Ranma has been with the Tendos for more than a few months when he sees it . He sees it long after school has ended for the day, and after the sun has begun slipping down into the side of the sky, glowing red and misty with sleepy twilight.
It is nestled into a scrapbook that Kasumi left open on a side table in the middle of the house, in-between photos of Ranma fighting Tatewaki Kuno and photos of Akane managing to scrape into success at cooking. Ranma remembers both of those things very well - he remembers every little scuffle with that asshole, and he remembers every single time Akane manages to surprise him with something edible.
He kinda does treasure those times when Akane looks so happy and proud of herself, just a little. Not that he ever tells her, or anyone else, that, because it would be too fucking embarrassing .
What he doesn't remember and certainly doesn't treasure, is the photo of him in his girl-form, in a dress. Not just a photo of him in a dress, but a photo of him in a modest dress, sitting outside and smelling the flowers like a fucking girl .
"What the fuck?" He says, not bothering to filter his crass mouth. His fingers, half-clumsily, retrieve the photo out of the scrapbook, pulling it up to his eyes so he can take a closer look. It doesn't even look doctored.
Hesitantly, he flips the photo over in his fingers, noting the information stamped into the back, the date marked down in black ink - Nabiki's handwriting, that of the middle Tendo child.
He scowls, sitting up from the table and flipping the photo over again. Without thinking, his legs carry him to Nabiki's room, and he throws open the door without even knocking.
"'biks! What the hell is this?" He growls, watching Nabiki pull off her headphones and glare at him, a smirk curling across her lips as she takes note of the photograph he's holding in white hands.
"That'll be ten thousand yen if you want to know," she drawls carelessly, kicking off of her bedspread and coming to stand in front of him.
"One thousand, at best ," he retorts. "This is obviously your creation, whatever it is, so don't you go extortin' me for it."
Nabiki smirks. "Fine, one thousand," she says, not even trying to haggle with him. Ranma knows that Nabiki is an exploitative jerk, but she doesn't always try to suck his wallet dry. Sometimes he thinks that's her way of showing she cares about him.
Then he gets blackmailed into doing a modeling gig in his girl-form by her, and he realizes that no, she doesn't quite care - that much.
"You're wrong, though," Nabiki corrects him after he's paid her sum, infinitely smug. "This isn't my 'creation' at all. I just took the picture."
Ranma raises an eyebrow. "Right. Because I go around happily wearing pretty dresses."
He doesn't, in his boy-form or his girl-form.
"Not normally, no," Nabiki snickers, plucking the photo out of his fingers. "But I guess you don't remember - there was this one time when you hit your head."
Ranma snorts. "Are you serious? You're saying I got clobbered and started wearing dresses."
That's not even how brain damage works - he has experience with brain damage, after all. He knows this shit.
"Yup!" Nabiki says delightedly, popping the 'p' with great satisfaction. "You hit your head again later, and it sent you back to normal. I'm kinda surprised you never remembered that it happened, but it's all the better for me, I guess."
"Better for you?" Ranma splutters.
"Yeah," Nabiki replies. "I made a lot of money selling pics of you, ya know."
"Nabiki…" Ranma hisses, grabbing the photo back and crumpling it up. "That is such bull, and you know it. I don't-"
( -want to be that kind of girl, brain damage or no )
"-do that kind of girly stuff, brain damage or no."
And he doesn't, he wouldn't, he wouldn't act like such a pansy weak fuck, smelling the goddamn roses. Roses smell like crap, anyways, as far as he's concerned, and he obviously doesn't feel bitter about it or anything. No, he's emotionally well adjusted, yes sir!
He takes a deep breath in and out, slowing down his speeding-up heart rate.
"And why did Kasumi grab this picture of yours, anyways?" Ranma hisses. "She's not the type to mock me-"
"She wanted it because you were smiling," Nabiki says, cutting him off.
His heart sinks slightly, and he stops gripping the ruin of the photograph, looking down and unfolding it with his thumb.
He is smiling in the photo, with his girl-form's nose hovering over the flowers.
He never smiles like that in his girl-form.
(he never smiles like that in his boy-form, either)
"...oh," he murmurs, the wind taken out of his sails and the air ripped from his lungs.
"Yeah," Nabiki chuckles. "Believe it or not, it happened, and Kasumi wanted to remember that smile fondly, I guess."
And that itches at Ranma, knowing that Kasumi made a memento of Ranma out of his right mind, but he's not completely stupid. He knows… well, he doesn't know. But he thinks he understands, just a bit, the way that you can get invested in someone who doesn't exist (someone who will never exist, no matter how much you might want them to), the way that you can get invested in a facet of a curse.
Kasumi isn't the first one to have done it, but she's obviously much sappier about it than anyone else. And he can't fault that, no matter how much he might want to.
Stupid of him.
"Also," Nabiki snickers, "you owe her for another copy of that photo you just ruined."
Ranma sighs and digs out another handful of yen.
Sometimes, Ranma thinks of his mother.
He doesn't remember her well, or really at all. Sometimes, he has dreams - running through gardens to help an older woman with planting flowers, sitting in her arms as she reads books he doesn't understand, and the like. Stupid mother-son bonding activities (and if he's being honest, mother-son wish fulfillment). It's probably just something he made up to make himself feel better, because there's no way he can actually remember who his mother was.
No, his mother is probably dead. He knows it as surely as he can know anything - which isn't very surely at all, when so much in his life lies in flux and the only things he can be sure of are ephemeral social ties. He can be more sure of his engagements than of his sex , and how fucked up is that?
Never mind about that, though. His mother is probably dead, and was probably some awful woman to boot. A more lovely woman would never have ended up with a man like his father, Ranma reasons, and the woman in question must have been truly horrible for his father to be so unwilling to talk about her.
Genma hasn't talked of Ranma's mother once, after all, and that's not for a lack of trying to broach the subject on Ranma's part.
So Ranma is alone right now. Poor Ranma. He could just about cry himself a river (not).
After all, he doesn't need a river, because there's already a river right next to him. A low-slung drainage canal dug into the earth, walled off by fences.
"Everything is training, boy-"
Ranma walks along the top of the thin metal fences, just like he had always been taught, his shitty shoes padding against the wire lattice.
He thinks back to the late Kimiko Tendo, the mother of the Tendo girls, and he can't help but feel cheated on some level. Akane, Nabiki, Kasumi - they all at least have a grave to come back to. He doesn't. He can't lay flowers at some headstone, year after year, because he doesn't even know where his mother is. There's no fucking closure .
"You're just like Mom was, you know-"
It itches, like the itchy feet that give him his wanderlust. It itches, like the itchy bones that seem so wrong sometimes, the itchy bones he ignores and pretends he doesn't have. He just wants some fucking closure, so he could shed his tears and get on with going around in circles (circles down a drain). He won't get it, he's sure.
He's so tied up with denial of grief that he doesn't even notice the fence give way under his feet, dumping him into the drainage canal, into the freezing water that triggers his gender-bending curse. And it's infinitely typical - life seeming to arrange itself into a perfect storm at every turn, so that he can be drenched in cold water and become a she. She's used to it.
"Fucking hell …" Ranma growls, getting up in the knee-deep trench. "Can't a guy even mope-? No, scratch that, I don't mope."
With a burst of speed, she leaps out of the canal, landing at the lip, where the fence had fallen over, and she comes to rest right next to a bemused-looking woman, with extremely dark red hair, brown eyes and fairly formal wear.
"I hope I'm not being impolite…" the woman murmurs, staring at Ranma. "But weren't you black-haired just a moment ago?"
Ranma freezes.
"It must have been a trick of the light," Ranma eventually says, lying through her teeth. She's hardly in the mood to explain her curse.
"Must have been," the woman shrugs. "Or maybe I'm getting old. Either way, could you humor me, and tell me where I can find the Tendo household?"
Ranma freezes for the second time in as many minutes. "You wanna see the Tendos? I can show you where they are, easy. I'm-"
( living with them )
"-staying with them for now," Ranma explains, feeling vaguely proud despite the fact that she's done nothing remarkable at all.
"Oh, are you?" the woman asks curiously. One of the corners of her mouth lilts up into a lopsided smile. "How fortuitous."
"Come on," Ranma says. "I'm heading home anyways, so do you want to come with me? They're just a block or two away."
"I think," the woman says, still smiling like the fucking Mona Lisa, "I would like nothing more."
