Ranma had always been insecure when it came to the idea of someone loving him. He knew he had a tendency to stick his foot in his mouth, his manners were atrocious and beastly, and that his education was about as far from 'good' as one could get. Added to that was his freakish curse and he'd been well and truly convinced that no one could possibly like him.
That was the main reason he never really could get closer to Shampoo or Ukyo. Their claims that they loved him always struck him as hollow. After all, Akane, his first fiancée, had always said she hated him, so why should those two be any different? He always figured that they just kept trying to seduce him cause they'd become clanless without him. And as much as he'd hate to see that fate befall either of them, he still wasn't about to force them into marrying a sex-changing freak like him.
But here was Nabiki under the effects of a drug that meant she couldn't tell a lie. There was no way she could be faking what she was saying even if she wanted to be. And he suspected Nabiki would never want any of this getting out to the Furinkan hordes. Even if she denied it later, the gossips at school wouldn't listen; he had personal experience with that.
She was in love with him. She didn't see him as a sex-changing freak. And she obviously had spent a lot of her time fantasizing about him in both forms.
And she didn't want to claim him by force, trickery, or coercion. She wanted him of all people to claim her.
There was a lot going for that idea, actually.
One did not get to his level of skill in martial arts by being blind to one's failings, and he knew he had plenty of them. Nabiki was very good at a lot of the things he was very bad at. She could talk to people a heck of a lot easier than he could. She was good at getting people to do what she wanted when she wanted. He'd have to learn at least some of that if he wanted to teach others someday.
She also didn't take the insults he had a habit of spouting off without meaning to personally. Hell, she did more to get him to stop by putting on a show of false tears than all of Akane's blunt trauma techniques put together; he always felt awful about making any girl cry even when he knew they were faking it, whereas his father's hits during morning sparring were harder than anything Akane's could dish out so he barely noticed.
She also wanted to be chased and claimed. That was a challenge, even if he had an unfair advantage now thanks to the "Master's Way" tome. There was no challenge in 'going after' Ukyo or Shampoo; he'd just have to stand in one place long enough and they'd throw themselves at him.
That had always been part of the reason he stayed with Akane; she was also a challenge. But there were many days when he thought of Akane as a challenge he couldn't win, no matter what he did. Not everyday, to be sure; there were plenty of times when Akane didn't push back quite so hard. However trying to be Akane's fiancé, for him at least, was like trying to get through an ever shifting maze. Just when he started thinking he was almost there, and with Akane he wasn't quite sure where 'there' was, Akane would react badly to something, often his fault but no where near as often as Akane seemed to believe, and he'd have to start over again. This was only complicated by the fact that Akane was just as confused about what she wanted out of him as he was about what he wanted from her.
Nabiki, on the other hand, might also be a challenge he couldn't ever win, but from the way she was rattling off fantasy after fantasy, it sounded like she wanted him to win, knew what she wanted from him, and wasn't currently leaving him any doubt what his 'win' would mean.
And it wasn't like Nabiki was unattractive, though some of the things she was saying whenever she described her picture of herself in her fantasies suggested that she though differently. Really, Nabiki was much more attractive than Akane, at least in his opinion, and he never really considered Ukyo like that. Only Shampoo had Nabiki beat in looks, and then not by that much. Nabiki worked out quite a bit to keep herself looking good.
Nodding to himself, he pulled out the "Master's Way" tome and started looking for:
See other episodes by Brian Drozd
(Posted Wed, 18 Jun 2003 01:09)
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