Chapter Text
It's late. It's early. The sun has barely risen and their car is dragging itself along the freeway, towards their favorite diner that's way too far away but the effort makes it taste better. Selen pulls into the parking lot, turns off the car. Millie is bundled up in a coat and scarf, the dark purple material wrapped around her lower face. It makes Selen smile, just the tiniest bit, because it's her scarf. Dragon things.
They walk inside, the door's bell ringing out clear and way too loud for this early in the morning. Millie leans into Selen's side a little bit as a waiter leads them to a booth. They order immediately, they know what they want. Pancakes and eggs for Millie, steak and eggs for Selen. As rare as allowed by the health administration.
They wait. They barely talk. They know each other well enough to know they aren't morning people. Selen communicates through grunts towards Millie's short, clipped questions.
Their food arrives. They start eating.
Millie scoops up a big spoonful of eggs, and groans with relief at the taste. Selen chuckles as she slices her steak. The silence is still there. Heavy.
"Soo," Millie pours syrup over her pancakes, watches them drown. "How's Elira doing?"
The lights flicker overhead, this diner was an old one. The two waiters on call, with one of them already heading towards them, turn around, and make for the other end of the building, towards the other customers.
Selen shuts down, slides a bit lower in her seat and lets her tail droop over her thighs for the comforting pressure. Grounding.
"It's not like that," Millie says quickly, "I swear."
The dragon shrugs, over-enthusiastic in the movement, easily see through. She speared a slice of her steak, chewed it ferociously. It goes down like gravel and sawdust. "I didn't say anything."
Millie rolled her eyes. "I know what you were going to say. It's written all over your face."
"Is it?" Selen's claws dig into the table, the human one merely balling into a fist. "Do you need to go crying to Elira about how your fake-"
Millie interrupts. "Not fake-"
Selen doesn't stop, she's moving like a bulldozer, avalanche, a broken dam's flooding. "-Fucking fake girlfriend is being mean and horrible to you? Like always? Like a fucking monster?"
The table cracks under Selen's grip. Millie repairs it with a rapping of her knuckles three times and the shadow of the salt shaker. She had gotten good at stuff like that.
Millie was quiet as she worked on fixing the damage. Her veins are dark purple still when she is finished, her eyes still glowing radioactive. "Is that what you think you are?"
Selen poked at her steak, watches the melted fat and blood pool in the dish, and huffs out smoke that wafts up to the yellowing lights of the diner. "It's what everyone else says I am. You just haven't said it to my face yet."
"I'm never going to." Millie's hands rumble with magic, sudden, like a natural disaster. The bones underneath vibrate like the strings of a tightly strung guitar, the skin glitching like light off water and hissing blue sparks. "Never."
"I bite," Selen said hoarsely, like she was reading off a script; memorized and known by heart. "I will hurt you. I promise I won't, but I will."
"Then you're not a monster." The spoons on the table rattled, slammed together before melting into a pool of silver. "You're just human."
Selen met Millie's gaze. She knew her own face was easy to read; anger in the bared canine, love in the roaring laughs and lolling tongue. Millie's was a love story, poetry, to Selen, a wrinkled letter tied up with a messy bow. There's a stain on the corner that looks like a kiss mark. There's syrup on Millie's cheek. Selen wipes it off with a careful thumb, to not nick her skin with her sharp claws. The cheekbone is the curve of a seashell, ocean waves in the sweet sound it makes at the loving touch.
Love leaks out of Selen so easily, a balloon with holes, a sinking ship. Beaten pinatas. Other, breakable things. Millie gathers it up tenderly. The spilling is not a mistake.
Millie stabs a slice of her pancake and holds it out. Slowly, eyes trained on Millie's own, Selen leans forward, opens her mouth, takes a bite.