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Since she can't currently imagine willingly offering to spend any significant amount of time with her hands in this man's hair, though... there was no reason to change except a desire not to wear her pretty dresses while going to meet him.
Taura is used to a relatively lax military in some respects, since mercenaries tend to be a more eccentric bunch than government forces, but still, military precision. She doesn't look impatient, though.
Does he smell neutral, though, or just not quite as bad? Even a fraction of a wolf's sense of smell is a trial sometimes.
She towers over Betelgeuse at eight feet, and looks down at as he comes into view. "Hi. You're looking for green dye, right? And what color nail polish?"
"Hol' up, girl. You are adorable. Hang on -"
BJ is fumbling for his communicator, getting up close and beside Taura to ostensibly...take a selfie with her?
"Saaaay 'Coping Mechanisms'!"
No thank you. Taura sidesteps nimbly, not wanting to crouch into frame and put her nose even closer to Betelgeuse. At this point, she doesn't much care if it's rude, because there's already been enough rudeness from him.
"Shall we?"
"You upset me more than once during our conversation earlier, and you didn't seem to notice or care." Which is a little more of an issue than the smell, though that's.. unpleasant. It, at least, is presumably something he can't do much about. She doesn't mind the soap, or the ash.
"I came to meet you and of course I'll help you get what you need from the spa, but just because I'm a warden doesn't mean I need to be agreeable to people who don't care about my feelings. I spent enough of my life doing that" It isn't her job.
He spreads his arms, looking at the sky as if to say;
"Admiral? Back me up here!"
Back to Taura.
"Look, I know I'm a little...much. But that's because I'm new. New to the ship, new to feelings in general, new to being seen for the first time in a thousand years instead of wandering the earth like an invisible clown no one can hear or see in the toilet.
Don't I get, I don't know, a mulligan?"
"Accusing someone of selfishness because they had the nerve to be upset by things you said, for future reference, is a terrible way of asking about their feelings." She raises her eyebrows, "That phrasing sounds like you're trying to slide out from under any responsibility for the effect of your words by putting it on me and calling it a character flaw. As if I shouldn't express my feelings at all."
So no, she doesn't actually think he cares about them.
"Maybe I'll change my mind if we talk more. I can reserve some judgment, but I'm not going to go out of my way to be nice to you until you offer me the same courtesy. I'll do my job, but I'll stick to business."
She's fought for people she didn't like in the Dendarii. She was biddable in the lab where she was raised. But she isn't going to let anyone in who doesn't treat her as a person whose feelings matter.
He still needs her key to get at the dyes, so she follows him in and heads for the cabinet.
"Sorry, Taura. I really tried to like you, but you just don't get me on an emotional level. You and me? Just not working out."
That would be the end of it in most conversations. Trouble is, he can't leave well enough alone, and turns back to address her;
"I mean! I'm like a demon. A literal demon. TRYING to calm that tendency to murder and extort and lie that's like. Engraved in my DNA. And you know, all I wanted was to just have fun and come here and meet you and you're just this...this serious guy even though you look adorable and I don't know. I just don't know, all right?!"
Mood flip. Now he's sad.
"God damn it. You are so goddamn cool and I'm just this...this regular old human corpse shambling around trying to learn what it is to just like. Temper those impulses and I just. I just want to..."
He throws himself dramatically into the spa's nearest chair, crossing his arms and exhaling loudly through his nostrils.
"I'm only fun when I'm having a good time too," Taura points out reasonably, turning away from the cabinet to look at him. She will be very serious and unfun forever if he continues to not give a shit about her feelings, in other words. She's pretty easygoing in general, but he stepped all over her weak points.
She suppresses the twinges of pity she can feel when he hits that bit at the end, the small reminder of her own crying breakdown in the subbasement of Ryoval's when she assumed Miles didn't see her as a person.
"I haven't said a word about what you are, because I never like it when people focus on what I am rather than who I am." She has heroically not mentioned the smell! Even if it's seared into her nostrils now! She's going to go stand in the shower after this with something strongly scented under her nose! Maybe she should find a way to covertly plug her nostrils next time.
"It only matters what you do." On the reason they're here, she adds, "Do you want to come over here and choose a shade of green?"
"Yeah, well, I don't know. Okay?! I don't KNOW that people don't think it's funny not to be murdered and they get all bent out of shape about being possessed. You people have all these stupid invisible rules!"
BJ, murder is bad everywhere.
He sniffles but sits up, blinking away evil tears;
"Yes please. But now I want purple; it reflects my mood better. God I miss my hair."
"Murder is never funny to people who are mortal. Except on the Barge, we don't come back from it." And Taura, for one, loves being alive. "Nobody will be around to laugh at your jokes if you kill them. And bodily autonomy is very important to some people. Especially when they've been denied it before."
Taura, who was quite literally property for the first sixteen years of her life, her body dedicated to someone else's science experiment, feels very strongly about bodily autonomy.
"If you're trying to tell whether people will find a joke funny, a good guideline is whether it will hurt them or make them feel powerless." Those are the unfunny punch lines.
"And if you're planning on changing your haircolor every time you change your mood, you'd better take a couple colors." She'll let him leave the spa with the dye bottles if he wants to and hope it doesn't backfire in the form of practical jokes. Bleach is staying here, though. "If you need to lighten your hair in between, call me to come get the bleach."
"Fine. People do not like either being killed or make-out parties. Christ, you'd think this hellboat would be one big orgy but 'noooo, BJ, there are rules."
He huffs and drags himself up out of the chair, looking over the dyes being placed in his arms.
"Got any hairspray?"
Taura will just pointedly ignore that first bit, because what's even the point of arguing with someone who thinks murder is a laugh.
"Most people like makeout parties, if they got to choose who to make out with." Possession-induced or otherwise coerced makeout parties, on the other hand? Nope. Even if her nose is still so offended that the idea of anyone choosing to make out with him seems impossible. "Plenty of people have found somebody to kiss here. Or more than one somebody."
Hair styling is an easier topic. "There's hairspray over there, by the mirrors."
Then, a sad sigh and a lowering of his shoulders.
"Usually it breaks." BJ snatches up a comb and the hairspray and starts to squint at his hair.
"Yeah, I KNOW. And I'm alone. Thanks for rubbing it in, Taura."
"You might eventually find someone willing. Without possession." It won't be her, but the ship is full of people who are more accepting than Taura's used to! ...She wonders if anyone has no sense of smell at all.
"And it's easier to fix your hair if the mirror's in one piece," she offers, since he seemed depressed about not breaking mirrors.
It's probably a good time to intervene; BJ has been with powers for so long that he's forgotten or has no idea that dumping half a bottle of hair dye and using his hands and the comb to purplify his hair is not a great idea.
After this conversation, Taura has some concerns about what his love life consisted off before he got 'fooled.'
"Gloves," she points out. "Unless you want purple hands too. There should be some your size over there. You might also want to put a little bit of vaseline around your ears and neck and forehead so the dye won't stick there, either."
[Because he'd feel even worse if he'd just gotten demoted over someone who immediately vanished.]
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