Declaimer: RK doesn't belong to me.
Author's notes: this fic is dedicated to Tomoe, in response to the challenge that SiriusFan13 issued on 'Rurouni Kenshin dream' forum. Please read and enjoy a non-traditional take on Tomoe's personality.
Beauty As I See It
As I walk beside her, talking and laughing with friends, she is silent; her head is slightly bowed and her ebony hair fell down the back of her body in long strands of black silk. She makes idle conversation with the girl Misao, but can never talk to her as Kaoru could.
Tomoe, Akira's, mine, my girlfriend.
I could tell that she loves me, it's in her eyes every time she stops and glances at me. Ever since we had begun dating a few months ago after I had gotten permission from her scary father, I had fallen in love with her, as she loves me.
I remember Tomoe being the shy girl when we went to kindergarten together. When she fell in the mud, I would help her up and she wouldn't even look at me, uttering a small "thank you" before walking away to rejoin her few friends. She had been a mystery to me.
Following the years in high school and finally, university, we had miraculously been classmates for most of the classes, and I had gotten to really know her, to understand her.
She is still that same shy girl back in kindergarten, the girl that seldom spoke and always had her head bowed humbly. But now, she had learned to communicate her feelings with one glance, and it's that glance, which told me that the time is right, that our time is now.
Everything could be traced back to one spring evening. I had just flunked an exam and drunken myself to another world. As I sat out on the bench alone in the park while the rain pelted against my sore face, she appeared. White as a ghost against the orange glow of the streetlight, she glided towards me and stopped in front of my swimming vision. She draped a coat over my shoulders and gave the slightest of smiles. I had never seen her smile like that before, and I had never seen that expression in her eyes either. Then she sat beside me and talked, it was as if she had been keeping her thoughts coiled up inside her, and she poured everything out to me that night. We had talked for hours, about her life, her studies, her family, as the rain soaked both of us until we both got a cold.
Now, as I say good-bye to my friends Kenshin, Kaoru, Aoshi, Misao, and waving till their silhouettes entered into their individual cars and drove off for the evening, I look to Tomoe. She looks up and smiles at me; a genuine smile of happiness.
I sometimes think that if Tomoe had not found me, her life would have been miserable. And I am only grateful to the gods that I found her too.