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terajkRating: PG
Fandom: Ranma 1/2
Characters: Ryoga, Ranma
Word count: 642
Inspired by: Rainy Afternoon by
sholio (A sequel) Warnings: Violence, ableist language, internalized ableism
Also at AO3.
Saotome and his damned shortcuts.
Ryoga doesn’t say anything, because this is a battle between men and if he says anything—asks questions, calls him out at all—he’ll have already lost. Instead, he grapples across the clothesline, swings onto a cement wall, then jumps onto a rooftop, focusing only on Saotome’s bobbing pigtail.
And he says nothing, but still...that jerk. That damned jerk. He must remember to kill him later.
“Hup!” Saotome’s across another rooftop now, this time scuttling on his hands. And then—
“Oop! Sprinkler, P-chan!” Ranma’s laughter is an octave higher when Ryoga stops on the edge of the roof. Damn his speed and lightness. And damn him hardest for still running, because if Ryoga loses that pigtail—
He opens his umbrella, points it downward, and dives.
They’re running through the streets of Furinkan now, which makes everything one hundred times easier...as long as no one cuts between them.
“Nihao, Ran—eee!”
Normally, Ryoga would apologize for doing a handspring off a woman’s head, but he doesn’t have time. Shampoo understands. “I beat you to a pulp after work!” she shouts, then calls him something unsavory in Chinese.
“Nice move!” Saotome says, still running. Not “Gee, Shampoo is rude!” or even “Thank you for saving me from certain death-by-bike!” Just...”Nice move!” Fool.
Ryoga can’t take this anymore. “Where the hell is this movie theater?” he asks.
“Just over that tower!” Ranma says.
Steven Segal on an exploding boat. Steven Segal on an exploding boat. Steven Segal on an exploding boat.
***
“The bad news is, I have no money,” Ranma says.
“What?!”
“Didn’t I tell you that yesterday, jerko? But the good news is, I have the element of surprise. And, you know, boobs.”
“You pervert,” says Ryoga.
“At least I don’t pretend to be a pig and sleep in girls’ beds. Which is being an actual pig, now that I think about it.”
“Why, you—”
Ranma dodges the punch. “You wanna see this movie or not?”
What Ryoga wants is five seconds to reset his brain. He takes two, instead. “What’s your plan, Saotome?”
“See that dope over there? I’ll get him to pay for my ticket, then let you in the back way around that corner. Give me ten minutes.”
The voice in his head says, Wait—what? even as the reflex kicks in. The reflex lets him ask politely for directions and repeat them back word-for-word if asked (”What did I just tell you, son?”) although they make as much sense to him as English in reverse. The reflex is what keeps other people from knowing just how unlike them—how stupid—he really is.
“Feh,” the reflex says. “No problem.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Of course.”
Thirty minutes later, Ryoga wonders how one building can have so many doors, so many pieces. He wonders how he can think about it if all his thoughts are balloons flying away in the breeze.
Corner, corner, corner. Those are pointy, right? But there are perhaps five of them! Four times he walks past the pigtailed girl in the window, her tongue sticking out and her middle finger in the air.
“Hey, you,” some guy says. “No loitering.”
“Look!” says Ryoga’s reflex. “Kids trying to see a European art film!”
“What the—?”
Just as he’s about to punch the guy in the face (the reflex isn't much of a planner), a door opens and Ranma pulls him inside. “The things I do for you, jerk. At least we only missed the plot. Let’s go.”
"Feh," says Ryoga.
It’s only later, watching speedboats blow up as Steven Segal kicks the head of some terrorist organization or other in the face, that Ryoga realizes Saotome had waited for him. Amid confusion, relief and shame, he realizes that if he thinks about it too hard, his brain will explode like the boat.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-24 05:12 am (UTC)Actually, having the notification pop up in AO3 that you'd written this was, on the one hand, massively flattering, and on the other hand, once I'd had a chance to think about it, made me hope like hell that there was nothing in the original story that was offensive to you or made light of his disability in a way that was hurtful. To be honest, I hadn't thought of Ryoga as a character with a disability (unrecognized privilege! hiiii~!) until seeing how you'd tagged the story -- and then I was interested enough to come and read your Ryoga meta, because, well, ♥ ♥ RYOGA ♥ ♥ -- but that made me worry EVEN MORE that ten-years-younger me probably didn't handle it all that well. I'm not sure if I trust present-day me to deal competently with disability issues, even after another decade of self-education and life experience. In any case, this did prompt me to go back and look at the story for the first time since I uploaded/imported everything, fixing my broken em-dashes (... damn you, AO3), quietly repairing a throwaway bit of unrelated ableism that I discovered along the way ... and then there was the unpleasant discovery that I'd misgendered girl!Ranma all over the place ... OH YOUNGER ME, WHYYYY. *facepalm*
Anyway, sorry to ramble all over your comments -- basically, I really enjoyed this fic, and I do hope that I didn't write anything that was offensive to you. >_> And maybe this'll get me to pull out all my old Ranma 1/2 volumes and re-read them; I haven't thought about the series in years, but I still have a ton of warm fuzzies for it.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-24 06:36 pm (UTC)Not to me, it's not! Although...this is the first "inspired by" work I've ever done, so I don't know what the ettiquitte is, in general. (Sorry for spamming you--eep!)
made me hope like hell that there was nothing in the original story that was offensive to you or made light of his disability in a way that was hurtful.
Oh, no, no, no! The only thing that bothered me was the "throwaway bit of unrelated ableism" that you took out. (I'm glad). But I wrote this because I absolutely LOVED your story! Boys! And as far as “making light” of it is concerned, I think the source might make that difficult :D. Because Takahashi takes it seriously--in the sense that she knows how it works, and also, unpleasant things happen to Ryoga because of it--but it’s also lolarious, often as it’s being taken seriously. I was actually afraid this story might lose the funny, partly because people who aren’t me might not think stuff is as funny as I do.
For instance, in the anime, Ryoga makes it to the school where the gymnastics competition is without getting lost. He weeps for joy, and then over the PA they announce that the contest is in the second gym. (I *hate* that). I wanted to bring him something sugary and/or caffeinated, but also, WAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Because I have personal experience with this kind of thing and am also me, I might think of meaner stuff to do to him than most people. (Martial baseball! HAHAHAHAHA!) *Ahem.*
To be honest, I hadn't thought of Ryoga as a character with a disability (unrecognized privilege! hiiii~!)
I'm not sure Rumiko Takahashi did, either, TBH. *g.* She certainly doesn't identify him that way. I struggled over whether to tag this story as “Canon disabled character” and decided against it. (Maybe I will be braver later :D) When I wrote the meta, I felt like it was a point of contention I had to prove. And I checked to see if people other than me had read Ryoga as a PWD, because part of me...felt silly. There’s something about systemic ableism in that, maybe.
But I did want to say that I adored your story, and totally meant this one as flattery. :D :D :D I was afraid you might be like: ”Ranma 1/2? I don’t care about that fandom anymore!” So, eee, I’m glad you don’t feel that way.