Exes and Bros

"Holy fuck, Crash! It's…"

Ranko's blue eyes were the size of saucers as she scanned the massive indoor space. What had been an empty warehouse with a plywood stage not much bigger than the one at the Phoenix before her knee injury a month ago had been entirely transformed. The north wall of the building was covered with a huge poster wallpapering nearly the entire sixty-meter-wide span, printed with an enormous panoramic photograph of a packed crowd in a large stadium.

A scant forty or so white padded folding plastic chairs were lined in two parallel rows running through the middle of the room, and a quartet of gray folding tables along the east wall overflowed with snacks, coffee machines, and other creature comforts.

But, at the south end of the building, Ariel, Masa and the roadies had practically built a whole-ass stadium. A stage nearly double the size of the one she'd performed on at the Japan Record Awards sprawled in front of her, the stage floor raised over three meters off the floor of the two-story open space. The center of the south wall behind the stage was lined with a large screen some six meters high and half the width of the stage, currently displaying a projection of a black background and thousands of little twinkling stars. Huge trusses of lights and speakers hung this way and that, with orange and green cords zip-tied everywhere to power everything and run audio and data connections. The back left and right corners of the stage were curtained off, creating small areas for quick costume changes out of the view of the mock audience spackled onto the back wall with poster tack. Small doors were cut into the stage platform at intervals to allow the roadies access to get under it. For what, Ranko could not guess. Maybe it's where they keep the boxes they're gonna ship all this shit in, she wondered.

"They're gonna build all that…" Ranko looked up at Crash, her eyes alight with wonder. "... everywhere we go?"

"We've got it down to eight hours. The goal is to do it in six."

Ranko turned her head, smiling up - way up - into the face of Lance Riker. "You mean, you didn't build all of that just once?"

Lance laughed, shaking his head with a bright smile. "We tear it down and put it back up every other day! Did you really think this whole setup was just so you and the boys in the band could practice?"

Ranko blushed, fiddling with her hair. "I suppose that's fair. It's just… wow. It's beautiful. Like, I figured they'd give us a couple of banners and a guitar stand and call it a day. This is just… incredible!"

The enormous veteran chuckled. "Well, I can't take credit for all that. Ariel, Masa and them did the designs. I just, ya know…"

"Pick things up, and put things down," Crash said with a chuckle, having heard the roadie's catchphrase enough times in the month their star had been absent to have memorized it.

"Exactly!" Lance gave a deep belly laugh, looking the redheaded girl in the sky blue dress over and beaming. "How's the leg holding up, Ran-chan?"

Ranko lifted the calf-length skirt of her dress a few centimeters, revealing a set of four flat steel bars, in two pairs on either side of her left knee that hinged on a single bolt each to allow her leg to bend for the first time in over a month. The contraption was strapped to her knee with a series of long black Velcro straps. Leaning on Crash's arm for support, she lifted her leg off the ground, slowly bending it back and forth in the brace, which squeaked slightly as she moved. "Getting there. It's just good to be on my feet again!"

Lance nodded. "Yeah, I know the feeling. I messed up my leg when I was in the service, and I was out of commission for almost three whole months. Never played so much Nintendo in my whole life. I was bored outta my friggin' skull." As usual, he spoke with the pair in English.

The redhead gasped. "Did you get shot?!"

The veteran smiled, shaking his head. "Freaking basketball game." Something about the look in his eyes left Ranko wondering if he was being entirely honest with her, but she thought better than to press further. Gods know I've got my share of shit I don't like to talk about, she considered.

Ranko let her dress fall back around her calves, beaming. She tried to maintain respectful eye contact with her teammates, but she just couldn't stop stealing glances up at the stage. Her stage. Crash must have noticed, because he leaned down to her, grinning mischievously. "You wanna get up there and check it out?"

"Oh, gods, Crash, do I!" Ranko bounced on her good leg, squealing excitedly.

The guitarist offered her his right arm, his elbow extended out to her. "My lady?"

The redhead blushed deeply, looking down at his leather-clad arm with a soft, coy smile. "Why…" She looked down, brushing her wavy red hair out of her eyes with pink-manicured fingertips. "Thank you, kind sir." She gripped his arm, leaning a bit of her weight on it each time she stepped on her left leg. Her cheeks darkened further as she realized how similar the feeling was to when Nodoka had walked her down the aisle at her wedding.

They were three-quarters of the way across the cavernous space when Ranko stopped, her grip on her best friend's arm prompting Crash to pause as well.

"You okay, Ran-chan?" The guitarist looked down at her with concern. "Was I going too fast?"

"Crash… thank you."

The tall young man laughed, running his hand through his spiky blond hair. "Oh, come on. Don't mention it. The last thing I need is you jacking your leg up again. Of course I'm gonna help ya, dipshit."

Ranko shook her head, patting his forearm softly with her hand and smiling sincerely up into his green eyes. "No, Crash. Thank you. All of this? All my songs, the band, this tour… you did this for me. You found me in that shithole of a place Takao ran, and I was just a terrified nobody, and you made me… all of this. I owe it all to you. All this time I've been laid up, I've been thinking about it, missing it, and it just made me realize how grateful I really am. I feel like I never properly said thank you."

Crash waved his left hand, his right arm still tight in his friend and former crush's grasp. "You won a couple of Japan Record Awards for the way you said thank you, if memory serves."

Again, Ranko emphatically shook her head. "It's one thing to tell a crowd, or sing it into a recorder. It's another thing to look my best friend in the face and tell him I wouldn't have the life I love without him. I'll never forget it, Noboyuki. I mean it."

The young man's smile softened, becoming at once more serious and more sincere at the sound of his true name. "Ranko, in case you didn't notice, me and Ken and Shin were all in that exact same shithole when we met. Hitomi and Ems, too. None of us were going anywhere either. You were always the missing piece. In fact, you know what?" He turned to the back of the room, yelling toward a dark corner. "Ariel! Light it up!"

A soaring electronic synthesizer riff came from the giant speakers mounted around the stage, and Ranko snapped her eyes up in its direction. She gasped as the image projected on the giant screen behind it began to move. Slowly, across the black background and the twinkling stars, a hot pink line began to appear, as if a giant invisible hand were writing on the back wall with a marker. As she watched, the animation drew out her feminine signature over the course of four seconds, complete with a little plop sound as the lopsided outline of a heart appeared at the end of the five romaji characters.

"Last I checked, it didn't say Crash up there." The guitarist beamed down at her, wrapping her tightly in a hug. His voice lowered to a soothing, gentle tone as he spoke centimeters from her right ear. "You might not have been world-famous when I met you, Ranko Tendo, but you were never a nobody."

Ranko's cheeks burned as she wiped a tear from them, burying her face in his chest and breathing deep of the black leather jacket he was almost never without. Between him and Hana, she had conditioned herself to relax at the smell of leather almost as much as at the feel of hugs themselves. Oh, Crash, if you only knew how long I went where I didn't even have a name of my own.

"So, listen, Ran-chan," Crash said in nearly a whisper as he released her and they resumed their slow walk to the stage, Ranko having re-taken his forearm for support. "I think you need to tell the guys about that whole Cat's Tongue thing. Or, at least, Masa."

The songstress shook her head. "I don't want anybody knowing. My sisters don't even know! It's too risky. If people know how easy I am to hurt…"

Crash nodded. "I get it, but Ranko, these people are going to be traveling the world with you. It's their job to keep you safe. If anybody needs to know you're easy to hurt, don't you think it should be the people who are trying to protect you?"

Ranko scoffed dismissively. "Present busted knee notwithstanding, I can look after myself. I appreciate having security, but I think I'll be…"

As she spoke, a flash of light and a staggering wave of heat sent her eyes rocketing up to the stage again as she was but a few steps from the metal staircase leading up its right side. No fewer than fifteen jets of flame had suddenly belched upward, creating a curtain of orange light some three meters high across nearly the entire front edge of the stage.

"What in the FUCK?!" Ranko started to jump back, but Crash caught her, not wanting to risk her overtaxing her knee.

Crash could feel the slender girl trembling in his arms, and he hugged her tight against his chest from behind. "Like I said, Ranko. You need to tell them what they're dealing with."

"Sure, it seems just like a fantasy…"

Ranko beamed as she belted the C6 that was no longer the upper limit of her vocal range into a headset microphone. Emi danced just off to her right, and Hitomi was stalking the far end of the huge stage, but Ranko herself mostly stood stationary. While she longed to start working on the choreography directly with her backup dancers, including the two new male ones she had yet to rehearse with at all, her doctor had advised her to wait. Just a few more weeks. Gotta get a little stronger first.

"... that fate would reach backward for a girl like me, but now, my happy ever after happens whoa-aaaall the ti-i-i-ime…"

The door in the back of the room, and a woman in a yellow skirt suit entered on a pair of matching stiletto heels that clacked loudly on the concrete floor as the music ended. "Man, it's good to see you up there again, Ranko," she called up to the singer, clapping her hands.

"Not as good as it feels to be up here," Ranko called back through her microphone with a bright smile. "How you been, Amaya?"

The Yokai Records executive smiled. "Doing alright. Sorry I'm late; my babysitter was running behind. What do you think of the stage?"

Ranko blushed, looking back at her surroundings and smiling at her bandmates. "It's beautiful. It's perfect." Other than the whole trying to barbecue my ass up here thing. "Thank you so much!"

The thirty-something woman smiled in response, running her finger through her shoulder-length black hair. "Of course. We can't have our star out there not looking the part, do we?"

The singer's cheeks warmed further. "Oh, I know! Shinji deserves all of this, and more! I'm thinking a super posh dressing room. Lots of pink."

"Oh, fuck all the way off, Tendo," the bassist said with a loud chuckle.

"Hey, 'Maya? I wanted to ask. The set list. Is it locked? Or can it be changed?" Ranko lowered herself gently onto a folding chair that had been brought up to the stage for her to allow her to rest her leg between songs.

Amaya shrugged. "I mean, the boys have been rehearsing for a while now, but… I suppose so, if you all want to. You've got enough time for about eighteen songs, so you might have to swap something out if you wanted to add something, but that's probably doable. Why? Whatcha thinking?"

"Is it okay if I add something that isn't on Phoenix Rising or Wild Orchid? Something new?" Ranko looked up with a hopeful smile.

The woman in the yellow skirt and blazer nodded. "As long as you don't do it too much, I don't see why not. Let's say two, maybe three songs tops, but other than that, let's keep it to the stuff on the albums. We wanna sell those CDs, after all! Why, did you write something new while you were banged up?"

Ranko blushed a bit. "Well, I was thinking about what you said. About wanting me to have a song that talks about… boys. And, well…"

Amaya chuckled, sliding into one of the folding chairs with an excited, toothy grin plastered across her face. "Oh, now, this, I gotta hear."

"I don't know…" The redhead looked back at Jacob. "You guys ready to do the new one?"

Receiving nods of assent from all four of the other musicians on the stage, Ranko rose to her feet, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear with a nervous flush. She thought back to that night a few weeks ago, sitting in Akane's lap on Izumi's living room floor, listening to her and her sisters recount their terrible experiences with the boys they'd dated in their past. She had insisted that night that there were no boys in her past to talk about.

It had been a lie.

While she hadn't admitted it in the presence of her sisters, Ranko certainly did have someone she had a few things to say about, too - perhaps more than any of them.

A heavy, almost angry riff broke the silence courtesy of Noboyuki Matsuyama and his cherry-red instrument, joined immediately by a long run on the snare and bass drums and an undercurrent laid down by Shin's white bass guitar.

Ranko stepped forward, a bit tentatively, a flame in the icy pools of her blue eyes as she clenched her hands in fists. Her voice had an angry, almost arrogant twang in it, as befit the way she felt about the boy for whom she'd written the song.

"Hey, jerk! I'm talking to you! I'm still getting over all the shit you put me through! And yet, it's finally clear: I am so much better off these days, 'cause you're not here!"

Crash thrashed his head downward as his hands flashed over the strings of his guitar. He stole a smile up at the beaming redhead a meter in front of him, swaying gingerly with the music on legs that had yet to fully rediscover their stride. She had refused to tell him the name of the bastard she'd written the song about, but Crash was glad he'd never met him, or the guy would have likely gotten a punch in the mouth. Nobody treats her like that and gets away with it. Not on my watch. Not her, he swore to himself.

"At last, I feel like I'm free. Dropped your dead weight from my neck, and I can just… be me! Can't wait to see how far I can go, without your constant voice inside my head, telling me no."

Well, 'Nothing Compares 2 U' it ain't, but… Amaya laughed quietly under her breath, crossing her ankles and listening. We told her she had to say she was with a boy, but we didn't specify that she had to say she liked it. Our bad.

"You're done with holding me back! Wasted too much of my life on you; don't owe you jack! And that feels great! Hey, jerk, you're never gonna get the chance to watch me suffocate!"

While Eiji Kanda had stifled her for a few months during their sham relationship, she'd largely forgiven him for his mistreatment. Ranko knew he had been trying his best to play the macho boy to keep up the act, all the way down to the parts of being a macho boy that weren't much fun for girls to be around. If ever there was a girl who understood the toxic ways boys were often taught to behave, it was Ranko Tendo.

But the song was not written for Eiji. Nor had she written Hey, Jerk! for Takao Tashima, or Mikado Sanzenin, or Saburo Kimura. Nor was it about Tatewaki Kuno, or any of the other legions of boys who had thrown themselves at her and been rebuffed over the years.

No.

Nobody had ever hurt her quite the way he did. No one ever could, not in a million years.

This one's for you, Ranma, she thought with a sneer as she began the chorus.

"You're an asshole! You're a pervert! You're a heartless creep! Tell me what about all that I should've wanted to keep! You are violent, and angry, and you're always rude, and you wonder why I never even miss you, dude!"

Ranko stole a glance back at the giant projection of the effeminate name she'd chosen for herself written in hot pink behind her, beaming proudly as she returned her eyes to the handful of folding chairs lined up in a warehouse in the middle of the Meguro district.

"Now I'm happy, and I'm thriving; having so much fun! All I had to do was say that you and me are done. So, yeah! It's true! Hey, jerk: I'm finally getting over being jerked around by you!"

Ranko inhaled deeply through her nose, blowing the air out slowly through her mouth. Crash had brought her a recording of the music they'd composed based on her lyrics and the general rhythm, but she'd never actually sung the new song in front of anyone before. She didn't realize how hard it would hit her to access the feelings she harbored about the boy she had once been.

She thought back to the countless times she'd been chased around by Kodachi, Shampoo, Ukyo, and yes, even Akane. How much time she'd spent wondering what life could be like with each of them. Ranma had always known that the potential futures he had to choose from all felt wrong, but he'd refused to allow himself to consider the true reason why.

"Hey, jerk! I honestly tried looking past all of the girls that you took for a ride. Although I knew it was wrong, I bit my tongue and waited my turn while you strung them along."

Ranma had always been so focused on becoming the perfect, untouchable icon of masculinity that Genma expected - that Nodoka, Akane, and his other suitors expected - that he had entirely ignored the whisper in his heart that ached for something different. Something better. Something more.

Something Ranko Tendo saw every time she looked in a mirror.

"But now, I finally see. The only girl you never even gave a chance was me! You loved putting me down, except when showing me off got you shit all over town."

Ranma had hurt Akane something terribly, and the other girls, too, but the soul-deep pain and the burning, gut-wrenching shame that the song's subject had put Ranko through was singular and unique. It had taken her years, and a lot of help, to claw her way out of it, and she knew she still had a ways to go yet. No one would ever truly know just how thoroughly, and for how long, the arrogant, sexist boy she'd written the song for had suppressed the ebullient young woman in the sky blue dress whose heart soared as she made music on a stage with her friends for the first time in nearly six weeks.

But not anymore. She had fought bitterly for her right to exist, and won.

"I'm glad I got up and split! I guess I was just the last girl to get sick of your shit!"

Ranko glanced downward, smiling softly as thousands of watts of incandescent light, beaming from an untold number of canister lights pointed at her from every conceivable direction, sparkled in the tiny diamond on her hand that marked her forever as Akane's life partner. Ranma had never been able to fully commit to any of the women who had pursued him, but it had always felt the most right with Akane. The problem was never you, Akane. It was always me, she mused wistfully. You were always the girl for me. I just had to figure out how to become the girl for you. It wasn't that I wasn't destined to be your husband. It was that I wasn't supposed to be one at all.

"Tough luck! That's life. Hey, jerk, you'd best get used to it: I'm somebody else's wife!"

Hitomi whooped loudly from her seat on the far right of the back row of folding chairs. No choreography had been designed for the new song yet, so she and her partner just watched as their friend sang on a stage for the first time since Christmas.

"You're an asshole! You're a pervert! You're a heartless creep! Tell me what about all that I should've wanted to keep! You are violent and angry, and you're always rude, and you wonder why I never even miss you, dude!"

She took a few steps to her right as she sang, reaching around the shoulders of the tall blond man with the red guitar in his hands and giving him a tight squeeze.

"Now, I'm happy, and I'm thriving, havin' so much fun! All I had to do was say that you and me are done! So, yeah, it's true! Hey, jerk, I'm fin'lly gettin' over bein' jerked around by you!"

She chuckled quietly to herself, remembering the uninvited guest that had demonstrated to her on her wedding day that, in a miracle she still ached to understand, her masculine body had become as firmly a part of her past as her masculine persona was.

"Hey, jerk! There's not much to say. I mean, hell, your father never liked me, anyway!"

Ranko sighed softly, thinking back to those first days after the Phoenix Pill was lost. All the time she'd spent alone in the Tendo guest room, or sitting up on the dojo roof, trying to make sense of who she was. All the tears she'd cried in the dark of night as Ranma's identity railed against the feminine body it had suddenly found itself trapped in. Even after she'd run from the Tendo home that early October night, when she was homeless and alone, her resolve to find a way forward as a woman had been begrudging at best.

Really, it was only once she'd burned her student identification card on her eighteenth birthday, and decided to leave Ranma Saotome behind for good, that she had gotten to experience a sense of self that didn't hurt to think about for the first time since Jusenkyo. One that she could, at long last, embrace without shame.

"I knew that we couldn't last. One of us was always gonna feel like the outcast. This thing was killing us both, so, instead of shrinking in your shadow, I chose growth."

She beamed brightly, playing with the skirt of her sky blue dress in her fingers and remembering the morning of her eighteenth birthday. The first day the pretty girl in the mirror had said I am Ranko, rather than I am pretending to be a girl named Ranko. The first day she'd decided to truly embrace Hana and her sisters as family and not just as coworkers. The first day that the woman that had been chained up and silenced in the dark recesses of Ranma's soul for years had taken the keys and slid, ready or not, into the driver's seat.

The day she was truly born.

"I'm proud of myself because the girl I am is SO MUCH STRONGER than the GHOST I was! I made my choice! Might have damn near broke my spirit, but I found my voice! You had your turn! Hey, jerk! I am the star now, and all you can do is WATCH ME BURN!"

She looked up at the tour poster taped to the back of the steel door leading out to the street. It bore a life-sized picture of her face, so it was like looking into a mirror.

"You're an asshole! You're a pervert! You're a heartless creep! Tell me what about all that I should've wanted to keep! You are violent and angry, and you're always rude, and you wonder why I never even miss you, dude!"

Ranko regarded the silver dragon coiled as always around her left wrist, concealing the remnants of Ranma Saotome's mortal wound on her feminine flesh. I'm not just angry at you for the person you were, Ranma. To an extent, you couldn't help it. You were a product of Pop and everything else around you. I'm mad at you for denying me the opportunity to become the person I deserved to be for so damned long. For not listening to your heart screaming that it needed more. That I needed… to be me.

"Now, I'm happy, and I'm thriving, havin' so much fun! All I had to do was say that you and me are done! So, yeah, it's true! Hey, jerk, I'm finally getting over bein' jerked around by you!"

Ranko smiled quietly as Jake and Crash played the song's bridge, throwing a wave to Hitomi and Emi. I've gotta be the first singer in history to write a breakup song about themself, she thought with a silent chuckle.

Every step of the process had been painful, but Ranko was ever so grateful to her past self for taking those brave first steps. The boy she had been, and the girl her heart knew she was destined to be, had never coexisted well. For one to flourish, the other had to recede. In the end, it had taken the love and acceptance of Hana and her sisters at the Phoenix for Ranko to give herself permission to choose the way she wanted to live, and not the way she'd spent months trying to hold onto on force of habit alone.

"I knew, right from the start, it was gonna hurt like hell to cut you out of my heart. I did what I had to do. Didn't like the girl I was when I was still with you."

Man, those first days were tough! Fighting with her bras. Remembering not to admonish herself too much if she giggled or blushed. Reminding herself over and over in class that Miss Tendo meant her, and not just Akane.

Allowing Izumi to put her in a wedding dress.

Allowing herself to smile when Yui and Izzi and Mei called her their baby sister.

Allowing herself to feel joy when Akane called her beautiful, or princess, or silly girl.

Allowing herself to feel joy at all.

"But I put my brave face on, and it gets easier for me every day that you're gone."

It wasn't perfect. She doubted it ever would be. There would still be days where she'd feel ridiculous. She knew she'd still feel foolish in the frilly tutu they expected her to wear in the first act of Phantom of the Opera at school in five weeks, for example. Ranko nodded resolutely in her headset, singing almost mournfully into its microphone.

"I admit that, from time to time, I can still feel you bangin' on the back door of my mind."

She imagined that there were still bridges too far, but she'd crossed most of them long ago. And burned them.

"And, yeah, I guess that is why I wrote this song: so, once and for all, I can say goodbye. The answer's no!"

She turned slowly, careful not to apply too much torque to her throbbing knee, and smiled warmly at her band. Her friends. Her brothers, almost. She glanced up again at her signature hovering in four-meter-high fuschia letters against the back wall.

She was glowing more brightly than it did.

"Hey, jerk, I've got what I want, and it's time for me to let you go!"

Ranko's voice became quieter - gentler, despite the harsh lyrics - as she raised her left arm at the elbow, slipping her right thumb under her silver bracelet and stroking the raised ridge running along her wrist thoughtfully.

"You're an asshole! You're a pervert! You're a heartless creep! Tell me what about all that I should've wanted to keep! You are violent and angry, and you're always rude, and you wonder why I never even miss you, dude! Now, I'm happy and I'm thriving, having so much fun. All I had to do was say that you and me are done."

She flipped the little clasp on the underside of her wrist, her silver guardian dragon releasing its tail from its mouth for the first time in weeks that did not involve an ice-cold shower or an MRI machine. The bracelet popped open, and she slipped it into the right pocket of her dress to keep its weight from swaying into her still-healing knee in the left one.

Ranko cradled her wrist in her right hand, gazing down at it and singing to it as if the scar was a portal through which her voice could reach back into the past and directly address the soul of a boy who had died nearly three years ago.

"So, yeah. It's true. Hey, jerk… I'm never going back to being jerked around by you."