Who is the man I see,
Where I'm supposed to be?
I lost my heart,
I buried it too deep,
Under the iron sea.
Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball,
Save us all,
Tell me life is beautiful,
Mirror, mirror on the wall.
- Crystal Ball by Keane
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Ranko wakes on the next day aching and sore. Her hip had been on a stone all night after she'd cried herself to sleep holding the package with the pyjamas she'd been given by her mother.
She looks around, the grey haze of morning twilight near a body of water and she stretches.
Her stomach growls. She ignores it and gets onto her feet, wondering what the time is.
Walking out from under the bridge, she sees a figure in red shorts and a yellow tank top jog by, short hair bouncing. Akane.
She shakes her head and moves away, keeping out of sight. She looks around for somewhere to change now it's not night, hefting her pack.
She finds a train station and spends a short amount of time in the bathroom, trying to wash herself and changing into her uniform.
It's not the first time she's been without a home. In fact, as far back as she can remember in Ranma's memories, the only homes she ever had were the Tendou dojo and her mother's home. But she's not Ranma. She has his skills, but this is a different environment to those camping trips. There isn't exactly a technique scroll on urban homelessness she can read.
She pauses. Well, there might be, given the craziness of her life before a few weeks ago.
Shaking her head, she splashes her face and picks up her pack, leaving the bathroom and walking towards school.
The day passes uneventfully; or as uneventfully as it can, given she feels like her entire being is starting to show hairline cracks. Akane invites her to sit for lunch with her and her friends first thing, but she declines, not feeling worth it.
Instead she sits where she had before, simply observing. She notes how close Yuka and Sayuri sit, and one time observes them kissing.
Had they been a couple in her old life? She'd never bothered to find out as Ranma, that sort of thing hadn't interested him.
Akane seems vibrant still, and seems so, so set on befriending Ranko. She keeps trying to hold the short-haired girl at arms' length but it's so hard. She always had a hard time saying no to Akane, even as Ranma, and especially now.
Sometimes she thinks back to the Akane she held the night before last, the last night she spent in a bed. She remembers holding someone who had deep, deep scars, a depression that caused her to lash out. Seeing Akane so calm and collected, and sure, bad-tempered, but happy is a combination balm and vice around her heart.
Everyone seems so much better now she's gone, like her presence was something that dragged down the world, like she was the catalyst to everyone's pain. She keeps hearing about how Nabiki has helped this girl or that girl, like some kind of gossip queen using her words to keep the peace. How Akane spars in a morning with the group of boys who aren't yelling for a date but simply enjoying a morning spar with a friend.
Most surprising is how many friends Akane now has among the male student body. Maybe not as good friends as she is with Sayuri and Yuka, but more than just scathing anger at them – she'll joke with them, talk with them, laugh with them.
Ranko's envious of how easy it seems for Akane to befriend people. Most outside of her class are avoiding her, and she can hear whispers when she walks, as if she's some kind of oddity to be discussed.
It's like there's an aura she's putting out that puts people off that hadn't really known her before. Thankfully her own class aren't a problem with it, they seem to settle in with her there very easily. Almost spookily so, but she can't really focus.
She tries to take notes in class, but her stomach knots again, the gnawing ache in her stomach growing stronger a moment before subsiding. Ranko grits her teeth.
So she sits here beneath this tree, alone, and contemplates the decision that led her to be alone. Maybe she deserves this.
Akane, sitting with Sayuri and Yuka in their customary place, gazes at the redheaded girl currently lost in thought. "Have you guys seen her eat today?" She asks.
Yuka shakes her head. "Nope, she's been sat under that tree staring the entire time. It'd be kind of creepy if she didn't look so… lost."
"She had that fancy bentou box yesterday, though…" Akane mumbles. "Personalised and everything…"
Sayuri shrugs. "She hasn't got it today, maybe she forgot it?"
"Must be it." Akane stands and brushes her skirts of.
"Where are you going?"
"I've got half my food left, no sense letting someone go hungry." Akane says, her cheeks tinged slightly red.
"Stars above you're moving fast. Second day of knowing her and already indirect kisses." Yuka teases. Then she goes serious. "Open up your bentou."
Akane does so and Yuka deposits two tamagoyaki in there. Sayuri puts in some pickled daikon and nods. "Go get 'er, 'Fierce Tigress'!"
Akane glowers at her friends for using Kunou's name for her and stomps off, muttering, towards Ranko.
"Hey Ranko-san." Akane's voice drops Ranko out of her miserable spiral of thought and she looks up. Akane stands over her, smiling brightly. Ranko blushes and looks down.
"H-hello T-Tendou-san." Ranko says softly, playing with her fingers. "W-was I bothering y-you? I was thinking so I d-don't know if I w-w-was staring…"
"It's fine. Hey, come join us. And here." Akane pushes her half-full bentou into Ranko's hands as the girl stands. "We saw you weren't eating, I guess you forgot your own bentou?"
Ranko looks down at the box, then back up. "I-I couldn't p-possibly…"
"Yes you can, it'd have only gone to waste. Come on." Akane idly brushes some of her short hair behind her ears and Ranko's eyes linger on the movement before the taller girl turns and walks back to her friends, Ranko meekly following.
Akane sits back down and both Yuka and Sayuri smile at her. "Hey there, Ranko-san, thank you for joining us."
"'Kay." Ranko says, looking down at the box in her hands. Her stomach growls, the gnawing ache in her stomach growing more painful.
"Well come on, eat up!" Akane says, nudging her playfully.
Ranko pulls her chopsticks from her bag (thankfully not in the bentou box that's in her backpack) and opens. She takes a bite of the food.
Kasumi's cooking. She can tell immediately that the rice is just that, though there's something slightly different about other parts of it. She eats daintily as the three friends watch her.
A tear splashes onto the box. Then another.
"Woah, hey!" Akane says, concerned as tears start pouring from Ranko's eyes as she swallows her first mouthful and starts on the tamagoyaki. "Hey, Ranko-san are you okay?"
More tears falling, and the redhead's breath hiccups as she tries to eat.
It's only when she's done and swallowed the last of the food that the sobbing starts.
Akane looked between her friends, watching Yuka point at Ranko and mime moving closer.
Akane scoots closer and puts and arm around Ranko, just listening to the girl cry. She's not crying noisily, it's quiet and soft, and Akane feels how cold the girl is. She circles Ranko in her arms as the girl cries into her blouse, making soothing noises and rubbing her back.
As Ranko is winding down, Akane takes her hands away and looks at the distraught redhead. "Are you alright?"
Ranko sits up, wiping her eyes and nods morosely.
"You know you can talk to us if you need to, Ranko-san." Yuka says, concern in her eyes. Ranko seems to be doing some kind of meditation as her eyes close and she mumbles something about ice to herself.
Ranko shakes her head. "It's p-private. I wis-" That word now has horrible connotations, "I would l-like to, but I c-can't."
Akane sighs and takes her bentou box. "Well at least we stopped that stomach growling." She says, grinning at Ranko and trying to lighten the mood.
The lost, forlorn look is back in Ranko's eyes as she bows to Akane. "Thank you, Tendou-san, for your kindness, and you too Tamaki-san and Nakano-san."
"Don't sweat it. And you can call me Akane." Akane says, smiling warmly at Ranko.
"Sayuri."
"Yuka."
Ranko nods, then stands. "I'm going to the bathroom to freshen up before class. Thank you for your kindness."
The three watch her go.
"What was all that about?" Sayuri wonders, her friends nodding along.
"I don't know." Akane replies. "But something's very fishy about Ranko-san. Maybe not her herself, but something about her circumstances…" She thinks a moment. "Something's off, I can feel it."
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After school on the third day is when she sees Ryouga. He's sweeping the front of the Nekohanten, surprisingly enough, and looks up at her as she passes. Again, she feels that disconnect, that jolt in her heart that's like a spike running right into it. He gives her a bashful look she recognises as him seeing a girl he doesn't know.
Ranko keeps her face carefully neutral. Soul of Ice. She can't give it away. She's getting a lot of practice doing this now, having to spend time in Fuurinkan. She wonders for a moment why the café is here, why Cologne is here.
She gets her answer when Shampoo emerges onto the front of the front of the restaurant and promptly takes Ryouga in her arms for a kiss. Ranko feels her heart quicken and another nail drive through as she watches the two, obviously in love, interact with smiles and a care she wished she'd been able to have before she made this stupid wish.
She's even more shocked when Mousse steps out and is promptly kissed by the two, the three then standing together, looking out on the street before breaking up with lingering touches and cleaning the rest of the frontage.
Her heart jolts. They seem so happy. Another showing of her being gone making things better, not just the Tendou family.
Having seen that display, Ranko moves on, ignoring the growing ache in her stomach. Akane's half-finished bentou seems so long ago, but it's only been a day. Today she spent lunch taking advantage of the empty changing room to have a shower. She'd tied her hair back up in the old pigtail to hide how wet it was, but she'd been pretty sure Akane had noticed.
She'd forgotten how hunger felt, gnawing at her insides. Her time on the road with Genma had certainly included times where she'd gone hungry, either on purpose by Genma stealing her food or by virtue of them simply having none to eat.
Maybe she could work somewhere – she'd say the Nekohanten but she's not sure how she'd take it, and she hasn't yet seen Ucchan's. Everywhere she's asked wanted ID, which she doesn't have. And those that didn't treated her… oddly. As if she doesn't quite work with the world – the same way some treated her at school.
Sighing softly, Ranko resigns herself to another night of studying her textbooks with the small lamp that somehow never runs out of power that Berry had given her, while trying to ignore the ache in her belly.
She makes her way to the vacant lot that Ryouga used to pitch his tent in. She'd been staying there on the bench, hoping to run into him – even as strangers, she knows he's kind enough to speak to her at least.
Now that dream is dashed, too.
Plip. Plip. She opens her eyes to see that the heavens are opening up; rain starting to pour down.
Ranko staggers as it hits her and she digs at her pack for the umbrella, sitting on the bench under it, knees to her chest, trying to minimize her exposure. The rain is cold, even though it's late summer and her blouse was already soaking before she'd managed to put the umbrella up.
She feels like someone's scooped out her insides, hollowed her out. The gnawing, biting ache in her stomach is insistent. For a moment she considers emulating her father before feeling disgusted with herself. Thievery is not something she will ever do again willingly.
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Akane takes her Ranko-watching to a new level over the next few days. She tries to get the red-haired girl to open up to her, but she remains stubbornly shy despite Akane, Yuka and Sayuri's best efforts. Some days Ranko comes with them for lunch, but most of the time she disappears.
On the days she joins them, she doesn't eat with them, claiming with an embarrassed face and a wave of her empty bentou box that she'd been too hungry to wait for lunch. Once or twice she forgets her bentou, but she won't take much food from her friends, if any, or she'll tell them after they've eaten their dinner already.
Akane's concern grows as Ranko seems to be more listless and depressed as each day passes. There's a pervasive air about the girl, an aura of depression chi she can feel thick in the air. Most days now, the red-haired girl seems hardly able to focus in class, and she keeps closing her eyes for a moment or swaying as if dizzy.
Akane keeps a watch out when it comes to the changing rooms. Ranko, timid as she's been, seems almost to shuffle into the changing rooms. So, she was embarrassed to be changing with other girls. Pretty standard for someone like Ranko as she'd so far gotten to know the new girl. Quiet and shy, but she could tell under there was a core of steel. She spoke properly, politely, and never raised her voice. She half expects to hear 'gokigenyou' as a greeting.
No, wait, she has heard the girl saying it. How someone who speaks like a Meiji-era princess wears such ragged clothing is beyond her. How such a polite young girl can seem so hurt but keep it all going.
Most days Ranko changes in the bathrooms away, but Akane and her friends had all but surrounded her as they made their way, chattering, to the changing room for gym class.
An eyebrow raises when Ranko finally deigns to change. Her PE uniform is slightly stained and patched, somewhat threadbare, but while she's changing, Akane can see bruises and the girl's ribs are showing. She's painfully thin. Her hip bones show, even. Akane's mouth flattens into a line.
Forgot her bentou indeed! The girl looked like she hadn't had a good meal for some time. And those bruises and scrapes – they looked like they were fading more quickly than most people's would, but from a fight perhaps? There are some she'd swear were caused by a blunt instrument, a mallet like her chi one, perhaps, but the really nasty ones are on her left side. It's like she was slammed against something hard.
The bruises look a few weeks old but even so, they must have been really horrible when she first had them. No wonder Ranko had been changing in the bathrooms.
Akane's not the only one to notice the bruises and a few of the other girls crowd her. She refuses to talk about them, biting her lip and shaking her head.
After gym, Akane tells her friends she'll see them tomorrow and seeks her older sister out. "Nabiki, we need to talk." She says.
Nabiki nods and steps out of her classroom after picking all her stuff up, falling into step with her little sister. "What's up?"
"Ranko." Akane replies quietly. "I'm really concerned, onee-chan."
"Oh? Your crush not working out?"
"Nabiki." Akane's voice is calm and cold. "Not now, this is serious."
Nabiki shuts up and nods. "Alright, what's going on?"
"I think… I don't know for sure, but I think she's abused." Akane bites her lip. "Or something. She has some really nasty bruising on both sides of her body. One side looks like she took one heck of a tumble into something unyielding and I can see them stemming from an accident, but the others look like… I don't know, blunt object trauma."
Nabiki looks sharply at her sister. "Why hasn't anyone said anything until now?" She asks. "I could have started an investigation before now."
"She's been changing in the bathrooms. I thought it was because she's shy, but it's more than that. And her ribs, onee-chan. She's so thin. It's like she's not eaten properly in a week or so. It's hard to tell how long. She's definitely a martial artist, and you know how we eat."
"No kidding." Nabiki teases her sister often for her appetite. "Shit. We failed a girl. Sorry, imouto-chan, I failed your new girlfriend."
Akane shakes her head, ignoring the girlfriend comment. "No, I wasn't paying attention. She'll wave her bentou box at us and say she ate earlier, but she was probably lying. I wonder if her family's starving her?"
Nabiki purses her lips and looks angry. "I think I'll have to investigate our girl's home-life." She mutters. "And find a bit more our about her family and circumstances. She still doesn't have a family name?"
"Not that I know of." Akane says softly.
"I'll look out, try to get her birthdate and where she was born."
Akane shrugs. "Oh sure, that won't give me away."
Nabiki ponders. "Ask her on a date." She advises and Akane goes red.
"Nabiki! Don't tease me."
"I'm not." Her sister says, bringing Akane up short. "I'm serious. You like her. I know you do, she's triggered that protecting people thing that had you going out with Arisa for a few months, remember?"
"…Yeah, then she dumped be for being 'both too much a tomboy and too girly at the same time', like I have to be either butch or femme, and not my own person, honestly." Akane mutters. "Bitch."
Nabiki pats her arm. "At least you didn't propose or anything. I could've told you she was a shallow one. But sometimes learning your own lessons is important, ne?" Akane nods. "Ask her out, Akane. The worst she can do is say no."
"I'll think about it." Akane says softly, twiddling her fingers together. "Why are you wanting me to?"
Nabiki shrugs. "I can follow her home after and find out where she lives. Step one to investigating her is finding out her home address."
Akane sighs. "I'll think about it." She repeats.
The next day, Akane's earlier than she has been for a long time, and yet Ranko's still there as if she'd either slept at her desk or not at all. She has dark circles under her eyes and seems more listless than she had been. Something hollow lurks in those blue eyes and Akane swallows on seeing a momentary pit of hopeless darkness opening up inside them, before Ranko seems to realise she's there and schools her expression.
I wish I could help you. Talk to me. Akane thinks, but she puts a smile on for the petite girl and pulls a few volumes of manga from her bag. "Ne, Ranko-san, I wondered if you'd like to read this." She puts them down, showing the covers to the first three 'Maria-sama ga miteru' volumes. Having spoken to Ranko and coaxing some interests out, she knows that Ranko wants to emulate some genteel and polite lady she looks up to. "It's about a school where girls learn how to be proper ladies, I thought it might be up your street."
Ranko perks up a moment, looking on the covers and looking at the first few pages describing Lillian. She smiles softly. "I couldn't possibly…"
Akane smiles as she sits at her own desk, leaving the manga there. "Ah, feel free, Ranko-san. They're a good story and I think you'll like them, as well as the friendships."
Ranko shrugs and takes them, putting them in her book bag. She'll try to take good care of them. "Thank you, Akane-san." She says politely.
Akane gives her one of those self-assured grins that reminds Ranko so much of her older self. Something flutters in her chest, but she ruthlessly crushes it down. "Ah, Ranko-san, I think you'll probably find yourself greeting everyone with 'gokigenyou' all the time rather than some of the time." The short-haired girl teases.
Ranko blushes but manages a giggle and Akane considers it a victory.
At least until she tells her best friends about it at lunch, Ranko having claimed to have food already and needing to catch up on homework.
"You loaned your female crush your favourite sort-of shoujo-ai manga series to read at school." Yuka states flatly. "Really, Akane? You don't even know if she likes girls!"
"You don't know if she likes boys!" Akane retorts. "Besides, she's always blushing and stammering near me, and I don't see her doing that to anyone else!"
"Kami above Akane, you are such a disaster lesbian." Sayuri mutters.
"I am not!" Akane says hotly. "Just because I get all hot and b-b-bothered and…"
"Keep digging, girlfriend." Yuka grins. "And maybe just ask her on a date."
"Nabiki asked me to do so too, but it seems kind of… I don't want to force it." Akane mumbles.
Sayuri shrugs. "If your big sis has a plan to help, that's obviously step one. Give her a day or two to percolate with Marimite and then spring the question if she seems like she liked the romantic friendships. Then bam! 'Ranko-chan I want your body please give me wild lesbian sex!'"
Yuka swats her girlfriend. "What Sayuri is saying," She says to their blushing and stammering friend, "Is to ask her in a day or two. Worst she can do is say no."
Akane sighs. "Alright."