((I’m sorry, but after reading the latest chapter in ‘Here We Are We’re Back Again’, I couldn’t help myself. Have my headcanons about Ballora/Lara would be like after the events of your story.))
Sometimes, after it was all over, she felt the urge to dance. Her new legs (and they were such lovely legs, long and elegant and able to bend in ways she never could before) itched with the desire to move, to spin, to leap across the stage like never before. But she had became an expect in ignoring her body, when she was trapped on stage with nothing but the pains of electric shocks and her own mistreated form, and she could use that here, if she had to.
Lara didn’t want to dance. She didn’t have to dance- but at the same time, she did.
She never told any of the others, how could she? It was not that that none of them would understand, almost all of the other animatronics have been forced to do things, unsavory, horrible things… Compared to that, what was a few twirls?
Sometimes she found herself standing en pointe without even realizing it. Sometimes she couldn’t force her heels downwards, even after she realized what she was doing.
(Michelle checked and checked again, but there was nothing wrong with her body. Lara understood that it was etched into her programming, if not her very being, but it was nonetheless disconcerting.)
Whenever it happened, the feeling in her legs or her unruly heels or the dark thoughts that followed, Lara sought an escape. She socialized with her fellows, loudly and openly with no fear of reprisal. She spent time with Rica, as her Chica decided to call herself, and somehow that was different from spending time with anyone else, (even Mike, who won her eternal gratitude after what he did for them, and Bonny, who always managed to make her smile even on the worst days.) She curbed the urge to dance into other creative enterprises, such as singing (which everyone seemed to think she was somehow good at, even if Lara personally thought her voice was too deep and too somber to be truly enjoyable) and the violin (which she was… not as good at.) And of course, she painted.
In the beginning, once she was in her new perfect body, her restored sight was almost too much to bear. Everything was so bright, so full of light and color that it overloaded her. She refused to let Michelle lower the intensity of her vision, or even accept the sunglasses Mike tried to give her; she had missed these sights for so long, and she refused to let them be taken from her, even through all the pain. And slowly, her vision adjusted and she was able to fully appreciate the beauty around her. She wanted to keep that beauty with her, no matter what, and that’s when she began to copy it down, not trusting photographs to capture the emotions in the same way something drawn by hand would.
She started simply, little drawings on the corners of napkins and things such as that. Lara didn’t even think anyone noticed, and yet she was presented with a sketchbook and a set of colored pencils, and from them she moved to watercolors, then pastels until finally she was painting with oils on a canvas.
Her subjects were wide and varied, sometimes her friends, sometimes landscapes, sometimes things she had never seen before she was rescued, sometimes things she never wanted to see again. She was messy and inspired, imprecise and imperfect and she loved it. She painted things as the way she felt them, rather than the way they looked, and while the results were never perfect, she always finished with a smile (and occationally a little paint) on her face.
((I chose painting because it seemed to be the best way for her to harness her creative energy into something the most unlike the dancing she was forced to do. The dancing was forced and regimented, always going through the same basic routines, while painting is wild and with a different result, no matter what she does. It’s also the most 'free’ artform I could think of, since she has complete creative control over what she creates.
Of course, this is all obviously headcanons, so you don’t have to encorperate any of this into your series, but I just thought you might be happy to know you inspired me, even if it’s just a rambling sort of drabble written at 1:30 in the morning.))
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I don’t know if you are okay with me posting this, but I love it so much. I love it I love it I love it.