Ranma 1/2 belongs to others.  Don't sue, I'm broke.
	C&C wanted, flames will be C&Ced.

Broken Hearts
By Ryo Hoshi

     I hadn't expected there to be anyone left alive.  I had thought it would
be safe to scrounge the building, removing food, clothing, and medical
supplies.  Stuff we always had little of.
     I was not looking for survivors.
     The citadel had collapsed days ago.  The day that they were planning to
execute the spy.  Almost everyone had gone, leaving my family, the outcasts,
alone in the village.
     I had wanted to go.  I had always wanted to join them, to be part of the
continual party, to eventually be one of the new ruling class of the world.  I
had laughed at my parent's warnings that all those who joined them would die
horribly and go on o an even worse afterlife.
     I think, now, that my parents were right.
     But, let me get back to him.
     I found him, face down, under what must have been several tons of rubble.
Most of his clothes had, well, suffered the fate of clothes and people who get
left under several tons of rubble.  He was bruised badly, and bleeding out of
many cuts.  I rolled him onto his back.
     Black hair, I thought to myself.  So he can't be one of them.  A young
handsome face...
     Well, my thoughts from that point got a bit hentai.
     The hentai stuff ended, however when he groaned.
     I leaped back out of surprise, then scolded myself for being scared and
went to get him out of rubble.
     Several weeks later, he woke up.  In a month, he was talking.  By the end
of the year, he was walking.
     But he never did get his memory back.  He could only remember his name,
Ranma Saotome, and one other name.
     Akane.
     Neither of us knew who Akane was, or why it should be the only other
thing of his old life he remembers.
     We eventually fell in love, and married.  But sometimes, he seems so far
away.  And I wonder, then, who Akane was to him.

     Ranma Saotome looked around, stunned.
	"An avalanche..."  He hugged his six year old son closer to him.
	He spent the rest of the day trying to drown his busy mind in work. He buried
his wife and gathered the essentials for returning to Akane.
	He had spent too long away, without his memory.  He could only hope she would
forgive him...

	*** *** ***
	Well.  That's done.
	This is something of a sequel to A New Beginning.  This was written to answer
one of the questions I left unanswered in it.
	In the next part of this series of shortfics, I'll be telling about what
happened with Shampoo and Mousse.
	Ranma's return to Nerima will be covered soon, in a full-fledged fic, because
I really doubt that his return to Nerima will be a short story...


		--Ryo Hoshi