The young girl cracked her eyes open sleepily as she heard her alarm go off. Yawning heartily, she stretched her arms only to cuddle them back under her blanket immediately. She loved the warmth of her bed, she loved those lazy Sunday mornings when she could just wait for the first ray of pure sunlight to crash through her window, shattering it into a thousand pieces of flawless diamonds that seemed to glow in all the colors of the rainbow, she loved listening to the night's silent orchestra and it being replaced by its cheerful counterpart. Before she closed her hazel eyes with a lovely smile, she caught a glimpse of someone's shadow lingering in her room out of the corner of her eye. She simply loved those lazy days - and jolted right up as her drowsy mind realized exactly what she had seen. Having thrown the blanket off of herself and jumped out of her comfortable bed, she got in a ready stance to fight off any intruder.

"Chill out," she heard a very familiar voice coming from somewhere beneath her and found her fiancé sitting directly in front of her. "I'm only here to wish you a happy birthday; in case you forgot."

Breathing a sigh of relief, the blue-haired woman let herself fall back on the bed. The mattress creaked under her weight and she buried her beautiful face in her palms. Just seconds later, though, she spied through her fingers to see the time on her clock - 6:30 in the morning -, yawned again and finally closed her eyes sleepily. This could not be real. After all, she had set her alarm to go off two hours later and there was no way that her inconsiderate fiancé would be sitting in her room, waiting for her to wake up so he could wish her a happy birthday. No way was this real; and yet she sat right up again. Suddenly wide awake, the young girl looked at her smirking husband-to-be.

"6:30? Don't scare me like - what is going on?" she jabbered and watched him get up from the floor beneath her bed. "What's it this time? Did someone get kidnapped? Or has Shampoo drugged you again?"

"Moron!" he answered grumpily, before he suddenly bit his lower lip and closed his sea blue eyes for a moment. Then, having opened them again, he smiled at her in such a cheeky fashion that the puzzled young girl could but smile back at him. "Sorry, but I mean, c'mon! You really think I'd be here if Shampoo drugged me?"

"No," the young girl shook her head and fell back down on her pillow, noticing the faint smell of sweet maple syrup, but dismissing it as a child of her own imagination. "No, you'd have been in China by the time I'd woken up. Well, I give up; what's it this time?"

"I told you," he said, conjured up a rather large breakfast tray out of seemingly nowhere and handed it to the surprised figure on the bed. "Happy birthday! Hope you like breakfast in bed."

The blue-haired woman looked at the tray in her hands in utter bewilderment. The freshly made pancakes, piled up and garnished with the number seventeen made of maple syrup, smelled as deliciously as the cup of green tea next to it. To the left of the plate full of pancakes was a bowl of fruit salad. A sole white flower adorned her breakfast. The young martial artist turned her head slowly and eyed the raven-haired man suspiciously, before she put the tray onto her bed, one of her hands on his forehead and the other on hers, trying to determine whether he was running a fever."Seems to be normal," she spoke under her breath. "What's wrong with you? Are you coming down with something? Is this your last day here? Or are you going to die soon?"

In the split second after her heedless words had left her smiling, ruby ​​lips the young woman saw the transformation in her friend's composure. His sparkling blue eyes were coated with an invisible veil that seemed to hide both his fear and the lurking form of death in its gray shadows. His shoulders slumped and his smile cracked a little bit. Remembering their recent encounter with death in China, Akane cursed her rash words and slid her fingers down his masculine face to distract him from his bleak train of thought, hastily trying to change the subject.

"Thanks, Ranma! That's really nice of you," she said a little louder than necessary so that the young man gave a small jerk and turned his head to the door, half expecting someone to come rushing through it. "Don't worry, it's early Sunday morning. They're not up yet and I wasn't that loud, right?"

"Right," he answered her slowly with his eyes still glued to the door, before he faced her again, still somewhat distracted. "I wasn't quite sure what to make for breakfast. The usual stuff didn't seem, you know, right, so I went with something foreign. Hope it turned out okay."

"It's great," Akane exclaimed delighted after she had dug in and went on to try the fruit salad. "What's with the salad?"

"I figured that no good story ever started with someone eating a salad," he told her with a smile, watching her eat her breakfast. "Today's not about a good story or something, you see? It's your birthday and you're supposed to enjoy it. And a good story is hardly ever enjoyable for the people in it, right?"

"Absolutely," she agreed with him, taking a sip of green tea. "Either someone gets kidnapped or drugged or something entirely unrealistic. You know, with all that's happening in our lives, I almost feel like I'm in one of these cheesy, half-baked romance stories."

"Yeah, that'd be it," he laughed. "Some twenty-something guy with absolutely no ideas whatsoever, sitting on his desk, a cup of coffee in his hand, writing about us."

"Coffee?" she grinned. "Given how nuts our lives are, I'd go for beer or wine. Plus, I'd definitely damn him, because he'd have something crazy up his sleeve that'd happen to us. Anyway, what were you doing in my room? "

"Dunno," he shrugged, still amused at the idea that his life was nothing but a story and not paying attention to what he was telling her. "You know, I love those peaceful, quiet moments and when I came in you looked like a sleeping angel, so I couldn't wake you up. That's why I tempered with your alarm clock ..."

The rest of his words were lost in the sound of the blood rushing from her heart to her face, as she blushed right up to her ears. She could not believe that her rude, unromantic fiancé had actually said something as sweet as this. Akane tried hard to keep her lips from forming a charming smile, but as she looked into his sincere eyes and knew that he had meant if not realized what he had said, she could not refrain from giving him her loveliest smile, which triggered his blush .The two adolescents looked at each other, both blushing, both not speaking a word, not even daring to breathe, until, suddenly, his stomach growled with hunger. The tension broken, Akane chuckled heartily while the young man gave her a sheepish smile.

"Open wide," she said, pierced half of the pancake with her fork, and held it out to him. Utterly surprised at this sudden gesture of friendliness, the young man did as he was told; little did he know that he would never eat the food offered.

Like two deer caught in the headlights, the two adolescents stopped dead in their tracks, as the heard the steadily approaching sound of a person coming up to the girl's room, the loose floorboards creaking in anticipation. Suddenly the noise ceased to be but existed as a distant echo of days long past in the despairing hearts of the youths still. The handle of the wooden door moved silently and maddeningly slowly. Then, the door cracked open and the head of the girl's older sister popped in. In a split second the brown-haired woman scanned the situation and grinned like a Cheshire cat.

"I just wanted to sneak in your birthday present while you were still asleep," she told her sister, placed the neatly wrapped parcel on the ground and grabbed a small apparatus from her pocket. "But that's just too good to be true."

Humming a delightful tune, the eldest female of the household put on her apron and looked around in her kitchen. She had the strangest feeling that someone had already used the kitchen this morning, because she could not find the whisk - but then again, who would have got up this early in the morning an used the whisk to prepare breakfast? Her father? Or Mr. Saotome? The woman giggled. No, she probably put it somewhere last night and just forgot about it. Shrugging the mystery of the missing whisk aside, she rolled up her sleeves and began to make a special breakfast for the birthday girl - when she heard the usual lover's quarrel.

"You jerk!" her baby sister screamed at the top of her lungs, waking up the whole household, followed by the sound of the young man's light footsteps and the stomping of Akane, who was running after him with the ever-present mallet in her hands.

"Oh, Ranma! You promised me you'd be a good boy today," she sighed and waited for the usual insult - and heard him yell "You witch!" - which was to be shortly followed by her furious sister's fearsome growl that somehow sounded like a giggle today. "Regular as clockwork - wait! You witch? Giggling?"

Before the woman could realize what was going on or do as much as turn her head to see who came running into her kitchen, Kasumi was jerked around by someone seeking shelter behind her fragile form. Now facing the door, the oldest of the three sisters Could see Ranma and Akane come to a sliding halt in the kitchen, slightly bumping into each other. Within a mere second, the woman grasped the gist of the situation, realizing that it was her younger sister using her as a shield against the combined rage of the two martial artists. What her sister had done this time, though, remained a mystery to her.

"Happy birthday, my dear!" she congratulated the young woman, who was still in her now somewhat rumpled pajamas, with a sweet smile."So, what has she done to upset you two this time?"