I read a beautiful, beautiful fic (admittedly, in another fandom) which made me stop and think very seriously about what I consider to be love. This is a written response to that (okay, a written explosion – this wrote itself). There is no real resolution, because this was written for real life, where things aren't perfect, and can't be changed by back-spacing a paragraph and starting again.

It's written a lot for me, and a lot for other people I know in this fandom and so many others who think that because 'their' characters are so perfect they can never find a human being that is right for them.

And it is written for anyone who has ever been downright confused by what the world describes as love, because if true love exists then why are there so many divorces?

Day 25

Drifting Without An Anchor

(Mei-Mei)

They always said to guard your heart, only give it to the right person. But she was a wide-eyed romantic, and surely love wasn't that dangerous? Love dragged clever girls like her out of poverty and sat them down beside the princes, right? Love doled out pretty dresses and wonderful, swooping, soaring songs and love let people live happily ever after.

So she was almost delighted when she realised that she had a crush on someone. Okay, he was older than her. And technically he wasn't really real, because every little girl got crushes on the storybook characters and that wasn't dangerous, because it was safe to have a crush on someone who wasn't real. You could never go too far, you could never lose something that you couldn't get back, you could never get heart-broken or dumped or abandoned...

It took her years to get over her first crush. Years. She only told her very best friend his name, but her other friends worked it out because she talked. A lot. They were kind enough to only laugh at her once. Maybe twice, if they were arguing. Most of them had crushes too. Celebrity, mostly - Julian Konzern was high up the list, as was Wales because he was beautiful and his eyes, girl, his eyes! Theirs were like hers – someone they could never touch, but desperately wished they could.

But slowly, she learnt. A crush on someone who could never respond was just as dangerous as a crush on someone who didn't care about her heart. It was too easy to make him perfect, to make him just right for her so that she always came out on top, so that she never had to face the moment when her love actually disagreed with her because lovers always fitted together perfectly, right? They 'harmonised', they were 'two halves of the same whole', they were on a perfect wavelength.

And then she fell out of love and into love almost in the same day. Gone was the childish crush, gone were the posters and the celebrity gossip because someone like that would never look at her, except maybe across the dish.

In its place was something far more terrible. This time, her affections had attached her to a real person, someone she spent a lot of time with. His hair was dark and his eyes were darker, and he was smart and funny and goodness, the other girls liked him enough! Wasn't she allowed to have a chance?

Calm, she told herself. No, he didn't just look at you and your face didn't go bright red because he told you that you pronounced that word wrong again because it really wasn't her fault, it was his for distracting her again didn't he know how handsome he was?

She made him a cake for his birthday, and gave him a hug. He blinked, and sort of hugged her back, but most of it was confusion. He smiled at her a bit more, though, and he taught her a new attack when Da Shan was busy training Chi Yun.

Her heart fluttered whenever he met her eyes.

She loved the sensations. It made her feel alive. It gave her just one more reason to be happy that she was alive- he is alive, I will see him today. She tried to avoid staring at him for too long in places where someone might catch her, but she always sat so that she could glance up if she wanted. He was beautiful, and she let her imagination run away with her.

.

The years passed, and she watched her friends in their groups, chattering about their boyfriends or girlfriends, and she smiled and thought about him, because even though it sort of hurt, tugging at an old shame like that, he was the closest she had ever come to really loving someone. And he had been gentle when he let her down (sort of. She'd run up to him in the rain and poured out her heart because that was what happened in the movies before the kiss that would make her insides explode with joy and he'd just given her a sad sort of look and whispered I'm sorry, I just never thought of you like that, Mei-Mei. And the other girls she was with at the time had rallied round in fury, even the ones he'd been flirting with an hour before, and shielded her and her poor, broken heart all the way back to the dormitories.) and so she didn't really hate him for it. They'd forgiven each other slowly over the years and she still had the necklace he'd given her for her birthday. Still wore it sometimes. He'd been a good friend. Still was. She did now understand why Da Shan had been so insistent that there should be no relationships between the members of Beylin Temple until they graduated from the training school, though.

And now it is the present and she's in her final year of training before she can step outside the gates because she never really had it in her to be a trainer (oh, she loves information and she loves blading and she loves the little kids that come in so full of fire and laughter and determination, but it's not where her heart lies) and there's only six months to go before she has to make a decision. She can't stay with the team, with her friends, because they're splitting up. Da Shan is going to America to study, Chi Yun wants to go into advanced training that she can't decide if she wants or not because blading is awesome but she wants to see the world and Chao Xin... Chao Xin is going back to live with his family.

And she's scared. She's scared because the stories always said that you know when it's the right person but she's never known anything for certain and she's always just drifted without any clear idea of where she's going, flickering from one life-plan to another like a candle in a draught.

How can she face that world which tells her every day that she is defined by what she wears, what she eats and what she looks like when the only person she has to treasure her body for exactly as it appears is her?

How long can she ignore the adverts that push and shove to sell her sex because that is the commodity that the richest end of the world runs on when she's heading out of her teens fast and she's never even been kissed?

And she's scared, because if she does find him, whoever he might be, what is he going to think of her? She's not exactly in a 'girly' sport, she knows that. She's good at what she does, and she's right up there with the boys, but what if he's intimidated by how strong she is? Isn't the point of love that he will come riding in on a white horse and sweep her off her feet? At least, that's what the stories said. What if he can't?

Sometimes she comes across girls, women, who tell her "You don't need a man to validate you! You're fine on your own, a strong woman like you doesn't need to be tied behind a man!" But she wants a partner. She wants to find someone who will reciprocate her feelings. Someone who will guard her heart as she guards his, with her life.

And no-one really tells her, for the longest time, that it's fine to want a partner. It's good to want one, a person to love and cherish and share the world and everything in it with. The problems come when she starts feeling like she needs one.

She focuses on blading, on training, on all the things that will kick-start a career in whatever she chooses. And every now and then she lets her eyes flick over the newest trainees, wondering when one of them will be him. In her head she knows he never would be there. He'd be where she least expected him. All she can do is trust that somehow, everything is going to turn out fine. But this is real life, and real life isn't like the movies.

So she hides behind veils of behaviour, pretending that she's fine, and waits for the day they will fall and she can let someone see all that she is.

And perhaps, in the falling veils, she will find out just who she can be.

This was a weird chapter to write, because it is incredibly, intensely personal. It also is the first and only one which looks at romance from the perspective of someone who has tried and does not succeed in any way. I'm not saying that romance is dead. It's just that it might be a long way off yet, and sometimes patience isn't the easiest thing to have.

This was originally meant to be the last chapter, but I moved it when I decided I didn't want this fic to end on such a low note.