SAYONARA
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.