Ranma sighed in contentment as Miu snuggled closer to him. Daylight was starting to come into the windows, and he tried to focus on what would be happening today, but his thoughts kept drifting back to last night. Making love, Ranma hadn’t ever before experienced anything like it before, and was certain that if it had been anyone else with him in bed last night then having sex wouldn’t have been anywhere near as pleasurable.
After taking a cleansing breath, Ranma shook Miu lightly to bring the girl out of her slumber. “Mrs. Furinji, wake up Mrs. Furinji.”
Slowly, Miu opened her eyes and looked up to the face of her husband. “Oh, Mr. Furinji, good morning. Is breakfast ready yet?”
Ranma blinked, and the childishly romantic moment seemed to pop like a soap bubble. “Breakfast?”
“Hey, you know that wives shouldn’t have to cook on their honeymoon. It’s… bad luck, or something.”
Rather than argue the point and get into some roundabout argument that was more or less just sparring via pillow talk, Ranma looked out the window. “Well, the honeymoon is over. We don’t have enough for more than one night in this place.”
Miu let out a sound to voice her disappointment, then rolled off him before standing up on the left side of the bed. Out of habit more than anything, Miu grabbed the top sheet to hide her nakedness from Ranma before thinking of how silly it was to cover herself from him. Along that line of thought, an idea occurred to her. “So, what to take a shower together?”
“Umm, wont we just be getting more dirty then?” Ranma asked.
Miu giggled at the unintentional joke and grinned. “Hey I’ve dreamed about this since I was in grade school. Let me have my fun.”
Wisely deciding to not comment about how wrong that was for a grade-schooler to be thinking about her wedding night, Ranma went along with Miu’s request.
When they had gotten cleaned up and dressed, Ranma sat back down on the bed to collect his wallet and other things while Miu check around the room to make sure she hadn’t left anything. Halfway though her search, she looked over to her husband to find that Ranma was just looking down at his shoes. Having seen this plenty of times, Miu knew what to do. “We really don’t have to go if you don’t want to, you know.”
Ranma sighed and didn’t look up. “Yes we do, it’s part of my training.”
“No it’s not,” the woman replied with a frown. At least, she didn’t think so. At the same time, she was a little afraid of it. The way Ranma talked about some things of his past, and probably more importantly, the things he just clammed up about had always been like some evil threat just on the edge of her vision that had been threatening to destroy what Miu and Ranma had built.
After they had started learning advanced ki manipulation from her grandfather, Ranma had been faced with certain problems because of his past and the person he used to be. While Miu had her darker side, she had eventually come to accept and control it. Ranma tried to just push his to the side and ignore it, to truly master himself he had to learn to deal with his past and the person he had been, and deal with several lingering doubts that had been assaulting his conscience since coming to the fork in his life that made him the man he had become.
Ranma looked up at her, then let out a sigh. “Then it’s something I have to do!” Putting his hands together and messing with his finger, Ranma tried to put the correct words to his thoughts. “I… I’ve been away from that place for a long time. During that time I’ve changed, at least… I hope I’ve changed. But I won’t know that until I face who I was.” Ranma cleared his through and looked towards the dresser. “Besides, me just running away probably caused a lot of problems too.”
“People have to take responsibility for their own actions, and where their life takes them. While you can point to other people and say they influenced your decisions, in the end those decisions were yours alone to make,” Miu told him, quoting what her grandfather had said on numerous occasions when Ranma tried passing the blame off onto someone else. “Okay, so maybe you just running away from your family and all the problems you were in wasn’t the best thing to do, but what happened afterwards was their fault, not yours.”
Ranma doubted other people might see it the same way. While his worldview had changed significantly since leaving the Tendo Dojo and joining Ryozanpaku, others probably hadn’t. He could hope for the best, but preparing for the worst was the better coarse of action.
“You know,” Ranma said after waiting for Miu to cool down for a moment, “I could just do this myself. We have to go back to the dojo anyway to get my stuff. You could just wait there for me to come back, this can’t take more than a few days.”
When he saw Miu’s face, Ranma knew that what he said had been a big mistake. “WHAT?” the young woman shouted before standing up strait and seemingly gaining over two feet in height thanks to the way she was looking down at him. “A martial artist couple must meet all challenges together no matter if they be on the battlefield or home!”
“Could you please stop reading that book Shigure gave you at our wedding?” Ranma asked as he looked at the hardback copy of ‘The Guide to a Happy Martial Artist Marriage’. Ranma wished that the weapons instructor had given Miu something akin to the ninja-to she had gave Ranma.
Since Miu didn’t bother with a reply and continued to look at him with that uneasy look that all women seemed to know by instinct, Ranma sighed and gave up trying to change her mind. “Okay fine, you win,” he admitted right before adding, “but we are doing this. It’s… just something I have to go through with.”
Miu closed the book and out it into her purse. “Well then I’m going too,” she said in a tone that told him it was final. If the threat of facing his past was so frightening, then Miu knew it would be good to have a reminder of what lay in Ranma’s future. She also knew that this ‘doing it myself’ was mostly a leftover of his old macho ideals that a man had to do everything on his own.
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:46)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.