/Title and summary from the heartbreakingly beautiful "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac./
For my RenMei fellows, particularly Eve-chan, and many others on Tumblr.
Mirror in the Sky
-what is love?-
Her mind was blank the first time she met him again.
She supposed she should have caught something about his appearance, about the way he now towered over her, the way his hair was almost as long as hers, and the way he was wearing a neat suit instead of traditional Chinese clothes. But she didn't. She merely stared at him, her eyes as empty as her mind, as they both stopped dead in their tracks on this crowded-but-not-quite-so street of Paris.
They most certainly weren't going out, or were even just friends, she told herself. It was true that they accidentally met on the street an absurd number of times, and often ended up walking the other to wherever they were about to go to, but there was always a distance of 4 feet or so between them. And it wasn't as if they talked to each other at all. But a small part of her, the fairytale-loving little girl, the part who didn't have any acquaintances that didn't have a ghost around them (and even that wasn't much), nagged her with hope of a small, small friendship of some sort. She pushed it down and stomped on it and crashed it with a hammer full of needles. She could have friendship, just not with Tao Ren.
However little they acknowledged each other in their all-too-often time together, she did manage to gather that he was in Europe to study Electronics Engineering, and that he was going to set up a company of his own back home once he got his degree. It sounded hopeful and exciting to her. She herself was studying pre-law, and she could swear she heard him snicker upon knowing this. So she straightened up and kept her head high like the stubborn sixteen-year-old she was; this arrogant good-for-nothing bastard didn't have any right to judge her career of choice. She was more than thankful to be given the chance to learn how the real, modern, civil laws were supposed to be; and by being a lawyer, she might be able to maintain justice without having to pull out one or two torture devices.
(He snickered more still, probably at her naiveté; and she had to count to ten to stay civil and not whack him in the head.)
They kept on doing that; being the only friends each other had in the most important time of their lives, and not acknowledging it at all. That was the way they had always been, she was most comfortable with it, and she could tell he was too. Forget about life debts and first not-kisses; they didn't want to involve with anyone on a personal level when they were both striving to be something more than unprogressive shamans who weren't of any use to the modern society. And they would deny that they started to seek out the other's face in the crowd, look for the only one who understood their preference for little words and little showing, who didn't preach or tried to empathize, who accepted without question. It wasn't the time for ties and relationships and working on feelings that stemmed from nowhere.
(everywhere.)
Mont. St. Michael was beautiful on a summer night. Stars scattered across the navy blue sky, and the towers and houses of the town in which she was born seemed to be illuminating in the dark.
She didn't know how she had gone here, or why he was right beside her. But again, she didn't know how they had gone out of their ways to be in each other's company that first day either. All she knew was that at that moment, there wasn't only Him and Her; there was Them. They weren't holding hands, they weren't even looking at each other, but there was no distance between them.
She didn't bid him goodbye when he got on the plane to complete his credits in America. She didn't expect to find the ring and the "Marry me." in the mail 3 months after that.
It was no Sleeping Beauty. There were no true love's kisses and falling in love at first sight. They were Yin and Yang, silver and raven, ruby and golden. And they were perfect together in all the most imperfect ways.
-End-
A/N: *ducks head* I know, it's really short. I'm kind of getting back to my roots of using little words here. This actually 's just a compilation of my RenMei muses: the reason(s) I think they are meant for each other, and the lot of feelings the first picture of them together in Shaman King Remix Track 10 gave me. My RenJeanne Manifesto, if you will. The scene of them standing at Mont. St. Michael is CANON. Thanks for reading. Please be patient with me; I swear I will come back full-time after I settle with my college application. Please review!