snowhare@xmission.com (Snowhare)

Much thanks goes to the FFML. Their comments have greatly improved this
story.

This story is based on the anime episode "Am I...Pretty? Ranma's
Declaration of Womanhood" from Ranma 1/2. All characters are based on
characters created by Takahashi Rumiko, who holds the copyrights on
Ranma 1/2. This fanfic is my original creation and its copyright is
mine.


"Hello Again" by Benjamin Franz

She wept soundlessly into the night beneath the bridge, hugging her
knees against her chest for the pain from inside, unaware of the
presence of the second girl - who's own emotions were less than
steady. The thoughts that flowed through her head would have been
familiar to either of them, if they had been spoken aloud: 'That
incredible jerk! How could he?! Why couldn't they understand how she
felt?' The tears streaked silently down the cheeks of the small
redhaired girl, sitting there on the bank of the river.

                *                *                *

Akane's eyes brimmed with unspilled tears as she gripped Ranma's
shoulders and looked directly into her eyes.

"Ranma, change back! I don't care if you are rude and insensitive. I
complain a lot, but this isn't you! If you stay like this, who will
I...what will I..."  The sentence trailed into silence, leaving the
ambiguous questions hanging in the dark air of Akane's bedroom.

Ranma looked up at Akane, her eyes pleading for understanding, the
height difference, as always, reversed when Ranma was in her girl
form. 'I...know how you feel, but this is who I am. The male Ranma
you knew doesn't really exist anymore.'

The flare of anger from Akane formed an almost visible aurora around
her, 'You idiot! You aren't Ranma at all! If you are going to be
that way, you can stay a girl forever as far I care!' The attack
with the wooden sword missed, whether because Akane wasn't as
serious about killing Ranma as she appeared or because of Ranma's
remarkable speed in avoiding the strikes undetermined. Regardless,
they quickly moved through the dojo and outside by the fishpond as
Akane expressed her frustration in a relentless assault and Ranma
continuously dodged.

Ranma never saw the rock she tripped over. The unexpected backwards
tumble into the fishpond, and the crack of her skull against the rock
edge of the pool for the second time that day seemed quite loud in the
quiet of the night.

'Ranma!'

                *                *                *

Doctor Tofu had left, and a subdued Akane sat on her folded legs
next to the still unconscious Ranma as Kasumi replaced the moist
folded cloth on Ranma's forehead. Doctor Tofu had said that the
concussion didn't appear life threatening, but that Ranma should
definitely take it easy for the next week, and that if he
experienced any dizzyness or lose of balance the next day, he should
come into the clinic.

Akane sat silently watching the softly breathing Ranma and tried to
sort her thoughts, but they insisted on repeating again and again the
moment when she saw Ranma trip backwards and knew that Ranma was going
to crack her head on the rocks, again.

What utterly shamed her was the flash that had shot through her head
in that instant hoping that the fall would kill Ranma, only then
followed by the horrified realization that it might really kill him.
It had a wierd kind of symmetry for the day - she was spending her
evening as she had spent her morning - wondering if Ranma would be ok
when he woke up.

                *                *                *

The day had _started_ fairly normally: Ranma and Genma engaging in
early morning fighting practice. Akane trying her hand at cooking
breakfast. The rest of the household finding plausible reasons not to
eat it.

With his typical disregard for everyone around him while fighting with
Genma, Ranma had managed to plant Akane's face in the platter of food
she had just spent an hour on. She had then planted the black haired
boy in the fishpond: head first. Nothing unusual for a morning in the
Tendo household so far.

What wasn't usual was that, when the wave of water had cleared, rather
than having a spluttering girl with a red pigtail in the fishpond,
there had been an unconscious girl with a red pigtail in the fishpond.
With a large lump on her head where she had bounced off a very hard
rock.

When she woke up things had started to get strange, even by Tendo
dojo standards.

"Why are you talking so weird!"

Akane glowered at Ranma.

"I can't help it, I'm a woman."

The declaration had dumbfounded Akane momentarily. The following
explosion from her was awe inspiring, the flight by Ranma from the
room unexpected, and the confusion left behind for everyone else in
the room, well, confusing.

The rest of the day had been surreal. Akane had stalked Ranma's
manhood both through direct assaults of argument and hot water, and
sneak attacks such as taking Ranma to the store to buy her some
women's clothing. The last had backfired badly. Akane had ended up
embarrassed as Ranma had delightedly tried on various bras, panties
and other women's clothing. She escaped the store with the relatively
minor damage of having bought Ranma a 35,000 yen dress.  Of the
restroom incident, the less said the better.

By that evening, Akane was worn down. She still didn't believe Ranma's
declaration, but she had used nearly all her energy (as well as more
than a small chunk of her savings) up for the day. She went to bed,
determined to start fresh in the morning.

The midnight knock on her door by a frightened to be alone Ranma,
asking to be allowed to sleep in Akane's room had not been welcome,
but the night's conclusion at the fishpool had not been an
improvement, in hindsight.

                *                *                *

'Nnngg...' Ranma stirred, and then blinked her eyes to clear her vision
against the morning light. Where??? On her futon, in her room. She
touched the back of her head. 'Owwww!!!'. She had tripped and then...and
then...she didn't remember after that until she woke up. She must have
hit her head again or something. She touched her head again. Definitely
hit it. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at the form of
Akane, asleep, slouched over while still sitting next to Ranma's futon.
Oh.

'She stayed up all night watching you, you know.' floated an even
male voice from behind Ranma. Ryouga. Of course. He didn't look like
he had gotten any sleep, either. Ranma pulled herself into a sitting
position, being careful to keep herself covered. 'I thought so,' she
said quietly.

'How do you feel?'

From the look in Ryouga's eye, Ranma knew that the question didn't
apply just to the bruise on the back of her head:
'Beatup, tired....female.'

Just then, Akane murmured something in her sleep. Ryouga motioned to
Ranma to come outside the room. Ranma hesitated, and then wrapped
the blanket around Akane's shoulders before leaving. She closed the
door gently behind her before turning and facing Ryouga.

'You know. That's why you spend so much time as P-chan.'

Not a question.

Ryouga nodded.

'You never spent much time in your cursed form - I spent MONTHS in
mine while still in China. Its not going away. I didn't tell you
because I hoped it wouldn't happen to you. Maybe you would be lucky.
Maybe I was just unlucky. Maybe a lot of things.'

Softly, 'So what do I do?'

'I don't know. It was different for me. People _eat_ pigs...so I
didn't have much of a choice: It was either life as human shaped pig
or lunch as a pig shaped human.' Ryouga grimaced. The latter had
nearly come true too many times. He still remembered the time Shampoo
tried to serve him up for lunch to Ranma.

Ranma understood the source of Ryouga's phenomenal depression now -
and why he had never told anyone why. Having the conviction to your
soul that your proper form was a pig while actually being *and
knowing* you were human would be enough to drive almost anyone into
a world class depression. It was a miracle the internal conflict
hadn't actually driven Ryouga insane.

In its own way, Ranma's situation was both better and worse than
Ryouga's. Better in that she actually _could_ live as a girl and
maybe even be accepted. Worse for the same reason - she didn't have
the compelling anchor to her original form that kept Ryouga from
losing himself to his cursed form.

The tall dark haired boy with the yellow bandana looked with bleak
eyes at at the short redheaded girl.

'Welcome to Hell.'

                *                *                *

It had been two weeks now, and Akane was in a white rage. She
couldn't take it out on Ranma. For starters it would be like kicking
a puppy, and second off she couldn't lay a finger on her anyway.
Ranma's speed advantage as a girl was insurmountable: Ranma didn't
want to fight, and was fast enough to make sure she didn't have to.

'Hiiyaaa!' <crash>

<plonk>

'Hiiyaaa!' <crash>

<plonk>

The sound of cinderblock after cinderblock being reduced to gravel
went on until Akane ran out of cinderblocks. She had gotten so good
at demolishing the blocks that Ranma had begun to wonder if she had
mastered Ryouga's breaking point technique somehow: When she was done,
what had to be accomplished for clean up was better accomplished
with a broom than by picking up the individual pieces.

Akane came inside, her gi plastered to her from the sweat of her
workout, her hair...limp. Ranma peeked at her from around the corner
at the top of the staircase, deciding if she would have to run or not.

'Come _down_ from there, Ranma!', snapped Akane. 'I'm not going to
attack you. I've calmed down.'

Ranma slowly came down the stairs, but looked ready to bolt at the
first hint of trouble. Akane might have come down from the absolute
rage she had been in, but she was scarcely completely calm.

'What did you think you were doing?!', Akane fumed.

'I *can't* go to the *boy's* gym class! It would be perverted!'
Ranma's damnable beaten puppydog eyes trembled as she answered
Akane's question.

'Ohhh!!! YOU!!!'

Akane moderated her voice somewhat as she saw Ranma prepare to run.
It had taken a week of periodically yelling at recently vacated air
and a conversation with Kasumi before she had learned to clamp down
on her volume when talking to Ranma now.

'You're *NOT* a girl! You're a *GUY*!'

'But...'

This now daily argument wound to its inevitable conclusion of Akane
storming to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her.

Ranma sat on the bottom step of the stairs, depressed. The arguments
with Akane were the worst of all. She always felt physically ill for
hours afterwards. She didn't *want* to upset Akane, it was just that
Akane couldn't understand that Ranma's change of perspective wasn't
something she *chose*. It just...was the way it was.

Father, Shampoo and Mousse would be spared this, at least. When Ranma
and Ryouga had talked with Cologne, she had quickly figured out a
formula would prevent that part of the curse from taking effect.
Unfortunately, it had to be used _before_ it activated. It was of no
use to either Ryouga or Ranma.

Cologne was of the opinion that it was irreversable once it took full
effect, and they were inclined to believe her:  She might be a
wrinkled little monster, but she had 300 years of experience to draw
on. And with the tight reign she had on Shampoo, that problem had
really ended before it started.

Although, Ranma hadn't quite known what to make of Cologne's sardonic
comment of 'how would you tell the difference?' just before
administering the formula to Genma...

Sitting on the stairs thinking about that, she didn't hear her father
approach.

'Boy.'

'Boy.'

'BOY!'

Ranma jumped at the shout. She hadn't heard the first two calls, but
she would have had to be more than deaf to miss the third.

'You're breaking your father's heart!'

Oh no. Time for speech number five. She really didn't want to hear it,
but it would be disrespectful to refuse to listen.

'How can you do this? Don't you care that this means the end of the
Anything Goes School of Martial Arts?' The speech wound through how
his father had spent his whole life preparing Ranma to take over
the school, and so on...and so on....and so on.....

She finally escaped by telling him she had to help Kasumi prepare
dinner. Ranma had always been a good cook, the practice she got with
Kasumi was turning her into an outstanding one. Combined with Genma's
enslavement to his stomach, it had stalled him long enough for her to
vanish into the kitchen.

She had been spending more and more time helping Kasumi, not just
because she really liked cooking and other homemaking things (which
she did, actually), but because it provided a space where no one tried
to convince her to 'change her mind'. Kasumi never did that - perhaps
instinctively understanding that while people could do as they wished,
they couldn't always wish as they wished. Whatever the reason, Ranma
was grateful to her for her support.

Ranma had gone into hypercute mode initially. The overreaction to her
new situation was caused by the combination of her recently acquired
emotional filters (well bred girls in 500 or so AD were not normally
taught to be swaggeringly independant) and her own upbringing as the
male heir to 'School of Anything Goes Martial Arts' (with a less than
informed male Satome perspective of what it meant to actaully be a
woman).

The resulting bout of hypercuteness had lasted about a week before
Ranma began to realize that she didn't *have* to be quite that
extreme. But it would be a _long_ time before she would ever feel
comfortable taking the lead in anything over a man: Neither her
upbringing as Saotome Genma's son nor her emotions from the drowned
girl of fifteen hundred years earlier gave any support to her for
that.

She was still _quite_ cute - and some things more fundamental about
her would never return to what they were before.

                *                *                *

Akane was openly contemptuous of Ranma's "squeemishness" about blood.
When Ranma had gotten her first period, Akane had been absolutely no
help. It had been Kasumi who had calmed the panicked Ranma down and
explained what was happening to her. She had never stayed in her
female form long enough for it to happen to her before.

The same went for Ranma's new found pacificism, her enthusiasm towards
doing housework, and above all her reaction to guy's underclothes while
doing laundry.

But the thing that ultimately led to disaster was the hair.

'I can't believe you!'

Sitting with both legs folded neatly beneath her, Ranma kept her eyes
on the low table as Akane stormed, but didn't respond.

'And you!'

Rounding on Kasumi now, Akane continued, 'You actually helped Ranma
do it!'

Kasumi responded very mildly, 'Now Akane, it _is_ her hair.'

'Ranma isn't a she at all! He's just a stupid _PERVERT_!!!!'

Akane glared at Ranma, daring her to dispute the statement.

The hair in question was neatly trimmed into a midback tail, quite
full, and very feminine over the flower print kimono Ranma was
wearing. Nothing unusual, unless you consider that up until about
thirty minutes earlier it had been a thin eight inch braided ponytail,
tied with a dragon's whisker. The whisker was still present, but now
hidden in a scarf that acted as a gather for the end of the flowing
hair.

To achieve that remarkable transformation, Ranma had removed the
dragon's whisker and suffered being changed into a male long enough
for explosive hair growth to change the short braid into a long mane.
The growth itself was the result of one of those accidents that seemed
to always plague Saotome Ranma: he had inadvertantly eaten a dragon's
whisker while training in China - a side effect of which was wild hair
growth. Growing the whole length to below midback had taken less than
twenty seconds.  The whisker stopped the growth in her male form, and
the out of control growth effect didn't affect her female form. She
kept the whisker 'just in case'.

After Ranma changed (with relief) back into her female form, Kasumi
had trimmed the red hair into an attractive tail and showed her how to
brush and maintain it. Akane's outrage had boiled over when she had
walked into Kasumi's room after dinner and found her sister arranging
the scarf that tied the end of Ranma's new mane of hair.

'Its bad enough that pervert is doing this, but you're helping him!'

Attracted by the yelling, the other members of the Tendo household
began drifting into Kasumi's room from their various post-dinner
activities. Nabiki's reaction on seeing the new look of Ranma's hair
was delight: Kuno-baby would pay a _fortune_ for the pictures. She
would be able to raise the price at least 5,000 yen per shot...

Tendo Soun and Saotome Genma's reactions were considerably less
favorable.

'Saotome, I think this has gone far enough.'

Genma nodded solemnly in agreement, and they simultaneously grabbed
for the seated girl, a pair of scissors materializing in Genma's hand
from Kasumi's dresser top. The chase that ensued did quite a bit of
damage to all six major surfaces of the room, but Ranma was too fast
to be caught that way. When they had finally pressed her too hard, she
had escaped out of Kasumi's window, leaving Genma and Soun behind,
panting and empty handed.

After a long time looking out the window, Genma spoke without turning
around.

'Tendo.'

'Yes.'

'I've got a plan.'

                *                *                *

Genma looked ridicuously satisfied with himself talking to Ranma's
back as she sat on the edge of the dojo entrance next to Akane.

'If you won't be a man and carry on the Saotome School of Anything
Goes Martial Arts, I will have no choice but to disown you and tell
your mother that you died while training.'

The words from her father froze Ranma in shock. The hope of someday
being re-united with her mother as parent and child had always been
Ranma's most cherished dream. Every visit by 'Auntie Saotome' was always
an internal battle to fight the urge to reveal who 'Ranko' really was.

Genma was saying that he was going to take that dream away from her,
and more, was going to disown Ranma, leaving her with no family at
all. In order to fight it, she would have to reveal her secret to her
mother - which would result in her and her father's death at Nodoka's
hands, making good on that incredibly stupid promise her father had
made when they had left home so long ago.

The alternative was to deny _everything_ that she was now, marry
Akane, and live a violent life as a man and martial artist for the
rest of her life. It was the kind of slimy plan only Saotome Genma
would have come up with. He was undoubtedly sure that Ranma would cave
in and do as he wished. What it didn't account for was that Ranma's
pacificism and identity as a girl went down to her core now. She
_couldn't_ live that way. It would kill her as surely as Nodoka's
sword.

As the full scope of the trap her father had put her in became apparent
to her, the blood drained from her cheeks, leaving them a pale white
against the dusk.

Only Akane really saw Ranma's face before she lept into the twilight
outside the dojo: What she had seen there had caused her to race after
Ranma, leaving Genma and her father standing in the doorway, mystified by
the two girls reactions.

                *                *                *

It wasn't like the times Ranma had run from fights at the dojo before.
Ranma had just been avoiding violence then. Not this time. There had
been hopeless despair in Ranma's eyes when she leaped into the night -
the look of someone who had nothing to keep on living for. Even Ryouga
at his worst never had looked quite like that. This had scared Akane.

Akane had never followed Ranma before when she fled fights at the dojo
before. She had just assumed that Ranma would return eventually. She
wasn't sure that would happen this time - Ranma's face had been...had
been...

When she had finally caught up with the fleeing girl, they were at a
foot bridge crossing the river. Ranma hadn't noticed Akane's arrival,
too caught up in her pain. The tears visible on Ranma's cheeks had
rocked Akane to her heels. Ranma? Crying?

She hadn't ever seen Ranma cry before. Oh, a few tears had been
squeezed out of his eyes by sheer pain once or twice when he had
really been hurt during a fight, but that wasn't crying: _This_ was
the weeping of a soul beyond hope.

In the months since Ranma had hit her skull in the fishpond, Akane had
been relentless in her harassment of what she thought of as "Ranma's
Girl Act". For the first time in that entire time, she seriously
thought about the possibility that it wasn't an act, and that it
wasn't going to change a whole lot. It was very hard for her to even
consider it since if it wasn't an act, Akane had committed two
incredibly horrible crimes against the person in front of her.

From one perspective, it could be argued that she had killed her
fiance (even if she hadn't meant to), and done her best to make life a
hell for an innocent girl ever since.  That was a bitter pill to
swallow.  But from that point of view, she owed the girl in front of
her in ways she might never be able to repay.

It was indeed a bitter pill - Akane's own cheeks were damp by the time
she finished swallowing it. This was nothing on the grief that would
come later when she paid her private respects to her ex-fiance, but
for now it was enough to determine her actions. She would settle
things with her father later. Whatever else happened, Ranma was _NOT_
going to be without a family.

The words were almost the first ones she had ever said to Ranma,
before she had found out that the 'girl' she had just met was a boy
cursed to take the body of a girl. She had written them in her journal
in sarcastic anger that day, and read them many times since when she
was angry at Ranma. This time, they meant much more than they had when
she had originally spoken them, and carried no sarcastic intent.
Perhaps it would give Ranma a small new reason to continue to live.

She opened her mouth, and in the dark night beneath a Tokyo bridge,
said the words that closed the chapter of her life when she had been
engaged to a boy named Ranma:

"I'm Akane."

"Would you like to be friends?"