the bad guy? You treat Kuno and his Hentai Horde like human beings but I'm just scum, right?"

Akane goggled at him. They'd been living in the same house for over a year and he still didn't get it? "At least they like me, okay? Even if I'm just some sort of prize to them…" She trailed off, already feeling the futility in trying to explain. Even if she could find the right words, he would never ever get it. "Whatever. It's not like you'd understand anyway."

However, as Akane's anger was leeching away, his seemed to expand a bit more. "Right," he drawled. "Stupid old Ranma… never understands anything." With an acidic glare, he turned away from her and began to move in the direction of the dojo.

Akane sighed, realizing that her comment had somehow been taken way more deeply than normal. "I never said you were stupid, Ranma. You're just not… me." That was the problem, it seemed a lot of the time: Akane herself.

"I'm not anyone, no one at all." He abruptly changed directions and headed down the hall to the guest room.

Akane knew Ranma well enough to know that he was having another one of his depressed fits, packing up everything he owned and leaving quite a bit behind. The fact that a normal, almost docile conversation had crashed so quickly gave testament to the fact that something else was probably on his mind. But his actions were enough to allow her own deep-seated depression make itself known.

Her eyes trailed him as he walked away. "But you are someone," she murmured softly, much too softly for the martial artist in front of her to hear. Slowly, she slumped to the ground, feeling suddenly like so much less. "How am I supposed to make this better?"

She had no idea where to start.

Hearing a soft noise, Akane turned to see P-Chan waddling toward her. It was uncanny, her pet's ability to show up after being gone for close to month whenever she was feeling particularly down. She looked at the piglet sadly. "He's leaving and I don't know how…" She trailed off as several things began to finally work themselves together in her mind. In a normal situation, she was so far gone in self-involvement and crying that she often didn't really notice P-Chan's appearance. The piglet wasn't something to focus on, he was something to be comforted by.

But now… Oh, not this, not now.

There was the name-calling (and there were so many names) and there was that bandana. A million other things swirled in her head, including the times Ryoga would "help" Ranma try to find a cure…

Was that a lie as well?

She looked her piglet in the eye, inching closer. "P-Chan, are you…" She gulped hard, more than betrayal pushing at her emotions. "Please tell me you're not—"

Almost instantly, as if he actually felt the full extent of danger hanging over his head, P-Chan panicked. He squealed and began to quickly back away, his eyes always on Akane. However, just as he began to turn to sprint away, the small piglet felt something sharp dig into one of his legs, causing him to trip over himself and lose his momentum.

Akane shuffled on her knees to where the curry monster was holding P-Chan captive. Latching onto the bandana secured around her pet's neck, she brought him close to her face. "You are Ryoga, aren't you?" Some of her sadness made itself known. "Please don't lie."

In response, the pig only struggled harder, squealing as it attempted to loosen her grip. The actions alone served as her answer, filling her soul with cold fury. Sure, anger was nearly everpresent with Akane – it marked who she was. But this coldness… This was what true betrayal felt like.

"All right." She tightened her grip on the bandana until his air flow was blocked, watching unfeelingly as the piglet's face began to turn blue before allowing her grip to loosen just enough to allow him to breathe. "I trust you." She held the limp but conscious piglet to her chest, her grip still like iron, as she began to heat up water in a kettle. "As much as I trust anyone these days…"

The small pig began to sob against her, pitiful resignation in the cries.

"Poor piggy." She could hear the false cooing in her voice and knew her anger was hitting a dangerous point. "Now, be still. Mummy has to make you clean with warm water." She tilted the kettle over her pet, every inch of her dreading this moment, and gasped at the instantaneous change. "Oh… Oh, God," she moaned.

Standing there oblivious to the fact that he was nude except for the bandana around his head, Ryoga laughed nervously, his hand gripping the back of his neck. "Akane… I can explain. This is all Ranma's fault." His tone was so certain that she would have almost believed him, had she not known better.

She clenched her jaw hard, trying to force herself to refrain from killing the boy in front of her. "How… just how exactly is this Ranma's fault?"

"He's the one that knocked me into the spring. He is the one who ran out on our fight…"

"That was years ago, Ryoga," she stated sadly. However, almost immediately to follow was a feeling of shock. "You followed him to China?"

It seemed that the eternally lost boy was still entrenched in his own misery. "Yeah, and he kicked me into that stupid spring when he was chasing Genma. Every time he sees me, he rubs it in my face, calling me Pork Butt, Babe, Hamhead, Bacon Breath, P-Chan…" Akane felt he probably could have gone on indefinitely if she hadn't interjected with her own opinion.

She grabbed his shoulders, trying to make him focus on her, but quickly released him when it came to her mind again that he was very nude. "Ryoga, you turn into a pig," she said as calmly as she could manage. "Besides, you mock him about turning into a girl."

"Bah!" he scoffed loudly. "He calls that a curse? At least he doesn't get people trying to eat him."

"No, not that," she murmured. She turned, wanting to get far away as quickly as possible. "I've gotta go but you should… you should get dressed." She walked toward the front of the house, just wanting to be outside in clean air. "It's not his fault, you know. It's not anyone's fault."

Though she didn't realize it, Ryoga promptly fainted behind her as he fully realized that he had been naked since he changed back.

Akane navigated through the corridors, turning toward the garden rather than the dojo. She didn't need to work out her frustration, she just needed something resembling peace. The koi pond served that purpose nicely, though some of the memories that it held were not so peaceful. Idly, she kicked at the water with the tip of her small foot.

"So stupid," she yelled at the garden. "That didn't fix anything!" After a moment of glaring at absolutely nothing, she sank to her knees. "I'm such an idiot." The truth of it wasn't just that she felt stupid because if she was honest with herself about Ranma's true nature, it became clear that he had been hinting at Ryoga's alternate forms for months and months. The crux of the matter was that she had cared for and trusted P-Chan, more than she had even allowed herself to trust anyone – the only person that even came close was Kasumi. But Ryoga had tainted that, had in fact seen her completely naked and witnessed her most private moments, a lot of which had her admitting things about her feelings towards Ranma that had taken even longer to convey to her sister.

It didn't take long for the lonely, betrayed feeling to convert to wild anger.

Ranma was vaguely surprised to see Ryoga's naked form, laying prone just outside of the kitchen. Shaking his head at the sight, he removed a pair of pants from his bag and shimmied them up the lost boy's legs. "Akane will kill him if she sees them," he murmured to himself.

A loud, shuddering crash caught his attention just then and his heightened hearing recognized that it came from the garden. Worried but not quite sure about what, he trailed outside to Akane lifting a medium-sized boulder. "What's wrong, 'Kane? Someone attacking again?" That was the only plausible reason that he could think of her wielding rocks that another female her size wouldn't even think of lifting.

The girl in question immediately turned to face him, whipping the rock around to hide behind her back. "Oh? That?" The back of his mind tried to bring up the fact that she sounded too chipper, especially for the argument they had just had. "I was just being a tomboy. You know me." That was off as well – Akane never called herself that. "No, nothing's wrong. Ever. I'm fine."

Ranma looked beyond the pond to the stone boundary wall on the far side of the property. The wall are cracked, something that definitely had been there before, and bits of the stone were still crumbling to the ground. It occurred to him that Akane had to be very angry to not only throw a boulder that far but also with enough force to cause that amount of damage. "You've never done property damage before… at least not without my head going through something. What's wrong?" His tone indicated that he wouldn't take no for an answer on this.

Akane sighed. "Nothing. Not really. It's just… I'm sorry, okay?"

His eyes boggled for a moment. "Sorry?" he echoed in confusion. He slipped into a fighter's stance and his gaze turned almost hard. "Okay, who are you and what did you do with Akane?"

"About Ryoga!" she responded almost desperately. She dropped the boulder and took a step back, stumbling over it in the process, as she eyed her fiancé and tried to figure out if he was being serious or not. "Because… with the naked… and he's P-Chan! Don't hurt me. I'm still me."

"So you figured it out, huh? That's a relief." He looked off to the side and sat on his bag after placing it on the ground.

"A relief? Oh, it's a relief." Akane rolled her eyes in building irritation. "Good, I'm glad that burden's off your shoulders."

Again, he matched her emotion by preempting with greater intensity. "You know how many times I tried to show you only to get my head knocked in? How many times I called him P-Chan… or commented on him getting lost? All for some stupid promise!"

Akane blinked. "What promise?"

"Before you 'adopted' P-Chan—" She could hear vague mockery in his tone at that word. "—I promised Ryoga that I wouldn't tell you about his curse." He shrugged. "Of course, at the time I thought he was a dog."

Thinking back, Akane vaguely remembered that night. "Oh… Oh! Bess… right. But why wouldn't you tell me? What's so bad about it?"

Ranma's eyes turned hard, even though his gaze wasn't completely set on her. "Well, I remembered how easily you turned on me when you found out about mine."

Akane smiled nervously, her next comment aimed to ease him a little. She wasn't exactly sure what she was trying to ease – his ego, his nerves… whatever was causing his tension, certainly. "Yeah, well, don't tell anyone this but I don't always handle stuff well."

The hardness in his eyes eased but he looked to the side again. "No kidding. Potential friend to public enemy number one in record time…"

It was remarks like that that made Akane realize that he really didn't get her at all. "Not number one," she corrected softly. "Anyway, it was stupid." She shifted her gaze pointedly to his bag, wanting desperately to change the subject. "Are you going somewhere?"

Ranma nodded, something like sadness settling over him and muffling his normal energy. "Yeah, I'm going to do a few things you've been telling me to do."

Akane was curious but she could feel foreboding as well. "Like what?"

"Foremost being talking to Mom and handling the fiancée mess."

Akane gulped. Ranma finally talking to Aunt Nodoka could really only mean one thing. "Do you… want me to come with you?"

Ranma stood, hefting the bag onto his back again. "If you want. But, Akane, you gotta promise not to interfere."

Akane tilted her head in what she hoped was a cute fashion. That dense attitude seemed to work for Shampoo, right? "Interfere with what?"

He gazed at her with wide blue eyes and she almost had to turn away from the plea there. "Just don't get in the way. Please."

She clenched her jaw, the only sign that she was fully unhappy with this turn of events. "If that's what you want. I will come with you, though." She cleared the thickness that was beginning to line her throat. "You shouldn't have to be alone when you go."

Ranma began to leave, navigating around the garden to the front gate. "I'm always alone anyways."

Akane followed him to his mother's house, always five steps behind him. "Not anymore," she murmured quietly.