"[To Mino] I think photography is like borrowing someone else's eyes. Even if your eyes are closed, you can borrow someone else's…[quietly, to herself] I see it. I want to see…Canaan."
~Maria, episode 1.
A/N: Set pre-series. In episode 1, Maria explains why she likes photography. It struck me as interesting that Canaan's synesthesia and Maria's photography are both visual preoccupations, and I wondered if there was any link. So here's the result, just a short interpretive drabble…
She'd asked Canaan to explain her "colors," once.
Canaan had looked up from the little red string she'd been detangling, a tiny frown appearing between her eyes. "It just is," she'd said, innocent as a child. "He told me it was special, that I use all my senses at once. It's just how I see."
And Maria's heart had melted, and she'd smiled and reached out to straighten the string, winding it around her friend's fingers once again. It was so easy to open Canaan to her world of affection and amusing games. But there were pieces of Canaan that she couldn't know, no matter how many lengths of red string she knotted and cast out to reach her. A special girl like Canaan shines too brightly for average people like her to see. She'd be blinded if she tried.
That doesn't stop her from wanting to try.
Now Canaan is gone, and she is home once more, she fills the emptiness with her newly chosen career. She'd always liked snapping pictures to remember vacation destinations and friends, but the little hobby she'd always taken for granted morphed into an obsession. These days, she wants to travel to the most vibrant places she can find, and immerse herself in the chaos of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. With a click of her camera, she makes a visual claim on her many sensory experiences. To view her images on a computer screen is too sterile; she uses a film camera so that she feel the photo between her fingers, smell the faint scent of paper and ink.
And maybe, just maybe, she can learn to truly see, to know brightness with her eyes and ears and nose and bare skin without flinching. Maybe then her strings will lead her back to grey eyes, pale hair, calloused but oh-so-gentle hands, and a secret smile.
With a cry of "Amazing!" on her lips and a worn red string in her pocket, she lifts her camera to eyelevel, trying to hold a little piece of Canaan's world in the palm of her hand.