Were the trees always this color? She has little time to reflect on it before she is off again, being led on not by her own feet but by the tugging of his hand. He's got his fingers tight around her wrist, but not so tight that it would hurt. Just tight enough to remind her that she is connected to him. The trees can't have always looked like this. She knows that if they had always been this vivid, she would have remembered.
He's laughing now. She has never heard him laugh, and she finds that she rather likes the sound. His laugh isn't hollow, or mocking, or a sure sign of insanity like the laughs she's heard over the past few years. It's a childish laugh, an innocent laugh, and she is reminded of how young he is.
If the youth is returning to his pale body, then she is aging in comparison. He pulls her toward a street corner he seems to like, and everything is surreal and unfamiliar when it shouldn't be because she knows she walked there when she was but a girl. Everything is bright and new and she knows that if she didn't feel so old she would have kissed him, and that if he didn't feel so small he would have done the same. But she feels such freedom and such happiness and nothing matters anymore, nothing that mattered to her mere hours before. He lets go of her wrist and runs ahead, into the sun, a bright blinding light against which the dark outline of his body stands out strong.
She hangs back and watches the gray lift from his skin.