July 6, 1991
4:42 AM

Ranko sighed, her foot bouncing nervously on the floor as she sat at the tiny dinette table in her old one-room apartment above the Phoenix. The sun only just started to rise, and even for July, she was a bit chilly in the upstairs bedroom in the white satin nightgown she wore. Admittedly, she’d packed it for looks rather than comfort. Due to the need to start on preparations as early as possible, she and Akane had decided to share her old room the night before the wedding rather than going home, so they could roll out of bed directly into their wedding venue. Ranko looked up to the curtain rod hanging over the apartment’s lone window, where a long dress bag hung off of three wire hangers to help support the weight. 

She smiled at her covered dress, and then over at her sleeping fiancee in the bed a few steps away. My gods, Akane. I’m going to be your wife in ten hours. My mother’s going to walk me down the aisle. My mom’s going to marry us, and I’m going to get to be yours for the rest of my life. How could she simultaneously want the hours to go by in seconds, and at the same time wish she had twice as many hours to prepare?

She looked down at the notebook on the table, which only had a few sheets of blank paper left in it. There were at least thirty crumpled pages in the tiny ceramic wastebasket beside her, however. What am I gonna do?

Ranko closed the notebook, glowering at the Ranko and the Dapper Dragons logo on the cover. Some motivation you are this morning! She rubbed her temples, reminding herself not to groan and risk waking the woman who would be her wife by day’s end. Between anxiety, having only slept about two hours, and the residual hangover from the shots Yui had encouraged her to take at Steam the night before, her head was pounding. She’d already taken a few aspirin, but they hadn’t had much chance to kick in yet. 

Think, Ranko. Clear your mind. She rubbed her eyes, staring at Akane’s unconscious form. Just talk to her. She’s right there. Write her a note. Forget the music. Forget the beat. Forget the pressure. Just tell her you love her.

She opened the notebook again. 

But… I tell her I love her every day. How do I make this one special? Even more special than You’re My Song? How do I say something that captures the totality of the way I feel about her? How can I possibly… there just are no words. None. Not in English, not in Japanese, not in that horrible poetry, not in Shakespeare, not in music, nothing. There’s just no words that are enough. There never will be, no matter how long I spend staring at this damn notebook.

There never will be words big enough. Never. 

Ranko gasped, snatching up the pencil on the table. That was it. She began furiously scratching line after line, looking around the room for inspiration wherever she could find it. This is gonna be great! 

In less than twenty minutes, three verses and three choruses stared her in the face. They needed some tweaking, but… 

I did it, Akane! I’m gonna keep my promise after all! 

Ranko scooped up the notebook and the pencil, opening the apartment door as carefully and quietly as possible and padding down the stairs to the main bar area. As she pushed through the blue saloon door into the bar room proper, the dark room was brightened just from the contented glow in her eyes. There was a white lattice archway assembled on the center of the stage, entirely interwoven with white roses. They were fake, as it was a last-minute addition on Izumi’s part, but it really gave the room a there’s a wedding happening here today feeling that made Ranko’s heart soar. 

A red carpet runner ran from the gap between the service and main bars to the middle of the room, where it joined another one perpendicular to the first. That one led straight to the stage, where Kaito had assembled a wooden ramp and affixed it to the front of the stage so that the girls, especially Ranko in the pearl-encrusted masterpiece his wife had crafted for her youngest sister, had a straight shot up to center stage without having to navigate the three narrow stairs on the stage’s right side. 

Half the tables had been removed from the room, and the half that remained were pushed to the front half of the bar closest to the entrance. Each had a small empty vase at its center, ready to receive the flowers Ayako would be picking up from the florist on her way in. Place settings - with real dishes, not the plastic stuff the Phoenix normally used for its customers - were set six to a table. A long rectangular table dressed in a white tablecloth sat off to one side with two chairs, both facing the remainder of the tables. At each of the two place settings, a champagne flute etched with a pair of interlocking hearts awaited their occupants. The round tables, however, had no chairs at all, as they had arranged in three rows of ten at the back of the bar facing the stage, each row split down the middle by the aisle created by the red carpet runner. 

Large white hearts sat on two easels on either side of the aisle, each inscribed with gold writing and rimmed in more of the white silk flowers. Ranko sighed happily when she read them, the words echoing what she’d said as she took the Polaroid photo that still sat in a heart-shaped frame on top of her dresser, the one she’d snapped of herself and Akane embracing on the bed not ten minutes after they’d walked into their new apartment for the first time. 

Here’s to the first day of forever.

Akane & Ranko Tendo

July 6, 1991

Leaving her notebook on the bar top, she walked softly to the table where the two chairs were, standing behind the chair on the right. I’m gonna sit right here. She’d asked Akane for the rightmost seat, and while Akane didn’t understand why it mattered to her, she was happy to grant the request. It might be silly, Akane, but… the left side is where the heart is. So that’s where you should be. Where my heart is. Where it always will be. With you. 

Ranko walked to the easel on the right side of the aisle, running her fingers over the gold print on the large cardboard heart as if she were reading them in Braille. How Mei had made them, she didn’t know; they looked professionally done. The first day of forever, Akane. Just like we said. Just like I promised. 

She turned to face the stage, the edge of which overflowed with realistic-looking silk roses in red and white on either side of the ramp. She stared straight down the red-carpeted aisle down which she would take her last few steps as an unmarried woman in just a few short hours. She beamed up at the lattice arch where Hana and Akane would be standing as she walked, as Akane had decided that she and her father would walk the aisle first. 

Blushing deeply despite there being no watching eyes in the empty bar as the clock struck six in the morning, Ranko stepped onto the red carpet runner with her bare feet. She clasped her hands at her waist around an invisible bouquet. She took a step forward with her left foot, bringing her right foot forward to match it rather than pass it. She paused there for a quarter-second before again leading with her left foot and using the right to catch up. The halting step, Izumi had told her, would make it easier to avoid tripping over her dress, make it easier for her mother to stay at her side as they walked, and also slow the approach down to give people more time to take pictures. It was a little awkward, though. Her white satin nightgown tickled the backs of her knees as she moved.

Her face aflame, she continued to practice the walk alone. Every movement of her left leg was a half-meter closer to the dream being made real. The space between right now and eternity got a couple heartbeats shorter. She was just a few more steps from walking directly into destiny itself. She ascended the ramp, stopping just in front of the right side of the vacant floral lattice arch. She bounced on her ankles, closing her eyes and breathing deep of the moment. She wanted to remember how it felt, how it smelled, every little ambient noise, all of it. 

In the early morning still, where no one could witness the joy exploding from within her, the final barrier she had placed between herself and true womanhood fell - not with a crash, not with a scream, but with two whispered syllables in the dark. 

“I do.”

She spun merrily in place on the stage, her nightgown swishing around her legs. This is gonna be the best day of my life. 

After taking a few more moments to soak in the moment, Ranko descended the ramp much more quickly than she had ascended it. She slipped quietly back through the swinging blue door to the kitchen, putting a kettle on the gas commercial stove to boil for tea. She normally didn’t even attempt hot tea anymore, as the Cat’s Tongue could make it hurt going down if she didn’t let it cool enough, but there were none of her energy drinks in the fridge. Excited as she was, the butterflies in her stomach and the song in her heart were not fully drowning out the thumping in her head, and the caffeine would be a welcome kick in the ass.

Returning to the bar room while she waited for the kettle to boil, Ranko walked to the front of the service bar. She chuckled softly to herself at the juxtaposition of the two items leaning against it side-by-side. Talk about old life, meet new life! Ranko reached past the blue-and-gold scabbard housing the Shimizu ancestral katana, which Ranko had not remembered to bring home in her frantic rush to get back to the apartment and change clothes between Nodoka’s visit and the trip to Steam. Instead, she picked up a red-and-orange guitar in the shape of a phoenix in flight. She hopped up, sitting on the counter of the service bar with her legs dangling off the customer side, opening her black notebook and setting it beside herself. 

Okay. Don’t have time for anything super crazy, so a basic beat will have to do. She started plucking at the guitar, listening for the melody she’d sung in her head. She was almost good enough after a few months of music class to be able to identify the notes in her mind’s ear, but not quite. She thought back to Crash’s advice from her first few guitar lessons. There are four chords that are the backbone of pop music, and if you can play them reliably and sing over them, they’ll fit just about anything your voice wants to do, he’d said. 

She hummed the first line, trying to place chords around the lyrics like periodic signposts rather than a continuous path of notes.  Okay… chord one, four, six, five. Repeat. It took her a few tries to get the timing right, but she giggled to herself happily as she did. Crash and I can put something better together later if we decide to record it, but this’ll be good enough to get through the reception, she coached herself to keep her nerves at bay. 

Okay, chorus… chorus… She hummed again as she read over the words she’d written. Hey, the chorus can actually follow the same rhythm as the verses! Two for one! Fuckin’ nice! The gods are on my side today, confirmed! 

Thrice more, she hummed the basic rhythm of her last-second musical gift to her wife, practicing fitting the four-chord progression around it. I think this is going to work.

She put the notebook down, closing her eyes and letting the pink plastic guitar pick in her fingers find the appropriate strings on muscle memory alone. She felt her whole body relax, as if the simplistic rhythm was a cloud on which she could rest and dream of all the good things today would begin. And then, the humming gave way to singing, a quiet intimacy in her voice.

“There’s a long white dress hangin’ over there. My sister’s coming in five hours so she can help me do my hair…”

Before she could continue the verse, she heard a noise from the kitchen. Looking up at the clock, she chuckled. That’s gotta be Izzi or Kasumi. They’re the only ones who would get up this early, even for this. Unstrapping the guitar from her shoulder and laying it gently on the service bar counter, she hopped down to her feet. The water for her tea was probably ready, anyway. 

She pushed through the blue saloon doors with a song on her lips and in her heart, and sure enough, the tea kettle whistled merrily from the commercial stovetop. “Good morning! Who’s ready for a freakin’ wedding,” she called excitedly into the kitchen before entering it. But as she passed Hana’s office and approached the kitchen, she saw no one in it. The hell? Mind’s playin’ tricks on me, I guess. Stupid tequila. Oh well. She stepped forward into the kitchen to make her tea. 

As soon as she stepped out of the hallway into the wider kitchen space, a pair of arms shot out of the dark and grabbed her tight. She was ripped backward violently off of her feet until her body slammed against a larger, unseen assailant’s torso; one of the intruder’s arms pinned her arms to her sides, and the other was cupped over her mouth. 

She frantically struggled to break free, but her muscles went stiff with panic at the sound of the familiar, gravelly voice in her ear from behind. 

“Hello, Ranma.”