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Lucy first went clothes shopping three weeks after breaking up with Tim.
Celina had been bewailing how little clothing she had after moving, having sold half her closet in a desperate effort to get the hell out of her old apartment as fast as humanly possible; an outing Lucy begrudgingly agreed to join her on.
They both knew Celina asked Lucy along mainly to help break her out of the mind-numbing cycle she'd been stuck in since the breakup, but she appreciated it nonetheless.
What she had not expected, however, was that she would be stuck thinking about him the whole time. She knew—obviously, since she was a psych major—that the way a person's senses are stimulated is tied to the way they process emotions and retain memories, yet all it took was one brush of her thumb against the cotton-polyester blend of a vintage band tee in Celina's favourite thrift store and all of a sudden, she was hurtling back in her head towards a centuries-old moment in time.
She closed her eyes.
She follows him through his front door with her go-bag slung over her shoulders and her heart in her stomach, dissolving in acid.
It has been close to eight hours since Lucy's best friend died; almost four hours lapsed from those fateful few seconds in Grey's office where she watched Jackson slump over the trunk of some random teenager's first car; a gunshot wound slightly off from the centre of his back.
Right now, though, she is following her former training officer in through his front door.
She is setting her tote at the foot of his couch, unsure if there is a guest room and lacking the energy to ask.
After ten minutes of pained, awkward conversation, Lucy gathers the courage to ask Bradford for a spare set of clothes to sleep in.
He nods at her in understanding and walks away, returning with what appears to be both a bottom and a top folded military-style and held in his hands.
And as Lucy changes in his bathroom, a faint Old Spice scent clinging to the fabric of his shirt, it feels for just a moment like her heart is soaring.
When she opened them again, smoothing out a crease in the fabric of the folded tee laid on a folding table, there was not a single question in her mind as to whether or not she intended to purchase the vintage band tee in Celina's favourite thrift store.
She wore the shirt to bed that night.
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Tim was never the kind of guy to wear striped shorts and a camouflage tank top in public, but neither was he—by any means—a fashionista.
Memories of reluctant dress-up games in his sister's bedroom flashed through his mind, a warm sense of nostalgia softly caressing his jaw before it punched him in the throat and snapped him back to the present.
He did make a pretty good Paper-Bag Princess, if he said so himself. For a time, Genny's favourite activity was to dress up as the dragon and obliterate him.
Tim held a red shirt up against his body.
What if this sends some kind of message?
The shirt went back into the closet alongside the fifteen other shirts he had already performed the obligatory pre-date ritual with.
Lucy was not going to call things off just because he did not pick the right outfit, was she?
Tim ended up simply admitting defeat and phoning his sister for advice. There was no way he was going to mess things up with Lucy.
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The house is cold and dark as Genny Bradford pushes the front door to the home of her brother—and the woman who was to be her sister—open, just as she had countless times before.
But unlike her regular visits, there is no clicking of carefully-trimmed claws on the floor, no tail thumping against the wall or a low grunt signalling Kojo's excitement. This is because Kojo is at her house with Austin and Tyler, where he will remain for the indefinite.
The last time she had to walk through the home of someone she loved, had to begin the process of readying a family member's house for sale, she had her brother by her side… and her sister, too.
But not this time. Not this time, because the home she is selling is theirs.
Genny has always been a romantic. From the day she first met Lucy, she knew that her brother and his aide belonged to each other, even if they themselves were not yet aware of it.
She had done the whole grin-and-bear-it thing with Ashley, pretended not to join along when her sons called the woman 'Trashley' behind her back, and had even done her best not to slap Tim in the face when he told her that he had broken up with the love of his life only months after finally managing to win her heart.
"…I know I gave you a lot of shit," Lucy says thoughtfully as she finishes reading off a sheet of lined paper in her left hand, the blunt end of a yellow pencil pressed against her bottom lip with her right, "but you never actually needed to win my heart. It was yours long before you asked for it— how does that sound? That's all I have so far, but I'm definitely going to include more."
Genny has to blink furiously to keep from crying as she stares at her brother's fiancée. "It's beautiful," she murmurs with a watery smile, "and he's one-hundred-percent going to cry."
"Oh, you think so?" Lucy's brow furrows as she panics, taking the pencil from her lip and flipping it around to bring the eraser end to the page. "I knew my vows were shit—"
She pauses when Genny reaches out and grabs her future-sister-in-law's dominant hand, stopping her just before she can erase any of her lovely words.
Lucy looks at her curiously, the nervousness clear in her eyes despite her attempts to hide it.
"I think you forgot the first half of my sentence," Genny laughs. "I said it's beautiful, Lucy. All of what you've got so far is gorgeous. Tim didn't cry once at his wedding to Isabel. That I know for a fact he's going to cry at yours is a testament to how much he's grown as a person since he met you."
Lucy's eyes grow glossy, and she is just about to respond when the pager the attendant had given them goes off, signalling that the mess at the dress shop has been successfully contained.
They had been, together with a group of the women Lucy is closest to, supporting her as she tried on wedding dresses when a heavily pregnant bridezilla's waters had broken on the floor.
The rest of their group had remained to help the staff members clean up once the woman's entourage had spirited her off to the hospital and an employee shooed Lucy out of the store with Genny, ordering them not to return until the pager he'd shoved into Lucy's hands began beeping in triplicate. They chose to spend the time at a nearby café while Lucy worked on her vows.
The aforementioned looks up at Genny with wide, unblinking eyes.
"You ready to go find your wedding dress?" Genny teases, already standing.
Lucy's countenance answers for her, the smile on her face spreading wide and bright like the fireworks on New Year's Eve.
The memory ends, and reality finds Genny staring at the opaque, overly conspicuous garment bag hanging in Lucy's portion of the closet.
In the end, Lucy had settled on the same pale, earthy sage-green colour for her rehearsal-dinner dress, reception dress, and wedding dress actual. It was vivid and dark enough to be a shade distinguishable from white, yet unsaturated enough that if you stared at the sun for ten seconds, squinted, and looked at the dress, you could call it white.
Her wedding dress would probably be too big to be arranged comfortably in the casket.
It is to be a closed-casket funeral, anyway— would it even matter?
No, Genny thinks. If they do some arranging, the skirt will fit.
It had been Lucy's dying wish, according to Angela. The last thing she had said before the blood loss claimed her life was that she wanted to be buried in her wedding dress.
Tim was already dead when they found the two of them together in their truck, the vehicle crumpled like a soda can at the bottom of a cliff.
She never got to see him in his wedding suit.
It is only fitting that he is buried next to the love of his life in his wedding suit.
Genny removes the correlative garment bags from the closet, opening each zipper just enough to confirm that she has the correct outfits before closing the closet doors with a vise around her throat.
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