because it's really changed how i feel

[unburden]

Most of the time, Rukia doesn't have too much trouble avoiding the boutiques in town. They're carefully nestled down the street, brightly colored and tucked away between the larger buildings, the franchises, all with various, nondescript names that Rukia can't ever manage to remember once she's passed them by. It's probably for the best — Rukia has a greater attachment to the cute things in life than she ever wants to admit, and boutiques happen to be expensive places to shop, making up for the lower volume of customers that they get day by day.

But in the mall, and during holiday season, it gets that much harder. There are boutiques that have gone to great lengths to pick up on the holiday season.

Such as pushing their sales racks outside of the store.

It's what draws Rukia to a store mostly decorated in pinks and pastels, sheepishly rifling through the racks and picking out the occasional dress to hold up against her person. While it's sometimes hard to find clothes in her size, the children's section works well at this store, and the style matches as well. Feminine, frilled, but never ostentatious.

"What would I even do with so many dresses?" Rukia murmurs to herself, holding the waist against herself and twirling a little in the middle of the hall.

Comments

[singmetosleep]

"Wear them, of course," Babydoll says, pleased to see that this kind of dress is in her wheelhouse. She plays with the tighter, shorter, more modern dresses as her own experiments, but this? This she knows well. And here's the rabbit to her Alice, and so she goes right up, determined to be helpful.

"My mother only told me one thing about womanhood I think is true," she says. "You dress for yourself first, for what pleases you, for what makes you look good, for what makes you powerful and attractive, and to a lesser extent, happy. Except I rank happiness at the top."

[unburden]

Easily warming in tone when she sees Babydoll approach from a distance, Rukia turns with a slightly flirty twirl, showing off the ruffles at the dress' hem before bowing slightly at the waist. With her little moment of indulgence done, she reluctantly hangs it back on the rack with one more lingering glance to memorize the color, in case she should later cave.

"I surely don't need half as many as I'm looking at right now," Rukia says with a small grin. "I used to wear a uniform to work, and... I was rarely seen without it. And if I wasn't wearing that, then I was usually wearing my school uniform. But I'm out of school here, and the toy store is a little bit more flexible when it comes to daily wear. It's tempting to fill up my closet, even though I know I don't really need all these clothes."

[singmetosleep]

"You work in a toy store?" Babydoll grins. That's adorable. "Anyway, start with a couple of nice ones, see how you feel in them. Maybe we can go see a movie or something, you can try wearing it out on the town."

Baby starts to sort through the dresses herself. "What do you like best?"

[unburden]

"I do work in a toy store. It makes children happy, and... honestly, I like cute things," admits Rukia with a scrunchy-nosed grin. "But I'd love going out to the movies, if that's an invitation. I never had anything like that growing up, so it's been kind of a treat to have everything here. Good toys, movies, everything like that."

Pulling out a cherry-covered rockabilly dress with a flowing skirt, Rukia tilts her head in consideration.

"What do you think of this one?"