Ranma 1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: UNBETA'D. I own nothing. Recognizable characters and events belong to other people. Together with the original characters and events, they collectively own my soul.

Ranma stumbled upon the Estate while looking for a safe place to sleep; safe being a relative term with all the weirdness around. A rogue samurai or rampaging dinosaur could attack any peaceful spot without a moment's notice. A solid, well-furnished house might change into a crumbling ruin or empty meadow while he slept.

He had been pretty lucky so far—if you could call it that. Ranma had been sitting down to eat with the Tendos when whatever had happened struck. It had felt like the Jusenkyo curse when he first gained it—as if his entire body was stretching out of shape and at the same time being pushed into a little ball. It wasn't real pain, but it still hurt like hell trying to hold on to his sense of reality. When he snapped back into himself, he lifted his head from his bowl to ask if anyone else had felt it as well. He really hoped it wasn't something to do with the curse—unless it had worn off or something which he didn't really believe. Hope was long gone ever since the whole wedding disaster.

No one answered his question and looking over at Akane, Ranma froze. She was haloed by a battle aura; resigned to the inevitable, he put down his food and waited for the mallet to smash into him. Nothing happened. Looking up again, he found that Akane still looked the same. She hadn't moved at all. There was something weird about her aura too—usually it flickered like an angry fire, but now it stood still as if it was part of a painting someone had attached to Akane.

Leaning over to check if she had a fever or something, Ranma froze. When he moved his hand towards Akane, that weird not-pain feeling came back. Pushing forward, he found that his hand started moving slower and slower even though he was pushing it with all his considerable strength. He tried to yank it back but it moved ever slower until suddenly there was a kind of pop and he fell backwards as his arm rocketed back into his chest. What the hell was going on?

Picking himself up warily he found it wasn't just Akane. All the Tendos were motionless, not even their eyes were moving. It was like he was standing inside a picture and anytime he tried to touch one of them, the picture started grabbing back at him and trying to turn him into one too. Running through the possibilities in his head, Ranma figured it had be something to do with the Amazons. Or maybe Kuno—he came up with some pretty weird mystical shit every once in a while. Like that dumb sword. Stupid wasted wish. Stupid perverted idiot. Ranma kept mumbling to himself as he ran to the Nekohanten.

Something was wrong. Even moving at his usual high speed through Nerima, he could tell the whole area was affected by whatever happened at the Dojo. Nothing was moving. He saw a couple people out on the street, frozen as still as the Tendos had been. Whatever was going on was big. Or maybe it was just affecting him—maybe he had finally gotten so fast that it only seemed like the whole world was at a standstill? He preened a bit, thinking of it. Then he stopped. It would drive him crazy if he had to move as slow as when he tried to touch Akane every time he wanted to talk to someone. This had to be something Ku Lon could fix. Had to be.

His hopes were dashed when he got to the Nekohanten. The building was gone. The lot where it was supposed to be was a forest—an untouched forest with no signs that people had ever been there at all. If it wasn't for all the buildings around it, he would have thought that he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. But this was definitely where the Chinese restaurant was supposed to be. He ran for the Kunos'. Whatever that idiot had found was really nasty; Ranma would make him regret whatever it was.

The Kunos' estate was in ruins. Kodachi stood, lifeless as any statue over a pond filled with black sludge, an alligator carcass rotting on the bank. He found Kuno and Sasuke in a thicket of saplings that were sprouting out of what he thought was a table. The roof was completely gone and most of the walls were fallen in. Ranma took off, praying desperately to all the gods he had ever heard of while staying in the shrines his pops liked to mooch off of.

Ukyo's restaurant was gone—replaced with a futuristic looking skyscraper. He trashed the laser guns at the entrance but couldn't find Ukyo or Konatsu anywhere in the building. The school seemed fairly normal—until he tried to go in it and felt that weird thing running through his body again. He left it alone and wandered around for a while before returning to the Tendo Dojo—he didn't see any people moving, but he did see some animals roaming around. So it wasn't just him.

He stayed at the Tendos' for a while, sleeping in his room and running a patrol of sorts, the Dojo to the Nekohanten to the Kunos' to Ukyo's to the school to the park to Tofu's old place. Every place that had become familiar to him in the years he had stayed in Nerima. Things changed—but never in a good way. The skyscraper where Ukyo's had been got even more futuristic and the plants at the Nekohanten started to take over the surrounding buildings and creep onto the street as well. He never found Ukyo or the Amazons.

He couldn't say how long he stayed at the Tendos'. The sun rose and set a few times, but that wasn't any help. Once he saw the sun rising in fast-motion, so he counted to himself, measuring his heart rate. 160 beats later, the sun had set again. Another time, the day was long enough that he was exhausted by the time the sun was overhead. When he woke up, it didn't seem to have moved at all.

Eventually he decided it was time to leave. Somewhere, there had to be a way to fix this. And if there wasn't, he still needed to get away from this place and the loss of every person he had ever cared about. He grabbed his backpack, scrounged some food from the kitchen, and set off.

Traveling through the mess of forest and buildings and ruins that Tokyo had become, Ranma did run into people occasionally. If they noticed him at all, they tended to attack him on sight, which was fairly normal, but the clothing they were wearing was all weird: some of it was really old and some of it was just plain weird. Many of the people disappeared before they got to him, some of them moved right through him like ghosts, and a few of them he had to fight off.

He slept when he had to, in buildings that seemed relatively normal. He couldn't quite shake the feeling that something would happen while he slept—the roof would fall down and kill him or one of those slow spots would creep up and he wouldn't be able to leave. Still, he had to sleep sometimes. Part of him hoped that he wouldn't wake up again to this frightening, lonely world. But Ranma Saotome didn't lose and didn't give up, so he kept going. He found that while minor changes happened all the time, anything major that could transform a house to ruins or create a spot where time moved differently caused that stretching, squeezing sensation and gave him enough warning to move somewhere else. He started to think of these events as storms—they came through like tsunamis and messed up most of the stuff in their path.

It was right after one of these storms that he found the Estate. Surrounded by the chaos that the storm had left behind, the Estate looked pretty peaceful and he figured a roof over his head would be nice. One of the things the storm had dropped off was a foot-deep layer of snow, although it had been a warm spring-like day before it hit. So he walked through the open gates, past the gardens and outlying buildings, and into the silent main house—where he hoped some food might be.

Wandering around, looking for something to eat and the best place to sleep, Ranma found that the place was not as empty as it had seemed. In a small room on the upper floor, there was a girl near his age standing in front of a window with her raised hands cupped above her head, holding some sort of glowing thing. Her eyes were closed and she looked pretty weird. She was wearing a long white dress and a gold tiara and her pale hair fell nearly to the floor in two pony-tails sprouting from round buns on the side of her head.

Watching her carefully and not seeing any movement, Ranma figured she must be one of the people who had been frozen in time. He backed out of the room warily. The statue people always creeped him out and he didn't want to get too close and risk being trapped with her. If he was going to give up like that, he would've done it at the Dojo with Akane.

He decided to camp out downstairs and move on in the morning, but he wanted to scout out the rest of the house first. It was always best to know where weird shit might come from and that girl was one of the weirdest things he'd seen yet. There was something about her that made him feel peaceful and relaxed, like this was the first time he'd been safe since all this started. He didn't trust it at all.

Two rooms down, he found another strange woman. This one was older, with long green hair—she reminded him of some of the Amazons from the village in China. She was holding onto a staff and kneeling in front of a big mirror. Ranma noticed a flicker of movement inside the mirror and he whirled around falling into a defensive stance. Most of the weirdoes and creatures that had attacked him had fought to kill instead of for fun and practice or a little harmless maiming. There was nothing behind him. Scanning the area, the only life he could sense was the woman peering into the mirror. Relaxing slowly, he studied the mirror and found that all of the movement was contained inside the glass. Fascinated, he watched as images of various disasters cycled through the mirror: flooded cities, frozen people, dinosaurs pushing over semis, knights having pitched battles with Indians, scenes of the messed-up world where time had stopped working right.

"Why won't they stop?" Ranma jumped backwards into a battle-ready position once again at the woman's despairing whisper.

"Who're you?" He asked, and then again more belligerently when she didn't answer. She didn't seem to notice him at all, not even flinching when he darted a quick palm strike past her head. He frowned and asked "Why won't what stop?"

"The Time Storms."

Ranma's eyebrows arched up in surprise. He hadn't expected her to answer him after ignoring the first questions. He tried again to find out who she was with no luck. Experimenting, he found she'd only respond certain questions and even then her answers tended to be vague and absent, as if most of her mind wasn't present.

"Who are you?" "Where are you from?" "What are you doing?"—got no response.

Questions about the other girl did get something. "The Queen must be protected—it takes all of her strength to hold back the Time." Any more questions about the girl just got the same response. Ranma eventually gave up and headed out into the gardens to think. Running through simple katas that didn't require any of this attention to do, Ranma considered what little he had learned. The woman at the mirror knew something about what was going on but she wouldn't or couldn't tell him. Touching her gave him the same weird feeling he got in the bad areas outside—with an added shock of pain. It didn't seem to affect her at all. The other girl—the "Queen"—was doing something to protect the house from the mess outside. Probably she was protecting the whole Estate grounds, he decided. The gardens looked fairly normal though in need of a good weeding and the buildings were all in good repair.

If there was any chance to fix whatever had happened, it seemed like these people were it. The Queen might be able to keep out the storms—but she was vulnerable to any of those freaks the storms dropped down. Would the only chance to save the world be lost if some scared and confused bandit came by and cut her down? Ranma couldn't risk it. His decision made, Ranma scouted the area more thoroughly. He closed and barred the gates and did a patrol of the surrounding wall—it seemed in pretty good condition. He found the kitchen and checked on the food. The place was pretty well-supplied—they should be able to last a while. Assuming the two girls ate anything. It didn't seem like they had. He wondered how long they had been here.

Wandering around once he left the Tendos', Ranma had purposely kept his mind blank, concentrating only on survival. He rarely ever let himself think about what was happening or what he could do. He had gone through everything at the Dojo and he wasn't ready to try again. It was too painful.

On the Estate, he had a bit more time to think although he still tried not to. He moved into the room next to the Queen's, close enough to hear if anything attacked but away from her disturbingly pleasant presence. When he was awake, he patrolled the Estate, occasionally checking on the Queen and the woman at the mirror. He started leaving the grounds as well, patrolling outside the walls and using tools he found to cut back brush away from the walls. Bored and desperate, he even tried to take care of the gardens a bit, but he didn't really know how to. Most of his time he spent on katas or looking for someone outside to fight.

A few days after stumbling upon the Estate, Ranma found the Queen crumbled into a heap on the floor. Her lips were white and cracked and for the first time he noticed how thin she was. Standing tall and holding up that glow, she had seemed ethereal and magical. Now, she looked sick. Cautiously moving to her, Ranma found that she was burning up. He dragged a Western style mattress in from another room, and carefully picked her and put her on it. In a corner of the room, he found a bowl of water. It was lukewarm and there was dust and bits of leaves floating on the top. He noticed it was half-empty and wondered if she had drunk from it before. Disgusted, he went and grabbed her some more water.

There was no running water anywhere Ranma had been, but the Estate had an old well he had been drinking out of. The water was clean and sweet and he hauled a bucket up for the girl. He found a glass in the kitchen and managed to get to drink some, though her eyes never opened. She murmured a bit when he lay her back down but he couldn't make out any words.

Another frustrating questions and occasional answer session with the lady in front of the mirror gave Ranma some ideas about what was going on. The glowing thing the girl had held up was a kind of magical crystal that only the Queen could control. While she was holding it, it built up enough power to last on its own and then she collapsed to sleep and get some water. "Why's she doing this?" didn't get any response.

Not in the least satisfied, but aware it was the best he was going to get, Ranma went back to the Queen's room. He wished Nabiki was there—she would have known what kind of questions to ask he was sure—but then he pushed back that thought. Wishing wouldn't help and thinking about how much he wanted other people around just made it harder to do what needed to be done.

The girl—it was hard to think of her as Queen when she looked so weak and helpless—was still unconscious. Ranma did his best to get some more water in without choking and then went downstairs to find some food. Kasumi had always fed him broth when he was sick (usually from Akane cooking and that one time that Happosai had made him so weak). He shook his head. Why was he suddenly missing people so much? He had learned on the road not to think about people once he left them. It kept him sane and let him be content even though he left every friend he ever made behind. Why wasn't it working anymore?

He didn't find anything for soup, so he made rice and pickles instead. Maybe if he helped her sit up she'd be able to eat something solid. Later he'd go out and try and find a store or something. Upstairs, he found that she was standing up again, holding up the crystal. He guessed the couple hours he had spent moving the bed, talking to the mirror lady and tracking down lunch had revived her enough. Like this, she looked more like a Queen and less like a girl. Still, he couldn't erase the images of her weak and sick. He thought about the dirty water that had been in the corner, about how light she had been when he moved her to the bed, about the soft whispers she murmured into the pillow. She needed to eat. Whatever she was doing, however powerful she was, it was taking too much out of her.

Frustrated and upset, Ranma stomped over to the Queen. He grabbed the chopsticks, picked up some rice and held it up to her mouth. He stopped to think about how he could get her to chew. He had some experience in force-feeding people, but usually they were already eating or at least capable of chewing on their own. Pushing the food into her mouth, he was surprised when she suddenly chewed and swallowed it on her own.

He found that she could eat and drink while standing as long as her held the cup or food up to her mouth. Every once in a while she would collapse for a short period of time. He moved the mattress directly behind her and covered it with a fat quilt and plump pillows. Red-faced and clumsy, he spent some time thinking about what he would do if she had to use the bathroom, but somehow it never happened. She started to look healthier with regular food and water.

Something about the mirror lady made him wary of trying to feed her. She was a little more mobile anyways—he tried leaving some food in front of her. He never saw her moving, but sometimes when he came back in the food would be gone.

Feeding the Queen meant he had to spend more time with her. Rather than just check on her quickly once during his patrol cycle, he had to come in three or four times and spend at least fifteen minutes feeding her. The feelings of serenity and safety that radiated out from her started affecting him more and he found himself relaxing when he was near her. He had to force himself to leave the room sometimes.

Ranma had spent most of his life on the road, leaving friends and enemies behind him scattered across the country. He had never been lonely—he had never let himself be lonely. It wasn't worth it and besides, he always had pops, right?

On the Estate, he didn't have anyone. The mirror lady was more like a talking doll than a person. He couldn't spend much time near her without wanting to hit her or melt that damn mirror with a ki blast anyway. It wasn't just the way she only gave vague answers to certain questions and ignored the rest. Something about her just really rubbed him the wrong way.

The more time he spent with the Queen though, the easier he found it to relax. Everything outside her room made him tense—patrolling and even doing katas, he had to stay alert for possible predators, human or otherwise. Random memories of Nerima would ambush, and he found himself wishing he could taste Kasumi's cooking, or pay Nabiki to tell him what the hell was going on, or spar with Ryouga. Thinking about his friends made him angry at whatever had taken them away and more and more lonely.

In the Queen's room it was different. Somehow he seemed to think about the people he knew even more, but it never made him upset. Instead, he found himself talking to her. Filling up the silence of the room with stories of his life, he talked more than he ever had to anyone before.

"This one time when I was nine or ten, we at a karate dojo, right? And the master had a lot of his own students so he couldn't teach me much. He gave me a bunch a scrolls, 'cause he said I was good enough to study them and figure out what to do. Then he'd watch me and correct me. But there was this one move I couldn't get it right. I kept trying, you know, 'cause Ranma Saotome don't lose, but it just never worked. I did everything just like in the picture. So his wife, she was really nice and man, she made the best baked fish ever—better than Kasumi's even. She tried to help me, looking over the scroll and all, and then she pointed to one of the sentences and said why I wasn't shifting my weight like it said. The picture didn't show that and it wasn't real normal. So I hadta admit I couldn't read it—all the rest of the moves I figured out from the pictures by themselves. She was real mad, but she spent the rest of our time there teaching me ta read and she gave me a bunch of books to help me practice when I left."

He told her about meeting Ryouga while he fed her a dinner of rice and pickles; his pops had been in jail for a while and a police man had escorted Ranma to school every day. Made him wear the uniform and everything. It had been the only regular schooling he'd had before Furinkan. He didn't think Furinkan really counted though, it was pretty weird—so he told her about old pineapple head and Ms. Hinako and all that.

"It was really different, you know. Staying in one place all the time like that. I got to know people who wouldn't'a talked to me at all if I was on the road. I guess pops and me looked pretty dirty most of the time. At Furinkan, I could count on people being there most days. And pops wasn't planning on leaving, so I could count on me being there. WE even there long enough for people to catch up to us, like Ryouga and U-chan, you remember I told you about them? 'Course, some people I didn't really want to catch up."

The more he talked to her, the more he found himself saying things he hadn't even known himself until he heard his voice saying them. He told her how excited he had been to see his old friends, and how it had hurt when they had been so mad at him. It wasn't like he had ever wanted to leave. That's just how things worked. He told her about Akane, about how cute she was when she smiled and how she could be a pretty decent martial artist if she worked at it instead of working on homework or going out with her friends. He told her what it had felt like, to have that offer of friendship taken back violently just because he was a boy.

The day the Queen opened her eyes and looked at him, in the middle of his story of Phoenix Mountain and how scared he had been that he wouldn't make it in time, it was like it was the first time anyone had ever looked at him. It was like she could see his soul—as if he had given her the key to it. He hadn't meant to say all those things, he had just been trying to fill up the silence. She had made him comfortable, made him feel like it was okay to say anything. Had she really heard him? Did she think he was stupid and weak. Even as she smile at him and closed her eyes again, he was wondering if she hated him.

The next day, someone else wandered onto the Estate looking for a safe harbor. Her name was Hitomi and she had been in Shinjuku when the first storms hit. She had some experience fighting—Ranma judged from her ki and the way she moved that she was probably at Ukyo's level. Even so, it was mostly luck that helped her stay alive and make it to the Estate. She was amazed to find a place like it and to meet a real person once again.

She broke down crying when Ranma told her that the storms didn't affect the Estate. He'd never known what to do with a crying girl, so he panicked and babbled for a while. Some of his nonsense must have gotten through to her though, because she started laughing through her tears and eventually calmed down. She was a pretty sensible girl.

Ranma fed her before showing her around the Estate. Food, he firmly believed, tended to make everyone feel a little better. As he showed her to the Queen and told her how he took care of her and the mirror lady, Ranma suddenly realized that this was his chance. Hitomi could take care of them, and he could leave, get away from the beautiful, magical girl who knew all of his secrets.

He left saying that he needed to go find more food. The Estate was pretty well-stocked, but it couldn't last forever, especially if anyone else showed up. Time had little meaning anymore and Ranma had never paid all that much attention to keeping track of it anyways, so he didn't know how long he had been on the Estate, spilling out his soul to a stranger. He figured they had gone through almost half the supplies though. Hitomi saw him off, promising faithfully to take good care of the others until he got back.

Part of him, a large part of him, wasn't planning on coming back.

Somehow though, he found himself gathering food anyways. The Queen needed to eat, and the new girl would too. He couldn't just abandon them to starve. Maybe he could leave the food inside the gates and then leave, content that his responsibility was done.

Ranma had spent time in the country, earning money as a migrant farm worker when he and Pops were desperate and living off the forest when they were even more desperate. That experience came in handy as he wandered around a devastated Tokyo. He pulled vegetables from healthy fields, gathered wild nuts and herbs from forest groves and grabbed packaged foods from empty grocery stores. He found an old fashioned cart and dragged it along rutted dirt roads and crumbling city blocks, filling it with anything that wouldn't rot too quickly.

Occasionally he saw people, but the number of ghosts compared to people who noticed him was even higher than during his first trip. When the cart was almost half full, he ran into a wandering Buddhist monk.

A light rain a while back had left Ranma female. There wasn't much point in trying to change back out on the road, and there was no around to care anyways. The monk, smiling cheerfully, had clasped her hands and gazed deeply in her eyes. "Please, beautiful lady, do me the honor of bearing my child." Ranma, predictably enough, had hit him.

Somehow, and Ranma was never quite clear on exactly what happened, they ended up traveling together in spite of the inauspicious beginning. Ranma found something about the monk calming and comfortable. Even as she dodged the occasional grope, Ranma found herself talking easily to the cheerful man. It seemed that she had gotten in the habit of saying whatever was on her mind back at the Estate. He didn't judge her for it, but instead kept smiling, even when she hit him to remind him to keep his hands to himself.

It was a good time. Traveling with a companion was a lot safer and more relaxing that moving alone. They took turns standing watch when they needed to sleep, and watching the cart when one of them went off to grab something. The monk added some clothes and tools to Ranma's load. It hadn't occurred to Ranma to look for anything other than food, but she found herself grabbing soap and other supplies when she went into grocery stores.

Ranma thought about traveling with the monk forever. The cart was almost full; they could drop it off at the Estate and then keep going on down the road. Of course, she would have to tell him she was really a man, but she thought he'd get over it. Maybe one day, they would even go back to the Estate and she would have new stories to tell the Queen.

She imagined it, the monk hitting on Hitomi while Ranma told the Queen about the dinosaurs they had seen grazing on a grassy plain, strange flying machines zipping around over head. He could tell her about the strangeness, the danger, and the wonder of the outside world, and not have to talk about himself at all. He'd show her he was brave and strong, telling her about fighting off the bandits and wild dogs that tried to make off with the cart.

Ranma continued to daydream through setting up camp for the night. Right up until the monk disappeared before Ranma's eyes.

The next day, the gender-cursed martial artist made his way back to the Estate.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: UNBETA'D. I own nothing. Recognizable characters and events belong to other people. Together with the original characters and events, they collectively own my soul.

This is a companion piece to Times Storms: Nabiki's Story. They should be more or less self-contained even though they are obviously intertwined. I do not plan on any other separate stories in this universe, but you never know. Most likely other people's perspectives will be contained within these two stories.

Warning: In later chapters this fic will contain shojo-ai (femslash) and possibly shonen-ai (slash).

The Queen's name was Usagi. It was odd, thinking about her having a real name. Ranma found that it made her seem more like a person. The Queen had been ideal—a beautiful, precious creature to be protected. A statue with a kind aura, like a goddess or something. Usagi was more annoying. She was real nice and all, but she whined with this nauseating high-pitch and she talked too fast.

She only did around him too. When it was Hitomi's turn to take care of her, she reverted to the Queen, silent and determined. The goddess protecting the Estate. He knew 'cause he spied on them sometimes.

Actually, she was like that most of the time, distant and still, immersing herself in that crystal of her's to keep up the protective barrier. Like that, she made him feel peaceful and respectful, like the really good mikos he had met sometimes. When she collapsed into sleep she looked exhausted and vulnerable, calling up all of his protective instincts. Awake and talking though, she pulled at his soul and his sanity. She knew all of his secrets. Hell, she knew stuff about him Ranma hadn't even admitted to himself before!

It wasn't like she came out and said it. But she'd be babbling about missing her friends and make an off-hand comment about how someone named Rei had a temper like Akane's. Every time she let something like that drop, he'd tense up. She'd just steamroll right past it though, talking a mile a minute. She missed all her friends too although she was glad enough not to have to deal with school.

He sympathized. It sounded like school was boring all over, not just in Furinkan. Not like they ever taught anything useful anyways. He knew how to research and all that—he knew everything there was to know about how to resurrect dead martial arts out of long-lost scrolls or how to find out what kind of demon was terrorizing him. Who cared what China's major export was or how to say "Where am I?" in English anyways? Okay, so that last bit was probably pretty useful for Ryouga, but Ranma didn't ever intend to go to America. Stupid foreigners didn't have any real martial arts, just stuff they borrowed from Asian countries. And guns.

Really, Usagi didn't wake up all that often anyways. Most of her time and energy was spent keeping the Estate safe. Sometimes though, when she'd slept long enough but didn't have to get back to the crystal right away, she'd talk to him.

The first thing she had said when he got back from his time away from the Estate was "It's so lonely." Those were the first words he ever heard from her. He and Hitomi had decided to take turns spending time with her after that. One of them would be patrolling or cooking or cleaning and the other would be feeding the Queen or just sitting with her. He even gave Hitomi some martial arts lessons in the Queen's room.

He kept track of when she went to sleep and when she got up, even when it was Hitomi's turn to watch her. When she went to sleep, he'd stay closer, sneaking by occasionally to see if she was talking to Hitomi. She never did.

When it was his turn to watch while she slept, he'd sit by her bed, trying not to stare at her. He waited for her to wake up and start talking. She never seemed to censor herself, just like he hadn't when he talked to her, even though she was talking to a real person and he had just been talking to a kind of statue. She told him about her friends and her family. She told him about being Sailor Moon and how scared she had been sometimes. He felt good after listening to her, even when he was annoyed because she'd spent the entire time whining or squealing over her boyfriend. "My honeybunch is sooo perfect! He's handsome and romantic and just too dreamy!" He preferred the squeals, as much as they hurt his ears, to the times she was quiet and sad though.

Ranma found himself liking Hitomi as well. She was a practical woman, nice and hard-working, but not afraid to tell him off. She settled into martial arts lessons with a grim determination; he wondered sometimes what had happened as she made her way through the chaos of the messed up city outside. He never asked. He was a little afraid of what she might tell him.

He had offered the martial arts lessons to her after a crazy guy in filthy rags had rushed screaming into the Estate. It had been Ranma's turn to feed Usagi dinner, and he had only just heard the yells from downstairs in time to stop the madman from stabbing Hitomi with a butcher's knife. She called him a knight in shining armor. Attacks on the Estate were rare—the walls kept most creatures out and there weren't too many people around. Still, it was for the best if Hitomi could defend herself.

The first lesson did not start out all that well. He still couldn't bear to hit a girl so he tried to get her to attack him while he dodged like when he was trying to get Akane's speed up. Unlike Akane however, Hitomi didn't know how to throw a punch effectively. He'd started winding her up about it, "Stupid girl! Not like that. Aw, come on, can't you do any better? Suppose I shouldn't expect it from a weak little _girl_."

She'd stopped and yelled at him. "How am I supposed to learn anything like this? Stop jumping around like a demented rabbit and show me! And stop that childish name-calling! Didn't anyone ever teach you how to be polite?" She'd chewed him out, glaring at him like his mother had glared at Pops when he explained why he ate so quickly. Shame-faced, he'd slowed down and actually showed her how to hold her body and how to move her arm to give a powerful and efficient hit.

While Ranma taught her martial arts, Hitomi taught him how to teach them. The more he worked with her, the more he remembered how he had learned. Pops may have taken a swim or be eaten by sharks approach to teaching, but the masters at various dojos they stopped by had been real teachers. Even Pops, when Ranma was little, had started him off by correcting his stance and teaching him the katas bit by bit. He'd only started going through them all at once when he realized how fast Ranma could pick them up.

The "days" settled into a pattern; chores and meals, patrolling and practice, and time with Usagi. The sun was still completely wacky of course, but they made due without it. Ranma found himself returning to his habit of talking to her, telling about his day and about random memories that still ambushed him sometimes. He heard a fair amount of her life story and they started to have actual conversations. They talked about the best meals they had ever eaten, their favorite kind of ice cream, and so on. Some of their conversations were more serious, about power and duty and the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak. Ranma talked about his fiancées and Usagi shared how she sometimes got frustrated with her boyfriend's condescending attitude. The only topic they avoided was the time storms. Even so, they preferred the silly conversations to the serious.

Usagi somehow picked up on the fact that Hitomi was still teasing him about being a knight—probably because she did it during the martial arts lessons they still had in the Queen's rooms. Usagi started doing it too, rhapsodizing about how he'd look in plate armor and then nearly falling over giggling when he blushed as red as a tomato and started making warding gestures.

After some time, more people started finding the Estate. The first was a man in a torn business suit with a glazed look. Ranma welcomed him onto the Estate and showed him around, just like he had with Hitomi. That formidable woman pulled him into the Queen's room once the grateful man was settled down with a hot meal.

"You can't just go on trusting anyone who comes by, Ranma."

"What're you talking about? He's not attacking us or anything. 'Sides he's just some office worker or something. Not any threat to me. And if he does anything stupid around you, I'll take care of him."

"Not everyone bad attacks right off. We need to be careful."

"It's a martial artist's duty to protect the weak." Ranma said stubbornly.

"Well, our first duty is to protect the Queen. She's the only thing between us and that mess of Time out there. Look, Ranma, I'm not saying that we should kick him out. I want to help him—and anyone else who might come by—just as much as you do. But we have to protect ourselves and we have to protect the Queen first."

Ranma didn't agree—until the third man who came on to the Estate tried to strangle Usagi, ranting that it was all her fault the apocalypse had come. After that, Ranma watched all the newcomers very carefully. He made sure that either he or Hitomi was always with Usagi, and he made sure to really get to know everyone on the Estate. If he or Hitomi got an odd vibe off anyone, they paid close attention to that person. Any kind of violence towards the Queen got a person kicked off the Estate automatically. If a person made other sorts of problems—attacking people or refusing to work, then Ranma and Hitomi called everyone together and they all decided if that person needed to leave or just miss meals or something.

Hitomi had taken Ranma's curse in stride and Usagi had had enough time to get used to the idea before she spoke to him that she didn't even really think about it. Most people arriving on the Estate accepted it fairly easily too. It was hard to get too worked up about a boy who turned into a girl after you'd seen your entire family frozen in time, walked from a snowstorm into a punishingly hot jungle, and scrambled up a cliff to escape from a saber-tooth tiger.

Some people gained enough trust from both Ranma and Hitomi that he started training them to protect themselves and others. From the beginning, they had fitted people into the schedule of chores that they had worked out between themselves, and guard duty became one of those rotations.

There were still only a few people on the Estate, but more were arriving all the time, as if some lock somewhere had been released. They were putting a growing strain on the supplies that Ranma had stocked. Hitomi organized a work party, clearing some of the ornamental gardens for crops. Unfortunately, with the sun's course still erratic and the weather completely unstable, a garden was unreliable.

Ranma took some of his best students from the guards and sent them outside to forage. He talked to them about his own journeys and found that most people didn't feel the warning tingle he had come to associate with the storms. He sent two of those few who did with the foraging party.

"I should have gone with them." He told the Queen later. "Mako's a good guy, but he don't got enough experience to really take care of them out there. They might be able to fight off most thieves, but what if they run into a group of samurai or something? I should've gone out ta get stuff myself. I'd do a hell of a lot better than them." He left unsaid that he had stayed only to protect her.

The foraging team came back, in spite of Ranma's worries, with only minor injuries. They brought back a cart of food, an irascible nanny goat, and a grand tale of adventure and danger. They were the heroes of the Estate. Ranma knew they would need more trips for food—two more people had showed up while the team was out. He added another training session for those people interested in being on a foraging team and taught them how to run as well as how to fight and how to find edible food in the forest. He pulled in a farmer to talk to them about how to know what crops were worth harvesting. Hitomi set up a group to do inventory and started a list of other things the Estate needed.

As Ranma got more and more busy, Hitomi took charge of putting together the lists of rotations for duty. If anyone was unhappy about their share of work, she sent them to talk to Ranma. Anyone who refused to do their share was invited to leave the Estate. Few took the offer. Hitomi took Ranma off most of the chore lists. He was spending more and more time teaching the guards and foragers how to fight. He was also taking turns patrolling the wall of the Estate and checking up on all the people on the Estate, watching for danger from within and without.

People started bringing arguments to Ranma to be settled. It wasn't that he was particularly good at it, just that if he made a decision people were less likely to argue. It was a crash course in solving problems for Ranma. He started talking to people even more, getting a head start on any problems that might show up and getting people's opinions on how they should be handled. He went over every decision he made with Hitomi and Usagi when she was up, trying to figure out how to handle it things better. He started listening to the complaints and arguments in the Queen's room after he found that the combination of his growing authority and her magical presence made people even less likely to argue with him.

Ranma found himself the leader of the Estate. It was not a role he'd ever imagined for himself. He'd never been able to solve his own problems very well. But people listened to him and he found that he wanted to make sure he was worth listening to, so he listened to them as well. People trusted him and he started working to be worthy of that.

One day, he overheard a woman in the kitchens talking to a girl who had just been picked up by a foraging party. "There's the Queen, right. She protects us and is as kind and beautiful as an angel. The gods gave her special powers to keep us safe. Her Knight is the most powerful man in the world and he takes care of her. He takes care of us too, because it's her wish."

Hitomi's teasing comments about his knight-in-shining-armor tendencies had become mythology. He had never paid much attention to people calling him Sir or being respectful, as busy as he was trying to keep with their expectations. Now though, he found that he was called the Queen's Knight by almost everyone on the Estate. She was a goddess of mercy and he was her voice. She was their mystic savior and he was her champion.

It made him uncomfortable.

"It's what they need Ranma. The world's gone mad and most of them have seen too much of it. They need something to believe in and you're here. Stop whining about being a hero and go do what you're supposed to be doing." Hitomi scolded him when he went to her, confused by people liking and respecting him.

He had too much to do to spend much time worrying about it. They had enough people to send out two foraging parties in rotations—one leaving a few days after the other came back. He spent a lot of time helping them train before they left and hearing reports on what they saw and did when they came back. The outside world was still pretty weird, but as they spent more time exploring they found that shrines tended to be safer than anything else. Each foraging party had at least one person who could sense Time Storms coming; Mako's party managed to hide from one Storm in an old shrine a few miles from the Estate. They had to fight off a pack of bandits from the Warring States period, but the buildings didn't collapse or disappear around them and no one was frozen in Time.

Ranma told everyone in the foraging parties to keep an eye for any shrines and to keep them in mind as safe ground. After talking with Hitomi, he told them to keep some supplies at some of the closer shrines too and to make sure to stop by them periodically.

When less people started showing up randomly at the Estate, Ranma wondered if it was because they had started to run out of people who had survived the Time Storms. It was depressing but he kind of felt relieved. More people put more of a strain on their supplies and more of a strain on him to keep track of everyone and help the Estate run smoothly. Then the foraging parties started bringing people back with them.

Ghosts that were as real as the monk Ranma had met were rare and all of them disappeared before anyone they were with got to the Estate. They freaked the foragers out the first few times they ran into them—having someone you were just talking to disappear was enough to disturb even people who trained on how to escape from velociraptors. Some of the people the foragers picked up though, weren't ghosts. They also weren't Walkers, people who had been wandering around since the first Time Storm hit. Instead, they found that some of the people who had been frozen in time were being freed. Not too many, but enough here and there.

Ranma started spending more time patrolling the walls. He would stop every once in a while and stare out into the city. It worried the regular guards on the walls. They approached Hitomi about it and she brought it to the Queen's attention. The atmosphere on the Estate got more and more tense as Ranma started to be more and more distracted. People started treating the newcomers with more suspicion and hostility. Maybe one of them had done something to affect their Knight. Next thing you know, the Queen would start to drop the ball and they'd all be overwhelmed by the Time.

Hitomi had started having conversations with the Queen as well. Mostly, she spoke to her as a representative of the people of the Estate talking to their Goddess, but she was enough of a no-nonsense personality that she also treated the Queen as she did Ranma—someone to respect and work with, but not actually a mystical force. She reported to the Queen as the number of fights between citizens of the Estate rose, as people started to shirk their chores more, and as Ranma became less and less involved with the running of the Estate.

Together, they decided to confront him.

"We're worried about you, Ranma. Everyone is." Usagi pleaded.

"They're scared shitless. Look, I told you before, you and Her Majesty here are people's shining hopes. If you fall apart, everything we're working for here falls apart too. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is." Hitomi had a very direct approach to life.

Ranma reacted defensively. He'd trained the guards and foraging parties in the Saotome Style of Anything Goes Martial Arts—the best of the best. Sure, no of them were his level, but they were good enough to protect the Estate. He wasn't really neglecting his duties anyways. Just yesterday—or was it the day before? Okay, fine a couple of days ago—he'd helped Mariko solve that mystery of where the dried meat was disappearing too, hadn't he? And now they had some dogs to help watch the gate. Hitomi kept arguing about Ranma's responsibilities, Ranma kept arguing that he wasn't neglecting them. Finally, Usagi intervened.

Usagi looked like she was about to burst into tears. "I thought I was your f-friend!"

"A'course you are Usagi-chan! I never said you ain't." Ranma panicked at the idea of her crying. He never knew what to do with crying girls.

"But friends tell each other everything! And you w-won't tell us what's w-wrong!" She wailed, her voice nearly high enough to crack glass.

"Aw, c'mon. It ain't like that. I am your friend really. I'm just worried, y'know." Ranma was desperate, hovering over Usagi awkwardly.

"About what?" Sniffed Usagi.

"Well…it's just…I mean…" Ranma mumbled uncomfortably. "The way some people are starting to wake up and all."

Usagi looked confused. Hitomi, on the other hand, had a look of dawning awareness. A number of people had come to her concerned about loved ones who might now be waking up, alone and vulnerable in a messed up world. She really should of realized what was going on, but for all that she was closer to Ranma than anyone other than the Queen, she still sometimes fell into the trap of thinking of him as a superhuman protector.

"You're worried about your family? Oh, Ranma." Hitomi sighed, upset at her own blindness.

Usagi looked startled. She knew how much Ranma missed his friends but it hadn't even occurred to her that they might be coming out of their frozen state. She thought of the wistfulness in his voice when he'd told her how cute Akane was when she smiled or how much fun it was to hang out with Ryouga. She thought about stealing manga from Rei and eating Makoto's cooking. She thought about how nice it would be to have someone like Ami or Nabiki advising her and Ranma on how to deal with the people of the Estate. "You're just being silly Ranma!" She interrupted Hitomi's attempt to sooth him by telling him how unlikely it was anyone he knew had woken up. "Of course you'll just have to go check on them."

Of course, it wasn't as easy as all that. Ranma didn't like the idea of leaving Usagi and the Estate unprotected. She pointed out that he had trained the guards himself and he had to trust them to do their job. Hitomi was worried that people on the Estate would be upset and cause problems. They depended on Ranma's strength and believed in his confidence in his abilities. Even if they didn't really need him, it was better that they thought they did. It made them feel better and it kept even the ambitious people from trying to take over leadership of the Estate. They couldn't afford to have a split over who was in charge. Usagi's mythic position in the minds of the Estate was similar to the Emperor and Ranma her Shogun; 40 some people might not make for much of a civil war, but they could sure tear themselves apart. And what about jealousy? Everyone was worried about their own loved ones. Why should Ranma get to check on his?

It took a lot of talking and negotiating to come up with a way it might work. Usagi had to return to maintaining the crystal long before they were done. She was adamant that Ranma should go. In her insistence, she tapped in the persona of Princess Serenity and even Hitomi found herself giving way to the grace and wisdom of that radiant person.

The next time Usagi was momentarily from the demands of the crystal, the Queen addressed her people for the first time. The woman who was born to be Queen of Crystal Tokyo spoke. She stood at her window, benevolent and magical, and spoke to them of a mission for Her Knight. It was time for him to venture out into Chaos and search out others who needed his protection. He would return triumphant, she was sure. In the meantime, she trusted the people of the Estate to protect her and each other in his place.

Hitomi organized a committee of people to make a map of everyone's journeys to the Estate. Anyone could apply to have Ranma check on their family. Everyone did. Most people, it turned out, came from within a thirty mile radius of the Estate. Ranma had come the farthest, which Hitomi supposed was not surprising. It added to his legend, that he had survived such a long journey in the Chaos of the Time Storms.

When Ranma finally set out, a few weeks later, he left with a map showing the locations of everyone he was supposed to check on as well as any shrines nearby that he could use for shelter. The people of the Estate had tried to send a cartload of supplies—as well as an escort of foragers and guards—but he left alone with only an old backpack full of food and one blanket.

Leaving the Estate, Ranma felt a great weight fall off his shoulders. Hiking through snowy streets and meadows full of brightly blooming flowers, he wasn't the Queen's Knight. He didn't dare leap up to the rooftops—no roof could be trusted not to collapse underneath him, but even on the ground he traveled faster than most could manage. He was free of the weight of his people's respect for him. There were no arguments to solve, no punishments to hand out to slackers and troublemakers, no awe-filled eyes expecting him to protect them from every danger. He was just Saotome Ranma, wandering martial artist.

He slept when he was tired, in a shrine when he was near one, or out in the forest when he wasn't. The homes nearest to the Estate would be checked out by one of the foraging parties. The foragers usually went a few days travel out—four or five at the most, but they would stretch it a little looking for so-called "Sleepers" waking up out of their frozen-in-time state. Of course, Ranma traveled much faster than those groups could. Still, he had nearly a week of time to himself before he had to start really looking for people.

He saw a few ghosts, too distant in time to even realize he was there. He fought off an enraged samurai and a band of wild dogs that was living in one of the shrines. He slept under the stars, got drenched in a summer rain storm, and watched a herd of mammoths trying to negotiate the narrow streets of a section of town stuck in the middle of wide grasslands.

He found a very confused office worker at his third stop, the husband to one of the best cooks on the Estate. Ranma explained what he could to the man and then took him to a shrine. Grateful to have someone telling him what to do and eager to reunite with his wife, the man agreed to stay at the shrine until Ranma could return and lead him back to the Estate. Ranma picked up a small boy and his grandmother nearby and dropped them off at the same shrine. As he slowly made his way into Nerima, Ranma found another six people and brought them to various safe shrines to wait for him. Two people refused and he gave them copies of his map so they could try to find their own way to the Estate. One man, angry and belligerent, ran away and was eaten by a dinosaur before Ranma could save him.

Walking through half-familiar streets, Ranma felt his sense of relaxation and freedom slipping away. He had been confident ordering the people he found around and taking care of their safety. He had felt comfortable taking charge, seeing them relax in the presence of someone who knew what he was doing. Nerima took all of that away, reminding him of the boy who hadn't been able to take charge of his own life, let alone anyone else's.

Tense and hopeful, frightened and lost and eager and angry and happy to be home, Ranma started the patrol he had run so many times right after the Time Storms first hit. Furinkan high school was still a swamp of slow time. Tofu's office had disappeared entirely into a block of old-fashioned courtyard houses. Ucchan's was barely recognizable as a building, a gleaming black monolith that belonged to a science fiction movie. The Nekohanten was still overrun by a wilderness that had started taking over all the nearby buildings as well. The Kuno's estate had crumbled further, a devastated ruin inhabited only by the statues of the Kunos and Sasuke.

He approached the Tendo Dojo warily, overcome with memories of the first time he had come here. He had been female then too, carrying a worn backpack, nervous and upset. Of course, this time he was approaching under his own steam instead of thrown over the shoulder of an overgrown panda.

The gate was closed and locked and there was a hole in the outer wall. He could see that the yard was overgrown and the dojo fallen in. Clenching his fists rhythmically, he approached the house. Coming up to the living room, his knees gave out from under him. Everything was exactly the way he had left it. Akane was still swathed in a frozen battle aura, her hand reaching for her mallet. Even the food was still giving off steam, piping hot from the Kasumi's kitchen.

It took him a while, filled with grief and memories, to realize that Kasumi was missing. He tore through the house, frantically searching for the kindest woman he had ever met. He finally found her sleeping in her room. She was huddled onto her bed, her dress streaked with dirt, her hair tangled and matted, and tear tracks barely drying on her face.

He paused in the doorway—he was never any good with crying girls, and this was Kasumi, the sweetest, gentlest person on the planet. He'd rather kill himself than see her so upset. But this was Kasumi, the sweetest, gentlest person on the planet and she needed his help. She had made her family her life and then she had woken up alone in a mad world.

He sat down on her bed and gathered her into his arms. She woke up with a scream, her hands curled into flailing claws and he thought for a moment that he'd made the wrong choice. Then she saw his face and latched on to him like a barnacle clutching onto a rock in a storm-swept ocean. She buried her head in his chest, soaking his shirt with renewed tears. Her arms clung to her with a surprising, desperate strength, nearly crushing him almost as much as one of Ryouga's hugs. He choked, then relaxed and hugged her back. He rubbed circles on her back, murmuring soothing words into her hair. It's alright, I'm here, nothing will hurt you, you're safe, you're not alone, it's alright.

She couldn't bear to let him out of her sight. He helped her pack, shoving everything she couldn't bear to leave into a bag. The only place she refused to follow him was into the living room, where her family sat frozen around a table ready to eat the last meal she had prepared. She barely spoke at all and when she did her voice was hoarse and broken. He packed everything as fast as he could, eager to get both of them away from the haunting presence and loss of those they cared about.

As he led her out of the house, he thought about all of the people he had seen still frozen on his journey. A few Sleepers had woken up—but they were so very few among so many left behind. The Time Storms were still happening, hitting randomly and changing the landscape in dangerous and unpredictable ways. He had described the Estate to Kasumi and to everyone else he rescued as a haven of sanity and safety. They were what was left of the human race. They needed him, to be their hope, their protector and leader, to be the Queen's Knight.

As he left, a terrified and grief-stricken Kasumi clinging to his arm, he said goodbye to Nerima, to the people he had known and cared about, and to the Ranma who lived there with them, concerned only about fixing his curse and avoiding as many weddings as possible.


	3. Chapter 3

Wow

Wow. This one was a lot harder to write than any of the others.

Disclaimer: Other than the ridiculous number of OCs and the dinosaurs, nothing in this fic belongs to me.

Even carrying Kasumi and moving fairly slowly, they reached one of the shrines Ranma had left people at within a day. It was the largest group of people he had directed to a shrine—six adults and two children, most of them not related to each other in any way. Ranma immediately started to organize a night watch schedule so that the group wouldn't be taken by surprise by anything. While he slept fairly lightly and had relied on his own danger sense on the trip out of the Estate there was a lot more risk traveling in a group. The people there were scared and confused. He had explained a little bit of what was going on (as he understood it anyways) when he originally found them and brought them to the shrines, but now they needed more. They needed someone to lead, to reassure them, and to keep them safe from the vagaries of the Time-riven world. He pushed his own pain and grief about his friends down and concentrated on taking care of the people in front of him.

Kasumi, lost in her own terror and grief, was quiet and easy for him to forget about as they moved on.

When he found her huddled up in her sleeping bag like a wounded animal at the third stop they made, he collapsed to his knees beside her. He had abandoned her to her pain. Thinking about how much she must miss her family had only made him think too much about how much he missed them himself. Being around her was like ripping pieces of tape off his skin one by one. It was so much easier to ignore her and focus on getting everyone to the Estate safely. How could he have been so selfish? Memories of her taking care of him--of everyone really--swamped him: Kasumi, the homemaker, the best cook in the world, the woman who bandaged his wounds, who encouraged him and Akane to spend time together. Kasumi, who had always had time to comfort everyone else's hurts and tears, was crying silently into her bedding and It. Was. All. His. Fault.

If this had happened before he found the Estate, Ranma would've panicked, unsure of how to respond. It's possible that he might have searched for her sisters to come take care of her--although he had been taught that showing weakness to others was unthinkable and so he might have simply left her alone to take of herself. Now though, Ranma had two female friends who had each taught him something about taking care of other people: Usagi, who knew more about him than anyone else, and Hitomi, who had quickly become like an older sister to him. Usagi seemed sweet and fragile, like a princess to be protected, but she had provided him with more comfort and support than he had known since he had first been taken away from his mother as a small child. Hitomi, on the other hand, was generally a very strong and rather brusque person and yet she needed comfort sometimes and she had turned to Ranma for it. He wasn't sure why, since he wasn't very good at it, but he supposed that it was simply because he was the only person there, at first.

The first time she had broken done in front of him, it was only a few days after she had wandered into the Estate. She had been a little wary of him and very take charge--in fact, she reminded him a bit of Nabiki without the most mercenary bits--so he had been surprised when she burst into tears in front of him over a somewhat burned dinner. He hadn't known what to do and he had retreated into his usual panicked attempts to distract her by telling her how cute she was, fluttering over her like a wounded bird trying to reach the safety of its nest. She had ignored his gibbering and grabbed him in a fierce bear hug that hadn't relaxed until she finally slipped into an exhausted sleep in his lap. When she woke up, still in his arms, she had gotten up and went to work cleaning up the remains of the meal as if nothing had happened. It confused Ranma, but, from then on, anytime she was overstressed, she had hunted him down and forced him to hold her until she was calm again. Eventually he had learned to accept the sudden attacks more or less gracefully and even figured out some techniques to help her calm down faster. Somehow, her glomps felt comfortable and safe--the exact opposite of how Sham Pu's clinging had always made him feel.

Spending time with Usagi and Hitomi had taught him a little bit about when people needed companionship instead of solitude. So when he found Kasumi alone in her house he hadn't abandoned her to her pain and he didn't when he found her crying into her bedding at the small shrine either. Instead, he cautiously pulled her up out of her fetal position and into his arms. He rocked her and tried to murmur soothing things to her—"It'll be alright. I promise I'll take care of you. Don't cry, you're safe, everything's fine. We'll be home soon."

It was only later that he realized he had thought of the Estate as home.

Kasumi fell asleep in his arms and he held her safe through the night. He didn't sleep much himself, spending most of the night berating himself and the rest plotting. After that, he didn't leave her alone. He kept watch over her when she was asleep and when the group was moving during the "day", he worked to keep her busy and distracted. He asked her to help him keep an eye on the others--especially the few children. He put her in charge of some of the food gathering. Mostly they were just getting enough to feed themselves on the journey to the Estate, but Ranma encouraged them to take as much as they could carry. A few resourceful people found shopping carts that weren't rusted beyond recognition and they took charge of those.

At first, Kasumi moved like some kind of robot, only doing what he told her to and not taking any initiative. Slowly though, as she started interacting with the others and falling into her old motherly role, he started to see glimpses of the Kasumi he had known.

Kasumi was good at taking care of people. She organized the best cooks in the group to take turns making meals out of the foraged food and she made sure everyone got their share. When one of the children refused to eat, crying for her mother, Kasumi sat with the girl, speaking softly to her, until the child finally picked up her spoon and slowly sipped at her soup. Ranma wasn't sure what she had said. He was too busy breaking up a fight when an old man insulted that day's cook to eavesdrop on her conversation with the girl. Whatever it was, the child clung to Kasumi from then on, clutching at her skirts as they walked the streets, helping her find bedding and spread it out at each sleeping stop and so on.

Ranma was surprised when he compared the Kasumi he saw taking care of people to the Kasumi he had seen in the first days after leaving the Tendo house. She hadn't been involved in the group at all then. She hadn't put any effort in to taking care of the people around her even though it seemed like such a Kasumi thing to do. She was certainly very good at it and seemed to enjoy it in her own way. But somehow, she had needed him to direct her to do it. It made him feel even guiltier to think that he hadn't even noticed how unlike herself she had been acting. He redoubled his efforts to spend time with her, sitting next to her at meals and talking about the day's events and the people traveling with her, working hard to coax a small laugh or a brighter smile out of her. Her regular cheerful mask was firmly back in place, but Ranma learned to tell the difference between her comforting smiles and her real ones.

--kkkkk--

The trip was fairly slow-going. They had a fair-sized group of people with four or five kids along, none of whom could keep up with Ranma's accustomed speed. Plus, they couldn't travel in a straight line, detouring to various shrines and away from the more unstable neighborhoods. Luckily, no one challenged Ranma's authority. Everyone was frightened and shocked and, for the moment at least, it was making them fairly docile. They were more than willing to listen to the only person around who seemed to know what was going on and how to keep them safe.

Everything else was quiet too--Ranma had deliberately taken them a way that he knew was relatively safe and free of obstacles like swathes of jungle or sinkholes of slow time even though it took longer. A few times, he even had to make the group turn back and find a way around someplace that looked a little too dangerous--a patch of dense forest or a group of buildings that looked about ready to collapse. By pure luck, they hadn't even run into any bandits or wandering samurai or dangerous animals. Most of the "ghosts" they saw were the most distant kind, the ones who didn't realize that they weren't in their own time and didn't notice the group at all. The people Ranma had picked up had mostly been Sleepers who had woken up at least a few days before Ranma had found them so they weren't quite as shocked as they might have been to see samurai walking down the street or a small dinosaur grazing in one of the overgrown lots. Most of them were quietly freaked out of course, but as long as they kept quiet about it and the ghosts didn't notice the group, there weren't any problems.

The nights, pulling his own bedding next to Kasumi's and sleeping lightly enough that any movement on her part would awaken him, should have been more stressful. Instead, they felt peaceful and it reminded him of his vigils over the sleeping Usagi. Even when Hitomi was watching her, he had always felt the need to be near her when she was so vulnerable. To protect her, of course, but also to remind himself that she was human and truly did need him there. Watching over Kasumi gave him the same feeling of being grounded by someone else's need. Surprisingly, it didn't make him feel trapped. It felt right--and it made him realize how much he missed Usagi. Hitomi as well--he was taken aback to realize that he missed holding her through her break-downs as much as he missed having her take charge of some of the organizational responsibilities of keeping a group of people working together.

Dragooned into taking care of all of the problems of the Estate, Ranma had felt like bits of himself were disappearing and he had struggled against the sensation of being more and more tied down. He had felt stressed and confused and not entirely like himself. He had begun to resent the Estate and even the people closest to him like Usagi and Hitomi. They all depended on him too much. He wasn't some mystical knight; just a teenaged martial artist, as lost and confused and grieving as any of them.

Given the freedom to wander through the Time alone, he had lost himself in his past, in being completely free and responsible only for his own self. Even when he had taken charge of some of the people he had found, Ranma hadn't spent much time with them. It was easy to reassure them a bit, guide them to a shrine to wait, and then move on. It wasn't entirely like moving around with his pop had been, but it felt good to be without real responsibilities. Getting to Nerima had been a return to his new role as support and leader for everyone else. He hadn't expected it--Nerima had always been the place where he was the least in charge of his own life. In Nerima, things happened to him and people bossed him around and Ranma Saotome just went with the flow and did what was expected of him. It was strange to have Kasumi depend on him. Strange to once again be the person others wanted to tell them what to do.

Now, as the group moved closer to the Estate and as Ranma got more and more involved in their problems, he felt himself relax into the position of leader. It felt right to keep his people safe. It felt good to be moving back towards the Estate--towards home and people who trusted him. As the group made their way through the city, he kept an eye out for danger and his other eye on Kasumi. She was doing better everyday, he thought. He hoped. He had to divide his attention among the rest of the group as well, talking to each individual one by one.

Partly he was talking to people to tell them about the Estate--reassuring them that they'd be alright there--and partly he was learning more about them and trying to catch out any potential trouble-makers.

He was a little worried about one of the men from the third shrine on the way home, a few days out from Nerima. There were a lot of shrines clustered around that small town.

The man's name was Kazaki and he was a crotchety old jerk who had trouble getting along with anyone. Ranma had to break up at least one argument a day between the old man and another member of the group. After the first few times, Ranma asked Kasumi to take care of whoever Kazaki had been picking on. She was better at soothing ruffled feathers than Ranma, who was very grateful not to be in charge of calming them down. Instead, he would pull Kazaki to help him reconnoiter in front or back of the group. The man was old but he was exceptionally fit and he made a good scout. Besides, it kept him occupied and away from the others. Ranma might have had him do it even if he hadn't been up to it, just to get him out of everyone else's hair.

It was after one of these incidents, which left a woman crying into Kasumi's shoulder, that Ranma found out that Kazaki was one of the rare people who could sense the eddies and flows of the Time.

"Hey, boy!" Ranma ignored the old man. He was still annoyed with Kazaki for causing trouble. "Kid with ego the size of Tokyo! Boy with fewer brains than muscles! Idiot we're all following around for some reason!" Experience suggested the old fart would continue on like this until Ranma gave in.

"What the hell do ya want now old man?" He glared as he moved over to where the old man was standing. The street they were on was fairly quiet. A few houses had been taken over by vegetation and some others had collapsed and were hemorrhaging bricks onto the sidewalk. Nothing seemed dangerous enough to attract the old man's attention.

"Something's up, boy. I can feel it in the air." Ranma frowned. He had spent his entire life around martial artists and priests and so he knew not to ignore warnings like that. He nodded at Kazaki and concentrated his own senses more thoroughly, first marking then blocking out the sounds of the group behind them: the woman still crying, Kasumi's comforting murmurs, the complaints from one old woman hobbling near the back, the rustle of clothing and the shuffle of feet. He brushed past the sounds of birds and leaves rustling in a light breeze, past the unnatural ki spots of people frozen in time, past the feral dogs shadowing the group. He concentrated on following the eddies of life and spirit surrounding them, searching for a break in the normal patterns, and trying to find what was bothering Kazaki.

A hundred or so meters west of the small group, Ranma found a distortion. It felt a little like the places where time warped and formed sinkholes that could trap travelers in slow or fast time. There was something different about it though--something he hadn't felt before. He pulled back his senses to find that the rest of the group had caught up to him and Kazaki. They looked worried; they hadn't been attacked by anything or anyone, so far, but the strangeness and chaos of the world kept everyone tense and wary.

Ranma wondered if he should go investigate the area. It was far enough away and unobtrusive enough that he wouldn't have noticed it if Kazaki hadn't called his attention to it. It likely wasn't a threat to his group. Plus, he wanted to keep them on track and get to the Estate soon. Investigating might not be worth the risk. Then again, it could be something important. The foraging crews weren't coming out this far yet--but eventually they might have to.

With that thought in mind, Mako, who was in charge of one of the two crews, had asked Ranma to keep a record of any strange areas he came across before he left. On his way to Nerima, he had marked three places where time had slowed on the map that had been prepared for him, as well as the shrines he had found. There were probably more places worth keeping track of around, but on the way to Nerima he had reveled in not being responsible and on the way back he was tied to the group and not as free to go off exploring.

Still, something about this thing felt stranger than usual. Plus, Ranma was interested in the fact that Kazaki had noticed it so easily. The old man hadn't mentioned the spot of slow time that they had passed a few days earlier. This thing seemed to call to him more. Ranma wanted to know how good the old man's senses were.

In the end, Ranma decided it was worth it to investigate the strangeness. Knowledge could mean the difference between life and death for the foraging crews and for the Estate itself. It was a lesson that had started with meeting Nabiki and continued on through taking charge of the Estate: knowledge was always power.

He left his map with Kasumi and a man named Kenji, who he vaguely thought he recognized from Nerima. Kasumi was upset--though she didn't let it show on her face. He could see it in the way she twisted her hands in her clothes, leaving her knuckles bloodless, but her face stayed cheerful. She wouldn't let her own worries scare the other members of her group. Ranma wondered how often she had protected her sisters with that blank smile.

Kenji was also concerned and much more open about expressing it. He had some experience taking charge of people--he had been a manager or something before, he had told Ranma a little bit about it as they moved through the devastated city. Still, while he had a fairly calm personality, he was as lost as anyone else in the aftermath of the Time. Ranma would really have preferred to leave the map with Kazaki--he was the man most likely to be able to keep his head and get everyone to the Estate. Plus, if he really had some sense of the Time, he could protect them better than anyone else especially since he had enough training in some kind of physical exercise to still be really fit. Unfortunately, the old geezer had managed to alienate almost everyone else in the group. It was unlikely that any of them would willingly follow him anywhere.

If Ranma didn't come back, it would have to be up to Kasumi and Kenji to keep moving on. He couldn't afford to be reckless and backup could be helpful. So he decided to take the old man with him and directed the group to continue on to a shrine that was a few miles down the road. It was the first shrine he had left people at on the way to Nerima. He figured it was about 10 or so days travel from there to the Estate at the speed they were moving.

"If we don't catch up to you there, keep going on. The map should take you right to the Estate--it's safe there, I promise." Kenji nodded and focused on the map, memorizing the route and the way Ranma had marked dangerous spots on it. Ranma's handwriting was still pretty terrible and it would take some effort and practice for the man to figure out his symbols. While Kenji pored over the fragile piece of paper, Ranma pulled Kasumi aside.

They stood apart from the group, under the shade of a large tree that was growing out of some ruins. He kept his hand resting lightly on her shoulder, trying to give her some measure of comfort. "If ya get there before me, help take care of Usagi, okay? She's the Queen and all, sure, but she really needs someone watching out for her. An' tell her and Hitomi that I'm sorry and I'll get back as soon as I can."

Kasumi's smile crumpled a bit. "Oh Ranma, are you certain you should do this? Will you really be alright?" He looked at her, her happy mask fraying at the edges and her hands twisting into the dusty cloth of her skirt. He was surprised to realize he was looking down at the top of her head. Somehow he had never noticed how much taller he had grown, even though he had been traveling with her for days. Guiltily, he wondered if he had managed to continue avoiding her even as he tried to stay focused on taking care of her. The sight of water starting to gather in her eyes pulled him back to the present moment. He grabbed her hands, pulling them away from their stressed fidgeting.

"I'll be alright, I promise. I might get slowed down a little but Ranma Saotome doesn't lose. You know that." Her smile brightened though he could still see fear in her eyes. "Look, I'm trusting you to take care of everyone till I get back. I can't think of anyone better than you, 'kay?" Her need had helped to ground him--he wondered if his need could help her. Maybe that's why she had dedicated her entire life to taking care of her family: so she didn't get lost in her own pain.

"I will, Ranma. Everyone will be fine until you get back." Her hands relaxed into his grip and she blinked away the tears that had been threatening.

"Hey, Ranma! What's this squiggly thing with the pointed tail mean?" Kenji hovered a few feet away, oblivious to his effect on the moment. It was like a bubble that had been separating them from the rest of the world had suddenly popped. Sounds rushed in, distracting Ranma from Kasumi. He heard a child crying in the group and some of the women trying to comfort it while berating Kazaki for something. Kasumi smiled at him and moved over to calm the situation down. Ranma grinned and turned to Kenji, helping him to decipher the scrawling scribbles he had made across the map.

Finally, Ranma and Kazaki left the group, angling off down a small alleyway to the west of the main street. Ranma let his concern for the group, for Kasumi, and for Usagi and Hitomi back at the Estate, fall away behind him. He opened his senses to the world and slipped himself into the mindset of a wandering martial artist, alert and ready for danger. He moved quickly, jumping over the debris and dodging through the plants that filled the streets with ease. Part of him noted with surprise that Kazaki was keeping up with him fairly well. He had known the old man had some kind of training, to be that fit and alert, but he hadn't realized how much until they were moving unencumbered by a group of civilians.

As they got closer to the strangeness, Ranma slowed down and tried to analyze it. On rare occasions in his journeys before he found the Estate and then later with the monk he had run into small pockets of time that moved faster than everything else around them. He had only realized what those areas were when he saw a newspaper blow into one of the smaller spots--and then rot away in front of his eyes. He had been tempted to see if he would age just as quickly by standing in it but he had no interest in dying of old age in the span of a few moments. Still, being a fairly reckless teenager, he walked through the some of the spots that felt less strong. He wasn't sure how much affect it had. The sun was so unreliable that the only way to really test the speed of the area was to have someone stand outside it and compare the way the two people moved and how much time they thought had passed. He had found that the smaller the area of the fast time, the stronger the effect was, figuring that out as much from the feel of those areas as any experimenting.

This disturbance reminded Ranma of those pockets of fast time more than of the more common slow time areas but there was something very different about it. Something he had never felt before. He considered walking into it. With Kazaki standing on the edges watching what happened, that could be the fastest way to figure out what was going on. But...he had promised Kasumi that he would come back. Could he really risk entering the strange distortion just like that?

Kazaki had stopped a few feet away from the edge of the thing. His worn face was twisted into a scowl; Ranma was pretty sure that was a permanent condition. The street they were on didn't look any different than any other one they had moved down recently. A few collapsed buildings, some with plants overtaking them, a corner store that looked fairly intact. The teen was trying to think of ways to make investigating safer--maybe if he tied a rope to himself and Kazaki?--when he noticed the old man pulling an apple and a pocketknife out. Slicing off a piece, he tossed the bit of fruit into the distortion. It landed a few yards away, just far enough that it was hard to see what was happening to it. He tossed another slice, a bit more gently this time. This one only flew a few feet before hitting the ground. The two men watched it cautiously.

The bit of apple sat on the ground. Nothing happened. Ranma peered at it, waiting. Still, nothing happened. He started to get restless. It seemed safe enough; nothing had hurt the apple, yet. Maybe it was time to go in himself. As he started to move forward, Kazaki grabbed his arm. He had a strong grip and Ranma paused, looking at him questioningly. "What, old man? The apple's fine, I want to go see what's going on."

"Shut up. Something's not right. Try and use some patience, idiot boy." Kazaki let go of Ranma and cut off another slice of apple. "See that toy truck on the ground over there? I'm going to try and hit it."

The toy was rusted and dirty, lying on its side in the middle of the street a foot or two past the second apple. Ranma wondered what the point was. It was still close enough to be pretty easy to hit even for an old fart like Kazaki.

Kazaki's throw missed the truck, landing more than a yard past it. Ranma grinned. "Don't know your own strength, huh, old man?"

The answering grunt communicated annoyance and impatience. "It should not have done that. You try it."

Ranma reached for the apple, but the old man pulled it away. The teen glared at him, then grabbed a pebble off of the ground. "Too easy, old man."

He ignored Kazaki's muttered "Cocky brat."

The pebble flew past the truck and hit a mailbox nearly ten feet beyond it. Ranma frowned and grabbed another pebble. He threw it more gently this time; it still landed three feet past his target. He grabbed another pebble and tossed it even more gently. His instincts told him it should fall short of the truck by quite a bit. Instead, there was a sharp ding as the pebble hit the rusting metal.

"Huh." He continued to ignore Kazaki, who was smirking at him, and grabbed more pebbles to try on different targets. All of them went further than they should have. Finally, he moved closer and stuck his hand past the edge of the distortion, dropping a pebble straight down. As if it was a bit of grass caught in a gust of wind, it landed almost a foot away from his outstretched hand.

"Fucking weird." Ranma muttered, flexing his arm from the elbow and rhythmically clenching his fist. He could feel the disturbance on his skin, as if someone had pulled at his hand, trying to tear it away from his body. Kazaki hadn't let up with his muttered comments while Ranma was experimenting and they were really getting on Ranma's nerves. "Just shut up, old man. And stay here. I'm going to see what's going on."

Kazaki snorted. "Still impatient, idiot. There's no telling what's happening here. Are you that eager to get yourself killed? It might not be much of a loss…but it sure will be disappointing to all those people back there. Hmmph. Might be what they deserve for trusting a brat like you to take care of them."

Ranma scowled and loomed over the old man. His eyes flashed with anger and his toned and trained body threatened barely contained violence. "I said shut up. This isn't a game—isn't some stupid little challenge. I'm not playing around and I'm not doing this because its fun. That thing could be trouble for _my_ people. Or it could help them. Whatever it is, I sure as HELL am not gonna just leave it alone and let one of my foraging crews run into it while looking for food to keep your sorry ass going. You want to run back and keep getting on everyone's nerves 'til they throw you out? Fine. But get the hell out of my way and let me take care of what's mine."

He stormed off, moving away from the old man to the edge of the disturbance. Angrily, he poked his hand at the boundary, trying to analyze the pulling sensation. He felt it more when he was moving fast. As if his own momentum was adding to the effect of the strangeness. He was almost tempted to try a Roasting Chestnuts punch, but he was afraid that level of speed might actually succeed in pulling his hand off of his body.

It didn't seem to effect time as much as distance. Ranma vaguely remembered something from Science class about the earth spinning all the time. It was as if that part of the earth was spinning faster than the rest of it. But that shouldn't be possible—or if it was, wouldn't it tear buildings apart or cause big cracks in the ground or something? It didn't make any sense. Not that time moving faster or slower in one place or dinosaurs showing up in downtown Tokyo made any sense either. Sense didn't seem to much a part of this new world. Fine, so if things were messing around with distance but not messing around with time, what did that mean?

Ranma was getting tired of just pushing his hand into the disturbance. It was time to do something more. It didn't seem likely to kill him or anything, so might as well walk into it, right? He continued ignoring Kazaki, who had started poking a branch into the disturbance. Cranky old bastard still wasn't willing to risk it, huh?

As Ranma walked past the edge, he felt that pulling sensation tug at his entire body. His clothes yanked against him as if he was walking in line with a strong wind. Then, as if he had been walking through a barrier and suddenly emerged on the other side, the pulling sensation stopped. He kept walking forward, expanding his sense carefully. The area he was in still felt weird to his ki senses, but it didn't seem to be having much of an effect on the rest of him. He tried speeding up, just a little bit. Nothing. A little bit more, and a little bit more. He finally felt a tugging on him when he was running, about at Akane's normal speed, not anywhere near as fast as he could get if he tried. He slowed down, glancing back the way he had come. Kazaki was completely out of sight.

Ranma sighed and turned back around. Kazaki wasn't pleasant, by any means, but he was still Ranma's responsibility. It only took him a few minutes to get back to where the old man stood, scowling furiously at him. "What the hell you doing back, idiot boy?"

Ranma glared at him. "Ah, shut up already. Look, this thing don't seem too dangerous but it does go on for a while. I'm gonna keep walking and see where it stops. Are you going to come with me or just standing around like a useless old fool?"

"Why you! Who's useless around here, boy? I'm not the one risking everything by climbing into something when I don't know what it is or what it does?" Kazaki kept haranguing Ranma, but he did so while walking towards him, clenching his hands nervously as he passed through the edge.

The trip was not a particularly pleasant one. Kazaki calmed down after a while, still responding to anything Ranma said with snipes and sneers, but keeping mostly quiet. Everything looked normal—but it still felt wrong. Plus, everything was too quiet. It was nerve-wracking. It wasn't just that Ranma missed the sounds of the group—the woman and men talking quietly or complaining loudly, the kids playing and laughing and crying. It was something else—something Ranma couldn't quite put his finger on…

There were no ghosts in the area. Ghosts, especially the ones that didn't notice that they were out of time, were fairly regular. The ones who spoke to you or acted like they saw you were a bit rarer. The buildings were still as randomly aged or replaced by meadows as ever, but Ranma didn't see any animals that seemed out of place. Actually, he didn't see many animals at all.

They moved cautiously down the street, ignoring the side streets shooting off. Ranma was pretty sure they were headed towards the Estate. The sun was doing one of its speed races across the sky, edging forward every minute or so. It was nearly sunset already, though Ranma didn't think it was more than an hour or so after lunch. He wasn't even particularly hungry yet.

Whatever this thing was, it stretched for a long ways. Ranma wondered if he should turn back at some time. He had promised Kasumi he would catch up to them—but he wanted to know where the edge of this was, to have some idea of where to mark it on a map. It only seemed to be a couple hundred feet wide, but it was miles long.

As night fell, Ranma noticed a light in the distance ahead. It shone familiarly, a glow on the horizon that tugged at Ranma's memories. He was distracted from it by finally feeling the edge of the disturbance ahead of him. He continued moving, passing through the barrier tugging him forward then turned around to glance at Kazaki again. The old man was muttering again, peering nervously at the edge. Ranma was pretty sure the old fart could sense it again. He resolved to take the old man to the edge of a slow time area to see if he could sense that too.

When Kazaki switched his glare from the street to Ranma, the teenager turned away again with a put-upon sigh. Trying to distract himself, he squinted at the light ahead. It was definitely something familiar.

A few hours ago, Ranma had left his group more than a week's travel from the Estate. Even at Ranma's own top speeds, it would have taken him a few days to get back and he hadn't even been jogging through the disturbance, just walking steadily.

Yet, there it was in front of him. The Estate.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Try and sue and I'll set Kazaki on you. Sorry about the delay folks. I'll try to do better, but the combination of grad school, work, and the fact that these are some of the harder chapters to write (the easy stuff doesn't happen for years on in and I need to actually get the characters there! Also, re-reading I have noticed some continuity errors. Some day (when I'm closer to done) I'll actually edit these. Meanwhile, I apologize for any mistakes and hope you will bear with me.

Unsurprisingly, Kazaki argued with Ranma all the way back to the group.

Something about this disturbance was warping space in such a way that the Estate, which should still have been days of travel away, was suddenly only a few hours good run. Even if they took the group to the last shrine first and then doubled back, it would still be shorter than heading to the Estate the normal way.

Ranma thought it was a god-send. He was starting to realize he didn't really mind having people depend on him and listen to what he said all the time, but it would be nice to have a break. On the Estate, everyone would still listen to him but they would have other people to depend on as well. And he would have Hitomi and Kasumi working together to make sure everyone got lots of hot food—there was the one new woman who came in just before he left who had made an awesome fish stew. Warm tasty stew...even Kasumi couldn't do much on the road with their limited supplies, time, and safety.

Usagi would be there too—he could tell her what it had been like to return to and then leave Nerima again. He hadn't been able to let himself really think about it since he'd had to focus on getting Kasumi and everyone out of there. Not that he'd break down in front of Usagi; Ranma knew that men don't cry unless they're Tendo Soun—and who wants to be like him? So Ranma wouldn't do anything like that; but he would be able to just spend some time thinking about it. And maybe let Usagi hug him, since it would probably make her feel better.

Ranma couldn't wait to get back to the Estate. Back home. So of course Kazaki had to put a damper on it.

"You really want to risk all those people, boy? You want to see what happens when something like this collapses around them?" Kazaki huffed. The boy was moving a little faster, eager with thoughts of getting back to this Estate, and Kazaki was having a little trouble keeping up. Not that he'd ever admit it—or stop complaining in order to conserve oxygen for his overworked lungs. "I can just see it now. Half way there the whole place will rip itself apart and we'll all go with it."

"Ah, shut up, old man. Whatever this weird thing is, it feels pretty stable. And it's a great short cut."

"Oh, well, if it feels stable. As long as your "feelings" are good, why not? Idiot. Haven't you noticed that there aren't any animals in here? Even those dogs didn't follow us in. Not that I'm surprised to learn that they're smarter than you."

Ranma growled under his breath. It was so tempting to just turn and throw a punch at the old man. A good fight might just shut him up and it would certainly make Ranma feel better. It's not like anyone would blame him either. Everyone else hated the old jerk too. They'd probably cheer Ranma on.

"You…listening…to…me…idiot boy?" Kazaki's breath was becoming labored. The old man was fit—but he wasn't Ku Lon or Happosai. Ranma felt a petty sense of satisfaction.

As they came to the edge of the disturbance, Ranma finally slowed down. Something tugged against him, pulling him back. He remembered what it had felt like when he had first crossed into the weirdness—the tugging sensation had faded or else he had gotten used to as he moved further in. Now it had returned, newly insistent.

Ranma frowned. The old man's comment about the place ripping apart and pulling whoever was inside to pieces along with it echoed through his head. He pushed against the resistance, forcefully making his way to the boundary of the warped space. The tugging turned into pulling, as if someone was holding onto his clothes, his hair, even his skin, and trying to drag him back away from the edge.

Pushing his way past the edge, Ranma stumbled as the force suddenly dropped away. Turning, he saw that Kazaki was moving more easily—and more slowly—through down the street. The old man walked past the border with barely the smallest hitch in his step. He smirked at Ranma and the boy scowled back.

Ranma still wanted to use the shortcut. To be back at the Estate so soon! But he thought of Kasumi, trembling in the night, her hands twisting into her apron. He thought of Kenji, his face set with determination and only the slightest hint of fear.

Damn. He hated to let Kazaki think he was right even if he was. It wasn't worth the risk. He turned sharply and kept running back to the group, leaving Kazaki laboring behind him.

Kenji and Kasumi had managed to get the group a few miles down the road. Coming up behind them, still angry and frustrated, Ranma managed to surprise some of the feral dogs that were warily following the group, looking for food. Most of them cowered and slunk away, too wild to be willing to get close to get a human. A couple of the dogs looked hopefully at him, tails wagging tentatively, and Ranma thought of the dogs that they had brought on to the Estate--mostly as guard dogs but there was a puppy here and there that the kids liked to play with. One of the biggest of the feral dogs did neither though; instead, it started growling, settling into an aggressive crouch.

Ranma stopped and frowned at the dog. He didn't think of the animals as being much threat to his people. Feral dogs had always been around in most of the cities that he and his pops had traveled through--cute little puppies that outgrew their owners' apartments and were left to fend for themselves. They almost always avoided people. But they were carnivores and there were a lot more of them on the streets these days. The animals seemed a lot less likely to fall to Sleep in the Time than humans were. And they must be getting hungry with no one around to feed them or dump trash for them to get into. They might be a threat to anyone who fell behind in the group. The people who weren't strong enough to keep up with the group as a whole, mostly the elderly, the kids and the sick, wouldn't be strong enough to defend themselves either.

It was stupid of him to ignore that. Even with him falling back to check on the stragglers, they were vulnerable when he was ranging out front or exploring off to the side like he had been with Kazaki. He was lucky that nothing had attacked them yet. Ranma made a note in the back of his mind to ask the people who took watches when they stopped to rest to also slow down and walk at the back of the group. They could probably hold something off until he could get there to save them.

In order to protect his people, he needed to teach them to protect themselves. He had learned that on the Estate but it had been a new lesson that was apparently easily forgotten when he left. A martial artist could rely on his own strength to protect those he cared for from dishonorable challengers, marauding monsters, and grabby princes. A leader had to rely on the strength of others.

Ranma scowled at the dogs again, wishing more than ever that he was back at the Estate. He needed desperately to talk to Usagi and Hitomi and have them help him sort out his thoughts and all the problems going on. Usagi might launch into a list of her troubles--might wail and make his eye drums bleed--but she also might fix them. Plus, she would hug him and tell him it was OK to rely on other people. Hitomi definitely would launch into her own troubles--that's how their friendship started after all--and she'd probably tell him to start fixing his own problems fast so he could get started on fixing everyone else's, but she'd listen without panicking at least and she'd get him an extra bowl of dinner and send him to bed with a guard at his door to make sure that no one interrupted his sleep unless it really was an emergency.

He missed his friends. He couldn't talk at all to anyone else. Someone like Kazaki or Isamu, one of the more belligerent office workers traveling with the group, would take any sign of weakness as a reason to rebel and try to take over. Someone like Kenji or Achika, who was lucky enough to Wake up at the same time as her only kid, would probably take any sign of weakness from him as a reason to panic. They needed him to be strong. Even Kasumi was relying on him being strong.

Ranma squared his shoulders at the thought of Kasumi and kicked a pebble at the growling dog. It yelped and ran off, its bravado collapsed at his own show of aggression. He was a man among men, not a scared little girl. Time to stop whining to himself and start acting...

"What the hell are you doing, boy?" Kazaki had managed to catch up while Ranma was lost in his thoughts. "Don't bother thinking, you're obviously no good at it. Now stop antagonizing those flea-bitten mutts and get back to your job. You might not be any good at it, but apparently you're all we got!"

"Shut up! I'm Ranma Saotome and I'm the best there is--at anything!"

"Sir Ranma!" His shout drew the attention of one of the stragglers--Achika, as it turned out, who had fallen behind while trying to calm her sulky four year old. She was one of the first people to call him Sir Ranma, but it had unfortunately spread among most of the group. Ranma supposed he should be used to it after everyone on the Estate started calling him the Queen's Knight, but it still made him shudder a but.

"Oh, Sir Ranma, thank god you're back!" Achika's glad cries drew the attention of the rest of the group and Ranma quickly found himself surrounded by a swarm of people, some welcoming him back and some taking the opportunity to make him listen to their complaints. The last few dogs disappeared and Kazaki and his mutterings faded into the background.

It took them a while to get started moving again. Kenji and Kasumi had helped him get the crowd to back off. He had to promise to settle a few of the complaints at the next camp but for the most part they weren't too serious. Ranma did ask a few of the stronger men to hang out near the tail end of the group--it gave Isamu something to do, too, which wasn't a bad thing.

By the time they got to the shrine--the last one Ranma was expecting to find people in--Ranma had some vague plans forming in the back of his mind. The shrine was in the middle of a neighborhood that looked mostly normal. It had a decent wall surrounding it--one with no holes and only two entrances to watch, so Ranma figured they would be pretty safe waiting there.

There were five people waiting at the shrine for Ranma; he only recognized to of them, an old woman and her grandson. She told Ranma that the office worker he had dropped off had decided to try and make it to the Estate on his own. His wife was there and he hadn't been willing to wait to see her. Ranma hoped that he had made it. The other three people had found the shrine on their own and decided to stay when the grandmother told them about the Estate.

Ranma was pretty sure that at least one of them was a ghost. He decided not to say anything. It was too hard to believe when you were talking to one; until the first one disappeared on you that is.

While Kasumi organized dinner for the "night," Ranma pulled out the people had organized to take guard duties. He explained his thoughts about having a rear guard and got mostly enthusiastic agreement. One man asked tentatively for some lessons in how to use the big stick he had picked up most effectively.

"Ah man. Look, I'm sorry about not doing some' a this sooner. You'll get lessons at the Estate--any body who wants them and a couple people who might not--but it'd be good for us to start now. After dinner I'll show you a few things." The man looked pleased as did a few others. In the group of twenty or so people, Ranma had pulled about a third of them out as guards. He'd have to make sure more of them took him up on the lessons though. Everyone needed at least a little bit of self-defense.

"Anyways, I know you've all heard about the Estate now." Everyone nodded. "And I think I've given you some ideas 'bout how it works. It's time to start thinking about it a bit more. Like I said, you'll all get some lessons in fighting there and the best people in those can work with the guards or the foraging crew. Won't get you out of all the rest of the work, but you'll miss some of the chores. It's hard and it's dangerous. People and things do attack occasionally so the guards get some action. And the foraging crews are out here; you know what that's like. Nobody on the Estate don't work. We can't afford it. So I'm asking you--and I'll ask everyone else at dinner too--to think about if you got anything special to share. We got people cooking, farming, sewing, whatever. We need whatever you can give us. So, um, just think about that. Isamu, Kenji, you two got first watch. You know who is after you?" The two men nodded. "Right, well, wake them up then your candles get low and watch out for those dogs. Everyone else go help do whatever Kasumi tells ya to."

The small group dispersed and Ranma started to head towards the main fire where Kasumi was organizing the shopping carts full of supplies. On his way there, Ranma noticed Kazaki setting up his own small fire near the edge of the shrine. He tugged on the end of his braid with annoyance (noting with vague surprise that it was half way down his back; he'd have to ask Hitomi to cut it some when they got home), then sighed and walked over to the old man. He squatted next to the pile of sticks waiting to be added to the fire and stared at the stone wall.

"Look old man, you don't like me. An' I don't much like either. In fact, I don't think anyone does. But I know you heard what I was telling the others earlier. So we gotta figure out how you can do your share without, you know, spending time with anyone. I figure you got some training in the Art so maybe"

Kazaki snorted loudly, interrupted Ranma's sentence. "Maybe I'm not interested in taking orders from a snot-nosed punk with more muscles than brains."

Ranma stiffened, his fists clenching tightly together. This old man could get a rise out of him as quick as his pops could--or Akane! "Damn it! Maybe I ain't interested in giving orders to a useless old jackass either!"

"There we go then. You don't give any orders and I won't listen to any. Sounds perfect." The old man didn't even bother to look at him.

Ranma leapt up and punched the wall. All of his instincts were telling him that he needed Kazaki and the geezer was just playing with him! The thick stones cracked under the force of his fist, leaving a spider-web that nearly touched the ground and the top of the wall.

"Feel any better?" Kazaki asked mockingly.

"Fuck. Shut up. I gotta protect these people and that's harder to do with you mouthing off all the time! So just shut up already." Ranma leaned into the wall, feeling the cracks beneath him. He hadn't hit hard enough to leave a hole in the wall, but it would still be a weak spot in their defenses. Like butting heads with Kazaki all the time was.

When he turned to look at Kazaki, it seemed like the lines in his face had multiplied. For the first time, Ranma saw him as old--really old, not like Happosai and Ku Lon acted like.

"I know." The old man said softly and his tired voice echoed with bitterness. "Mankind's sunk and you--arrogant idiot that you are--you seem to be the only hope we have. They're listening to you, believing in you, instead of panicking and drawing the wolves down on themselves. I won't ruin that. I'll go with you as far as this Estate of yours, make sure you make it there, then I'll head off."

Ranma face-faulted. The old jerk almost sounded reasonable for the first time but what he was saying...  
"What are you saying? What the hell are you thinking? I ain't letting a senile old fart like you wander off to die by himself!"

"Ha! If a stupid punk like you can survive I'll do just fine!"

This was getting nowhere. Ranma gritted his teeth and, for the first time in a while, consciously called on the Soul of Ice. The technique helped him think; calmed him down and let logic rule him. He hadn't felt like he needed the full strength of the technique since he was getting better and thinking reasonably without calling on its coldness. "What will you do out here then?"

Kazaki poked at the fire. His eyes were dark as he gazed into the growing flames. "No reason for you to care about it."

"Say I do anyways." Ranma said calmly.

Kazaki looked up at him with a narrow-eyed suspicion. "Say I don't care if you do."

The two men stared at each other with assessing expressions. Ranma pulled himself deeper into the Soul of Ice and thought about the instinct that told him that Kazaki was needed. He let the cool chain of logic that the technique called up trace the origins of the instinct through his mind. Kazaki was a fighter; strong enough to survive out here for a while anyway. He was cautious enough not to get others killed but brave enough to take the risks that truly needed to be taken. And he could sense some of the stranger ripples in the Time.

The people of the Estate, Ranma's people, needed all the protection he could get them.

Kazaki was the first to look away from their staring contest. "Never had much use for people, even my own family. I don't want to stay on your "Estate," boy. Too many desperate idiots crowded together...too many people I can't protect from this craziness any more than you can."

"It's a martial artist's duty to protect the weak. Against any odds." Ranma's gaze didn't leave the old man and so he caught Kazaki's flinch. The man's shoulders hunched up, hiding his weathered neck and pulling his head into his chest like a turtle retreating from the world. He didn't say anything.

Ranma let the silence build around them. It was a trick he had learned from Nabiki and was only able to use when deep into the Soul of Ice.

"Maybe I'll bring people to you. If I find anyone out here. And if I think you'll actually be able to take care of them." Kazaki was trying to sound disparaging, but Ranma heard some of the weariness that tainted everyone's voice now. The whispering calculations in the back of his mind told him to strike carefully.

"The Estate don't support itself. Not entirely. We havta send people out to get stuff--that's what the foraging crews are for. Food, soap, clothes. You bring anyone home with you and you'll need to load 'em up with supplies too." There wasn't a hint of question in Ranma's voice. The Estate was home and it would be so for Kazaki, Kasumi, and all of the rest too.

Kazaki wasn't letting go without a fight though. He was staring at Ranma with an incredulous twist to his mouth and a spark of something unnamable in his eyes. "You thinking that I'm a dog then? A boy like you says 'fetch' and I say 'arf'?"

"Dogs are good people. Good workers less they go feral like those ones out there. And even some of them will be useful if someone gets their heads on right and they start protecting like they're supposed to instead of threatening to attack." Kazaki's stare turned back into a scowl as Ranma spoke but he didn't interrupt the boy. "The foraging crews are good people too. They pick up supplies--people too--and bring 'em back to the rest of us. They're strong, fast, and smart too. They need to be because they run into all sorts of weird shit out here. We got two right now. Probably need a third one soon, with all these extra mouths. I'll want to send one back here to check out whatever that was back there too. More we know about what the Time's messing with, the better off we all are." Ranma pushed himself off the wall and started walking back to the main part of camp. "Whoever comes could probably use someone who knows the area to help them stay out of trouble."

strsstrsstrsstrsstrsstrsstrsstrs

Ranma got more serious about foraging as well as training his newest band of refugees as they got closer to the Estate. They were only about a week away and he knew that adding more mouths really was going to put some strain on their supplies. His group would half again as many people as were already on the Estate—and that wasn't counting anyone else that Mako or his people might have brought in. Before he even left, Hitomi had been talking about expanding the existing gardens with another work party. It was time to do some serious planning for the future and—Ranma wasn't going to bluff his way through this—that wasn't really his strong point. They had set up the Estate mostly with luck up to now. Well, luck, people's awe of the Queen, and Hitomi's organizational power. It wouldn't keep being enough.

Talking to the people as they traveled back about their skills and seeing how some of the stores and homes they passed by were already worthless for supplies being either looted already or lost to the whims of the Time, Ranma had started thinking more about self-sufficiency. Most of the women he had picked up knew how to sew—but they needed to get cloth from somewhere. Farming could get them some food—but would it be enough to feed everyone? And could they get some animals on the Estate besides the dogs? Pigs or something? They couldn't get fish, Ranma didn't think.

The thing was, there was a lot they needed that Ranma could think of but couldn't figure out how to get. And there was probably more that they could use that he couldn't even think of. Same with Hitomi; she was smart but she didn't know everything. They needed some way to use everyone's brain. Without sitting down and having to listen to everyone 'cause they were getting too big to do that and dealing with everyone would just give Ranma a headache.

It was something to sit down with Hitomi and Usagi about. Maybe Mako too; his foraging crews knew a lot. And Jiro was pretty good at filtering stuff through to Ranma. And Mariko in the kitchens knew a lot too…but that was just getting him back to having to talk to everyone. There had to be a way to limit it.

Ranma was distracted from his thoughts by a shout from the rear. The terror present in the yell started his feet racing before his brain had even finished processing his ears input. A day from the Estate, the group's luck had finally run out. They were being attacked by a band of soldiers.

Their armor looked old—maybe warring states period? Ranma never had paid too much attention in history but battles caught his attention for a little bit. Whatever—whenever—they were, they were ghosts but solid enough to be really dangerous and aware enough to want to be.

The rear guard, armed with sticks and rocks, were fighting as best they could against a group of trained men with swords and knifes. Luckily there were no horses and no guns. Vaguely aware of Kasumi and Kazaki herding the children and weaker adults away, Ranma cursed his own training. His fists and feet flew, knocking men down and out, but there was only so much he could do to protect his people without a weapon in his hands. A real weapon, made to kill, would let him get through the attackers quicker so that his own men didn't have to face them for so long. Didn't have to die under their weapons. He struck out viciously at the marauders, not bothering to watch as the ones he laid out faded into nothingness, and finally grabbed one of the swords.

Anything Goes Martial Arts might distain weapons—but they were called anything goes for a reason. He might not know the delicacies of kendo or the intricacies of real sword fighting, but he knew how to use a weapon. He stabbed and swung, slicing whatever flesh he could reach and putting his strength into slicing through even the thick armor that protected their vulnerable spots. He let his thoughts slide away and danced with the power of the Art.

When he came back fully to himself, the attackers were gone, faded away. He could see that several of his own people were wounded—Kenji and Isamu among them—and there were two bodies lying on the ground in pools of blood. One was a woman that had joined the group at the last shrine—one of the ones that had found their own way there instead of being picked up by Ranma. He barely even remembered her name; Junko, he thought.

The other body was wearing the armor of the attackers.

All of the ghosts that Ranma had met and fought had faded away when he had brought them down. All of them.

Cautiously, he made his way over to the body. Poking it with the tip of the sword which might fade away at any moment itself, he turned it so that he could look at the face. It was a fairly generic man's face. But…there was something…its (his) teeth were perfect. They shone white through the blood leaking out of its (his) mouth.

Ranma felt a shudder go through his entire body. He couldn't stop staring at the body in front of him. It wasn't the first time he had killed; the Time was too dangerous for that and there had been Saffron before then. But…it was the first time that he had had to deal with a corpse. A corpse that he had made.

From a distance, he heard a cheer go up behind him. It was a cry of survival—full of desperation as much as joy—but it was a cry that came from being alive and that was worth acknowledging. Ranma let his people pull him away from the bloody man sprawled in front of him. Kasumi and the rest of the group were coming back. They would tend the wounded—the gash on Isamu's head, the bleeding slice on Kenji's arm—and they would bury the bodies. Both of them.


End file.
