terajk

Title: Steven Segal on an Exploding Boat
Rating: 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.