Chapter Text
“ Psst….psst!”
Lark sat perched on the edge of Sparrow’s bed. Only the dim glow from outside provided any light, painting their shared room in a strange red underwater world. Sparrow slept on his back, torso twisted, one arm thrown up over his head. His front teeth were just visible from where his lips parted in his sleep.
“ Brother, wake thee from thy sleep!” Lark intoned dramatically to no-one, poking his brother in the cheek.
Sparrow groaned in his sleep, turning onto his side in what looked like a horrible uncomfortable twist.
Lark gave in and shook Sparrow's shoulders. “ Sparrow!”
“Uh!”
Sparrow’s eyes shot open in surprise, a single syllable escaping him. His eyes searched wildly around, as if he were expecting to be somewhere other than their bedroom. He held onto Lark’s hands, still on his shoulders, and blinked a few times to focus.
“What?” Sparrow said, more in blatant confusion than an actual question.
Lark held him firm by his shoulders until Sparrow met his eyes. They stared at each other. Sparrow, sensing the gravity of whatever was happening, put his hands on Lark’s shoulders.
“It’s time,” Lark stated.
Sparrow’s eyebrows jumped. “Right now?”
“Yes. While Henry is asleep. We’ll wake up new men.”
They are 14. They’re starting high school in a month. They’ve already heard stories from the other boys, and for 2 years they waited in agony to be able to join them. It wasn’t as often now that they were treated like the kids of the group. After they got back, they had all been through so much that they were on the same level. But once Grant, Terry Jr., and Nicky started high school and began complaining about their various high school grievances, it became painfully obvious that their age difference mattered at least a little.
Sparrow rubbed the sleep from his eyes, stretching out on his back. “What time is it?”
“Time to become new men.”
“Does ‘new men time’ have a numerical association?”
“Roughly 3 in the morning.”
Lark waited as Sparrow sat up and twisted his back to crack his spine in a few spots. When he looked up, his eyes were alert and alight with determination.
They both jumped off the mattress and made their way silently to the bathroom down the hall. The harsh, bright lighting made them both squint as they fumbled around to find the little bag that contained the materials they would require. Sparrow clicked his tongue to get Lark’s attention, and held up the prize from where he found it tucked at the back of one of the cabinets. A small floral patterned bag with a zip at the top. Inside, a pair of haircutting scissors, electric clippers, several different guards for different lengths. Lark grinned.
The two positioned themselves in the mirror, looking at their reflections. The same boy, four times. Their hair had grown long in the few years since they’d returned. Shoulder-length, and wavy, a sun-pale blonde that contrasted their warm tan skin. Sparrow pulled his hair back out of his face, considering. Lark held his so that it came to his chin. They experimented, moving bits of hair here and there to try and mimic different shapes.
“How do we feel about ears?”
“It is going to be summer soon.”
“Something shorter?”
“We’ve never done a buzzcut.”
“Mm, I want to have some hair.”
“Yeaaah, we couldn’t pull off the military look.”
They went back and forth for a bit before settling on a general look. Choppy (as if it would be anything but given their past experience), short, but not too short. Enough to give a little bit of fringe, to allow their natural waves to form. Long enough to style if they wanted, but not long enough to go over their ears.
“You first?”
“Yeah.”
Lark sat on the toilet seat backwards while Sparrow dug out the little orange scissors their mother kept for haircuts. He pulled his sleep shirt off, tossing it haphazardly to the bathroom tile. Sparrow passed a brush through Lark’s hair a few times before taking a section between his index and middle finger. Lark’s skin bristled in anticipation. Sparrow was much more careful when cutting hair than he was. He was careful in turn - he couldn’t be careless if they wanted to be able to still pass as each other - but Sparrow cutting first ensured that Lark wasn’t just chopping willy nilly.
Lark closed his eyes. The first sharp snip came from behind him, and Lark could hear every fiber being sheared off. He felt the flutter of hair ghost over his back as it fell. He felt the tips of Sparrow’s fingers on his skull, tilting his head down. He obliged, and sat staring at his hands while Sparrow worked. A strange fuzz came over his mind, that subtle emptiness inside him yawning wide. He couldn’t put a name to it. There was no real reason to be feeling it now, other than the fact he felt it often and it came without warning.
He felt his head begin to lighten as Sparrow snipped more and more hair away. He watched the clumps drift to the ground and land on the floor.
“Do you ever miss it?” Lark asks his hands.
“Miss what?” Sparrow asks conversationally.
Snip…snip-snip.
“Back then….”
Ssssnip….
Sparrow’s hand pauses for a beat, scissors held open, before he resumes. “Sometimes…I don’t know…”
Lark waits for him to gather the rest of his thoughts, and when he doesn’t continue, he prompts, “Penny for your thoughts, or….?”
Sparrow inhales deeply through his nose, goes back to his task at hand. “It like--I don’t know, sometimes I think being back there would be better than like…some stuff here--”
“Like what?”
“Like…school, I guess. Or worrying about classes. Taxes seem stupid, so we probably wouldn’t have to do that when we get older if we were there.”
“I think they had taxes there.”
“Yeah, but taxes there are, like, a guy with a big money bag coming around and telling you to give him ten gold coins or whatever. I’ve heard Father and Mama talking about it, it seems complicated and stupid here.”
Lark hums. It does seem complicated and stupid here.
“Ok…what else?”
“What else, what?”
Lark huffs. He can’t turn to look at his brother so he settles for anxiously bouncing his knee up and down. “What else don’t you like here? What else do you miss there?”
“I miss lots there.”
“Like what?”
“Like a lot! I don’t know! I miss Walter, I miss getting to be outside all day?” Sparrow was starting to sound defensive now. "Would you stop bouncing your leg, you're gonna make me mess up!"
“Ok, ok, I’m sorry,” Lark says quickly. Then, belatedly, forces his knee to stop jittering. It aches a little, like there's energy in there trying to get out. He picks at a hangnail on his thumb instead.
“Ok…head up,” Sparrow says, tilting Lark’s skull again.
They continue in silence.
Lark stares at the wall. Pale, blue, a small picture of an abstract, hand-painted watercolor of hanging over the toilet. Lark's pretty sure it's supposed to be two naked women near a river, but it's just smudgy enough that it isn't explicit, and isn't quite clear what it is. Every once in a while, he can feel Sparrow’s breath ghost over the tips of his ears, which were now uncovered from the length of his hair now.
“What about you?” Sparrow asks.
“I miss it,” Lark says immediately.
Sparrow is silent; he knew this answer already. He waits for him to elaborate.
“I hate it here,” Lark says, glaring at the maybe-women in the picture. “We can’t do anything here. We’re treated like children. We’re all treated like children. Grant is almost sixteen and Darrell still doesn’t let him go out past 9:00 unless they have an pre-planned itinerary or something. He had to carry around a walkie-talkie for two years when we got back. Even just to go down the street.”
“Yeah…” Sparrow grumbles. “I get that they want us to all have a normal life, but...at a certain point acting like nothing in the Forgotten Realms ever even happened, while still acting like something might come steal us away again…Like you can't both over-protect us and want us to be normal kids.”
“If I had released the Doodler back there, they wouldn’t be like this. They’d have to let us help. We helped before! And now they just want to protect us! Like they did such a good job of that before!”
And there it is again, that seed of anger growing in his chest.
“I’m angry too,” Sparrow said after a moment. His voice was calm, but there was a tension in it that told Sparrow it was measured. A quiet anger.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m crazy,” Lark said.
“You’re not,” Sparrow responds immediately. “Or if you are, then so am I. So…you know.”
“Hm.”
Sparrow did a few more chops before ruffling his hands through Lark’s hair to dislodge any stray hairs that might be sitting around. A few more pieces fell to the ground. The bathroom air was cool on the back of Lark’s neck, the sides of his head were lighter now. Sparrow took a step back, and Lark stood up, brushing some stray strands from his shoulders, his shorts. They went and stood in front of the mirror again together. Lark stared at himself.
Ruffled, slightly wavy hair cut just long enough to curl around his ears. It made the shape of his face stand out more - still rounded with youth, but the angles were beginning to show themselves at the cheekbones, the jaw. He glanced at Sparrow in the mirror who, it turns out, was already looking at him with a tooth smile. His own face split into a grin. It wasn’t often the two didn’t look identical. Lark looked at themselves again. One short haired, one long haired. No longer mirror images, just for a short time.
“What do you think?” Sparrow asked.
Lark went up to the mirror to get a closer look. He fussed with it, moving pieces here and there. He’d need a shower before he knew what it would really look like, but the change felt good. That roiling need for something, for chaos, sated for just a little longer.
“Good,” he said. “Feels colder.”
“Astute observation, I’m sure,” Sparrow teased, Lark stuck his tongue out at him in the mirror.
“Your turn?”
Sparrow smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. Lark narrowed his eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing!" He stepped up beside Lark again, looked at themselves in the mirror. "I’ll just miss the long hair.”
Lark felt his stomach drop slightly. “Why didn’t you say you didn’t want to cut it?!” he snapped. They couldn't exactly go back now.
Sparrow got a sheepish look. “It’s fine! I didn’t not want to-"
"But you wished we'd kept it for longer."
Sparrow shrugged. "It's no big deal, Lark, really."
Guilt began to curl in Lark's gut. He hadn't even really asked; he'd just assumed Sparrow would be on board like they always were when the other demanded a change. Ride or die, Lark and Sparrow - that's how it was between them. That's how it always was.
"I would have waited if you wanted..." Lark said. He felt like folding in on himself. He scratched at his arm, rubbing a hand over the tattoo.
"I didn't mean to make this a thing," Sparrow said, voice gentle and kind like it always was these days. "I'm really not bothered by it. We'll grow it out again sometime later. Besides, we needed the change, anyways."
Lark studied his brother's face. If he were lying, he'd know. They may have been proficient in fooling others, but they knew each other too well - knew how to be each other too well - to be able to hide things from each other.
"Alright...still. I'm apologize, brother," Lark said, adopting the dramatized cadence of their youth to illustrate how serious he was.
Sparrow grinned, and held his hand out for the Predator handshake. Lark gripped his hand tight without a moment's hesitation.
"Apology accepted, brother. Now take your sheers in hand and deliver my hair a swift and righteous death."
They switched places; Sparrow took his seat on the toilet, and Lark stood behind him with the scissors. He opened the medicine cabinet door at an angle so he could use his own face as a reference. They sat in comfortable silence as Sparrow's hair fell to join Lark's on the bathroom tile. When they were done, they looked in the mirror together, the same boy twice, once again.