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The light glinted off of her face, filling the room with its ethereal beauty. She spun around, and her skirt flew up from her ankles to form a halo around her. Professional was the execution, her head turning back in a snap to meet his eyes. As always, a garden of violets bloomed in hers, mesmerizing him with her gentle smile. He closed the distance between them, grasping on to her figure in the blurry world.
Was she crying?
~*~
Though the rest of him was groggy, Mika's heart fluttered as he came to. That sunlight didn't stream in through the window indicated it was long before he would need to awaken, but he paid it no mind, lighting a candle and pulling the sketchbook from his side table. He would need a new one soon, he thought idly, as he flipped to nearly the last page. Every other one was full of her, his attempts to grasp her in his mortal hands.
When had she appeared? He must have been a child, having a vague recollection of recurring characters in his dreams. It wasn't only her, he had seen many a friend and family member, but she stayed. She stayed, and she came again, and again, and again, sparsely at first, but gradually it became such that he saw her several times a week.
Every time, he drew her. He couldn't draw well, but he tried, capturing his feelings in the basic representation of his vision, until his heart could rest again. As the years went on, he improved, and every time he captured another nuance of her form, another way to express her essence.
Peachy pink hair, either left down in loose ringlets or pulled into an elaborate hairstyle. Amethyst eyes that shone like the crystal itself. Gentle hands that grasped his and pained him to let go of on waking. Beauty. Longing.
Tonight, her hair was short. It had been short a few times before, when he was young, and not in a long while since. Thinking on it, her dress wasn't so much of an elaborate beauty as the ones she normally wore. So delicate was the handiwork on her typical outfits that he had given up drawing them entirely and begun replicating them in fabric, dedicating a drawer to his half-stitched attempts to understand her taste. Tonight, it was a simple, sky-blue dress, lightly embroidered with white flowers. Come to think of it, they may have been in the shop she bought it at... He sketched out her twirling figure, her pixie-short hair fanning out just slightly, and her eyes...
She wasn't sad. Everything she was in that moment was joyous. He felt, even in the waking world, the contentment she radiated. And to his memory, she never, never cried. He wanted to know what could have brought her to such an overwhelming happiness. As much as he could know her, he could never understand. Still, her smile brought him enough peace to sleep again until morning.
~*~
When he woke again, his eyes stayed closed for a little longer, savoring the peace of not having work that day and feeling the warm morning light on his bed. On days like these, he wanted to be a part of the world that shone upon him, no matter how cruelly its inhabitants rejected him. And so, he pulled himself up, taking time with his morning routine and breakfast, and headed out to nowhere in particular, in decently nice clothes and a cameo necklace he had seen on her enough times to desire as a memento. When he wasn't half-asleep, it seemed strange to treat this otherworldly woman as something like his girlfriend, but there was no harm, and it kept him happy.
He walked idly until the streets changed from run-down apartments and faded asphalt to the sleek, busy sidewalks of the city. Music in his headphones deafened the whispers thrown about wherever he went, letting his mind paint the world in its own colors. Lately, those colors had been the crisp, elegant brushstrokes of a piano, longing tunes that almost felt like memories.
He passed a designer store, a beautiful, pink-tinged place where in the window was a new spring collection. His eyes drifted to the side of it, contemplating how difficult their dumpster would be to get into, nearly missing a piece shunted off to the side, one that snapped him to attention and brought him wide-eyed up to the glass.
A simple, sky-blue dress, lightly embroidered with white flowers.
When he exhaled again, it fogged up the glass, and he took a step back. His body moved on its own, pulling him inside.
He wasn't sure what he expected of her. Maybe that she was an angel, and her beauty would be just as unearthly now as it was in his dreams. Maybe that she was looking for him, too. Maybe not that she was hunched in the corner of the shop, clutching the dress as though it were sinful to hold. Her anxious eyes only left the ground to scan her surroundings, and when they locked with Mika's, time stood still.
Before he knew it, they had bridged the distance between them, and Mika was sobbing into her shoulder, held tight in her grip.
"You... yer just as pretty in real life," he blurted out when he was able to collect himself to any degree.
"So are you," came a quiet reply, as if anything more would burst a dam.
She smelled like roses and old books, and as they managed to pull apart he realized that she wasn't wearing a dress, but rather a fancy shirt coupled with tailored slacks.
"I've never seen ya wear pants before," he mused. "Wonder why."
"I..." she started, moving slowly back to the dress and picking it up. It draped limply across her arms. "What did I, then?" she choked out.
"These gorgeous dresses." A spark lit in his heart, as somebody finally asked about the world he'd seen. "So fancy n' detailed that they made that one look plain. I could never, ever draw 'em, so I had ta make 'em myself, just ta remember 'em."
She said nothing. Her breaths came out heavily. The door to a dressing room opened, and slowly she stepped inside.
When she came out, he swore he was back in last night, living his dream again. With her ballerina-like poise, she did a twirl, and he understood in that moment that even if she were human now, she was certainly an angel. Their eyes locked again, and tears fell onto his cheeks as they kissed, her soft hands gripping onto his for dear life.
"God, I've missed you so much," she admitted in a hushed tone. "Nothing has ever felt right in this world until now."
He didn't need to respond. So entwined in each other's hearts were they that the beating said everything they needed to know, a harmony between two lost-and-found souls.
~*~
"By the way," Mika noted, blowing on his tea and burning his tongue anyway, "what's yer name?"
"You don't already know?" One of her eyebrows raised.
"I never really thought about it?"
"How like you," she said, then added emphatically, "Mika."
His entire face burned up, and the sudden inhalation of drink sent him into a coughing fit.
"That's all right, though. I suppose I don't know it either, anymore." She patted his shoulders until he gathered himself.
"Well," he smiled sheepishly, "we'll figure it out together."