[ MOVIE - COMEDY? ] Shoulders hunched, Sara curls into herself with sardonic laughter, the only one in the entire room that does. The villain is beyond redemption and unapologetic moreover, so she feels nothing watching him get his comeuppance and meet a deserved and grisly end. His type never learn, of course. She knows men who commit far worse crimes and receive no justice for their actions. Fiction loves pretending otherwise.
Her hollow laugh dwindles to nothing, though it never fully reached her eyes in the first place. The room goes quiet again save for the voices projected by magic while Sara peers at Maria with a curious, questioning look as if to ask, "Didn't you find it funny too?" and "Is it just me?"
Instead, she only says, "Sorry, I interrupted. Do you want to rewatch the show together?"
There's a lot you can learn about someone in even the ordinary moments. It is an ordinary thing to sit side-by-side with a friend (may she dare?) and watch a play, or a moving picture -- a... 'movey', she'd heard someone call it? -- just as it is an ordinary thing to look up at the stars together, too.
'Less ordinary,' says the silence when Sara laughs; 'unordinary,' the leveled stares only pretending to be subtle accuse. Even the story plays no music now, stewing in its own significance, the villain laid to his grisly end, and Sara laughs.
Maria wonders what it means. It doesn't sound like a joyous thing, and beside her the girl curls into herself, the sound bitter like a summer storm. It tapers away, leaving no relief in its wake, and the air is humid still, heavy still with all that had preceded it.
Truth be told, Maria did not find it funny either. It is her life's work to heal wounds like those that had laid the villain low, and her heart's work to love more than she should -- to hope that even at the end of a villain's path, there might be room enough to turn back. That is her great flaw, is it not? She is too selfish to ever take back her hand.
But she likes the sound of Sara's laughter. Not the fact that it sounds bitter to her ears, but to hear it at all and know that laughter itself still exists within her. She hears it, and she thinks: What is it that makes her laugh? and I'm happy that she can.
"Hee hee..." So when Sara laughs, it isn't alone; when she looks to the girl beside her, she will find rosy eyes narrowed into crescents, tender in their corners as Maria laughs too, soft giggles seeping into the space that silence left. The scene continues, all other eyes turn away, but in this moment she still looks at Sara and tries to learn.
A hand comes up to her mouth, guarding a secret for the two of them.
"Yeah," Maria whispers back, "I think I'd like that a lot!"
