Work Text:
The roots have done in. That is the actual problem.
Fingers hover over the slit in the hair, as if they’re calculating something by themselves – they were straining their eyes when they did try to see what was up with that, so they don’t. They just laughed a little, awkwardly- and now the fingertips shift, like instead of brushing through to check if the hair is clean enough (after they’d washed it a long, long time ago, baha) it’s patting his head. The laughing sound stops.
Mikoto kneads their knuckles and puts the gloves on. It makes the movements crinkle when he’s brushing his hair, but it makes the process easier still, the one, two, three. He brushes a straight glance at them in the mirror.
It’s nothing special to the eye. Just a young man barely fresh into adulthood anymore.
Why were they doing this again?
Because it’s nice, Mikoto thinks. To have everything back in one place, back together, to be as he used to be – repetition is nice, balance is. Stability is what makes a successful person. Even if we approach the cheesy things like that, like hair dying.
Right.
They were not supposed to be feeling so sad about bleaching their hair again.
Mikoto closes their eyes. Takes a second.
It’s fine now.
It just really has been such a long time. Unfairly melancholic, like the good old days of the childhood.
Or the days he’d order a bleaching agent online and receive quite a failed experiment a few days later. He did go to a professional stylist on the day before starting his new job. That was the last time, before. Now, the roots have grown in and they threw the trimmed pieces into the trash, but it’s going to be better now, even if until it’s finished he is looking really different from the habit.
Better stop reminiscing now.
He did it because the interviewer guy who was from the team had blond hair, they think. Mikoto blinks rapidly. He didn’t remember that. It probably didn’t happen like that, actually.
Yeah. Didn’t happen.
He puts the brush down, settling it.
Nothing at all.
Mikoto mixes the Box 1 with Cream 2 uneventfully. What are those called… they really haven’t done it in so long, ah.
He could just read it. Couldn’t he, huh. Applying the mass is going to sting.
In the reflection, the rims of their eyes are red.
“Aah,” his nose is starting to itch a little – but it’s fine- it’s fine. He jerkily wipes it on the skin. A mess might be going anywhere in small splotches, and he immediately feels a bit bad for his top, but it’s- necessary sacrifices must be made!
He sneezes.
Every time this happens, the trim of their hair gets a shade more blank – and just barely stiffer, but it’s not anything a good balm can’t hide. The prickle of it on his roots’s still present, discomforting, but he finds himself smiling. Really like that.
A little bit has gotten onto the mirror. A gloved fingertip swipes at it, pushing it away. The trail remains.
I- it’s nice.
They’re looking at him in it. Mikoto blinks, embarrassed with himself, and leans away.
He missed this. The ideal, just-a-bit-out-of-the-ordinary, approachable cute look. If there’s one thing he’d like to be, it’s always this. You can never really go wrong with it, can you?
Ah, making his own choices.
His scalp’s experiencing a shallow feeling of burning.
But it’s not really that. It’s not really anything. He just sits with his hands in his gloves (one-off, to be thrown in the waste, phew), smudged, and his wrists are starting to get numb. It is a process outside of his line of control. He is simply sitting. There are… something, there should really be off-work time documents for him to filter through, but he doesn’t… does it- should it matter?
His hands are shaking.
“It’s… good!” he says nasally, to himself, to affirm it. He thinks the smell is making his eyes water, even though it’s so slim it almost falls through in his conscience.
A single wet strip slides down his face, one of those jokingly-called sexy movie crying lines – both of his eyes are glistening thick, and it’s just that one strip that manages to overflow. Mikoto shakily holds his arms up, above the sink and his wrists ache. His throat feels swollen.
But i- it’s fine.
His gloves have been changed, in this span of time.
Mikoto absentmindedly brushes the tear track off. His head hurts.
Their hand fiddles with the rim of a glove when he notices, and it embarrassedly stops.
It’s gonna be okay, his inner voice says, and strangely, it feels kind of cold, and flaccid, now. He feels cold. There’s a defeatism to it.
Was there a better way? he asks it shakily, without moving his lips. The figure cowers in the small chair on the bathroom tiles, but they still don’t hug themselves- the hands still just barely there. There is a clumsy, unthinkingly ripped hole in their heart. WAS THERE A BETTER WAY?
Is there any sort of happy ending, a sort of working out the unsolvable if he just didn’t do it wrong, did it better? Didn’t hide, was real and ugly, was guilty? There wouldn’t be.
“It’s not fair,” he chokes out to it. He just wanted to not hurt. Is that so bad?
Their hands hug them and it feels like nothing. It feels like hugging themselves, artificial comfort. He doesn’t think they feel anything anymore. Maybe that’s it, that’s the trick to not feeling pain. Even when the fingers caress his shoulder, they don’t actually care, they’ve already given up.
“Don’t lea- uuukhhh,” they had to leave. That thing, has to leave.
Mikoto grasps his shoulders painfully, and then does his temples, and can’t feel the mussed hair on his skin but only hear the wrinkle of gloves, “D- do- d-,” never manages to make himself say it.
It makes them feel so much pain.
They scratch at the temples and mess with the dye – and when they turn the sink on the water stream is almost too short to shove their head under. Waterboarding, they think, is a form of torture. They gulp air- they gulp water. It gets under their nails. They need to be clean. It’s possible to wash off your sins if you really try. They need to- get that T-shirt off. It’s dirty. Their face smashed in-between the basin and the faucet.
And then it’s all gonna be okay. No one’s gonna know, and it will all be okay.
They cough and spit mucus- it comes off bloody, and with a weird stench smell attached, that keeps not being able to come- off! Hands rush splitting hair and running the stream through it.
Silly, who would think to wash off blood in a sink?
They look up. There’s a dazed open-eyed look in the mirror, and their hair’s clean. They wore a beanie that time.
Damp and darkened, it’s hard to see the effects going into motion yet, but they can see clearly, around the roots, how parts and patches are splattered and botched, a bright yellow hat in slightly annoyingly different shades. Some hairs perk out grey.
And they stand in front of the mirror, dazed, halfway sideways. And they’re alone.
Always alone.