Ranko's eyes rocketed open wide, staring up at the white popcorn ceiling. Her entire body went rigid as a board, her back arching as a cascade of violent shudders rolled up her muscles in a wave running from her toes to her nose.
A rustling sound accompanied the approach of the large lump under the hotel bed's green duvet cover, and in a moment, Akane's head emerged from its edge. Her hair, still caked with styling gel from her masculine presentation at their second wedding the day before, was stuck in a matted spike on one side - a product of it having rested on her wife's stomach all night after she finally fell asleep. "Good morning, beautiful," she said softly with a wide smile.
The nude bride covered her crimson face with her splayed hand, turning her head to the side on her down pillow. "I, um… good… uh… hi."
Wiping her lips on the sleeve of her unbuttoned white dress shirt, Akane crawled up the bed until she could sit next to her lover with her back leaned on the white oak headboard. "How's my wife this morning?"
"Mmm." Ranko rolled over on her side, resting her head on Akane's chest and nuzzling her cheek against it as she curled up tight. "She's yours. It doesn't get better than that." Giggling, she slid her head up along Akane's arm until it rested in the crook of her elbow. "And how's my husband this morning?"
Laughing, Akane squeezed the naked redhead tight against her side. "About the same as you, I think." She blinked as Ranko began to wriggle free of her grasp. "Where you going? Don't you wanna cuddle?"
Her face flushing again, Ranko bit her lip as she sat up on the bed and looked back at her lover. "Always. I'll be right back. I'm just gonna start some tea for ya. After all, a wife should always be willing to serve her husband, shouldn't she?"
Akane grinned, letting her wife go, but not without first grabbing a handful of her beloved's backside. "I could get used to this."
"You'd better, mister," Ranko said, swiveling on the bed until her feet dangled off of it. "You're stuck with me now." She slipped her butt off the bed, letting her bare feet make contact with the gray pile carpet of the hotel suite.
"You are so freaking ador-" Akane trailed off, sitting up straight in the bed as Ranko collapsed to the floor. The thud echoed through the fourth-floor room. "Baby?!"
"Owwwwww," Ranko mewled, curling up in the fetal position on the floor. She pressed both of her hands to her navel.
"I…" Akane's cheeks bulged like a chipmunk's, and she covered her mouth with her hand to keep from cackling. "Aww, baby, what happened?!" Try though she might, she could not hide the mocking in her voice under faux concern.
"Like you don't know,"Ranko whimpered, tittering a bit despite her discomfort. Indeed, her quivering legs, and the ache in her midsection, had been entirely Aki's doing. The pair had not made love since Ranko had left for the second leg of her tour nearly two months prior, and Akane had more than made up for lost time on their wedding night.
"I'd say I'm sorry," Akane said with a grin as she slipped out from under the blankets to her feet, "but I wouldn't mean it." She walked around the king-sized bed, smiling down at the love of her life on the floor at her feet. "Not in the slightest."
Ranko flushed bright red - first at the position she found herself in, then more at being reminded of why, and more still when she felt Akane's forearms slide between her and the soft plush carpeting. In a moment, her limp form was picked up off of the floor and cradled in Akane's arms.
"Well, okay," she purred, wrapping her forearms tightly around Akane's neck as she was lifted. "My hero."
Akane rocked the young woman in her strong arms as she carried her back toward the bed. "I've got you, girl. Always." She dragged her foot along the carpet with the next step she took, kicking the weapon she'd wounded her wife with out of her path. "Look out, D-chan!"
Ranko groaned as she was gently deposited back onto the pillow-top mattress. "I don't know how many times I have to tell ya, I really wish you'd stop callin' it that."
"Aww, c'mon," Akane said, flopping onto the bed next to Ranko. "It's cute!"
Yeah, but I don't really wanna think about Ryoga when you… Ranko shook her head. "Forget it." She curled up against her "husband" again, shivering a bit as the hotel air conditioning kicked on and sent a tickle of cool air racing over her hypersensitive skin. "What do you want to do today, sir?"
Akane wrapped her arms around her bride, rubbing her bare back firmly with her hands to help warm her. "I wanna go out somewhere. Don't care where. I only get a few days where I get to go show the world I'm married to the most beautiful girl in it, and I want to enjoy every minute. I want you to dress up like the princess you are, and I want everyone in Japan to see you on my arm and wish they were me."
Her cheeks warming faster than her back did, Ranko nuzzled tighter against Akane's torso, dragging her finger gently down from Akane's neck between her breasts through the gap between the sides of her unbuttoned tuxedo shirt. "True, that does sound fun… Alternatively… we could stay here, and…" She craned her neck, looking down at the object Akane had kicked against the wall on the floor.
Giggling, Akane ruffled her wife's already-matted red hair. "You insatiable little minx! You already can't walk! I swear, you're trying to be one of those girls who gets knocked up on the honeymoon, aren't you?"
The smile faded immediately from Ranko's face, and she buried her face in Akane's shirt. It was less that her shoulders slumped, and more that her entire body did.
"Ranko? Hey. I was joking. What's the matter, flower girl?"Akane spoke softly. She sat up a bit, looking down at her beloved with renewed concern.
Might as well clear the air, I guess. Ranko sighed heavily, sitting up and brushing the rat's nest of half-styled hair from her eyes. "C… can we talk for a minute?" There was a shame in her eyes that disquieted Akane greatly.
Akane gave a gentle nod, saying nothing. She reached across her lap, taking Ranko's right hand in her left.
"So…" Ranko looked down at their conjoined hands, biting her lip. "I know you want… that. And I know I can't give it to you. Not like this. I think, really, that's the reason my head wouldn't stop messin' with me about you and Sho. Everything else, I can do for you even though I'm a girl, but that…" She seemed to physically shrink a little more with every word she spoke.
"Ranko… silly girl, gods…" Akane scooted away from the headboard, wrapping her arms around the dejected woman in her marriage bed. "What the hell gave you that idea?"
"I see the way you are with Mioko and Jun. I can tell. You think I don't pay attention, but I do," Ranko lamented, resting her head against Akane's breast again. "And I can't make that happen for you." She winced, remembering a very hard conversation she'd had nearly a year and a half ago. "It was one of the first things Dad brought up when I asked him to bless this thing with you and me."
Akane sighed, leaning her head down and kissing Ranko on top of her head. She nearly gagged at the blended smell of a half-dozen hair styling products that remained caked in her bride's crimson coif. How in the frozen fuck did Ranma Saotome somehow turn into the most insecure person I've ever met? Stroking the redhead's temple with her fingers, she emitted a single scoff under her breath. Probably the same way that jerk became the sweetest and kindest one, too.
"Ranko, baby, listen to me. I dream about kids sometimes, sure. But it's not something I want. At least, not right now. With my school and your career, what the hell would we do with a kid if we could have one? They'd just live at the babysitter's full-time. If we decide we wanna do it later - and we'd only do it if we decided together; this isn't one of those things where one of us wants it and the other goes along with it like it's picking a restaurant - we've got options. We can adopt."
"No we can't," Ranko mewled in a hollow tone of voice. "They'd check into all our family documents and stuff, and our story would fall apart in ten seconds, and you know it."
Akane chuckled darkly, shaking her head without her nose breaking contact with Ranko's scalp. "Push comes to shove, we go through with Nabiki's idea, then. But either way, it's not something I want right now."
She paused for a moment, a thought crossing her mind that she was shocked she'd never had before. "Is it… something you want? I mean… I see the way you are with Mioko, Jun, and especially Hoshi, too, ya know." Akane reached out, batting a springy stray curl of Ranko's hair out of her face. "I think you'd make a great mom, too."
The redhead shrugged glumly. "I think about it sometimes. Mostly I get scared shitless at the thought, and then feel like crap knowing you gave up the chance." She motioned with her neck in the direction of Akane's left hand. "Another dream you traded for that ring."
Akane reached down, pulling her wedding band off of her hand and setting it on the mattress next to her. Ignoring the aghast reaction on Ranko's face, she leaned forward and pulled her bride into a furious kiss. Ranko was hesitant to return it, mostly out of shock.
"It's not the ring," Akane insisted breathlessly after releasing her wife's embrace. "It's you. And I don't regret it for a second. I never have, and I never will." She scooped her ring back up from the bed, sliding it back home on her third finger. "Even if we never have kids - even if we both decide we want to, and never find a way - it's not ever - ever - something I want you spending one second feeling bad about. There's nothing I could ever want enough to make me wish you were still… what you used to be. There is nothing, and I mean fucking nothing, that could make me regret making you my wife for a single moment. There is no sacrifice too big that I wouldn't make it in a second."
She glanced down at the uncomfortable black men's dress shoes that rested just inside the door out into the hotel's fourth-floor hallway. "If I had to pretend to be a guy every day for the rest of my life to be with you, I'd do it."
Sniffling, Ranko looked up, following her eyes with her hand. She rested it gently on Akane's cheek, turning her head back toward her. "Then I guess you're damn lucky I like girls."The redhead stretched her neck upward, meeting Akane in another kiss.
Akane didn't respond as enthusiastically as Ranko might have expected, and when she pulled back from it, her own eyes were clouded with deep thoughts. "So, hey. I… while we're talking about all this kind of stuff, there's something I need to talk to you about, too."
"Uh-oh." Ranko sat up, turning on her backside to face her partner. "Am I in trouble?"
With a laugh that broke through her melancholy for a moment, Akane crinkled her nose and shook her head. "No, princess. Not at all. You're a good girl. I've just been thinkin' about something."
Ranko ran her fingers reassuringly over Akane's bare thigh, listening silently.
"When you go back out this time…" Akane sighed resolutely, wiping the glistening corner of her left eye with her fingers before returning her intent gaze to Ranko.
"I don't want you to go back to Jusenkyo."
Ranko recoiled back on her butt, shock in her eyes. "But… Akane! I have to go! I need answers! I need to know what happened to my curse."
"Do you?" Akane reached out for Ranko's hand again. "Why can't you just call it a miracle, thank the gods, and leave it alone? Who cares why it happened, as long as it did? What would knowing change for you? For us?"
Slumping her shoulders, and then shrugging them, Ranko sighed quietly. "I don't know what it would change. Probably nothing. But there might be something hiding in it that we need to know. Something that could sneak up on us when we least expect it. Some other shoe that's gonna drop. That's why I have to find out."
"What scares me isn't what might happen in some hypothetical distant future, but…" Akane bit her lip, staring up at the ceiling as if searching for the rest of her sentence there. "When you're so prone to dumb ideas like thinking I wanna cheat on you with somebody so they can get me pregnant, it makes me really scared. Like, you're going to go back to that place not looking for answers, but looking for solutions to problems we don't even have. You're gonna do what you do, put your more guts than brains hat on, and do something monumentally stupid to try to make me happy. The literal mother of all pulling a Ranko moves, when I already don't want anything to change from how things are right now.
"And, even if you didn't - even if you truly went there with no intention other than to ask the Guide your questions - it's still way too risky. Anything could happen. You could run afoul of the Amazons again. Xian Pu is cool with us at least, as far as I know, but you know how touchy those women are. Gods only know what could happen, but weirdness and danger seem to be soaked into the ground around that place, and I don't want you anywhere close to it."
Ranko nodded, seeming to crumple a bit. She pulled her hand back from Akane, folding it and its mate in the cavitation between her bare thighs as she sat cross-legged on the mattress.
"I have to, Akane. I'm sorry. I have to know."
Akane took a deep breath, letting it out very slowly to buy herself one final moment to reconsider the words she was about to say - words she'd been preparing to say for weeks, but had hoped never to utter.
"If you insist on going to that gods-forsaken place, you're not going alone, Ranko. I'm going with you."
Ranko's eyes widened more than they had in reaction to Akane's unorthodox wake-up call. "But… Akane! You don't wanna go there… It's out in the middle of nowhere, and it's…"
"No, I don't. Not remotely." Akane steeled herself, straightening her back. "But I would follow you into hell itself to keep you safe. What's a valley full of puddles?"
Ranko frowned a bit. The thought of visiting the Cursed Springs again reminded her of a history she'd largely left behind - one in which she had been an all-but-invincible martial artist, to say nothing of other things she was far happier to have walked away from. "Who says I wouldn't be the one keeping you safe?"
Akane, spying the regret in her lover's body language, scooted over next to her and hugged her around the shoulders again. "Oh, I'm counting on it. You always do, princess." She leaned down, brushing Ranko's hair away from her forehead before pressing her lips to it. "You always do."
"I'm sorry, Akane. I'd do almost anything for you, but I can't let this go."Ranko squeezed her lover tight around the waist as she was held.
"Well, you're going to have to," Akane said, chuckling over the growl of her stomach as the smile returned to her face. She reached behind her back, prying Ranko's interlaced fingers apart.
"Some of us don't have a magic spring to make us look like the opposite sex, and I've gotta go get all handsome so I can take my bride out for breakfast."