[Ranma][FanFic] Sayonara
Jan Story
A Ranma 1/2 Fanfiction by Jan Story
All characters © by Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, etc. and used without
permission
Father is finally asleep, and I can take what I need from his room
without confronting him. I can no longer hear the sounds of Tachi's
weeping. In the garden, the crickets chirp quietly. The night is calm
and quiet. So, at long last, is my heart.
They are married. Now that I look back, I see it could never have been
any other way. It was so easy to persuade myself otherwise when all I
saw was the way they fought, but as time passed and I saw how every
attempt to break them apart only bound them closer... I should have
known from the first that I never had a chance with him. He would have
taken any of the others before me... but his first choice was always
her. Still, I pursued him as desperately as a last chance for
redemption. To me he was that redemption, the light of stars in my
darkness. He still is, even now that I have lost him forever.
I think they all expected me to do something today. Disrupt the
wedding... kill her... kill him... kill myself. A tempting though, but
something held me back. The memory of his eyes. Clean blue like the sky
after a storm, they look into my heart and see the tiny part of me that
is still sane and whole. The part of me I hadn't realized existed...
until him. I cannot disappoint those eyes, not even now. I will do
anything -- *anything* -- to be worthy of those eyes. If not in this
life, then perhaps in another. Hence this decision.
The sitting, the labor, the diet, these will not be difficult. Not for
me. The meditation, the prayers, those will be harder. A different sort
of discipline. Training to untwist my soul. Well, I have never shrunk
from hard training. Mother would not have approved. *He* would not
approve. So I pass my hands over my head and say farewell to what I
have been.
Sayonara, Father, Tachi.
Sayonara, Ranma-sama.
Sayonara, Kurobara.
In the predawn light, a shaven-headed figure in nun's robes slipped out
of the gates of the Kunou mansion. On the floor of the room that had
been Kodachi's lay a coil of long hair. In the shadows it looked like a
black rose.
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NOTES, EXPLANATIONS, ETC.
This one's a couple of years old. Back when I was first getting into
Ranma, had only seen a few tapes and hadn't discovered the Internet
yet, I was noodling around with a list of end-of-series pairings and
didn't know what to do with Kodachi, so I wrote "shaves her head and
turns Buddhist nun." (I think I was reading Heike at the time.) The
idea of the Black Rose devoting her life to prayer and good works
struck me as perversely funny. Then I found the world of online fanfic
and discovered stories like "Black Days" and "Dark Indiscretions." All
of a sudden Kodachi-as-nun didn't seem quite so funny any more, and
this little piece more or less wrote itself.
As always, constructive comments are welcome.
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