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***
The dress was simple, unremarkable, and very, very yellow. Yellow flowers printed on a yellow background, tiny yellow buttons sewn with yellow thread. Selene didn’t know why she was staring at it, but she was; she reached a hand out to touch a button. It was cool and plastic; the dress itself was cotton, with a flowing skirt and short sleeves.
It was ordinary. It was mesmerizing. She wanted it, and that was simply disturbing in how little sense it made, which only made her stare all the harder, trying to puzzle out its appeal.
It had started with waiting; Michael had figured that since she was unfamiliar with shopping malls, her own shoes or jeans sizes, and in general the entire process of purchasing mass-produced clothing, that it would take her longer to find what she needed. Thus, they’d agreed to meet back here – here being the Juniors’ section of Macy’s, as it had been determined that the Misses’ section didn’t fit her.
He’d given her a look when they’d figured that out – a look she hadn’t answered, that she’d mentally translated to, how old *were* you?.
Before, on that last day that you were human.
Selene had known she was fine-boned, slender – it was a hard thing to forget, surrounded as she’d always been by far more men than women, and strong, athletic men at that. Her height, augmented by four-inch wooden heels, had compensated somewhat. Conveniently enough, those heels also did a fair amount of damage when aimed at a Lycan’s skull. She’d learned to run in them several centuries ago.
The flat-soled, flimsy cloth things that she’d been wearing for the last half-hour or so seemed utterly pathetic by comparison, but people had been staring, and that was not what they needed. She’d bought a pair of tennis shoes and taken the boots out to the car, where they waited now, like she waited, having outlasted their usefulness.
As it turned out, she wore a size seven and a half shoe, wide, and a size five jean. Given a choice she wore black, but they’d had that argument half an hour ago when she tried to buy black sneakers. Michael knew her well enough to spot an emerging pattern at the first point, and that was ridiculous all on its own – he’d know her less than two weeks. Surely in six centuries she’d accumulated more than ten days’ worth of personal quirks. But then, maybe she hadn’t.
Selene had tee-shirts in a variety of muted colors tucked under one arm – blue, brown, off-white – things that would apparently do a better job of helping them to blend in and avoid notice than would the head-to-toe black she would have preferred. There was a single black shirt, and if Michael asked, she’d explain that she could wear it with the single pair of faded blue jeans she’d picked out, and then she wouldn’t be in solid black, so there.
The rest of the jeans she’d acquired were black – deeply, satisfyingly, not-at-all-faded jet black. She was aware of acting approximately as old as she looked, and had difficulty caring.
There had been a mother and daughter in the dressing room, arguing about the cut of a formal gown – too low at the neck, as far as the mother was concerned. Perfect, in the daughter’s opinion. Selene had stood silently in a pile of discarded jeans of various sizes and bitten her tongue, wanting to snap at them. What did it matter? What did any of this matter?
She’d waited until they were gone to emerge, slinging the jeans that hadn’t fit over the top bar of the rolling cart at the entry to the dressing room and ignoring the sales girl’s dirty look.
Michael hadn’t been waiting for her. A glance at the register – and the sales girl gave her another unamused glare, and informed her quite pointedly that she wasn’t supposed to be behind there – told her that less than half an hour had passed. He’d said he would be back in about an hour, which meant there was no reason to worry and no excuse to go searching for him. There was probably even time to duck into the next department over and take care of socks and undergarments, before he’d come looking for her, but she didn’t.
Staring at a flimsy camisole that seemed to have been torn on purpose, she missed her catsuit and her leathers with a sudden intensity that was very like grief.
That, she’d silently scolded herself, went beyond ridiculous and into the realm of the surreal. She had not grieved for Viktor, who she had loved for so many years, however little he might have deserved it. She had not grieved for Kahn, who had been something like a friend. If he escaped Lucian’s subterranean fortress, and Kraven’s treachery, then Markus had most likely killed him. She couldn’t be certain, but logic would suggest he was dead – like Rigel, and Nathaniel, at the start of all this. She hadn’t mourned for them either, though she’d hunted alongside them for longer than mortal lifetimes. They were just gone.
In the past she would have congratulated herself on her absence of feeling; she was the perfect soldier. In the present were the looks Michael gave her when he thought she wasn’t looking, and the way she tensed every time a tall black man walked past - of course it wasn’t Kahn, and of course he didn’t escape, and he’d likely shoot her on sight if it ever were to be him. But it wouldn’t be. And when it wasn’t, she felt nothing, just the ebbing of adrenaline and the floor beneath her feet regaining its solidity, and the weight of Michael’s eyes.
She didn’t understand it, and for Michael's sake she wanted to, because he seemed disinclined to leave her. If she was to be his world as much as he had become hers, then it was of new and disconcerting importance that she be capable of functioning as a human being. A human being would not feel the loss of a pair of boots – which weren’t really lost, damn it, they were just out in the car – more keenly than the loss of everyone she’d ever known.
Selene did, though; she shifted her feet awkwardly, off-balance in flat soles and feeling like her heels were sinking through the floor, and felt loss. It gnawed at her gut and it didn’t answer to reason, and it wanted her boots and her leathers and Michael – perhaps not in that order, but perhaps so.
How long could it take him, really, to buy clothing?
She wandered impatiently, trying to avoid the still-glowering sales girl. Selene had noticed that these people – the employees of the store – seemed to have territories they patrolled. The girl who worked Juniors was a careless warden of her assigned realm, which meant Selene could escape her just by finding the edge of it. It would be easier for Michael to spot her near the walkway anyway.
That was where the dress had found her, hanging on a clearance rack across the faux tile path, just the one and no others like it. There was a little tendril of thread hanging loose from one of the buttons, and Selene could see that the cut of it was vaguely dissimilar to the newer, crisper things at her back. Just a little off.
She rolled the little plastic button between her fingers, feeling the shape of it and noticing the tags – size five. Fourteen-ninety-nine, fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, printed on neon pink, slapped over another sticker that had been glowing green and started with the number three, though the rest of it was obscured, and the original price entirely gone. The clearance stickers had even begun to peel. It was a summer dress, and it was late October now.
She had no need for a dress, and it was yellow.
“That’s nice.”
Selene jumped, snatching her hand guilty back, and turned to Michael. He had several large bags dragging from one hand, and he was eyeing the wad of mostly-black jeans under her arm. His comment had been very carefully neutral, almost a question.
“It’s -” Selene began, and then stopped. It was what? Nothing she had any reason to want or admire, and besides that it was flawed and probably poorly constructed. There was a thread coming loose.
She wanted her boots.
“Did you get what you need?” she asked brusquely.
“Yeah, you?” Michael responded.
“I just need to pay.”
“Right.” He went digging for his wallet in a back pocket; she turned and started off towards the counter.
“Did you want to get this?” he called after her. Selene glanced back over her shoulder; he’d picked up the yellow dress.
“What for?” she asked dismissively, and raised a hopefully convincingly dubious eyebrow. Does that *look* like something I’d wear? demanded her incredulous expression. He shrugged. She had the uncomfortable feeling he wasn’t fooled.
“You looked like you liked it,” Michael offered. It was tempting to ask what exactly that looked like – her liking something. She didn’t respond; he just shrugged again, and she turned away, stalking off clutching her black jeans.
“Find everything?” the salesgirl asked distractedly as Selene slapped her acquisitions down on the counter. Selene didn’t deign to answer; the girl cracked her gum and didn’t appear to notice, ringing up pairs of jeans and shoving them into an oversized bag without so much as glancing in Selene’s direction. She heard Michael walking up behind her, and then suddenly there was the yellow dress, on the counter, sprawled out over her jeans.
The salesgirl looked up, somewhere between confused and annoyed. “You’re together?” she asked tiredly. Selene stared incredulously at Michael.
“You liked it,” he insisted, again shrugging.
“I don’t want it,” she countered. Of course she did want it, which was why she didn’t, and the day was suddenly too long and too strange and she wanted to go crawl into the back seat of their dilapidated car and huddle there with her boots – or possibly kill something.
The salesgirl cracked her gum again impatiently, and violence seemed increasingly appealing. Guns, she mentally added to the list of things she missed. A pair of pistols, sleek and black.
“So I’ll wear it,” Michael teased.
“Fine,” Selene snapped. “I’ll be in the car.”
***
“You’re mad.”
“What?” She knew what; talking about it seemed entirely pointless.
“If you really don’t want it you can throw it out. I didn’t mean to encroach on your personal space or whatever it was I apparently did, so – whatever you want. I won’t care.”
“Fine.”
Silence.
“Is something else wrong?”
Selene had to turn sideways and glare at the deep and fundamental stupidity of that question.
“Right,” Michael acknowledged tightly, looking away, and she turned her eyes back to the road.
When they got back to the hotel he went straight into the shower, giving her as much space as was possible in a single room with paper-thin walls. Selene took a bag of blood from their cooler, drank a cupful, sat down on the bed and stared at the bags of clothing as if they contained a ticking bomb.
***
Michael emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist, drying his hair with a hand towel. It was utterly silent in the main room, so completely devoid of sound that he wondered for a moment if Selene had left. He glanced up.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, and she was wearing the yellow dress – the one he’d spent the past ten minutes worth of shower mentally kicking himself for purchasing. He’d thought she was angry about it. She didn’t seem angry now.
She didn’t seem anything. The hotel room was arranged such that only the shower and the toilet were actually in the bathroom; the counter and sink sat in a little sort of tile foyer just outside the bathroom door, and the wall above it was one big mirror. It had fogged over with the steam of Michael’s shower; Selene stared straight ahead, at her own obscured reflection. Slowly, oh so slowly, her eyes met his.
“You look nice,” he offered, carefully, having the distinct feeling that anything he said was going to be wrong. She did look nice, but more than that she looked flushed and fragile and small, sitting there with her deadly competent hands folded delicately in her lap. She should have looked ordinary in that dress, and she didn’t – he wondered if it would help to tell her she reminded him of things that lived in rainforests, brightly colored because they were poisonous. The dress didn’t stop her looking like what she was.
“I don’t,” she argued, her voice soft, flat, devoid of feeling. Her eyes turned back to the fogged-over glass.
“Okay,” Michael said, because that seemed the safest thing.
Selene stood with unearthly grace, the sunny yellow dress swirling around her legs in the damp air. Her hair swayed faintly as she moved – not black, but a deep brown like undisturbed earth, the color brown becomes when it doesn’t see the sun for six hundred years. She didn’t look nice, he decided. She looked too perfect, too beautiful to be real.
He stayed where he was, crumpling the hand towel up in one fist, going hard just from looking at her and hoping she wouldn’t notice. He wasn’t sure how she’d take that, right now.
She reached out one fine-boned hand and wiped a slash of condensate from the glass, just at eye level, and then let her hand drop back to her side. She stared. Moments ticked past and still she stared. Michael just waited, beginning to feel vaguely ridiculous standing there in his towel, but not wanting to walk away from her.
Her hands came up to the neckline of the dress, swift and precise in their movements, efficiently attacking the buttons. They moved down the front of her, bunching the skirt up to her waist so she didn’t have to bend. Michael’s fading arousal returned full force, and he shifted uncomfortably, tightening the towel around his waist.
The dress was shrugged off her shoulders, left to pool at her feet as she turned towards him. She was wearing nothing under it.
“I don’t know what to do,” she confessed, and there was the faintest hint of some feeling to the words. Fear.
“About what?” Michael asked, soothing as he could be while wanting her so badly he thought he might explode with it. He wondered distantly – not nearly so disturbed as he really thought he should have been - if there was something very wrong with him. It didn’t seem quite normal that he found her so appealing like this, broken and needy for things that had nothing to do with sex.
“This,” she said, and didn’t elaborate, standing there thin and pale. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
***