"Whoa!" Ito chuckled, clasping his daughter on the knee as a jet of flame erupted a mere few meters in front of him, backlighting a lithe brunette in a red dress. The girl had wings on her back, to boot.
Hana laughed, hugging her father around the shoulders. "Easy, Papa. It's a long show, and it gets to be a bit… well… you'll see."
"It's the legendary lyricist, the Phoenix rose! I'm here to shake your body from your hair down to your toes!" Ranko rapped as Sanyo and Utaru carried her onto the stage in her red leather jacket and pants. "It starts in your ears, and flows down your spine. Works its way into your hips until it makes you mine."
"Hope the old goat had his pills this morning," Yui said with a playful smirk on her grandfather's other side. "I don't know if his heart can take two and a half hours of this."
Ito turned to Yui, wagging a finger in her face. "I'll have you know, you little… shiiit!" His eyes widened as he caught a glimpse of something on the stage over her shoulder.
"You were saying, Granddad?" Yui cackled in her seat as two men in crimson leather armor launched Ito's youngest granddaughter forward from their shoulders. The redhead landed in a superhero crouch, pounding on the stage floor. When her fist contacted the platform, the black background of the video board seemed to shatter into a rain of obsidian shards, revealing a hellish landscape of fire, lava and brimstone on the eight-meter display behind the performers.
"Don't be shy." Ranko rapped as she strode lackadaisically across the stage. "Everyone knows ya can't help but lose it when your system's overridden by the sound of music."
Hana sat forward intently in her seat, the grin having disappeared from her face.
"Hannie? What's wrong, baby?" Ito shouted in order to be heard over the massive speakers.
Hana bit her lip, shaking her head. "Something's wrong, Papa. I don't know what, but… she doesn't look right. I can see it in her eyes."
So focused was she on the disquiet in her daughter's eyes that she did not notice Crash return his guitar to its stand on his left. Shinji did the same, and Zoe and Jacob both stood from their instruments. By virtue of the emergency backing track Ariel had wired to play through the speakers, the equivalent of a karaoke beat without any lyrics, the music continued uninterrupted.
Ranko strode to the dead center of the stage, flanked by Hitomi and Emi at her sides. Crash, Sanyo and Utaru joined the line on Ranko's right, while Shinji, Jake and Zoe did on her left. Slipping out from behind the black drape separating the stage from the backstage area, Kazuki led Norio out onto the stage. The two stagehands joined the group on Shinji's right, completing a semicircle with Ranko at its outermost point at the front of the stage.
"Don't know why you're surprised that you're completely transfixed, and absolutely mesmerized by the track that we mixed," Ranko rapped, but with none of her trademark sass present in her voice. She turned on her heels to face the video board at the back of the stage, and all of the other members of the band's traveling entourage - save Lance Riker, whose eyes never left the crowd - did as well.
At the command of Ariel's control board, the stage lights all went dark, leaving only a pair of spotlights. Both were trained at the back center of the stage, bathing the vacant black drum set emblazoned with the Ranko and the Dapper Dragons logo in two beams of bright white light.
"With Ranko on the… huh?!" Kumiko trailed off in her front-row seat, realizing that while she spat the leadoff track's lyrics in time with the music, Ranko herself was no longer doing so.
All eleven Dragons on the stage - current and temporary, new and original - bowed in silence in the direction of the empty stool behind the drum set. Zoe reached to their left, taking Jacob's hand as the pair bowed in respect despite the act being out of the cultural norm for the Australian couple. The music continued unabated, but no lyrics were uttered.
Ranko could not bear to list off the members of her band as the song's lyrics commanded. Not when one of them was missing.
High above the stage, in the control booth, Ariel and Masa both rose from their chairs, bowing over their control boards in the direction of the drum set on the other end of the cavernous stadium.
From his position behind the curtain backstage, Ryo had also bowed as low as he could as he watched the tribute from the wings of the stage.
Akane bowed next to him, though only a martial artist's sense of honor and self-reliance prohibited her from holding the crying young man so he wouldn't fall over, instead.
After the twenty-five beats that would have completed the verse had passed, the instrumentalists began making their way back to their positions. Ranko herself remained bowed, and it took a nudge from Hitomi to remind her that she needed to resume the song and had already missed her cue.
"There's no time to rest," Ranko said in a near-whisper - both to continue the song and to admonish herself in the doing - sniffling into her microphone as she wiped a tear from her eye. She slowly straightened her back, turning to face the crowd and trying again to force herself to smile. "There's a siren on the mic that's makin' you possessed."
"No escapin' from the demon in your radio!"
The capacity crowd packing the Tokyo Dome whooped and cheered, but Hana sat forward intently in her seat, still watching her daughter intently on the stage. Baby, what happened? she fretted, clasping her hands under her chin.
Ranko made her way to center stage, and both spotlights trained on her. Behind her, the hellscape painted on the video board faded to black.
"Alright, guys. Your instruments are hot again," Ariel announced into the headsets of all of the performers. "We're ready up here when you are."
Ranko ignored his words, walking to the edge of the stage and wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. "How we doing, Tokyo?! Merry Christmas!" She forced a broad smile onto her cheeks, waving to the crowd.
Hana shook her head in dismay. If there was one skill she had mastered beyond the faintest shadow of doubt in the few years that had passed since she had taken the redheaded dynamo on the stage into her bar - and into her family - it was how to determine when her youngest daughter was smiling with her mouth, but not with her heart.
"It's good to be home, for the last show of the Wildfire Tour!" Ranko waved again as the crowd cheered. "We made it!"
Almost all of us, anyway, she thought darkly, biting her tongue hard behind her teeth.
"So…" Ranko sniffled into her microphone. Just leftovers from the cold. I'm not crying, damn it, she insisted in her mind. Not out here. If I start, I won't stop. "... before we keep going with the show… you may have noticed something… a little weird with the last song, and if it's okay, I'd like to talk about it for a little bit." Her voice was slow and halting, as if every few words, she had to wait for her shallow reservoir of strength to refill.
A smattering of cheers arose from the audience, and Ranko accepted it as permission to proceed.
High above the lower deck of seats, behind where center field would be during a Yomiuri Giants baseball game, the band's pyrotechnician slipped out of the control booth. He carefully clutched a small slip of paper in his hand. As he strode down the few steps to the concourse below, the video board switched to a wide live video shot of the stage, being transmitted from the camera mounted under the concrete booth.
"So, you guys might remember, we, um…" Ranko fidgeted with her fingers as if she might find the words she sought under one of her red-painted fingernails. "We… used to have another drummer, before Zoe joined us. His name was Ken Hirata." She enunciated his name slowly and deliberately.
Ranko smiled softly as the crowd cheered at the sound of her friend's name, nodding along with them. "We never really publicly explained why Ken left the band. Truth is, he asked us not to. But, I'm gonna tell you now. Ken was… he was really sick. And…"
"Oh, gods…" Mei gasped, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. "... please, no."
"We, umm…" Ranko swallowed hard, as if every instant that she delayed uttering her next sentence was another moment that her friend was alive in the hearts of Firebirds everywhere. "The truth is… we lost Ken this morning. He was twenty-seven fucking years old." Her voice cracked with emotion as she quoted his age.
"Oh, shit," Nabiki muttered under her breath.
I have to give the kid credit for being out there after that, I suppose, Genma considered, stroking his chin in deep thought. After the master died, I didn't stop drinking for two days straight.
Masa held up the dogeared photo in his hand, standing on his tiptoes to extend it high enough to be seen by the camera mounted under the control booth and projected onto the video screen behind the band. It showed Ken sitting on his couch, laughing as his Labrador retriever, Thunder, licked his face while seated in his lap. The photo was frayed around its edges after the better part of two years spent in Ryo's wallet, but it was the best that the group could produce on short notice. Ariel used the camera's control joystick to zoom in on it as tightly as he could. The wide-angle lens was not well-suited for the purpose, but it did the job passably enough.
A murmur rose through the crowd as the shock of Ranko's words began to set in.
Ranko wiped the corner of her eye again with a trembling left hand. "We just found out, right before we came on stage tonight. It's why we started a few minutes late. And, I'm not gonna lie, we talked about canceling the show. But, everybody was already here, and out in their seats. And you all came out, on Christmas, to hear us play. So, we're gonna get our shit together as best we can, and we're gonna do our damnedest to put on a great show for you tonight. It's what Ken would have told us to do."
Wait, you guys are still gonna do a show?! Nabiki leaned forward in her seat, glaring across the front row of stunned concertgoers at Kichirou Kondo. The man showed no visible emotion whatsoever. Probably because they knew how hard Yokai fought us on the Sydney cancellation. And they call me heartless when it comes to business. Nabiki let a long, slow breath escape through her lips. It's gonna be okay. Ranko's a tough cookie. She'll get them through this.
"Ken was… Well, he was like that. The show must go on. Always. He wasn't the loudest, or the brashest guy. We'd all be hanging out in a bar, goofing off or something. Crash'd be cracking jokes with me, Shin would be trying to pick up a girl somewhere. Jake would be watching sports on the TV and yelling at the players like he was their coach and they could hear him. Hitomi and Emi'd be matching each other shot for shot or fixing each other's makeup in the bathroom. And Ken would just… sit in the corner, nursing his beer, and watching us. Laughing with us. He was that way. He wasn't showy. He was absolutely the wrong person to be a celebrity - even more than me! But he never cared about all the fame and showy glamor stuff. He just… all he ever wanted…" Ranko's voice cracked again. "... was to make music with his friends."
Hana reached to her right, and Ito instinctively squeezed her hand. There was a resolute urgency in her eyes. "Papa, I have to get back there. I have to go to her."
Ito shook his head, leaning over in his wheelchair to get closer to Hana's ear. "Hannie, honey, you can't. Not now. If she's going to carry on, she needs to try and put this out of her mind and focus. She can't do that if you're back there comforting her and encouraging her to let it out every few seconds. There will come a time, when we're back at home, when she's ready to take the mask off and feel this. She's going to need you there for her then. Until then? The best thing you can do to help her is to let her see you sitting in the front row, supporting her and lending her your strength. Give her something she can center on."
Behind Ranko, Hitomi collapsed into Crash's arms in the dark, bawling into the lapel of his black leather jacket.
"But, what Ken was, more than anything… fuck, that guy was brave. The stuff he went through, as sick as he was, and he didn't even tell us until his body didn't give him a choice. He…"
Ranko stared daggers down at the portly man in the front row - the record executive who, less than twenty-four hours prior, had tried to coerce her into bed with him in order to prove that she herself was not hiding the same secret Ken had taken to his deathbed. "He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and everybody was willing to laugh at him for it, and he didn't care. He never complained, not once. He knew what he wanted, and he wasn't gonna let anybody tell him no."
Rolling her eyes in disgust, Ranko turned away from Kichirou Kondo to instead search for her mother in the front row. She needed strength, and she knew exactly where to look for it.
Hana clasped her hands over her heart, seeming to indicate to Ranko that she was hugging her little girl from six meters away. Oh, little star, I'm so sorry.
"My father…" Ranko continued after a long pause, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her red leather jacket. She nodded to a stone-faced Soun Tendo, seated next to Nabiki near the center of the front row. She flashed Soun a gentle smile, trying not to focus on the fact that Nabiki looked like she was doing differential calculus in her head with a three-day hangover to his immediate right. Ranko wanted to make it clear who she considered her true father to be, even though he was not currently the subject of her words. "My birth father… he used to have this saying. If someone was being exceptionally brave, he'd say that person had the heart of a dragon."
That's true, Genma thought from the press box high above the stage as she watched his only child eulogize her friend. I'm surprised she still remembers that. He sat back in his seat, a contemplative expression on his face. And that she hasn't entirely thrown out everything I taught her, after all.
Genma's calm was far removed from the reactions of everyone else in the press box, who were frantically notating Ranko's impromptu speech for their publications. The journalists, most of whom had expected to dutifully report that the show had come and gone without incident, had just had breaking news fall into their laps like a present on Christmas night.
"Well…" Ranko sniffled as she spoke, her breath shuddering slightly in her throat. "There are eleven Dragons on this stage tonight. And Ken Hirata… Ken was the heart of us all."
The redhead paced on the stage, fumbling idly with her hands. She could not bear to see the heartbreak on the faces of her fans, let alone her family and friends in the front row. "We, um… we talked backstage before we came on about, like, what you're supposed to do when stuff like this happens. Something to, ya know, do a tribute. Jake said it's pretty normal to ask for a moment of silence, and we agreed that was a good idea."
The audience fell quiet within an instant. Ranko closed her eyes and bowed her head. She hesitated for a few seconds, her brow furrowed as if wrestling with something in her mind. When she opened them again, she turned her head back to her right, and what filled her eyes was no longer sadness. Instead, her face was painted with pure, unyielding, seething hatred as she beheld the fat man in the skinny gray tie that occupied the seat closest to the aisle in the front row. No. You're not going to see me do to Ken what you did to me. Not today, Kondo.
"But I've been thinking about it, and I've decided, we're not going to do that!" Ranko declared in a stronger, almost angry voice, staring through the executive as if the very speaking of her fallen friend's name was itself an act of defiance. "Because, if there's one thing I know for sure about my friend Ken, it's that he lived too fucking much of his life in SILENCE! And he deserved BETTER!" The songstress' voice broke in equal parts fury and anguish as she all but screamed her decision.
"So, we're going to do the opposite of that, instead!" Ranko seemed to take on a new energy, moving across the front edge of the stage at nearly a run. "We're going to do what Ken didn't do for himself. What he wouldn'tdo for himself. What he couldn't. We're going to get awfully fucking LOUD for him tonight, Firebirds! Together, we are going to SHAKE THIS PLACE TO THE FOUNDATION! And tonight, wherever he is… whether his soul is here in this room with us right now, or up in the sky, or a thousand light-years from here…"
She pointed out at the crowd with her left hand. The molten steel in her eyes made it abundantly clear that her words were a command, and not a request.
"... so help me, gods, Ken Hirata is going to hear the world SCREAM HIS FUCKING NAME!"
It took a moment for the crowd to parse the singer's instructions, but a new sound gave them the guidance they sought. With a slight tilt of their black-booted foot, Zoe kicked at the bass drum that had once belonged to her bandmates' dear friend. They waited a half-second before striking it again, repeating the rhythmic bassline to provide a timing cue.
"Ken," Emi said quietly into her headset microphone as the next beat of the drum sounded, her voice quavering.
"Ken," Hitomi added, joining her girlfriend, Ranko, and half the band for the next repetition. For the first time since the band had taken the stage, she smiled.
"Ken!" came Shinji's booming bass voice through his microphone, joining the chant along with a good many Firebirds in the crowd.
"KEN! KEN! KEN!" chanted more and more of the reinvigorated crowd with each thump of the drum. The one-syllable chant filled every corner and corridor of the Tokyo Dome and spilled out into the street beyond.
Ranko prayed that the more than forty-five thousand voices were somehow loud enough to reach her beloved friend's soul in the afterlife. If she could have summoned another forty million on that Christmas night to make sure of it, she would have.