✧ ˖ @purerationality asked:
[ SONG ] - nothing raises spirits quite like music, and nowhere could possibly need their spirits raised more. it only takes one person with an instrument and someone to start to dance before a little section of the city becomes just that much brighter. grab a friend or a stranger and take a moment to forget about the worse things in the world.
the chorus of singing voices is far from perfect. some are off-pitch. others are a little too slow, a little too fast. some have forgotten the words. others have skipped ahead to an upcoming verse. still, the people sing and dance and laugh to their hearts' content — starkly alive against the pure white landscape. their unified, cacophonous song — interwoven with the shuffling of whirling feet — is almost magical. watching this, “dr. mei” helplessly remembers scenes of bygone days: the parties that offered increasingly-brief distractions, how with every year the atmosphere grew less and less real, the attendants fewer and fewer in number. but here, no one can say what fate will await them all. the comparison — sentimental, reflexive — is surface-level. a product of nostalgia, not reason. but she remains where she is: at a distance from the living. except — something compels her to turn around. when she does, the figure she sees — that smile, that shade of pink — almost surprises her. what a strange universe. what was it that fu hua had once said to her? all i seem to find at this point are ghosts of the previous era. how are you here? “elysia,” she finds herself saying, as if relieved. stepping aside, turning half-way back toward the crowd of resilient people, “dr. mei” wonders if elysia would find it silly to think of themselves as ghosts. “are you planning to join them?”
She looks just the way that Elysia remembers, the only way that she ever has. There is something to the doctor that is just like that-- sterile, unchanging, like her human existence remains as stubbornly the same as the woman herself. It is like reliving a memory, the background changed but this the same.
And her greeting, as though it has been some days since last they met and not generations, earns from her a quiet laugh.
"I might," she answers as though she had been thinking of exactly that, stepping forward until she's stopped by Mei's side. "It really is so lovely, isn't it? How everyone can still smile, even like this. Reminds you of another time, am I right~?"
The memory comes to her too, of parties each more somber than the last. Celebrations on the same nights as funerals, until the air in the room became too heavy with worry that those nights became silent. Before the world seemed to stop spinning, it was as though they had personally ensured that it did. How odd to remember a time when they were younger, as though either of them look any different.
Elysia reaches for one of the other woman's hands. The sort of touch that is more like a question, lithe fingers curling around her wrist. "I think we've spent long enough on the outside of things like this, don't you?"
The way her eyes glitter, she knows the doctor will understand. Even if the outside looks different for either of them.
A gentle tug, a step backwards towards the crowd.
"Just for a minute, 'kay? I won't tell Kevin he missed it~"
