Hormonally Yours ~

Rating: NC-17.  Lemony fresh.

Pairing: Mousse/Ryoga.  This is YAOI, folks, and for those who don’t know, that’s two guys hopping on the good foot and doing the bad thing.  Consider yourselves warned.

Disclaimer: The characters of Ranma ½ are not mine and frankly, I don’t want them.  They’d destroy most of my neighbourhood, eat all our food and make my area more violent than it already is.  _-_  However, I’ll happily borrow them for the course of this fanfic.

Notes: This is, despite the appallingly open ending, a one-shot fic; I will not be writing a sequel unless absolutely begged to do so, and even then it’ll take a while.  Also, this is based on the anime way of things, not the manga — the only practical difference here is: who’s Akari?  Also, thanks to Pan Pingli for being an inspirational yaoi writer and for kindly hosting this.  ^_^

*****

“....um....”

“...”

“.....uh....”

“What is the problem, young man?  You’ve been standing there for over an hour now.”  Dr. Tofu inspected his watch, then removed his glasses and began the lengthy process of cleaning them.  “I do apologise.  Fifty minutes.”  He squinted short-sightedly at the tall, muscled boy in the canary bandanna who looked like he could take down an army alone — despite the little bootee shoes that just looked criminal even to his less than fashionably conscious eye — and watched with a little amusement as he fidgeted, looking up and down up the street.  His feet twitched.

“Uh...”

The good Doctor just gazed at him for a few further moments, slipped his glasses back over his ears and then recognition seeped through the outer layers of his mind that were, as always, saturated by inexplicably encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese martial arts medicine (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one) and dreams of Kasumi Tendo dressed only in a frilly pink apron.  “Oh!  You’re Ranma Saotome’s friend, aren’t you?”

This managed to free the cat from the boy’s tongue, if not to the desired effect.  “Friend?!  You are asking me if that disrespectful, offensive fiend and myself are friends?!”  He stopped short, out of things to say, and trailed off uselessly.  “...I know him quite well.  My name’s Ryoga Hibiki,” he added helpfully, and extended a hand that was shaken with vigour to be expected of a man who made a living by contorting his patients.  “This is Dr. Tofu’s clinic, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Tofu half-mumbled as he wondered how the large and easily read sign proclaiming this, less than six inches away, could act as a deterrent to such a discovery, “and I’m Dr. Tofu, what did you—”

“You’re really Dr. Tofu?”

“Yes....”

“Really?!”

“Yes.”  He pointed to the sign as if to strengthen his argument, and the boy’s eyes followed his hands with a widening smile of ecstatic joy.  Unnervingly, this revealed a pair of canines that looked like they’d been borrowed from a creature of lesser evolution.

“I really made it!  I really really made it!  In just five days!  And I’ve never ever been here before!”  He briefly made eye contact with Tofu and didn’t seem at all embarrassed that his happiness was not shared by the brown-haired man.  “It must be the power of...of...”  And at this, he trailed off to silence and looked at his ridiculous bootees with the most soul-crushing expression Tofu had ever seen in his life.

“What’s wrong?” Tofu asked hesitantly, afraid of the answer.

Ryoga leaned against the gate of the wall surrounding the doctor’s clinic and picked at the bricks; Tofu blinked as concrete chunks the size of butter blocks came away with the slightest touch of his fingertips. 

“Infrastructure!” Tofu coughed as one of the hinges creaked in complaint.

Ryoga snatched his hand back obediently.  “S-sorry.”

“That’s....that’s quite alright,” Tofu mumbled, eyeing the gate closely for signs of further degradation.  None appeared.  “Follow me into the consulting room, my appointment book is pretty clear toda—”

He looked behind him momentarily and discovered that Ranma’s non-friend had wandered off and was heading towards a perimeter wall that Tofu was by no means certain would act as a restraint to the fanged young man.

It took a further twenty minutes, which included a neat Ryoga-shaped hole in two walls and a final decision to drape a fatherly arm around the Eternal Lost Boy’s shoulders and practically drag him into the examination room, to get both of them where they wanted to be.  Ryoga perched on the end of the starched, thin bed, removed one of his bandannas (Tofu noticed that his headwear seemed to be self-sustaining; there was no effect made to the state of his hair) and fiddled awkwardly with it, binding it around his fingers.

“So, Ryoga,” Tofu said with a cheery little smile borrowed from Kasumi, “what can I do for you?”

“I...I...um...”  Ryoga gave Dr. Tofu a pleading look that communicated an intense desire to get all this over with, whatever this was.  “You’re a proper doctor, right?  I mean, you deal with everything?”

“I’m a chiropractor, mostly,” Tofu replied with a little mystification, then remedied Ryoga’s collapsing face with the addition of: “but I deal with everything, yes.”

“Good,” Ryoga coughed, rubbing furiously at the back of his head.  “Th-that’s good.  I was just wondering if...if...”

“If what?  Don’t be shy.”

The boy in yellow and black gave him a momentarily dark and terrible look, as if being proclaimed shy was a punishment worse than death, but it passed quickly.  “Can you fall out of love with somebody?” he blurted, and Tofu had been so unprepared for this sudden proclamation that Ryoga had to repeat it before he caught up with the conversation.

“Umm...” Tofu glanced over his excessive collection of literature and snatched a pink psychology volume from the top shelf.  “Can you, uh, explain?  Fall out of love with whom?”

Ryoga gave a slightly distasteful glower, indignated by having to embellish such a statement, then frowned.  “I mean, I was in love with Aka— I was in love with a girl.  And I mean not just stupid teenage crush.  I’ve read the pamphlets about my body changing and all that junk.  I loved her.”  He ran a hand through his hair, caught it in the bandanna and cursed in a quiet, controlled way that Tofu had always associated with evil maniacs in badly dubbed Bond movies.  “I really, really loved her.  It didn’t even matter that she...she acted like I didn’t exist and she was in love with that moronic jackass Ranma Saotome BUT I STILL LOVED HER, DAMMIT!“  The bandanna he’d been tangled in was ripped from his head, along with a disturbingly great deal of his hair, and the shredded remnants of at least ten bi-coloured headbands fluttered to the floor.  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.  Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes but didn’t fall.

“That’s alright,” Tofu said, edging his chair back in a not entirely subtle motion.  “So, uhm, what happened then?”

“I don’t know,” Ryoga eked out pathetically.  “I just met her one morning when I was out jogging and I just...I still liked her and all, she’s a nice person...but I didn’t think she was pretty.”  He winced as this painstakingly rehearsed speech was intricately shot to hell.  “I mean I wasn’t...”

“Attracted to her anymore?” the doctor offered.

“I guess you could say that,” he confessed.  “I didn’t hate her suddenly or anything, I just didn’t think she was pretty anymore.”

Tofu rubbed his chin thoughtfully and laid the pink volume on his desk, flicking back and forth.  “What about other girls?” he wondered aloud, not really addressing Ryoga who took this as an enquiry anyway.

“I don’t really look,” he said quietly, as if doing this would betray a girlfriend he didn’t have.  “But no, I guess not.”

Tofu took another not entirely concealed shuffle backwards and the castors on his chair squealed embarrassingly.  He wasn’t unnerved as much by Ranma or Akane, despite their attraction to random and gratuitous violence, because they quite simply could not walk through a wall without noticing.  That and they at least had some major personality flaws to match their appreciation of physical aggression.  This Ryoga Hibiki was just a nice, if somewhat socially introverted, boy.

“W-well...if you’re not attracted to any girls...what about boys?”

There was a long silence.

It grew into an uncomfortably long silence.

This then positively mutated into a silence that stretched into the Great Beyond, tinged the heavens and made Tofu worry for his life and his patient’s sanity.

Ryoga coughed gently.

“...boys?” he practically whimpered.  “N-no...I’m not...”

Tofu wisely decided that a shift in focus was necessary.  “How old are you, Ryoga?”

“I’m sixteen,” he answered automatically, too thrown by the change of subject to object to it.

“Sixteen,” Tofu nodded, glancing back to the pink book.  “Well, ah...I know it’s hard for a boy of your...development...to understand, but...you know about hormones, don’t you?”  Ryoga gave an uncertain nod and the doctor continued.  “At your age, sometimes they’re still sorting themselves out and they don’t quite know what preference to make you.”

“B-but I’ve always liked girls.  Ever since I liked people, I liked girls...”  Ryoga took an immense interest in his bootees again.  “Until now, I mean.”

Tofu nodded sympathetically.  “It just happens like that to some people.  It might just be a phase...you might start liking girls again soon.”

Ryoga looked up and the movement of his head forced tears from his eyes; he raised his hands and scrubbed furiously at his cheeks in a motion Tofu was afraid would rip the skin off his face.  “But it’s not normal,” he said helplessly.  “Normal people...normal boys like girls.  So they can have babies.”  He frowned at the simplicity of this argument and turned his reddened eyes to the ceiling.  “Only weird people are...”  He struggled with the word.  “...gay.”

“How many gay people do you know, Ryoga?” Tofu asked gently.

“N-none,” he mumbled.  “But I don’t have to know any!  I just know!  That’s the way it is!”

“According to who?”

“...”

Dr. Tofu sighed.  This was like trying to convince Hitler to run a Jewish kindergarten.  “Look, Ryoga, I can’t try to change what you believe,” he attempted after a lengthy pause.  “I just want you to know that this might be the way things are, and you can come to your own conclusions,” he finished gently.

“Isn’t there a cure?” Ryoga asked, his desperation pathetic.

“Why have a cure?  It isn’t a disease.  Besides, it might not be permanent.”

“W-what if it is?”

Tofu’s eyes flickered to the pink book and back again.  “Look around.  Experiment.”

Ryoga’s face contorted in a manner that would have been funny in any other situation.  “Experiment?  With boys?  B-b-but I’ve never even done anything with a girl!  I’ve never even kissed anybody!”  This sudden admission floored his delicate mental processes and he stared wholeheartedly at the floor.  “I...I’ve just been in love.”  He didn’t add ‘and that’s it’, because the sort of passionate, all-consuming and occasionally physically painful love he’d had for Akane Tendo didn’t feel like a ‘and that’s it’ issue, but on consideration he felt he could have done.

“Maybe this is a good time to start.”  Tofu shrugged recklessly.  He’d been asked to give advice, not to give good advice.  On top of that, he really felt an immense need to get Ryoga out of his clinic before he said something disagreeable and the boy brought the building crashing down around them.

“Oh,” Ryoga said a bit uselessly.  The shade of red on his face matched the umbrella strapped over the top of his backpack, and the variety of damnably fascinating mental images thoroughly abusing his mind were doing precious little to help.  A vein ruptured inside his nose and blood trickled down his face as his blush reached his crotch with results he could only hope were not visible.

Tofu watched with worried bemusement as Ryoga sprang from his chair in a spray of blood, rushed at the door, slammed against it (not through it, Tofu couldn’t help noticing.  Perhaps he was preoccupied) and furrowed his brows in confusion.

“Th-th-thankyouDrTofuI’llgiveitcarefulconsiderationthankyouforyourtimegoodBYE!”  His body smacked into the door again, gave a pained little noise like a dying piglet and slipped a finger into the wood of the door as if it was soft butter.

“BAKUSAI TENKETSU!”

Tofu could only stare as Ryoga raced out of the cloud of dust that later transformed itself into a four-foot wide, six-foot high crater and a pile of rubble that used to be the door and doorframe.

Ranma and Akane had never managed that, either.

*****

”MOUSSE!  Two order ramen, table four!”

The aforementioned black-haired Amazon expertly snatched the two bowls from their mid-air flight with only a slight bounce on his heels, without sparing a glance to their dealer, and glided to the table where two Furinkan High schoolgirls were looking at him disconcertingly and tittering to each other behind their hands.  One of them, with long black hair, whispered something into her brown-haired companion’s ear, which started up another round of giggles.

Feeling victimized and more than a little intimidated, Mousse set the bowls down. Before he could even run through the ‘here’s your meal, enjoy!’ that Cologne had recently decided he should say in case being an Amazon warrior working tables at a Chinese restaurant wasn’t humiliating enough, the black-haired girl lowered her hand and piped up: “Me and my friend have a bet, can you help us?”

Mousse peered at them through coke-bottle lenses and wondered if this would do more harm than good.  “Sure...”

The girls shared another conspiratorial snicker, then the one who had spoken before asked: “Okay.  Do you, um, y’know...”  She trailed off into another blushing giggle and her friend nudged her in the ribs.

“She wants to know if you’re gay,” the brown-haired girl said matter-of-factly.  “We’ve been watching you and we think you are.  Not that we mind or anything, we think it’s cool,” she added hastily as she noticed a blade gleaming inside his sleeve, “but with your hair an’ your dress thingy and all...”

Mousse affected the deer-in-headlights expression he assumed whenever somebody said something he didn’t expect — usually a compliment — and stared at them.  “I shall have you know that I am—”

“MOUSSE!” the voice of a delicate Chinese flower bellowed from the kitchen.  “Stop gossip with customer!”

“I’m sorry, Shampoo!” he returned with genuine fear, then gave the slightest haughty glare to the two girls — enough to let them know he in all his fine heterosexual manliness was not amused by their wonderings, but not nearly enough to dissuade them from a return visit — and fled to the kitchen in a flurry of ebony hair and ivory robes.

“Let’s call it a draw,” the brown-haired girl said.

“I still think he’s gay.”

“I’d rather remain optimistic.”

“Meh,” the black-haired girl said eloquently and took a bite of noodles.

Mousse flustered into the kitchen and mopped a bit of sweat off his forehead that wasn’t there but he would have been able to justify if it had been.

Great.  I can fight anyone under the sun, defeat bizarre chicken hybrids and even work triple shifts at this Godforsaken restaurant but I can’t deal with two fifteen-year-olds trying to drag me outta the closet.

And what a closet it was.  He had loved Shampoo, at one time, a long time ago —

“Duck boy stop daydream!  There customer what wait for service!”

That once sweet and lovely voice, dragged into militant hardness by anger and pidgin Japanese, snapped him from his poetic inner monologue and he raised his hands for the bowls he knew were coming.  His fists clenched around air as a frying pan slammed into the top of his head with the sort of accuracy that suggested practice beforehand.  His cranium resonated with the force of the strike, but he was so passionately dedicated to the violet-haired girl that it merely raised another slight welt on his skull to go with all the others he had there.  He didn’t even bother rubbing it.

“Stupid lazy Mousse what no serve customer is fired!” Shampoo yelled, and it took him a moment to realize this was actually a threat and not a statement of dismissal.  “Great-grandmother no pay Mousse for mess around!”

“That shriveled old monkey doesn’t pay me at all!”  Mousse snapped through a haze of pain, unable to resist the comeback but knowing instantly that he’d pay for it.

True to form, Cologne hopped through into the kitchen on her stick; her expression was the default look of slightly irate omniscience she took on whenever dealing with something that didn’t matter all that much but was worth some of her apparently neverending life.  She had, Mousse was absolutely certain, heard their exchange in its entirety and wondered if his employer would add another shiner to his impressive collection of cranial scars or merely force him to work another twenty-four hour shift.  Maybe ‘merely’ wasn’t the word.  Another of those and he’d be able to carry ramen deliveries in the bags under his eyes.

“You kids talking about me?” Cologne asked with the sort of sadistic joviality that foretold Very Bad Things happening in the immediate future, probably to the duck changeling.

Shampoo folded her arms over her breasts and Mousse found a sort of sickly fascination in the way her silk-clad bosom overflowed her forearms until one of said arms stretched out and an angered fist met his nose.  Shampoo re-folded her arms and tapped one foot angrily, turning all her attention away from her coworker in a meaningful flick of purple hair.

“Mousse what call great-grandmother shriveled old monkey,” she tattled gracefully, closing her eyes as if the mere view of the dark-haired Amazon in her peripheral vision was more than she wanted to see of him.  “And he gossip with customer instead working, and what on punishment shift too.”

Mousse opened his mouth to protest — he wouldn’t even be on this stupid lousy goodfornothing shift if Cologne hadn’t slung eight bowls of ramen at him on the assumption he would suddenly become a Hindu god — but a twin throb in his head and nose advised him otherwise and he remained sullenly silent.  Cologne nodded as if she had all the world’s wisdom, then glanced over the bar at the large number of people who were notably not eating.

“I see.  Shampoo, we have customers waiting,” Cologne said gently.  The demi-coherent Amazon girl instantly took this as the order it was, snatched up a notebook from the bar and bounced out into the melee.  Mousse folded his arms with the metallic jostling of bladed weaponry and leant against the bar in an unwitting imitation of Shampoo.

Cologne’s features settled into a comfortable glower that she looked like and probably had spent fifty years practicing.  Mousse fidgeted uncomfortably.  This was her ‘slight annoyance’ face, something that Mousse had only ever earned once or twice and been hit so hard on these occasions he could not remember how.

“Mousse,” she said grimly, hopping over to the huge oven and dumping some chow mein noodles into a pan of boiling water that spat viciously at her.  “Why are you here?”

Right now, I honestly don’t have a damn clue.  He thought it at her furiously but, under the delusion that his life had some value, didn’t say it.  “Why need you ask?  I am here to win the love of my beautiful Shampoo!”

Cologne looked at him sadly.  It could have been sympathy, but he knew it wasn’t — it was pity for a man wasting his life.  “It wouldn’t even matter if she did love you.  She is engaged to Ranma, and by Amazon law she must marry whoever defeats her in battle.  The only way you could even begin to rein her interest to you would be to defeat Ranma.”  She chuckled at the concept — without cruelty but with genuine humour, which was far worse — and poked at the noodles.  “I will tell you why you’re here, Mousse.”

Then tell me already and let me return to my pointless slave labour.  He remained cautiously silent.

“You’re here as a cheap worker.”

Cologne’s words, although expected, stung horribly — far more than he had ever thought they might.  “Th-that’s it?” he whimpered.

She didn’t look up from her work over the ovens, although he didn’t know if it was out of guilt or just a lack of desire to see his face which he was sure at that moment looked beyond pathetic.  “Not quite.  You occasionally provide a little protection for Shampoo — and don’t see me wrong, I am grateful for that.  But yes, that’s about it.”

“Oh.”  His legs gave out and, without any other option, he sat on the floor.  “Is that all you’ve ever thought of me?”

“No,” Cologne said thoughtfully, and his heart swelled with hope until she thoroughly squashed it with: “I thought you were a sad, delusional little boy with conflict issues until you started working here.  Now you’re just cheap labour.”

“Oh,” Mousse said again, wondered whether Cologne deserved anything better and decided she didn’t.  In her defence — and only the gods knew why he was defending her — this was probably the best way to phrase it.  Three hundred years had probably taught her not to bother with bullshit when the truth was a better weapon.  Because this was a weapon, wasn’t it?  He was just being beaten pointlessly, softened up for something worse.

A gnarled but surprisingly limber hand spooned some noodles into a bowl and flung them out over the young man’s head to land neatly in Shampoo’s waiting grasp.  “Mousse?”

“What?” he sulked, still not bothering to stand up.

“Tokyo is a very big place.  I can get cheap labour elsewhere, you know.”

Panic alarms went off in his head with startling clarity.  So this was ‘something worse’.  “I know that, ma’am,” he said softly, treading gently as he climbed to his feet.

“Better cheap labour.”

He nodded.

“Better cheap labour that doesn’t casually insult me, skip shifts to get beaten up in the pursuit of doomed romance, wear their own armoury and intimidate the customers or any other such foibles I can only attribute to you.”

“Are you throwing me out?” he asked roughly, all patience with the matriarch gone.  “Because if you are, just do it so I can go empty out my sleeping cupboard and get out from under your stick.”  It still hurt.  It really did hurt.  But what Mousse had when he lost everything else was pride and at least a bit of honour, and he’d be damned before some graying old woman who should be dead three or four times over took it from him.

“Actually,” she said with the slightest hint of surprise (Mousse took this as one of his greater achievements), “I was just going to tell you to get your act together and that you could keep your job if you did.  But now you come to mention it...”  She smiled again, and this one was laced with sadism.  “...you’re fired, Mousse.”

He stopped short.  He’d been waiting for that statement for weeks now and had a very carefully laid out contingency plan, but when it had finally come to it, he flat-out panicked.  “...I don’t have anywhere to live,” he said finally and hated how damn plaintive he sounded.

Cologne waved a hand dismissively and hopped across the room to fill some ramen bowls.  “Not my problem, is it?”

Her apathy sparked his anger.  “I’ve been working here for months, this place has been profiting like crazy and I haven’t been paid once, damn you.  I could sue.”

“I’d have paid you if you’d had the sense to ask,” Cologne said lightly and Mousse hated the fact that she wasn’t lying.  She threw the ramen bowls to Shampoo and received a few empty bits of china in return; she hopped over to a basin of hot water and dumped them inside.  “What would you sue on, grounds of being an idiot?  Come to that, what would you sue with?”

Mousse didn’t quite swallow his pride, but shielded it from the blow that he was forced to make now: “Can you at least give me a bit of money to buy some bug repellant?  I’ll need it if I’m gonna be sleeping rough.”  He was trying to be caustic but didn’t think he’d quite made it.

Cologne rolled her eyes, fished into her clothes and pulled out a purse.  Snatching a few thousand-yen bills from it with fingers that were increasingly reminding Mousse of birds’ feet, she tossed them at him and deliberately made him dive to protect them from the heated oven top.  Cradling the money to his chest, he glowered at the Nekohanten’s owner and walked heavy-footed into the restaurant.  It wasn’t worth going to collect his things; he hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he slept in a cupboard, and all he kept in there was some steel polish and some spare clothes — nothing precious to him, and nothing he couldn’t buy or steal.  He just couldn’t face having to see that damn wrinkled face again.

Shampoo’s face scrunched up into a frown as Mousse walked past her.  “What wrong with duck boy?” she enquired.

“Cologne fired me,” he said, not bothering to lighten his tone for her.  “So I can’t live here anymore.  I’m going.”

She blinked and concern flashed in her eyes, then she beamed at him.  “Bye-bye.”

Tears crested in his eyes and he thanked something more reliable than the gods that his glasses were thick enough to hide it.  “You really don’t care?”

“Shampoo not care what Mousse do,” she kindly repeated for him, gathering up dirty plates in a gravitationally unfeasible stack in the crook of her arm.

“You hate me that much?” he asked, his voice weak and cracking from not only being kicked out, but being reminded for the umpteenth time that he could risk his life for Shampoo as many times as he liked, follow her to the ends of the earth, and she would still treat him like something scraped off the bottom of her shoe.

“Shampoo hate Mousse very much,” she said with a tiny pinch of disdain that floored him completely.  “If Mousse fired, he go now.”

“I love you,” he ventured.

“Shampoo love Airen.”

Mousse couldn’t take her mouthing platitudes about that bastard any more than she could take his professions of love, so he just stormed past her.  In the most nauseatingly convenient example of coincidental appearance that he had ever seen, he watched as a red-haired Ranma and a red-faced Akane crashed into the Nekohanten, opening the door first in what looked like an afterthought.

“I can’t believe you embarrassed me like that!  In front of everybody in the store!”

“Hey, I didn’t embarrass nobody, all I said wazzat you needed to buy a bigger dress size!  I was just caring and all and you go all out on me!”

“How d’you call calling me fat caring?!” Akane demanded, whipping a mallet from the ether and leveling it at Ranma as they entered fully, door swinging shut behind them.

“I didn’t call you fa—hey, I guess I did kinda imply it.  Wouldja look at that.”

“RANMA, YOU JERK!” Akane catchphrased and swung the now impressively battle-scarred instrument of doom towards a ducking pigtail.  Missing Ranma by a long way, the mallet slammed into Mousse’s already twice-assaulted head and he didn’t have time to think of rolling with the blow, instead absorbing the force of a mallet and Akane’s full body weight so hard that his brain rattled in his skull.  ‘Pain’ didn’t quite cover it.  ‘All-consuming, mind-numbing agony’ was close, but didn’t quite have the panache he was looking for.  He touched the side of his head gingerly.  No blood.  This, if nothing else, was a good thing.  He lifted his hands and counted the fingers.  Excellent.  Just twelve.  Shampoo’s harder strikes had sent him into triple digits.

“Akane Tendo,” he rumbled, but his minor concussion and extreme dizziness denied him of the mental processes designed to produce any vengeant statements.

However, just saying her name was enough to incense the illustrious — and already thoroughly enraged — Tendo daughter.  “Sorry Mousse, but I really don’t have the time to deal with your stupid challenges right now!” she snapped, and backed up her argument with a high kick that took him off his nonexistent defences and, by a miracle of accuracy, flung him through the door at a decidedly upwards angle.

Ranma shielded her eyes, watching Mousse’s flight into the stratosphere.  “Geez Akane, you didn’t hafta kick him that hard.”  Her eyes flickered downward.  “By the way, everyone can see your panties when you do that.”

“And I suppose you looked, huh?!”

“Why th’heck would I ever wanna look at some macho chick like—OW!”

*****

Ryoga leapt up from the edge of the fountain and his umbrella seemed to jump to his hands as it outstretched, protecting him from the minor tidal wave caused as a semi-conscious Amazon impacted with the water.

“Mousse,” he acknowledged quietly, then raised the umbrella hurriedly as Muumuu-chan clambered out of Mousse’s robe, hopped out of the fountain and shook himself in the way a dog might, ridding his body of the chill water.  His glasses came off in the process and he fluttered after them, but a concussed human in the body of a duck attempting to fly is a sad sight indeed.  It was all in vain anyway, as Ryoga neatly reached out and plucked the ridiculously tiny spectacles from mid-flight.

Mousse quacked in rage, flapping desperately after his only means of vision — Ryoga was by no means fond of him, and he could turn the glasses into dust if he was in that sort of mood.  However, all the boy did was very delicately polish them on a corner of his shirt and prop them back onto Muumuu-chan’s beak.  This display of kindness would have made Mousse cry, but he wasn’t sure if ducks could cry and his headache, concentrated into a very small space, was already absolutely indescribable so decided to choke it down instead.

“You alright?” Ryoga asked, raising an eyebrow at the very woozy duck skittering up and down the low stone wall.  When Muumuu-chan just gave a little whining quack in reply, Ryoga sighed and shut his umbrella, leaning over and using it to fish Mousse’s clothes out of the water.  Methodically spooning the lot into a plastic bag he’d had in his backpack and tying it shut, keeping his distance to avoid any splashes of water that might trigger his metamorphosis, Ryoga stood and slung the lot over his shoulder.  Finally, he cast an eye over the duck, which had just huddled up into a feathery ball and looked a bit pathetic.

The lost boy sighed.  He had always had a potent dislike for Mousse, but that was because he endangered Akane.  Now he found himself not caring either way with a slight bias toward the negative, but he wasn’t in the business of stealing people’s clothes and leaving them to flail about with obvious injuries.

“Let’s go find somewhere quiet where I can heat some water, okay?” Ryoga said placatingly, tucking Muumuu-chan under his arm.  The duck quacked unhappily and snuggled against Ryoga’s waist, not really wanting to be in this position but not wanting to stagger around nude in the near future.  Cologne and Shampoo would just love that.

Ryoga wondered if there was any point in actively looking for the public baths — it would take him a few hours, optimistically speaking, and even then he had no immediate desire to deal with a naked, wounded and no doubt infuriated Amazon warrior in a public place where there was cold water.  Wondering why naked had been the first thing to occur to him, Ryoga squeezed Muumuu-chan’s warm and disturbingly limp body as he jogged away to find somewhere quiet.

*****

Mousse noticed a few things were wrong when he drifted back into consciousness.  He felt a sharp pain in three parts of his head — and his head, he noticed, felt a bit too small.  A lot too small, in fact.  That, and his line of vision barely made it over the taller blades of grass.  This was wrong.  On attempting to move, he swung an arm forward and saw a white wing move sluggishly through his peripheral vision.  Oh.  That was the problem.  Mildly settled, he looked around and saw a kettle rattling merrily on a portable stove and beyond it was Ryoga’s face, half-concealed by steam.  Above the oven, his clothes were drying in the steam on a roughly constructed drying rack and his weapons were lying in a heap to one side of it.

“I think that’s enough,” he murmured to himself, lifting the kettle up and setting it to one side.  A hand reached out and he switched off the oven with a flip of his fingers.  “I’ll just let it cool down from boiling, alright?”  Once again, Mousse’s heart swelled from Ryoga’s casual kindness, so much so that he didn’t even quack in complaint as Ryoga lifted him up gently and set him in his black-clad lap, exploring the angry bumps of the top and side of his head with his fingers.  “Shampoo hit you again?” he said sympathetically, tutting.  Usually, this display of pity would have set Muumuu-chan into a fit of quackily righteous rage but right now his head hurt too much and the warmth was making him muggy.

Ryoga leaned over and grasped the kettle.  “Here, you can change back and kick my ass for caring.”  He set the duck to one side and poured a mercifully small amount of water onto his back.

However, he hadn’t thought this out quite properly and ended up with a dazed, untidy and extremely naked Mousse a scant few inches from his own body.  He shuffled backwards at speed, all his blood rushing from his internal organs to his skin, and he hid his face with both hands as his body contracted into a little ball.

“Y-y-your clothes are over there!” he stammered desperately, pointing with a foot towards the rope his clothes hung from.  A very confused and still pained Mousse took the hint and yanked his robe and pants away, pulling them on with more haste than the waves of pain allowed.  His head throbbed as he belted his robe and pulled his slippers on, smoothing the ensemble down and flipping his hair distractedly before turning his eyes to Ryoga.

“I’m decent now,” he offered to the flushed boy, who peeked between his splayed fingers for a moment before realizing that Mousse’s silken, lickable ivory skin was covered in its entirety.

...

...silken?

Ivory?

Lickable?

‘Sexually confused’ just didn’t cover Ryoga’s feelings at that moment and the mere concept of another man being lickable, an adjective he had never applied to anybody regardless of gender, had his hands crushed so entirely to his face that one might think he was attempting to merge them.

Mousse rubbed at his head — the pain, faded with time to a dull throb and distributed through a larger and more complex volume, wasn’t nearly as bad as Muumuu-chan had it — and couldn’t help but notice Ryoga’s peculiar behaviour.  “Uh, Ryoga?”

“W-what?” a distorted and disturbingly high-pitched reply came.

“You’re being more weird than usual.  Are you alright?”

The fanged boy forced his hands to his lap and nodded rapidly.  “Of course I’m alright.  Don’t waste my time with such stupid questions.”

“But you were being nice to me,” Mousse pressed.  Ryoga stumbled to his feet and started gathering up the thrown-together drying rack and cooker, pointedly avoiding eye contact as he did so.

“I’m always nice,” he managed at length.  “And it looked like Shampoo did a number on you, so I thought...”  He trailed off.  Usually, when Shampoo beat up Mousse, Ryoga laughed at him.  “I don’t know what I thought.  But you were staggering around pretty bad, so I might as well have helped.”  He still wouldn’t turn to face the Chinese boy.

“I don’t want your pity,” Mousse bit off.  “Shampoo hits me all the time.  It builds my character, is all.”

“Builds it into what, a love-blinded, manic, obsessive delinquent?” Ryoga attempted, but it didn’t sound genuine.

“Better than a love-blinded, brutishly violent and delusional delinquent with no viable sense of direction,” Mousse muttered in reply.  That did sound a bit offensive and Ryoga frowned.

“At least I can see where I’m going.”

“At least I know where I’m going.”

“At least I don’t start petty arguments a three-year-old would shun as immature,” Ryoga said finally and decided that between this and That Talk with Dr. Tofu, he was probably going to spend the rest of the day sulking in Akane’s arms as P-chan.  At least she was nice to him, albeit for the wrong reasons.

“Cologne fired me from the Nekohanten,” Mousse said out of the blue, reinserting his arsenal into his sleeves.

“She kick you out?”

“No, Akane Tendo did that.”

It took a while for Ryoga to untangle the full implication of this and instead of going into an enraged fit about Akane’s naturally gentle and peaceful nature as was habitual for him, he just nodded and shut his now dangerously full backpack, sitting on it to hold it closed as he did up the latches.  “And Shampoo beat you up?”

Not really wanting to list his abuses at the hands of Ranma’s two most violent fiancées, Mousse just nodded.

“Pity,” Ryoga said thoughtfully.

“...Why aren’t we killing each other?” Mousse asked.

“I figure it’s because Akane, Shampoo, Ranma or any combination of the three aren’t here,” Ryoga suggested.

“But I insulted Akane,” Mousse objected.

Ryoga blinked owlishly.  “So you did.”

“And you don’t care?”

The boy in the speckled bandanna considered lying, then decided pretending to beat up a wounded boy in blind rage that wasn’t there just wasn’t worth the bother.  “No, I guess I don’t.  Funny, huh?” he added humourlessly.

Mousse eyed him curiously.  “So you don’t love Akane Tendo any more?”

Ryoga looked shamefully at the floor.  When the Amazon said it, it seemed even more appalling — as if he had some established duty he was failing to perform.  “...”

Mousse considered this.  His prime directive of sorts had been to get Ranma away from Shampoo so he could marry the girl himself, and marrying him off to Akane was as good a method as any.  Relieving Ryoga from his duties as a rival for Akane’s affections could only ever be a good thing, and it meant he could casually abuse the Tendo girl without fear of reciprocation to a certain extent, but Ryoga looked so miserable at this apparent turn of events that despite everything he wished it hadn’t happened.

“W-what about you and Shampoo?” Ryoga retorted dimly.  “You’re n-not exactly crying blood over being kicked out of her house, are you?”

Mousse smacked him in the face with a yo-yo and sprung to his feet.  “How dare you question my adoration for Shampoo?!  I am merely biding my time in the hope that I shall form a plan to regain my employment and due proximity to my fair bride!”

Ryoga rubbed at his reddened cheek.  “Sorry,” he mumbled and didn’t even pretend to mean it.  “So, where are you sleeping tonight?”

Mousse pulled a pitifully small wad of cash out of a hidden pocket — he was mildly impressed that the other boy hadn’t stolen it — and held it up for Ryoga to see.  “How long would this get me in a hotel?”

Ryoga squinted at the bills.  It was more money than he’d seen in years outside passing a cash machine.  However, he knew enough about hotels to confidently shake his head and say: “Maybe twenty minutes at the bar.”

The Amazon glowered at his shoes.  “Then where am I going to stay?”  He eyed Ryoga myopically.  “Where do you stay?  I doubt you ever find your way home.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Ryoga replied shamelessly.  “I haven’t been home ever since I left to chase Ranma.”

“What about your parents?” Mousse wondered aloud.  “Did they not even care?”  Ryoga remained silent, but the look on his face told him that this was An Issue so he didn’t push it.

“I just sleep in the forest, usually,” Ryoga said informatively.  “Camping out doesn’t bother me most of the time.”

“You’ve been sleeping rough for...it must be months now.”

“Oh, it is,” Ryoga said with feeling.  “Although there is something I’ve been doing...it’s kind of immoral, though,” he added and refused to meet Mousse’s eyes.

“I can do immoral,” Mousse encouraged him earnestly.  “What is it?”

Ryoga frowned.  He must be concussed.  “Got enough small change for a couple lockers at the public baths?”

Mousse rattled some coins out of his other sleeve and counted.  “I think so.  What do we need lockers for?”

The fanged martial artist glowered at the concept of having to explain this in its entirety.  “To leave our clothes in overnight, bird-brain.”

“I resent tha—”  Logic penetrated.  “Ohhhh...”

*****

Kasumi Tendo was finishing up her chores when a slightly wounded-looking duck with a few bumps on its head and feathers askew appeared at the kitchen window.  Blank eyes clouding with concern, she opened the window and Muumuu-chan flapped noisily inside, unwisely crashing into a basin that was mercifully full of tepid water.

“Hello there,” she said, brightness battling with exhaustion as she lifted the now slightly damp avian out of the water.  Her fingers lightly ran over his wings, touching the feathers back into place.  “You’re terribly bruised,” she murmured.  Mousse did his best to hang his head and look pathetic, which was surprisingly easy given that a duck did not have much in the way of ability to express emotion.  He checked his glasses were still tucked under his wing where he’d left them — although not the most observant soul in the world, Kasumi would probably be dubious of offering a bed to one of Ranma’s more offensive nemeses.

The second-oldest of the Tendo family squinted at the injured bird sitting rather unhygenically on the workboard and bit her lip.  “It would be terribly cruel to leave you outside with all these bumps on your head, wouldn’t it?”  Muumuu-chan nodded emphatically.  “Well, you can sleep in my room tonight.  But it’s our secret, alright?” Kasumi giggled.  “Just let me finish my chores.”

If ducks could grin, Mousse would be grinning, but ducks couldn’t even smile so he just tried to look very badly hurt and dependent instead.  He did, however, spare Ryoga a slight wince as he heard an argument brewing upstairs.

“Akane, I can’t believe you’re lettin’ that stupid little thing sleep with you AGAIN!  You’ll catch rabies!”

Akane cradled P-chan protectively, unaware as usual that his face was pressed into her modest cleavage.  “The only one being rabid around here is you, Ranma!” she snapped in retort.  “Just go to bed!  What I sleep with is my business!”

Ranma snarled and walked over, addressing the black piglet this time.  “You think this is funny, huh?  Just wait ‘til she finds out—”

“Finds out what, Ranma?” Akane barked.  “That you’re jealous of a little pig?”

“Like I’d ever wanna be crushed between those!” Ranma said indignantly, pointing at Akane’s chest.  “It’d take me enough time just to find ‘em!”

“THAT DOES IT!” Akane screamed and kicked Ranma in the crotch as hard as she could with bare feet, which was more than enough to send him gasping into a foetal position with tears in his eyes.  P-chan curled up a bit in sympathy and Akane took this the wrong way.  “Oh, I’m sorry, P-chan!  Did I scare you?”  She kissed his snout lightly, which he was depressed to find didn’t send him into raptures as usual.  “There, there.  Ranma’s not going to bother us anymore.  Let’s go to bed, okay?”

Ryoga gave a cruel mental smirk, scampered up to Akane’s shoulder and stuck his tongue out at Ranma.

“Damn Ryoga,” the aquatranssexual muttered as he waited for feeling to return to his groin.

*****

The residents of Nerima were remarkably jaded by now, and for that reason nobody enquired as to why a bespectacled duck and a piglet with a bandanna tied around its neck were scampering through the men’s section of the public baths that morning.  There were a few raised eyebrows and exchanged murmurs as the pair plunged into the bath, revealing a pair of black-haired boys, but in any case they were too muscular for anyone to consider it safe to question them.

“How does Kasumi live in that family?” was the first thing Mousse said, taking off his steamed-over glasses and resting them on the tiles beside the bath.  His bruises had gone down enough for him to escape confidently as soon as Kasumi had opened a window.

“I’m never doing that again,” Ryoga muttered darkly, looking extremely angry but not at anything in particular.  If Mousse had to guess, the aura of rage was feeding upon Ryoga himself.

“Why not?”

“It felt wrong.”

Mousse raised his eyebrows.  “You don’t love Akane any more and now it feels wrong to sneak into her bed without her knowing it’s you?”

“Shut up, Mousse,” Ryoga hissed and stood up, hot water rolling off his skin.

Mousse blinked.  He’d seen Ryoga naked before, although at those times he’d been too busy trying to kill him or Ranma to actually look.  Right now, he had all the time he needed.  Letting his eyes not all that subtly trail down the length of the other boy’s body, he had to admit that anyone who wasn’t blind or mad would have to consider Ryoga Hibiki one of the hottest people on God’s green earth.  His eyes settled on Ryoga’s inhumanly firm ass as he watched him walk away and it took him a few moments to realise that he was looking at another part of him entirely as the bandannaed boy turned around.

“And Mousse?  Leave me alone!”  Ryoga turned around again, grabbing a towel from somebody’s shoulder and winding it around his narrow hips as he stormed to the exit.

Mousse glowered as he tried to will down his growing erection and hopped out of the bath, stealing his own towel and pursuing Ryoga out into the locker room.  It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want Ryoga in a bad mood at his expense so much as that he didn’t want Ryoga to get mad at him in a violent vengeful way.  Hate as he did to admit it, the fanged boy was stronger than him and had kicked his ass enough times for him to know that having it done again was inadvisable.  Even apologising was better than Ryoga with a vendetta.

The boy who didn’t yet have a vendetta but was getting there slammed the door to the locker room, heard it hit Mousse in the face with the sound of cracking lenses and allowed himself a tiny vengeful grin which quickly left his face.

Moron, he thought angrily, slipping his fingers into the knot on his bandanna where he’d jammed the key to his locker.  It wasn’t there.  God dammit, this is just not my day...  Ryoga slammed his fist into the lock.  It creaked.  Another punch and the door whined open a few inches.  It was torn off its hinges and flung across the room to neatly hit an approaching Mousse, knocking an already ravaged lens out of his glasses.

“Mousse, I’m telling you now.  Go away before I get angry,” Ryoga warned, not turning away from the locker.

“Look, Ryoga, I didn’t mean to get you all mad—”

“Well, you failed!”

“—but that’s still no reason for you to be throwing this stupid damn tantrum.  What’s wrong with you?”

Ryoga just glared at him.  “Since when did you give a damn?”

“You’ve been okay to me recently,” Mousse understated.  “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Just don’t talk to me about Akane and we’ll get along fine,” Ryoga muttered, pulling his backpack and umbrella out of the locker.  “Actually, don’t talk to me at all.”

“Why not?”

Ryoga continued looking away, because Mousse’s body was making him think things he really had no desire to think in his established knowledge that he was a normal, heterosexual man with a healthy sexual appetite and desires and absolutely no fantasies whatsoever about Mousse’s near-nude body such as ripping off that tiny little towel and letting him — STOP THAT!

Mousse edged forwards.  “Ryoga?”

“Go away!  J-just go away!”

“Ryoga...Ryoga, you’re blushing.”

“I am not blushing, I am crimson with rage!”

“Your nose is bleeding.”

“That’s how angry I am!”

This was getting nowhere fast.  Mousse grabbed Ryoga’s shoulder and threw him against the bank of lockers, pinning his shoulders down.  Ryoga gave a choked cry of fury and thrust his knee into his stomach; Mousse’s grip loosened enough for him to be thrown backwards by a powerful kick.  Sent to the floor, Mousse swept Ryoga’s legs from under him and he landed on top of the Amazon, noses almost touching.  Jumping at the look of horror-tinged shock that touched Ryoga’s face, Mousse shifted his weight and rolled, pinning his opponent underneath him.

“Look,” Mousse snarled.  “We don’t have to be enemies, okay?  I don’t know if the concept of friendship is foreign to you, but it doesn’t have to be.  We can work together if you’d just stop being weird for once.”

“I’m never weird,” Ryoga snapped.

“So that’s why your nose ruptured and you ran out of there like you’d left the gas on?” Mousse guessed.

“You belittled my love for Akane Tendo,” Ryoga said out of the blue, folding his arms.  Unfortunately, the gesture that would have appeared intimidating in any other case, when performed in a too-small bath towel underneath an Amazon, seemed frankly ridiculous.  So much so that Mousse snickered quietly.  “You belittled my love for Akane Tendo and now you’re laughing at me!”

Like a six-year old, Mousse thought loudly.  “Why do you care about me belittling your love or such trash?  You don’t have love for her anymore, do you?”

“No,” Ryoga confessed guiltily.  “But...I should...!  I mean, it’s n-normal—!”

Mousse realised that Ryoga had given away a lot more than he’d intended with that last statement.  “Ryoga, are you...you’re gay, aren’t you?” he asked with surprising gentleness.

“No,” Ryoga said in less than a murmur.  “I’m not like that.  I’m not.  I...”  He glared defiantly at Mousse.  “I love Akane.”

“You just said you didn’t.”

Ryoga lifted his chin a little.  “Momentary spasm.”

“Ryoga, stop talking such crap.”  Mousse was learning the hard way that Ryoga’s attitude to the real world also applied to his one in debate: when in a hole, keep digging, because you’re bound to find a way out somewhere.  He was also certain that a personal slight would have the boy in the bandanna up like nobody’s business, albeit with painful results, but there was no movement from the body below him.

Time passed.  Stars formed and imploded, galaxies and solar systems winked by in currents of wind.  Ryoga, eyes closed and indignantly silent, lay prostrate below Mousse’s half-straddling form.  Their bodies heaved with unearned heavy breaths in chorus, hearts beating languidly within.  The Amazon’s hair hung down around his face in slick jet streaks, barely brushing Ryoga’s chest.  He shifted his body a little, as if to get off Ryoga, and a dripping length of hair stroked over his left nipple, flushed with blood as the rest of his skin was.  Ryoga let out a tiny, cracked moan, barely suppressed as it battled against his all-consuming desire to get Mousse to go away.

Mousse’s eyes flickered downwards, straining through condensation-iced lenses, and realised why Ryoga hadn’t gotten up yet: the towel around his hips was small, but it hadn’t been nearly that tight a little earlier.

“Ryoga,” Mousse breathed and everything suddenly became a lot more serious.  He pulled himself up immediately and physically forced himself not to investigate how big the bulge between the Lost Boy’s thighs actually was.  The boy in question did nothing to make this easier by rolling quickly onto his side and into a foetal position, his breaths coming in shaky gasps.

The Amazon said nothing as he hurried on his clothes, uncaring as they clung uneasily to his still-wet body.  He was aware from the movements beside him that Ryoga was doing the same but could not turn his head to see.  He’d crossed some sort of barrier with the Lost Boy, broken the unspoken law that stated that no-holds-barred physical contact was allowed when you were trying to kill the opponent, but if you had anything more constructive in mind...?

There wasn’t any social decorum to follow for this.  If you won a fight, you gloated; if you didn’t, you ran away and trained like crazy until you could.  If you accidentally gave someone of uncertain sexuality a hard-on...well, that was difficult.  He opened his mouth to apologise, but apologies didn’t come easily to him and besides, what was the use?  He’d probably only make Ryoga even angrier.  Securing the belt on his robe and tucking a stray flashbomb into his sleeve, he dared to crane his neck a few degrees to the left.  Glancing through a half-shield of gleaming black, he could see that Ryoga had gone.

*****

An entirely embarrassed, angered and  above all confused Ryoga had tried to actively get himself lost, found himself outside the Nekohanten within the hour, gave up and tried looking for the Tendo Dojo instead.  It didn’t take him long to end up perched atop of a streetlight, looking out onto what he hoped was Nerima’s tangle of roads and buildings.

“Where in the world am I now...” he murmured with genuine dismay.

“Ryoga?”

The streetlight shuddered slightly as somebody tapped on it and it was enough to make the already poorly balanced boy sitting on the lamp quake and fall off.  Gravity assured that he did not misplace himself in his journey to the pavement and sure enough he landed painfully a few feet away from his visitor.  He peered out at a pair of scuffed sneakers and white socks, then his eyes rolled up the length of a pair of feminine legs until they reached a purple denim skirt.  He had to shift his neck a little to see the striking sludge green sweater — a daring combination if ever there was one — and finally the not entirely sympathetic face of Akane Tendo.

He leapt up and back, blood rushing from his extremities.  “A-A-A-A-A-Akane...!”

The young martial artist squinted at him.  “Ryoga, are you okay?  You look kind of blue...”

He drew breath to explain that he wasn’t depressed at all, then realised that she was actually discussing the colour of his face.  “It’s cold?” he said lamely, and knew he deserved the hike that Akane’s eyebrows took up her forehead.

“I thought it was kinda warm,” she said in confusion.  She was still waiting for him to blush, gibber something and run away, and the fact he was only gibbering was putting her off.  “Um, have you seen Ranma anywhere?  He’s been out all day,” she added with irritation that did not hide her concern.

“N-no,” Ryoga managed.  “I haven’t seen him.”

Akane glowered miscellaneously, making the recipient cringe, and tapped her foot.  “Have you seen anyone he might have been with?  Maybe Kuno — no, he’s not that much of a distraction — Mousse?”  Ahh.  Now he was blushing.  Akane could only assume it was some sort of time-delayed reaction.  Perhaps he was coming down with a cold or something.

“M-M-Mousse?” Ryoga stammered, rage and heat boiling up ambivalently within him.  “N-no, I’ve not seen Mousse for a long time.”

“Oh,” Akane said shortly.  “Well, if you see Ranma around, could you...”  She was on the brink of saying ‘find me’ but realised that was something of a futile hope.  “...tell me?”

Ryoga nodded rapidly, glad for a change of subject.  “S-sure, Akane.”

The heir of the Tendo Dojo nodded brightly, turning to leave.  “Well, see you around!”  She glanced over her shoulder as she walked and was a little gratified to see his blush starting to fade only when she left.

He so has the hots for me.

*****

Another night fell, as they do, and Ryoga found himself in the forest.  It was dry and crisp with cold, not unpleasant and damp as others were, and he was perched on a branch, almost entirely hidden by the thick foliage.  His back was pressed to the trunk and he could barely feel the vibrations of a thousand tiny creatures going about their business.

126, 127, 128, 129...

He was counting leaves.  When he found himself faced with something he couldn’t, wouldn’t or didn’t know how to think about, he occupied his conscious thought with menial and pointless tasks that held his attention while not being too complex to strain himself.

141, 142, 143, 144...

If only that damn little voice at the back of his head would have the grace to stop chanting Mousse, Mousse, Mousse, Mousse...

At one hundred and seventy-three, he stopped counting and glared at the leaves in question instead.  He was not a coward, and as such he was perfectly capable of facing up to a change of sexuality and an attraction to another person who was almost certainly not of that sexuality.  It was no worse a challenge than the ones he delivered to Ranma Saotome with startling frequency.

Mousse.  Chinese Amazon, 16-ish, competent fighter, loathed Ranma, infatuated with Shampoo.  Beyond that, he knew nothing of the other boy.  However, he knew more than enough to realise that attempting to pursue him, even attempting to talk to him about it, would end in humiliation for him or both of them.

He still had no idea what could possibly justify this relatively mild curiosity in comparison to his long-lost love for Akane.  He knew, somewhere, that it didn’t matter.  Akane herself had never reciprocated his love, not really; never even seemed to notice that he would always be the one to protect her ahead of that apathetic self-serving bastard, Ranma.  But it still felt like betrayal — to himself if not to her — that he had so suddenly foregone these intense feelings, to be replaced with childish lusts.  It felt like his emotional development had taken a backwards step and he loathed himself for it.

Besides, even if he was gay and even if Mousse was gay and even if he’d be interested in...experimenting...what would they actually do with each other?  Even with his limited knowledge of female physiology, Ryoga knew for a fact that male and female bodies, well, interlocked in order to procreate.  Male and male bodies didn’t.  They couldn’t, could they? 

Guilty and hot, he tugged off his sweater and the thin undershirt beneath.  His fingers trailed down the length of his torso and he allowed himself the luxury of a proud smirk as his eyes roved over the hard muscle, then shivered a bit, fingertips brushing the increasingly sensitive skin just about the waistband of his pants.  A rich blush found his cheeks and worked its way down his body as he traced over the thick cotton that covered his groin.

Unbidden, the coil of arousal in the pit of his stomach called up every memory he could muster of the events in the public baths.  The sight of Mousse naked, steam coiling around his powerful, slim body, droplets of water caressing his tanned flesh, not even bothering to conceal himself in the knowledge that he was perfect...on hands and knees above him, heat radiating from his body, face bare inches from his own...

...kissing him...

Ryoga failed to suppress a moan as his eyes slipped shut, unable to block out the fantasy, and he squeezed himself painfully to try and rid himself of the off-colour thoughts.  It had the opposite effect, making him twitch and gasp, the uncomfortable tightness between his thighs becoming even more so.  Pressing a heated cheek against the rough coolness of the tree trunk, he attempted to force his hand away.  His years of discipline had not trained him for this arena, though, and he failed in this endeavour.  Sliding his hand beneath the waistband of his trousers and boxers, his fingers brushed the heated flesh underneath and he bit his lip hard to stop himself from crying out.  Unused to such touches and with so little to fuel them, it was almost too much.

...lips locked tightly, half-wrestling for dominance on the cracked white tiles, barely covered hips rubbing desperate for stimulation, gasping moans sounding against each other’s mouths...

Ryoga squirmed in the confines of his clothes, baring himself to his knees, and slicked his palm with saliva before lowering it to his aching erection.  His hips bucked fiercely as he touched himself, leaves fluttering around him as the branch was rattled.  Uncaring he squeezed himself until it ached, drawing a low, throaty groan from the base of his throat.

...pinned beneath the strength of the long-haired boy’s body, spread out and trembling for him, feeling his cool hands everywhere on his overheated, needy body, teasing, stroking, tugging...

Shame gave way to the heat of gratification as he thrust freely upwards, driving into the wet heat within his fist, moaning freely now.  The chanting voice at the back of his head had full reign now, screaming Mousse’s name at him — his fangs pressed against his lower lip were the only things stopping him from doing the same.  His body bucked beyond control, his hard cock jerking as his hand squeezed tight around it.  Drops of precome drooled from the tip and slid into his quivering grasp.  Ryoga’s breathing came in panting gasps, almost painful with the need for release.

...hands sliding over his body in powerful caresses, coiling around the point of his intense arousal, pumping at him with firm, almost abrasive actions, driving him higher and higher until he barely knew where he was, knowing what he wanted...

A sharp, ragged cry shook the birds away in flocks as Ryoga shuddered and reached his peak, hot whiteness staining his chest and stomach.  His hips bucked powerfully, lifting almost all of him off the branch, and continued twitching even as his breathing calmed with the rest of his body.

A sharp breeze whistled through the forest and Ryoga shivered, the delicious heat of less than a minute ago becoming uncomfortable and cold.  He looked down at himself, lips twisting slightly in disgust as he realised what a mess he was.  His hands fumbled for his backpack and pulled out a couple of tissues, wiping away the pale essence from his body and around his groin.  His still-flushed skin sung at the rough stimulation, his body refusing to acknowledge that playtime was over, and he fought down the waves of lust that were already washing anew into him.  Who’d be a teenager? he thought bitterly, looking at the soiled tissues, sighing and wrapping them in another one, stuffing the demi-hygenic lump into a side pocket to be disposed of later.

Feeling filthy, he tugged his pants and underwear back up, followed by his undershirt and sweater, then his belt.  His body curled into a knot against the tree trunk and he sighed shakily.

Mousse had brought him to orgasm.  Mousse.  Without even being there.  He was a weak, stupid man with few morals and no ethics and really nice legs—

Ouch.

He wasn’t gay.  Really.

Just...going through a phase.

Squirming uncomfortably on the tree branch, he settled into an uneasy sleep, bespectacled ducks fluttering drunkenly through his dreams.

*****

Mousse had considered returning to the Tendo homestead that night, but out of some feeling of obligation towards Ryoga’s bizarre moral mindset (rather than any sense of guilt), he did not.  Instead, he took the rest of his meagre earnings around the local hotels, found nowhere that even approached reasonable, gave up and ended up walking aimlessly.  The night cast a blanket of blessed silence over Nerima, something he was certainly unused to.  It made the place seem almost hospitable.

It was approaching midnight as his ramble took him into the forest, and he was considering his options.  The first involved doing nothing and hoping everything sorted itself out.  The second involved grovelling in apology to Ryoga, then doing nothing and hoping everything sorted itself out, which was even more unattractive.  The third option would be explaining everything in the almost certainly vain hope that the two of them could reach an arrangement.  Hopefully one that involved nudity and exchange of the more agreeable bodily fluids, although he doubted that he could realistically swing that with Ryoga of all people.

And then he came across the crying tree.

He realised, almost immediately, that the tree in and of itself could not be crying.  If indeed Nerima had a crying tree, it would almost certainly have been centric to at least one misadventure and probably recorded as a biological abnormality.  Clambering with ease into the black depths contained by thick foliage, he decided out of boredom to discover what, exactly, was deluding passers-by into thinking this tree was in fact some sort of microcosm of the misery felt by the environment.

It was Ryoga.  He was pressed tight against the trunk, body coiled as small as possible and rocking gently with the force of his sobs.  If he had noticed Mousse’s arrival, then his face — red, wet and contorted with distress, mouth moving in an inaudible mantric mutter — failed to show it.  The Amazon bit his lip and shifted over.  The mantra became audible.

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-akane, I’m s-s-sorry....p-p-p-please...”  His choked words dissolved in tears and his body shook, pitifully broken.

Mousse edged forward the tiniest bit.  Emotion on Ryoga’s part usually led to violence or rapid retreat, and the other boy wasn’t particularly keen on either.

“Ryoga?”

The Eternal Lost Boy’s gleaming eyes snapped up in a headlight stare.  “Mousse,” he said tinily.

This near-silence was nearly always a prologue to something unpleasant happening, so Mousse clumsily backpedalled as best he could until he was precariously on the thinnest part of the branch he could rest on without snapping it off.  Ryoga undermined his efforts entirely by lunging forwards, knocking his unprepared body onto its back, then leaning over and pressing cold dry lips against his.

Mousse just lay there, shock-numb, as Ryoga lay atop him, slowly easing his body weight down until he was entirely against the boy in the white robe, mouths still crushed together in a way more saddening than erotic.  Desperately, Ryoga ground his hips into Mousse’s, seeking a reaction and finding only a choked breath from his half-willing partner.

Not knowing whether or not he was reluctant to continue, Mousse pressed his hands tight against Ryoga’s shoulders, shoving him away.  Obediently, Ryoga rolled back onto his knees, staring at Mousse with all the pain of rejection, and pressed a finger lightly to his parted lips, barely visible in the shadows of nightfall.

“M-Mousse?  Don’t you want this?” he asked, like a child who had nobody to play a game with.

“You don’t want this,” Mousse corrected him in confusion, catching his breath slowly.  “You don’t...I mean...Akane...”

This was a bad choice of words if ever there was one and drew a high-pitched laugh from Ryoga, teetering on the brink of mania.  “Akane?!  Who cares about Akane?!  Her or you or anybody else, it doesn’t matter, my love will pass again and I will be alone!  Again!  Forever!”  Rage and hate entered his voice as he wailed at the other boy.  “It doesn’t matter!  Love is precious — I used to know that above everything else!  But now I know better!  Love isn’t real!”  He lunged, incensed with tears, and took them both off the tree.  His scream rattled the forest, drove nature away in flocks.

“THERE IS NO LOVE!”

He landed straddling Mousse on the chill, dewy grass, eyes alive with every colour of the emotional spectrum.  His chest heaved with something wild and untamed, nothing that he had never unleashed before, something that engendered all of his passion and none at all at the same time.  Ki rippled around him, shimmering one colour and the next like a strange Northern Lights, all with an undertone of furious crimson.  It was the only thing that illuminated his face in the blackness.  It was the void.  It was singular, incompromisable knowledge that there was nothing to live for, yet left him unable to die.

When next he spoke, his voice was frightening in its controlled clarity below his aura of lunacy.

“Love...does not...exist.”

Mousse, stung in the ravage of Ryoga’s pulsing energy, was beyond appalled.  Baiting an opponent was fair.  But taking them, making them think this way, destroying every hope and transcendental dream they had...this was going beyond.  Once again, he had overstepped the line.  This was a crime.  And with many crimes, there was no way that he could see to undo it.

Ryoga pulled himself to his feet with slow deliberation and walked away, every step shaking.  His ki was a bright, pale grey-blue when he stopped and turned to face Mousse, eyes empty.  Tears teemed over his cheeks.

“SHISHI HOKODAN!”

Mousse watched in wonderment and horror as the sphere of pure mental energy bore up, numbed by the thought that the glimmering globe could possibly be filled with Ryoga’s distress and hatred.  Feeling an oncoming sense of dread, he watched it descend.

Face pale and wet, eyes blank, soul hollow, Ryoga stared without fear into his own power.

“I’m sorry, Akane.”

The ki ended its journey and crushed him into the ground.

There was perfect silence.  The crater gaped, black and portentous like a mouth of hell, and every bird and insect was hushed by the intensity of the blast.  Ryoga’s body was nowhere to be seen.  Not even the slightest sigh of wind shifted the scene; the moment could have been frozen in time.

A long, unsteady breath escaped Mousse’s throat and he flew to the horrific black crater, only halfway there when he saw Ryoga, centered perfectly, limbs splayed.  His entire body looked thinner, paler; half-dead.  The rise and fall of his chest was barely visible.  The Amazon slid with trepidation into the carved basin, stumbling on the ragged ground until he reached the prone boy.  This had really seriously gone too far.  Ryoga’s flagrant self-denial had amused him at first, then angered him.  Now it flat-out scared him.

Scooping the boy’s elusively heavy figure into his arms, backpack and all, he started the trek to the only place he could really go.

*****

Shampoo was, fortunately, awakened by only the third stone that hit her window and stomped over, slamming it open with force that rattled the glass in its panes.  Mousse was easily visible under the streetlight, his body slumped under exhaustion and the weight of another boy, clung like a baby in his arms.

The girl would have melted with sympathy for the pathetic figure he cut, but that was not the Amazon way.  Instead, she snapped: “What Mousse do here throw stone at Shampoo window?!  It too too very late!”

“Shampoo, open the doors!”  It was an order and a whine at the same time.  “I need some help!”

“Mousse what not welcome here!  Go away!”  Shampoo stuck her tongue out rather viciously and made to close the window.

“Shampoo, he’s DYING!”

A lie and a last-ditch effort, but it made her pause.  Having somebody die on the doorstep would probably be bad business for the Nekohanten, and she had no immediate desire to get into Cologne’s bad books with such permanence.

“...Shampoo what be two moment,” she finally compromised and slid the window shut.

It was closer to five minutes later when Mousse and his load were finally inside. Shampoo had shoved two tables together and Ryoga was laid across them; she noted the fact his breathing, although extremely shallow, was steady, and tsked.

“Lost Boy what not dying,” she pointed out with a hint of disappointment that Mousse couldn’t place.  “What he do, anyway?”

“He used Shishi Hoko-something on himself,” Mousse answered, praying he wouldn’t have to explain, and when Shampoo shot a questioning look at him he was forced to embellish this with: “He made a ball of ki and hit himself with it.”  He made a brief up and down ‘woosh-thunk’ motion with his hands to illustrate and Shampoo gave a bemused little nod.

“Why he do that?”

Mousse opened his mouth to invent a response, then just shrugged.  “I just found him is all,” he mumbled noncommittally.  He noticed for the first time that Shampoo was wearing a tiny red silk nightgown that most of her body was trying to escape from; the shoulder straps were almost visibly vibrating with their need to snap.  He swiftly judged that eyeing that particular area of her was nothing if not a good way to get his nose broken, and returned his gaze to Ryoga’s dirty, bruised body.

“Shampoo what go get wake-up herb,” the eponymous warrior announced and vanished into the kitchen; Mousse winced.  Cologne’s smelling salts, which had been subjected to Mousse most often as he was the most frequently unconscious, worked on something of a kill-or-cure basis.

His ominous expression had barely faded but renewed as Shampoo bounced back in — or rather, her breasts bounced back in and her body was compelled to emulate them — holding a small brown bottle that was already making the room start to smell like a health hazard.  She unscrewed it, making Mousse’s eyes water, waved it under Ryoga’s nose and scowled.

“He no wake up,” Shampoo sulked.

Of course he didn’t wake up, Mousse answered with mental vigour.  Who in their right mind would want to wake up to that?  He remained silent, though, watching Ryoga as if he could unravel all the mysteries of the world.  Shampoo attempted the dangerous chemicals again to no avail and tapped her bare foot with unbridled irritation.

“If he no wake up, Shampoo go back bed,” she said, as if it was a threat, and glowered at the unconscious boy.  In response, Ryoga’s eyelids fluttered and opened, his face turning a distasteful shade of green as he leaned over and vomited.  Shampoo’s nose squished in disgust.  “Ew.”

“Sorry,” Ryoga muttered, the faraway look in his eyes suggesting that he had no idea what, when or who he was apologising for.  His gaze rolled to Mousse and clouded slightly with uncertain emotion.  Who else would have scraped him up and brought him here of all places, even after what he’d done?  But Mousse had...he had...violated him.  Inexplicably and without trying or maybe even knowing, but terribly violated him.  Forgiveness did not come easily to Ryoga and it was struggling to do so now.

“Mousse what clean up,” Shampoo sniffed, arms crossed below the trigonometrically unfeasible breasts that Mousse was starting to think he was getting a complex about.  “Shampoo need sleep.”  She set down Cologne’s murderous smelling salts on a nearby table and headed upstairs.

The duck changeling fled at the opportunity to leave the room, only to return in five minutes with a basin on hot soapy water and some reasonably heavy-duty cleaner.  He also noticed that Ryoga was bleeding onto the tables from some minor scrapes and winced; those would need cleaning too.  Ryoga himself was still lying there, but on his side, his breathing somehow constricted.

“How d’you feel?” Mousse asked, his articulation suggesting he cared neither way.  He dunked a cleaning rag in the water and went about his task on the floor.

A somewhat more lucid Ryoga picked up on this and pounced on it.  “Why should you care?” he said slowly.  “All you want is to look selfless for that whining bimbo of yours.  How can you love that?” he continued with bitter pessimism.  “I’ve seen more coherent Chinese girls on street corners.”  He rolled onto his back, painfully setting his hands behind his head.  “I don’t believe you love her, anyway.  After all, there’s no such thing as love.”  The repetition made Mousse shudder but it was followed up by nothing.

The Amazon thrust the rag back into the basin and stood, tense on the now-clean floor.  His hands shot out, grabbed the front of Ryoga’s sweater and yanked him forward, almost hauling him off the table.

“THERE.  IS.  LOVE.”  He flung Ryoga back easily, sending his already weak body sliding across the table and onto the floor with an unpleasant thunk.

“There must be love,” Mousse continued, walking around Ryoga’s makeshift stretcher to grab his belt, yanking his barely-responsive body to his feet.  “Or else, what is it that we fight for?”

“We fight to serve the hatred in our hearts,” Ryoga replied in a defiant mutter.  “We fight for pain, for dominance.  Those are the only truths.”  His head hung with the shame of it.

“We fight for the hope of love,” Mousse confirmed.

“You’re delusional.”  Ryoga half-sneered at the look of desire in Mousse’s eyes.

“You want to hear about delusion, Ryoga?”  Mousse released his belt and it was all it took for the boy in yellow and black not to hit the floor.  “You think I love Shampoo.”

Ryoga blinked.

“I think I may have loved her at some point,” Mousse said, his voice small and dark.  “Sometimes, when I think hard enough, I sometimes even think I love her now.  A brother’s love...I do not want to marry her.”

“Why not?”

Mousse gave him a blank look.  “Because I’m gay, Ryoga.”

This threw him for several loops and after a few moments his head was still spinning.  “...you’re not,” he managed finally.  “You c-can’t be — I mean, you and Shampoo — !”

The boy adjusted his spectacles.  “Shampoo was...our hope for the future.  Even when she was young, she learned fastest, trained hardest.  She was our brightest star,” he continued, bitterness leaking into the edges of his voice.  “It seemed that almost ever since she was born, everyone knew she would be our champion.”  He sighed.  “And what was I?  Some myopic idiot who seemed no better than anybody else, at least back then.  Any connection to Shampoo would raise my status, increase my chances...and before I was even ten, I realised that marrying her would quash any fear of rejection.”

Ryoga just blinked at him, numbly half-realising that Mousse was spilling his heart out and he should have been paying more attention.  Eventually, he managed: “...so you proposed?”

He nodded grimly.  “So I proposed.  However, I wasn’t actually proposing to her...”  He winced at the memory and his own stupidity.  “I couldn’t even get her on the clause of defeat equalling marriage — like with Ranma.”  Ryoga nodded his comprehension.  “She’d already defeated me by the time we were three years old.”  The Lost Boy would have laughed had Mousse not looked so pathetic; instead, he managed a sympathetic murmur.

“I suppose it was a crush.  Our parents were friends, and so were we, after a fashion, so we spent time together.  Like kids do.”  He took off his glasses and his eyes were misted beneath.  “You know how it is...you see moms and dads together, in love and so on, so you assume you should do the same.  So I...”  He swallowed hard.  “So I loved Shampoo.”  He sighed, almost wistful, for an innocent and uncomplicated time when matters of the heart did not really matter at all.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” Ryoga mumbled helplessly.

“You don’t want to listen, you mean?” Mousse corrected without anger.  “I’ll stop.”

“No, it’s okay—!  I just...”  He didn’t have the words.  “I mean, if you’re not comfortable telling me, then don’t trouble yourself with me, or...or anything like that,” he trailed off.

Mousse gave him a look, then dropped his naked eyes to a blurry mess that he hoped was his feet.  “I grew up, though,” he continued, slipping back into his story with grace that bewildered him.  “My hormones were a mess for a while, but I was just a little kid,” Ryoga winced but Mousse couldn’t see it, “and Shampoo became cute and marrying her wasn’t just a means to an end anymore.  I upped the ante a bit, got more desperate, trained harder.  I wiped the floor with anyone else from our village who came near her but I was kinda, I don’t know, over-zealous?”  He scowled.  “I think she started hating me then...and then she stopped being cute.”

Ryoga listened to this with something of a sick fascination.  “..you...you turned gay?”

Mousse frowned at this question with the jaded ire of someone dealing with a stupid child.  “Nobody turns gay, Ryoga,” he said tiredly.  “Your sexuality is already kinda programmed into you.  It just depends on when you find out.”  Ryoga opened his mouth in argument, then decided it would accomplish nothing and let it fall closed.  “And that was when I found out,” the Amazon murmured.  “I stayed quiet about it...I didn’t know if it was right, wrong, normal, or what.  I was just...different...”  He shifted uncomfortably.

“Then, two months after my thirteenth birthday, I think...two men in our village were caught.  Together.”

Such a dire tone crept into Mousse’s voice that Ryoga found his own choked a little when he asked: “What happened?”

Mousse cleaned his glasses on a corner of his robe to keep his shaking hands occupied.  “They were beaten to the brink of death, exiled from the Amazon tribes and thrown out of the village to die.  We all watched.  To the older ones, it was like a sport.  It was...disgusting.”  He seemed displeased that he could not think of a worse word to use.

Genuine horror found Ryoga’s face and took hold of it.  “But...why...?”

“The only point of Amazon life is to be strong and to procreate,” Mousse said woodenly.  “If you can’t do that, then nobody sees any point in letting you live.”

“That’s atrocious,” Ryoga murmured.

“Barbaric,” Mousse echoed with feeling, “but I had no hope of changing a law that’s been around for centuries.  ‘Course, I was pretty damn worried after that.  The second Shampoo left for good, I jumped at the excuse to chase her.”  He sighed and rested his glasses back on his face, mildly gratified to see Ryoga’s dismayal.  “So here I am.”  Repeating the story outside his own consciousness, he was surprised to find shame welling up in him at his failure to stay and face the music.  “I’m done.  You can go now,” he concluded, sourly.

Ryoga was taken aback at the sudden chill that met Mousse’s disposition, but recovered.  “...I was right,” he said quietly.

“Right about what?” Mousse sneered.

“Love isn’t real, after all,” Ryoga smiled sadly, almost nostalgic, as he moved to leave.

Mousse grasped his shoulder, wrenching him back.  “We don’t know that yet,” he hissed, shoving Ryoga against the door.  Before the Lost Boy could retaliate, Mousse surged forward, taking his mouth in a searing kiss.

Ryoga felt numb.  He should have pushed him away, hollered at him, hit him.  But in fascination, he didn’t.  Something a good deal lower than his brain was screaming at him to react and uncertainly he placed his hands on Mousse’s arms, pulling him that tiny bit closer.  As sensation returned, he realised that having Mousse’s lips on his wasn’t all that bad.  Nice, almost.  He tilted his head a little and moved forward, experimentally shifting his mouth against the other boy’s.  The friction made him shudder — although not in a way that was bad, or intrusive — and his arms ventured around his back, pulling him tighter.

This is bad this is wrong this is deviant this is not normal behaviour of a heterosexual man his mind sung, but he was long past caring.  Mousse’s lips parted and Ryoga felt hot wetness at his mouth, opening his own to allow Mousse’s tongue entry.  It suddenly became a lot more intense, feeling the heated muscles move together, the foreign taste and slickness in his mouth, and he found himself barely able to breathe.  This was right, after all, this was good, this was what he needed—

Mousse pulled away, but barely, his swollen lips still brushing Ryoga’s.  His face was flushed with heat, bright teal eyes clouded.

Ryoga let his head fall forward, his rough bangs shielding his eyes.  “I...I’ve never...” he struggled out, as if it wasn’t obvious.

“Me neither,” Mousse breathed.  It was true.  He had never dared go any further than furtive admiration, what with the chill fear of rejection, the agony that awaited him back home.  As Ryoga peered incredulously from beneath thick black locks, he forced a guilty laugh.  “I...I’ve just read things.”

“What did they say we should do now?” Ryoga murmured, his arms refusing to loosen from Mousse’s body.

The Amazon blinked.  Still being conscious had felt like a bonus of the situation in itself.  “You want to...?”

“....yes.”

“But...but you can’t,” Mousse breathed.  “This is so fast...I mean, you d-don’t even know if you’re—”

“Then let’s find out,” Ryoga cut him off, the needy ache of arousal shortening his temper.  “Even if I don’t like it, it’s okay, right?  Not like we’re in love or anything, no relationships to mess up...”

“I guess,” Mousse said sullenly.  The idea of no-strings sex battered against his moral code somewhat, but Ryoga...he was there, and he was asking for it, and it wasn’t even as if he’d started it...  “Fine, then.”  And sheerly for the purpose of showing the Lost Boy who was boss, he shoved him back against the door, kissing him open-mouthed, his hands venturing downwards to free him of the belt that secured his sweater.  Snapping it away and aside, he worked it up over his chest, breaking the kiss for a few moments to get it all the way off.  The tight black undershirt soon followed, and Ryoga shuddered at the cold air that met his skin.

Mousse pulled back, his eyes tracing the sculpture of Ryoga’s body.  His skin was cold and smooth and scarred but still sublime, like old marble.  Nervousness attacked him.  What if he couldn’t do this?  What if he did it wrong?  What if Ryoga didn’t like it?  What if, what if...

“Mousse?”

The sheer openness of Ryoga’s face made him hate himself for faltering — how many of the boy’s ideals and morals had been bent or broken to let him do this?  Still hesitant, he traced what he had been eyeing with his fingertips, denying both of them the fuller contact that he knew would make him relinquish control.  Ryoga’s breath caught, his body surging against the tiny touches.

The longhaired boy bit his lip as his fingers walked to Ryoga’s nipples, erect in the cool air.  Experimentally, he ghosted his fingertips over them.  Not much of a reaction.  Lightly gripping one of the hard pink buds in thumb and forefinger, he twisted it lightly; Ryoga let out a shaky gasp that he hoped owed more to pleasure than pain.  Mousse lowered his mouth to the reddened spot, kissing it, then lightly running his tongue over the top.  It was intended as a reconcilliatory gesture, but the way Ryoga moaned suggested otherwise.  He gently sucked and licked his nipple for a few moments, teasing with his teeth, his other hand playing idly with the other hard nub on his chest.

Ryoga panted, fangs bared, face red.  The dull ache between his thighs had sharpened, hazing his thought and logic.  Gods, but this was better than that cheap fantasy.  As he felt Mousse’s lips detach from the tiny spots on his chest that he’d had no idea could be so sensitive, he was about to whine in complaint until he realised that the exploring mouth and hands were very definitely travelling downward.  His shaking hands found Mousse’s hair and his fingers laced through, tightening as an unskilled but eager tongue travelled down .the cleft of his abdomen that ended in his navel.

Mousse blushed prettily as he found himself on his knees, directly facing the needy bulge in Ryoga’s pants.  Undoing them, and consequently the yellow laces bound around his calves, he dragged them down along with his boxer shorts.  Unthoughtfully, he dragged the elastic heavily across Ryoga’s erection and drew a sharp cry from the Lost Boy.

“M-Mousse, that hurt—!”

“Sorry...”  What little blood hadn’t pooled in his crotch found his face as he stared at Ryoga’s manhood.  Apart from his own, and the microscopic collection of pornography he’d managed to hide from Shampoo and Cologne, he really didn’t have much experience here.  Reaching out a hand, he traced the hard shaft with his fingertips, sliding from base to tip.  Ryoga shuddered and moaned, his hips shifting forward for more.

Mousse stroked him gingerly, feeling his own trapped hard-on throb at Ryoga’s keening cries, then decided enough was enough, spat on his hand and wrapped it tightly around the boy’s cock, sliding it up and down.  Instantly, both Ryoga’s hands left the Amazon’s hair to cover his mouth, trying to strangle the scream that escaped as a choked groan.  His mind swam as his hips jerked forward, driving into the slick heat of Mousse’s fist.

As his tongue flickered out, lapping a drop of precome from Ryoga’s tip, the bandannaed boy thought he was going to pass out.  He could feel the all-too-alien spiral towards climax starting with a vengeance, and his body bucked into Mousse’s pumping hand.  He sucked helplessly on his fingers, trying to quench the heated noises his vocal chords were intent on wrenching from him.

Mousse savoured Ryoga’s taste on his tongue — salty with an edge of bitterness, but by no means intolerable — and slid his hand down to the base of Ryoga’s quivering erection as he took the head of it into his mouth, tongue sliding all over it in little exploratory licks and sucks.  The sounds from above him became louder, the movements of his sweat-slick writhing body more desperate.  Needing to know how far he could take his newfound lover, he pressed his shaking hips against the door and slid his head down as far as he dared, wringing yet more hissed moans from Ryoga.  When he started sucking hard, it was barely seconds before Ryoga screamed around his own fingers and bucked powerfully against Mousse’s hands, hot seed spurting from his cock.

Feeling the flood of liquid hit the back of his throat, Mousse yanked back, swallowing only a couple of mouthfuls before he choked, spots of sticky whiteness ending up on his face and Ryoga’s abdomen.  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grinning sleazily up at Ryoga as he caught his breath.

“Good enough?”

Ryoga’s chest heaved, his voice lost in sated exhaustion.  Mousse could have asked him if black was white and he would have said yes just to please the other boy.  His brain screamed at him, appalled, albeit with a few circuits shorted.  You just let a guy suck you off!  Ewwwwww!

“...M-Mousse,” Ryoga stammered.  Leaning against a door, weak-kneed and with his pants around his ankles, was not a position in which he wanted to offend the Amazon.

Mousse slowly pulled himself to his feet, lip already bitten, looking nervously at the other boy.  “I’m sorry...?” he offered, unsure if it was a statement or a question.

Ryoga just stared at him for a long few moments.  He could do this after all, couldn’t he?  It felt so good...and when all was said and done...did it really matter if it was a guy or a girl...that much...?  And there he was, not talking, and Mousse was looking more and more scared by the second...

Ryoga decided to surprise them both by wrapping his arms tightly around Mousse’s still-clothed body and kissing him again.  Hot and deep, like the first time, but more confident now as tension drained from his body.

Mousse moaned into their kiss, pressing his hips desperately against Ryoga’s.  His arousal was starting to become painful, straining tightly against his clothes, and he didn’t know how much longer he could last without throwing Ryoga across a table and having his wicked way with him...which, while being terribly appealing, was probably not the best course of action.

The Lost Boy noticed it too, and his body writhed restlessly against the bulge between his lover’s thin hips.  Mousse let out a choked gasp, pulling back, his face flushed so badly he felt feverish.

“Mousse...you...you’re still, uhm...”

“I kn-know...it’s okay, you don’t gotta...I mean...”

“Wh-what else is there...that we can do...?”

Mousse blinked.  “I, erm...well...if you wanted to, we could...”

Ryoga looked up at him, his expression a curious mixture of hope, lust and fear.  “We could...?”

The longhaired boy frowned.  He knew exactly what he was thinking, and he figured that Ryoga did as well...but just coming out and saying it was the hard part.  “Well...”

“M-Mousse...how do...”  He blushed an improbable shade of red, gazing downwards.  “Y’know...how do...two guys...do...do it?”

Well, that was as good a phrase as any.  “You want to...?”

“Y-yes...”

“...with me...?”

Ryoga looked up and Mousse almost choked on the pleading trust in his face.  “Yeah.”

This is too quick for the poor guy, Mousse’s mind snapped at him.  His crotch was giving different advice entirely and he didn’t leave his paralyzing indecision until Ryoga kissed him again, this time making a direct effort to pull off his belt.  Mousse made a mental note that the boy was very good with his hands; within moments, his entire robe had hit the floor with the audible sound of ringing metal and he’d barely noticed.

Ryoga played with Mousse’s nipples with an almost childlike fascination, teasing and stroking.  He lowered his mouth, teasing one of the hard buds with his fangs, and the Amazon made a high-pitched cry of pleasure.  Smiling a bit smugly at his tiny victory, he looked up at Mousse.  “Show me how.”

Mousse could only nod breathlessly as lust defeated logic and did a happy dance on top of it.  “G-give me a moment...”  He barely managed to stagger in and out of the kitchens, returning with a bottle of olive oil.  He wasn’t sure if using a cooking implement was kinky or just strange, never mind the ethics of whether he should put it back afterwards, but then again that just wasn’t the time to think about it.

The second he’d walked back in, he almost passed out.  Ryoga had draped himself across the tables, every inch of his nude body available to Mousse’s roving eyes.  He turned his head slightly and smirked as he heard the door fall shut, letting a hand drift over his lower stomach.

“...you look way too hot for a guy who’s still technically a virgin,” Mousse managed after a few lengthy moments.

“So?  Do something about it,” Ryoga replied briskly, shuddering a bit as his fingertips reached his half-hard member.  “Mmm...”

Mousse wasted no time in shucking off the rest of his clothes, climbing atop the Lost Boy, grinding his erection down against him.  Both of them moaned in sync, their hips moving lithely together; Mousse could only stop when the insistent throb between his thighs heightened, highlighting quite how close his climax was coming.

He pulled himself up, reluctantly breaking contact to kneel over Ryoga’s legs.  “Is it...are you sure it’s okay...?”

“I’m sure,” Ryoga nodded despite the palpable hesitance on his features.  “Please...?”

Mousse mustered as seductive a smile as he felt he could, knowing that it probably looked like he was giving birth to a small farmyard animal, and rescued the oil that had come dangerously close to falling off the table, pouring a decent amount into his hands.  He smirked at the way Ryoga’s face contorted with pleasure as he slathered it over his renewed erection, hips bucking wantonly towards the touches that were making him feel so good.

Ryoga’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he watched Mousse’s slick fingers delve between his own thighs, drifting past his shuddering erection to his ass.  One, then two fingers vanished inside, slowly stroking and delving; the black-haired boy’s head lolled back, his lips parting to expel tiny, whining moans.

“What are you doing...?” he ventured.

Mousse laughed, the sound choked as Ryoga’s hand ghosted over his needy erection.  “If...if you dunno...then I’m not gonna sit here and draw a diagram...”

It was then that Ryoga actually examined the situation and realised just as quickly exactly what it was that Mousse was planning to do.  “Oh—!”

“Yeah...it’s okay, right...?”

“Won’t it hurt you?”

“Not much...besides, it’s good, too...”

A fang peeked over Ryoga’s lip for a moment.  “If you’re sure...”

“I’m sure,” Mousse whispered, and shifted himself forward so he was kneeling directly over Ryoga’s groin.  Resting a hand on Ryoga’s chest, he grasped the boy’s slick hardness, guiding it inside him.  It hurt, but the contortion of pleasure on the Lost Boy’s face was more than worth it.  Relinquishing what little control he had left, his hips bucked wildly, and Mousse’s breath escaped his lungs in a gasping whoosh as he was impaled fully.

Ryoga’s head lolled back, unable to do anything beyond whimper helplessly.  Already this was more pleasure than he’d ever felt, so good it almost hurt within the clenching rings of muscle, and the nearly overwhelming desire to flip Mousse onto his back and take his fill without mercy was wearing down on him.  Forcing his eyes to flicker upward, he saw the obvious pain on his partner’s face and concern attacked the haze of pleasure.

“...does it...hurt...?”

The Amazon forced a tiny smile.  “It’ll pass...d-don’t worry...”  He waited, impatient, for the undeniably sharp pain to pass, replaced by a dull ache that at least offset his far more urgent need to reach his climax.  Shakily, he managed to slide his body up, the slick movement inside him making his whole body shudder.  Ryoga gasped, flinging his head from side to side, his body shuddering wildly.

“T-tight,” he managed to stutter out, his next attempt at speech choked as Mousse’s lithe slides became faster, his weight leant on Ryoga’s chest as he bucked his ass over the hot intruder.  His unattended erection bounced with his motions, leaving sticky drops of precome on his and his lover’s stomachs. Abandoning half of his balance, he reached down to stroke himself, groaning sharply, his sounds becoming high-pitched mewls as Ryoga’s body ground up, the tip of his cock scraping against a bundle of nerves inside him that made his body tighten in desperate gratification.

Feeling his breath escape as Mousse’s grip on him became even harder, Ryoga panted, feeling his muscles tense as his climax built up on him.  His eyes locked on the sight of the other boy touching his own almost purple erection and he reached out a hand to hesitantly brush over it; Mousse moaned, thrusting forward against his small touches as he pumped himself faster.

“R-Ryoga—”  Whatever he was about to say was cut off as his dam broke and he cried out, continuing to thrust into his own and Ryoga’s hands as he came, his hot seed bursting into his fist and onto Ryoga’s torso.  Feeling the almost painful clench of his muscles around him, his lustful screams and the very sight of his climax, Ryoga bucked up powerfully, almost knocking the other boy off him as he released deep inside Mousse’s body.

Gasping for air, Mousse slid off Ryoga’s softening member and collapsed onto his chest, making the tables rattle.  “Mmmm....are you okay, Ryoga...?”

You just got screwed by a guy Ryoga’s brain twittered disconcertedly at him, but he didn’t care.  “I’m fine...mm...that was, uh...”

Mousse blinked at him, myopia unhindering his view of Ryoga’s face at such close quarters.  “That was...?”

He smiled sleepily, his body unwinding into sleep.  “...nice...”

The Amazon boy smiled, rolling to Ryoga’s side and wrapping and arm around his nude body as he, too, drifted away from consciousness.

*****

“AIIIIIYAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!”

Sometimes, screaming and arm-flailing is far more effective than actually talking.  Shampoo was learning this very quickly.  Right now, grabbing a chair and whacking that reprehensible morally deficit Amazon thing lying on the table with it also seemed like a rather expressive thing to do.

So she did.

Mousse woke up with a start, noting three things: firstly, he was cold, secondly, he had just fallen onto the floor with a still sleeping Ryoga in tow and thirdly, he’d just been hit over the head with a chair by...by...

He grabbed his glasses from whichever nook of reality he’d dropped them in and plonked them securely onto his nose.

“Shuh...Shuh...Shampoo...?!”

In comparison to this verbal stumbling, the purple-haired warrior was in very good voice.  “PERVERT BOY WHAT DIE!” she screamed, raising the chair overhead for another thwack.  Ryoga squirmed in Mousse’s embrace at the noise.

As it bore down, Mousse prepared to wriggle out of the way but it turned out he didn’t have to; an arm that wasn’t his shot out, securely grabbing a leg of the chair halfway through it’s journey and squeezing, snapping the thick wooden length as if it was a matchstick.

Ryoga yawned.

“AAAARRGH!  Pervert boy and-and-and other pervert boy what DIE NOW!” Shampoo hollered, grabbing a sturdier weapon — one of the tables that had previously housed the two boys.  She stared unintelligently at the white dried-on stains and dropped it on reflex, her colour turning a peculiar shade of pale green.

It was only the familiar click-clicking of Cologne’s stick on the stairs that saved Mousse and Ryoga from their oncoming deaths.  Walking into a restaurant containing a smashed table and chair, an extremely riled Amazon warrioress and two disheveled naked boys was not how the matriarch had particularly wanted to start her morning, but the decision was clearly out of her hands.

“Now now, what is going on here?”

“Shampoo what kill pervert boys!” the obvious person hissed, finally forcing herself to remember about the concept of plural nouns.  “They what do pervert things in great-grandmother restaurant!”

“Apparently,” Cologne echoed, her eyebrows arched.  “Shampoo, do calm down.  It is hardly as if the sight of Mousse naked can emotionally scar you that much.”

“Shampoo not see anything big enough to what emotional scar,” she sniped, glaring at Mousse who had the good sense to recoil in fear.

“What do we do?” Mousse heard a small, rather cowered voice to his left that could only be the Lost Boy.  The ‘we’ inspired a small amount of inner fuzziness that almost offset Shampoo’s murderous aura.

“Running for ours lives was kinda high on my list of priorities.”

“We’re naked.”

“It’s raining.”

“...Good point.”

Five seconds later, a duck and a black piglet were high-tailing through the streets of Nerima with an extremely angry two-tone cat in fast, hissing pursuit.