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.
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
I once did a list of end-of-series pairups, and couldn’t decide what to do with Kodachi, so I wrote “shaves her head and turns Buddhist nun.” There was a certain perverted humor in the idea of the Black Rose devoting her life to prayer and good works. Then I discovered Jai-kun’s “Black Days” and Tzigane’s “Dark Indiscretions,” and suddenly my idea didn’t seem so perverted any more.