She wears sundresses and sun skirts and sunhats all embroidered with sunflowers. The summer never stops. The grass is always green. The sky is stripped of colour all save a thin layer of the palest blue. Everything in the garden is alive and will always be alive and has always been alive. Alive. Her fingers open up, her palm catches sunlight – and he holds buttercups beneath her chin.
She smiles.
He says, "My students always used to play this game." And he tilts his head. "It looks like you like butter."
Her neck is splashed yellow. He turns the flower, and looks her in the eye. She laughs and shakes her head. "Oh, no. Butter isn't for me. In Besaid, we never had such things." She looks at him and says, "It makes me feel sick."
"Then, it must mean something else." He's childish, she glows. "Who says that the buttercup makes your neck yellow? Perhaps… it is you, who colours the flower."
"Don't be silly," she laughs. She folds her hands over her skirt. Brushes, one two thee, brushes that idea and sticky dew grass away.
He cranes his neck, watching her, watching the whole world. He just smiles, and she tilts her head up to the sun. The sky is too blue. She wonders if she can just pick herself up and fall away into it. Fall away from here.
But he catches her attention again, hands her yellow flowers. She looks down at them, smiles. "What are these?"
"Daffodils." He coos like a morning dove, looks like a snake. She wonders which he is, she wonders if he is both.
"They have a meaning… don't they?" He's always telling her what the flowers mean, not what the stars in the sky mean or what life means or what all of this means, but he knows and can tell her what the flowers are.
"… Yuna, I don't think anything has meaning, any more." He's gentle and soft and takes all the words right out of her mouth and reshuffles them back together in an order she can swallow. She swallows that, like it's lifeblood and mana, like it's all she has. She drinks his words. She drowns in them.
"Let's go," she says, and takes his hand. They spiral and do handstands and cartwheels in the garden, and everything is lit up yellow and gold, everything sings for them. They are happy. They are free.
But then she begins to dance, begins to pull pyreflies from the world and feels stretch beneath her fingers and feels them snap, one two one two from his marrow.
He grabs her wrist.
His eyes are manic blue.
"Do you want to die, today?"
The world turns blue and cardboard and watermesh. The garden is dead. The flowers are rotten. The walls are peeling and everything is dark and full of dust and he is barely breathing, blueblue eyes wide open and shuddering, skin like a layer of cheese, eager to be pulled off. She almost laughs at that thought, almost does but feels her own skin sag and her ribs protest.
"Not today," she says. Nottodaymylove,nottoday – she's a sing-song repeater always in this violent circle. But while there is the sun there is hope and though there is no sun in this place she can dream and he dreams with her and they paint the world together.
She stops.
She smiles, feeling the sun come back, looking round at the yellow flowers that open beneath her feet.
"I wish you would cry," she whispers, the last ember of blue. Seymour laughs, and she laughs, and they go to play again for one more day.
I wish you would cry too.