Entry 11: [Transmissions (II) or: Rafflesia (Appearances II)]

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

(Sonett 130)

So, there are areas where they can more or less manage;

That didn't mean there weren't any uphill battles – There were still very much moments where she still felt keenly aware of the disparity, moments in which it became obvious, and moments in which some thought or idea that was no longer quite possible would sneak up on her.

The most common circumstance to make notice that things had changed was, perhaps not the most profound, if you will, but just something that came up, was a somewhat regular component in the scenes of his arrival; These days, he was liable to show up in the nearest storage room whenever he felt like it, only to evaporate for a week and a half and turn up at the most inopportune moment ever in the middle of some important meeting or conversation; Granted, his trusty time machine provided him with the perfect excuse to ignore the concept of inopportune moments restrained only by whatever remained of her sense of propriety, which, despite, or maybe exactly because of the limited reliability of the TARDIS and its pilot, was not very much.

There was still, however, the occasional occasion on which he'd actually stick to the schedules, - or fail to stick to them so badly that he'd show up just when she was getting ready for something completely different

– and he would arrive to find her at her vanity table, adding the last finishing touches to today's look, and he'd even linger in the doorway, scrutinizing her turns and motions with unreadable glances that were not even devoid of light, but more in the vein of an enthused observer who couldn't tear his eyes from the object of study, except, perhaps, to briefly express his bemusement, 'those silly humans', or something of the sort, a treacherous part of her hoped that it would at least be 'silly Clara' in particular, but she would, without fail, carefully slide the last rings onto her fingers, only to turn away from the mirrors, dexterous little feet closing part of the distance between them as they spun and dragged the petals of the dress behind, red cloth and black polka dots only coming to a halt once they had arrived the desired position before him, arms partially stretched to her sides, bracelets in golden and coppery shades twinkling at her wrists –

Even the times she'd been gearing her preparations toward someone, something else, it wouldn't take more than the slightest,spontaneous nudging of a whim for her to dedicate her efforts to hi instead.

There was something about his presence that made it impossible for her, and her in particular, to ignore his existence, some natural ease, a recognition of a deep and fundamental truth, a part of her that felt that she would be intersecting with, or stepping into a much smaller story when she went to see what awaited her one she walked out that door, not uninteresting, not without its worth or its heroes, but smaller in scale and priority, smaller, by which she didn't primarily mean smaller than him or his story, but smaller than hers, so hers would be wasted if she didn't take advantage of the worthy one until the blue box had departed.

She spent years perfecting her ways of hiding from those who would presume -

She liked attention and adoration, she loved to bask in power. That didn't mean that she was willing to get them at any cost, or that she would throw a childish hissy fit if those things didn't come her way.

She had a wanting heart, she went through life striving with all of her might. That didn't mean that she didn't have the will and capacity to devote herself in full.

She may have held wisdom and had some success at being a strong, high tower for those who'd seek refuge and support in her care, but that didn't mean that not a single of her actions had ever been born from a raw and vulnerable mess of wounded, jumbled feelings.

That she wasn't a naive ingenue, but a professional adult with firm ideas didn't mean that she had to hand in her curiosity, her readiness to try new things or her drive as a seeker, and neither was there was any mutual exclusion between being concerned with the larger patterns of the occurrences in this world and her duty to the individuals living in it.

Just because she thought highly of herself and wasn't afraid to show that, that didn't mean that she'd think less of others or intended to prove she was 'better' than them.

They didn't seem able to get it into their heads that a person who would be genuinely clumsy at some things could be unnervingly sharp at others, their perceptions engineered contradictions or contrasts from things that, in reality, flowed from one and the same source.

The world she lived in had no place for people like her, or indeed very many people that didn't fit into a very arbitrary set of narrow outlines that even the more typical people only fit in very roughly; And she knew from her steady observations that there were few things they were less likely to forgive than something and little they were more likely to reject than something that was too hard to pin down for them to label; Many people would rather have closure than details to order and absorb.

Given the choice between 'two-faced manipulative bitch' or 'flighty cutesy airhead', she could tolerate to let some think the former and let it be their loss, if they could not see the timeless quality of her dresses and how they existed outside, let alone form an image that would actually account for the footwear beneath, overlooking the shiny black biker boots that were always ready to spring into action even when she'd sit there at the library, immersed in dreams and stories of faraway worlds.

But now that he had arrived, she could either go out there and dwell among people who probably thought she was sickeningly sweet on the inside, and that all she needed or wanted were some strong arms to guide her and tuck her in so she could sleep in safely, or she could go with him, and be seen in her entirety for a while, have herself be experienced, if never comprehended let alone mastered; It was quite alright if he was confounded by her (or humanity in general) as long as he didn't stop looking at them with a degree of underlying reverence and fascination, besides, she liked to keep him guessing.

It wasn't as if the fulfillment of her life stood or fell with his opinion, she'd make sure to nip it in the bud – violently, with extreme prejudice – if he ever got that cocky, but she liked to set her own goals, and she liked to set some of them high.

Through effort and continuous refinement of the advantages she had been given to begin with, she'd won the admiration of many different people wherever she had gone, and on occasion, even drawn their eye, but far and in-between as it might be any recognition she successfully tease out of someone as accomplished and – as of recently – superficially impassive as him would make for a particular trophy she'd be sure to cherish proudly.

"So, how do I look?"

The parts of her concerned with making her life make sense in the context of a clear and defined narrative that would eventually arrive at a goal she could actually state with a straight face – she wouldn't go so far as to call them her rational mind – figured that she might as well use the convenient presence of a friend for a safe, risk-free test run, but that narrative, whether it was accurate or not, could only make sense that his recent track record in such matter had slipped her mind – Had she been more conscientious, she would have known not to expect any exception today, and as ever so often, she turned out very much right –

He goggled forward, ostensibly considering the point with some amount of concentration assigned to the task, and already it was apparent that she might not be getting the much simpler, less over-thought answer almost everyone else would have understood her question to request, but curiously, that didn't diminish her interest in his potential answer; She braced herself for shortages in terms of dignity, but also found herself genuinely wondering what awaited her this time –

"Orange."

"Seriously?"

She blinked a few times before it occurred to her that he probably meant her dress, which, for the record, looked pretty much red to her. Light red, admittedly, maybe with the slightest orange tinge.

"Orange-ish, " he conceded, as if that might placate her. "Possibly salmon."

Now, the whole incident isn't worth much more than a momentary sigh of frustration, but that frustration is sometimes there, not always, but sometimes, and then again, she knows very well that she's not an insecure teenaged girl or some stereotypical fishing for compliments; She knows very well that she's attractive, which is also reflected in the way she is treated by most of the adult people she interacts with; And even if she weren't , there were significantly more relevant qualities a person could lack. If anything, the joke was on him, really, because alien or no alien, however he may or may not perceive them, he had been living among humans for a long, long time and should at least have gotten the rough gist of the etiquette.

Half of the time, he didn't even intend to be insulting, but that didn't excuse him from the definitely deliberate refusal to even check his various wordings for their insult potential before opening his mouth; But she figured that his cluelessness could sometimes be endearing. Depending on her mood, she might shrug it off as a minor annoyance, annoy him right back, even smile about it – but that was when she wasn't posing for him, which was, all things considered, very common; He'd see her in her bedroom, in the storage rooms of her workplace or on the stairs of the console room, with a slight, teasing tone to her voice, brows raised somewhere between 'suggestively' and an expression of superiority, with the lightest deliberate swing to her hips, quite often in the middle any given exchange that fell more into the lighthearted end in the spectrum of their banter.

Something kept her going at what might very well have been a futile endeavor even as a playful, cheeky annoyance of sorts, or, at least, an ineffective method of communication, and in her more innocent moments, she attempted to explain it with the simple proposition that she simply forgot sometimes, especially once they were more or less back to functionally getting along with a certain regularity, because things had been different for three long years and there used to be this reaction she could reliably expect and leverage for her own purposes, or even just her cheap amusement – His poorly concealed crush had been flattering, for sure, but that was, or ought to have been, a nice bonus, all things considered, not unappreciated but besides the point.

There was a time where those same carefully placed hints of provocation would have been enough to reduce him to the incoherence of a stuttering, flustered schoolboy and turn his face a bright and obvious shade of dark magenta that his usually ivory cheeks did little to conceal.

Now, this reaction simply wasn't there, along with many others she'd learned to count on; There might have been different reactions but she was thrown back to square one when it came to ordering them, maybe not exactly back to the start, but this proved harder than it had been the first time.

He was, back then, a bit of a loose cannon, the type to follow his various impulses in a knee-jerk reaction, he'd just whirr about the room with little thought to what it looked like or what he was even doing, and while he might sometimes seriously intend to hold back, she'd catch him consciously trying, and never quite succeeding to restrain himself, whether it was the obvious effect of her womanly wiles, something potentially suicidal that peeked his curiosity, and injustice he couldn't walk past, a smug remark he couldn't help making, however self-consciously the final result would look or just something that looked incredibly fun and distracting and appealed to the childlike side of his personality –

She was working with a completely different sort of energy these days, he had a way of just standing there now, seemingly unaffected, until reactions just suddenly arrived before she could see them coming, leaving her with little time, or prior warning, to do anything about them. When he acted, it might be sudden, in a wild, startling fashion, or come with a detached, delayed quality, like his heart(s) and mind were barely even connected to their early vessel and really lost somewhere else, drifting aimlessly in faraway spheres – in general, his temperament seemed to be one of the things that varied the most between his various incarnations – She'd encountered the one just before the form he showed up on her doorstep with, and he'd seemed much more capable of resisting the urge to unduly embarrass himself, so that he actually succeeded at pulling off a certain air of genuine gentlemanly elegance, but he was still relatively hyper, something that wasn't true at all for the him from the time when he'd just walked out of the Time War, but they were both noticeably more sensible and considerate than any of 'her' versions had ever been, especially the latest model which didn't seem to share any of the warmth that had been a constant of the three others – and while he certainly didn't fit the 'hyper' bill any longer, Clara had little doubts that 'Captain Grumpy' would have found him every bit as undignified and head-shake-worthy as a previous two –

But alright. She figured that some degree of weirdness couldn't be avoided when you were hanging out with a man from another planet, particularly when he happened to be such an... unique individual, she'd learned early on that he couldn't always be expected to make all too much sense, but there was something about this recent situation that seemed to bug her in a more fundamental way than it really had any right to, not in a way that would have been an immediate tragedy, but – something that just equaled a cumulative sort of irritation each time she couldn't quite get him to respond.

Not because seeing him turn magenta on cue was mainly what she'd wanted out of their relationship, but because all of this forced her to confront the fact that she liked to make people turn magenta, or any number of other things – if he took the bait, the joke was sort of on him, but since he'd taken to barely reacting at all, she saw herself standing there like an orphaned punchline followed by silence instead of a laugh track, keenly aware of her own actions and countless places where she might have gone wrong, made to examine and question every little tidbit of potential signals she might have transmitted over -

And still, he got the privilege to see the mask of makeup, gestures and presence she presented to the world in the process of being assembled, when everyone else, no matter how close to her, could only ever hope to glimpse the finished product – He'd arrive and find her in the middle of preparing tomorrow's lessons, or leaning back on her sofa for a much needed ten-minute break from the day's stress. He'd witness her in the middle of the night, in her pajamas with her hair undone, although he could expect to get yelled at if he woke her in the morning hours of what she expected to be a busy day. She'd allow him to observe, with confounded fascination, how her existence unfolded in his realm as well as hers, in the abstract as much as in the concrete – despite her rocky start with the ship itself, she found its near-unlimited store of clothing quite delightful and since she first stumbled on the place on one of the wild goose chases in search for her bedroom, she'd rarely resisted the urge to get herself some appropriate period costume and go crazy with the local aesthetics. He'd obviously never see the point in that, his policy being to wear whatever he felt like and, if needed, could always manage to prove himself sufficiently competent - or at least intimidating enough – for people to listen to him anyway.

Most of the time, he seemed blissfully ignorant that there was anything odd about his wardrobe, although he had this tendency to regret his last fashion choice as soon as he'd picked the next one, in a manner reminiscent of a teenager proving themselves juvenile exactly because of their overzealous urge to discard all childish things, only to turn to viciously hating whatever all the 14-year-olds were raving about by the time they turned sixteen and burned their own paraphernalia from that time. Clara made a point to discourage that tendency in her students, telling them that they might just come to look at the madness of their youth with fond nostalgia and regret that they didn't save any keepsakes – The things she had left from her mother were probably Clara's most prized possessions; When he'd taken her to a world where people used mementos as a currency, she'd been horrified; When she'd seen him give away his favorite fob watch without a moment's hesitation, the mere thought gave her an irrational sort of chill that made it very hard to act natural in his presence, that he could discard that palmful of memories she herself still inwardly mourned over, days they'd lived together and appart, its weight in meaning with such carelessness disturbed her – He'd told her, just before the transformation finished, that he'd never forget that last chapter of his life, but by the next time she found him in a halfway lucid state, it seemed like he'd already forgotten, the days past drained away like the memories of a dream from long ago, or the memory of swirling leaves long buried beneath the dark, barren branches of unyielding winter.

Back then, that was what he'd just emerged from, and all she could recognize when she looked at hi, all that seemed to be left of the man she once loved: Barren, unyielding winter.

Palaces of dead trees and withered gardens that could give nothing, nor even receive anything she could possibly have to give.

It was only later that she came to see the pattern, put in in context and realize that he was never particularly treasuring with things pertaining to himself – the vitriol he reserved for the judging and characterizing of his own person was more acerbic than anything he'd ever spewn at any other person, and maybe that willingness to criticize himself, a trait not uncommon in many great artists and discoverers of the past, was what kept him pushing himself to more greatness every day. Maybe it was where the consistency came in, where she came to see an odd sort of purity where she'd last expect it, in that he'd subject his own life to the same sort of icy weighing scales as everything else and always unfailingly chose to take the bullet himself should the option exist.

When their trip to the bank of Karabraxos wound up revealing that he was a lot more insecure about his wardrobe choices than he ever let on, it made an unexpected lot of sense to her.

He still wore them, though, which was probably indicative of how little he cared about what anybody else might think of him and how little the concept of fitting in wherever they were going interested her – As far as she was concerned, she would insist on being the voice of reason as far as that could be expected to lead to anything productive, but more than anything else, getting into costume was part of the game for her, it was a part of the fun that appealed to her inner little girl – (And he'd remark, that this reminded him of certain friends of his which had also had a thing for costumes, to which he quickly added that said friends had ended up hitting him with cricket bats and throwing him off tall towers, lest she get any illusions that it was meant as a sort of compliment.)

And most of all, she liked the idea that she could transform, and mold herself, and the aura she exuded to others, into something of her own making, especially when it happened faraway from her home and its promises of permanent consequences, in realms that allowed her to forget about some of the more neurotic elements and just have fun with what she could create in terms of perceptions, and just like that, her efforts to learn about him had taught her a little something about herself again:

When she came to greet him with her bracelets and rings, her hair polished to shine and possibly dolled up with any number of modifications, straightened or made to curl, done up in great elaborate knots or simply tied back, garnished with decorations or interwoven with extensions, it was because she liked to see herself that way, liked to admire her reflection and show herself to the residents of their destinations, for its own sake, since she was going to be making myths and leaving impressions anyway, she could very well revel in pimped-out dresses, futuristic bodysuits, and her favorites from her very own wardrobe – if he arrived without much announcement, she'd readily leave in the more professional little blouses and sweatshirts she wore for work, that were already a result of deliberate image-crafting, but when given the time to prepare, she'd pick the most poetic of her patterned dresses and the most tough-looking of her trusty leather-jackets, and her big black boots, always ready for action.

She was always performing wherever she went, and while she might have become more assured in her calculations that when she first started this hobby, and thus less likely to discuss the 'plot' with herself, she always tried to guess the rules of the narratives and try to keep up with the thinking – but only here did she get the chance to dress for the genre without having to explain herself. The two of them would be unexplained enough as they were – and maybe in that sense, their ideas of fashion or presentation connected, and that might be another reason why she wanted to be seen by him in particular, no matter how much she would do this for its own sake.

So she'd let him observe as she picked out her dresses, even if his input was rarely of any help, and continued to pose and coquette around even when she'd long figured out that she was unlikely to get any more than bemused stares.

It wasn't a matter of hopelessly pining away after tragic dreams and breaking herself over it, a little girl building sandcastles to decorate the great, vast sea that would uncaringly sweep them away – and even then, it wouldn't be the sea's fault that it was at it was, and even it deserved to be given a little gesture of treasuring, now or then, as a matter of principle, it was the thought that counted and that might just be abstract enough to build a bridge between her world and his. But more importantly, she wasn't some melancholy dreamer admiring him from afar, she knew him, in all of his immediate, everyday silliness, odd little habits and tendencies that got on her nerves.

He would never be completely disenchanted to her because at times, he proved just as awesome as he claimed to be, and there was a vastness to him, his history, and his entity, a particularly cavernous instance of the inner universe that could be found within any other person, and there were moments where she was awed that he could still surprise her with new sides of himself after she'd read stretches of his diary, learned so many of his secrets, visited his darkest hours and woven herself into the full length of his story; Even now, she was piecing together the basic outlines of his life story from his many cryptic references, taking note of odd habits and little hiding places (not all that unexpectedly, his hidden stash of sweets proved harder to locate than his spare TARDIS keys) and noting the methods and details in his shroud of glitter, until she could have worn his modus operandi like a glove – and he knew it, too, and was never all too delicate when it came to displaying it –

("Haven't the foggiest, do clever thing!"

"I think I can fix this, just go get that strawberry jam you snatched last week." - ("You sure you haven't just misplaced it? I mean, have you met you?") - "Only you would rearrange my jelly babies by color. Not just a control freak, but a neat freak as well!")

She'd brought her smarts and her approach to facing down the darkness herself, but it was him who taught the woman who once thought that people always had plans the value of improvisation, and it wasn't too long before she turned it back on him.

From the beginning, she'd never been too shy to speak with confidence of what she could deduce about him, and so she had some grounds to suspect that the efforts of her and her 'orange-ish' dress weren't talking at a wall here – It had to be a language he understood, because he spoke it himself, so he must clearly have been aware of the concept.

She saw him, quite clearly, trying to impress her, in many ways by many means, some of which included posing and dressing up nicely – if anything, he'd become a lot more brazen and unapologetic about it since the regeneration, or as a simple result of the passage of time.

One way or another, he was provoking her to the face and she would not let herself be outdone; She wouldn't let that challenge slide, so she had to answer back, transmit the signal back on all channels figuring that he was bound to pick up some of them, and she knew that he'd put up those satellite dishes, hoping to pick something up.

She was still very much trying to get a hang of the being that lived and moved behind his aura, the man himself beneath all decorations, protective barriers and necessary acts.

The initial impression that he wasn't paying attention to her at all was easily dismissed, rather, he did in patterns that were as erratic as him. The tasks he trusted her with and the words he'd use to comment on them revealed the extent of his professional respect for her as a partner in crime almost casually, as if it were some obvious thing he wouldn't have to mention unless it came up in conversation, and yet, he succeeded to piss her off with the disregard involved in the way he made the decisions by himself, whether he thought she was 'brilliant on adrenaline' or not, but that, too, ended up ensuring that she'd seize any of those rare chances to one-up him when they happened to present themselves, whether they involved their wardrobe, leadership skills or even fancy computer antics, and in contrast to his bow-tie-wearing days, his current self was a lot more willing and serious about annoying her right back and returning her provocations if they were of the sort that he was likely to pick up, even if some of them now earned her jabs at her vanity instead of conspicuous blushes.

She could console herself with the knowledge that he was every bit as vain in his own ways, and over time, enough fiddling with the wires revealed the frequencies on which he was receptive, sometimes, she couldn't help but stumble over them – He liked it when she left some of her belongings on the TARDIS, although the possessive pronouns were rarer these days, she would still very much hear them now or then and while he might refuse to cease his ramblings about earth's pudding-brained engineers until he was finished with it, he never really said no to fixing her household appliances.

It turned out that he noticed when she changed her shampoo (and would remark on it in he weirdest way possible, in public), and of all the details he could have managed not to miss, he noticed the two she wanted to acknowledge the least, her latest tendency to conceal certain parts of herself when it was a certain someone else she was preparing herself for.

Of course, he formulated it in roundabout ways that might leave one guessing what he was talking about, but he noticed her straying for her trademark choice of footwear, or her more minimal, decidedly-accentuating style of make-up. He only seemed capable of perceiving the roughest gist of them and what they might meant, and it mostly confounded him, but notice he did, and that, too, prompted her to ask herself uncomfortable questions.

A part of her tried to convince the rest that it was only normal and to be expected that someone would put (even?) more thought into their appearance and image when they were in love, you were sort of supposed to change, and lose your balance a bit, this had to mean that this was a sigh that this was finally, the real, serious thing she was supposed to build a future with in which any previous, school-boyish dalliances would come to look like a learning process that had lead her where she was supposed to get –

(But she'd never felt the need to hammer herself into shape in those last three years, and it hurt her heart to dismiss their importance, to mark every flutter of her heart at the sight of that sweet, tentative smile as an unwelcome distraction)

It was outright hilarious, how he could deduce incredible things from the slightest details that no one else might even have noticed, but when asked to process the sight of her in her entirety, could rarely come up with anything more eloquent than 'Orange'.

And yet, he'd always have a tendency to miss the most incredibly obvious things, no matter how absurdly brilliant he could be when it came to more exotic topics of conversation – His expertise in a given thing did often seem to be directly proportional to its weirdness, with maintaining a semblance of normalcy being one of the tasks he was less likely to accomplish; That particular trait was just somewhat more pronounced with his latest incarnation.

And there's another superpower: Missing the forest for the trees.

Practiced, refined and perfected through literally ages of experience...

When it came to him, she sometimes genuinely didn't know whether to be awed or resigned.

There were many failings she could accuse him of, but there could be no doubt that the man had truly made the most of what he'd been given, both the privileges and the limitations, and she admired that about him. And more than anything, certainly more than she'd ever dare to admit, she feared that she might not be able to claim the same by the time she'd have become an old lady.

She wondered if he'd be flattered if he knew that. Pompous as he could be, it was possible. Or he might be repulsed by the very idea. Or just bitterly remark that there was nothing worth admiring about him, because he was that sort of idiot.

She wondered if he could be flattered anymore. Maybe she simply had yet to work out what 'flattered' or 'stunned' even looked like on the new hardware, and she had already witnessed him displaying such emotions right in front of her, if there was indeed anything like that left inside of her.

("Come to think of it..." he'd continued the conversation when she'd long stopped expecting it, bringing her train of thoughts to a crashing halt. "Actually, I think the dress suits you quite well, it reminds me of a flower." he remarked, completely offhandedly, like it was the most incidental of observations. It was astonishing how he could make that simple sentence seem so surreal just by having it come out of his mouth.

Did he just happen to say something actually appropriate by random chance?

"A... flower?" she repeated, raising her brows in disbelief. "Would that be an Earth flower, by any chance?"

Knowing him, it might be some carnivorous alien mutant plant that vaguely resembled something out of Super Mario. Or so she thought.

"Coincidentally, yes. It's a bit like a rafflesia, don't you think?"

"A rafflesia...?!" If that was meant to be some sort of stealth insult, he should really have accounted for the fact that at least some of all those books about the sights of this world she'd liked to read as a young girl were likely to list the 'single blossom with the world's largest circumference' as a common fun fact. The mere act of talking over her head like this with some term that he didn't expect her to understand – or did he expect her to be familiar with it, even count on it? – should have been insulting enough in its sheer presumptuous smugness, but he seemed oblivious to even the distinct tinge of indignation in her voice, and rambled on, apparently blissfully unaware that he was just digging himself deeper with every word.

"Yes. Definitely a rafflesia. Come to think of it, that strikes me as the perfect flower for you! It's a really flashy sort of flower, it's huge, it smells very strongly of rotten meat as a means to attract many, many flies to pollinate it, so it' a real eye-catcher. And a nose-catcher, too, I suppose. It's also sort of roundish, and on top of that, the flower is almost the complete plant. Just like your face is all eyes sometimes..." he elaborated, gesturing with his right hand to implicitly refer to that supposed wideness of her face.

Typical. The only way he could possibly anything resembling a successful compliment would involve comparing her to a parasitic carrion plant.

She rolled her eyes.

At this point, it began to dawn on him that his genius idea for an answer that would placate it wasn't quite as convincing as he'd assumed it to be, and he tried, somewhat clumsily, to amend it into something workable. "But mostly, it's because rafflesias tend to be a sort of orange-ish red with white dots. Just like your dress. And other things you wear. You have a lot of things with... patterns, don't you? I like ...patterns, too." he provided, helpfully tugging at the dress shirt he was currently wearing (which, coincidentally, also featured white polka dots) to illustrate his point.

Clara sighed in resigned annoyance, but couldn't completely suppress the smile creeping up at the corners of her mouth.

"I know. I vaguely remember that time you tried to fit far too many of them onto a single coat!"

"Don't remind me!" he retorted, cringing, none too amused by the way her words had lapsed into playful teasing.

"Hm. At least this means my dresses weren't completely wasted on you."

"What do your dresses have to do with me? I suppose it's kind of you to offer, but I doubt that I'd fit into any of them..."

What a hopeless case, she thinks to herself, and finds him almost endearing when he isn't being annoying.

But by that time she is about to finish with the initial request he made upon arrival ("Dispose of your stilts!") and has finished to tie the laces on her own boots, and it suddenly occurs to her that he actually does have something of a point – Not about the carrion flowers, of course, but about the part with the patterns, and that insinuation that their fashion choices aren't that different at the end of the day.

It struck her, quite bluntly, that their footwear matched.

He couldn't possibly have chosen those boots to impress her, couldn't he?

(And the rings, too?)

That would be far too ridiculous, with everything surrounding that moment.

No argument there.

Completely and utterly impossible.)

What she didn't consider was that, maybe, his version of 'stunned' or 'flattered' was not subtle at all, but in fact, hilariously blatant.

("Why are you talking like an idiot?!")

His unique brand of adoration takes a little getting used to.

But on the other hand, he's a bit confounded by her, too, so they're even, in a way. He comes in from the perspective of a researcher studying a bizarre thing, but how it really is and not how it's commonly pictured, not "measuring the marigolds" as much as understatedly passionate if not slightly obsessed with the details in their field of expertise, possessed by a need to know more, with the clinical, skeptical approach merely being a filter to separate the true insights from the bogus and build a bridge to the truth despite the limitations of perception, and even the confounding or imperfect things become things to know, cards to play or facts to investigate.

So there's still some of that reverent focus on her alone, if not in the same way that she wants - and there might even be a little bit of the way she wants in there, with how he almost seemed taken aback there in the doorway.

Some of their signals, transmissions and communications, of their waltzes, dialogues and duets, are going past each other to an extent here, but there's a critical mass of commonalities that ultimately serves as the glue – And it's not like he never finds himself wondering wether she noticed that he visibly put some effort in combing his hair that day, if it is, for example, styled in a bit of a modern-ish peak, or how he's obviously trying to impress her with the list of potential destinations he keeps rambling about...

But, bottom line: If Clara hadn't ceased with the posing here and there, it wasn't because she had yet to realize that it was futile, or really wishes it weren't; It's more that she's not willing to be out-peacock-ed, or feels a need to respond, because, if there's a conversation on the subject of being awesome, shell always have some personal experience to contribute.

At some point in the undefined, recent past, these exchanges had long ceased to be something that was a holdover from the olden days, and become something very particular to the combination of their current selves. Sure, he was showy before, in fact, after that encounter involving three of him at once, she felt quite confident stating that he always was, to varying degrees – He intrigued her from the beginning, too, so that's not a new thing, either, but it was more pronounced, more at the forefront right now, with his current self, because he would openly challenge her, annoy her back, even try to catch her off-guard or just get her impressed in a more direct, deliberate, head-on sort of way, there's a bit of a petulant brat defying his babysitter for the heck of it, or goading the more sensible playmate into pulling a crazy stunt with him (in part because he wouldn't dare to do it alone, wants to do it together, or watch her as she does it – she knows that all these are subtly different things. ) but there's also the man who's not hiding his experience, or even flaunting it, and daring/trusting her to keep up

So even if he's difficult and pisses her off, she can't just let him be because all of him, even the difficult-ness, is a challenge she doesn't wanna back off from (and that might just go both ways) and it's not so often that someone like Clara meets someone she'd consider a 'worthy opponent'.

(On the other hand, she can't help but consider that, from a certain point of view, someone might find a bit of an undertone or subtext in their exchanges, something like this being their particular, individual version of the stereotypical couple having the 'how much longer will you need to get ready'/'does that dress make me look fat' conversation, or arguing about potential destinations before the designated date night, except it's a great deal more interesting, because they are more interesting, and, non-standard in many ways, and wouldn't really want it any other way, deep down.)