30 Days of Drabbles

25: Sound

Prompt: Sound
Warnings/TWs: none
Tags: Synesthesia, Outsider POV

NOTE: i don't experience synesthesia myself, though i do associate certain colors with certain voice types entirely because of auditory things that a choir nerd learns after seven years of choir nerding

--

You can see voices. You've been able to see voices since you can remember. Since kindergarten, when your class sang happy birthday to your friend. It'd been an explosion of colors streaking across your vision. No one'd believed you when you told them.

It wasn't until middle school that you learned about something called synesthesia. It meant that you saw certain things as colors. You thought that was pretty cool.

In high school, you learned to use it to your benefit in choir. You learned to read the combinations of colors and be able to tell if things were in tune, often more accurately than the conductor.

There, you met your best friends. Scott and Mitch had been friends longer than you could even really comprehend. Their voices, though, were special. They weren't single tones or even two or three shades like most people. They were whole spectrums of colors.

Scott was blue, mainly. Almost like a navy, but not quite. A little lighter than navy, but the same kind of tone. A stormy blue in his lowest ranges . Sometimes red, too. Not a lot, but a little dancing around the edges when he got higher in his chest voice. More in falsetto, but softer, too. Sometimes purple, but rarely. Scott's voice was soothing to watch. His speaking voice, too, was blue, but that was shades of navy and sometimes a lighter streak.

Mitch was harder to pinpoint. He was better at blending and changing his voice at will, but he always danced with some kind of smooth wine red, whether that was the base or streaks. He also tended to be within the warm colors, the reds and oranges and yellows and every color in between. It wasn't unusual to see silver or ivory or white flickering throughout, especially in his lower range. His higher range tended towards the brighter, sharper orange-yellow. His speaking voice was a lighter red, something in the family of burgundy but much lighter and a little pinker.

Scott and Mitch together, though. That was something you'll never be used to, even after knowing them for so long and after being in the same acapella group for six years.

Scott and Mitch's colors together were basically magic. Most people's voice colors, when they sang together, didn't blend. They hovered around each other, but no, not Scott and Mitch. They fit together perfectly. They melded and mixed and swirled until they were indistinguishable, Scott's cool colors and Mitch's warm colors and their shared reds. Their perfect octaves were particularly magical. Those were pure whites and silvers and purples that spiraled in and out of their original blues and reds.

You were glad they chose to go as Superfruit instead of solo artists, at least at first. Your own clear blues and dark purples could stand on their own. Avi's dark, warm greens were calming and solid and reassuring. Kevin's yellows and blacks and greys played well against the dark, dark reds of his cello. Scott and Mitch could probably do just fine individually, too, but their voices have been together so long you can't help but wonder if they've actually grown to work intimately with the other's. You wonder if they've evolved to have the other around them, that they'll be okay alone but better together.

It's hard to say.

-fin.