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Jon’s trying to find the right angle in the bathroom mirror, his elbow sticking out awkwardly and his tongue poking out slightly between his teeth as he tries and fails to simultaneously hold his hair back and maneuver the electric hair clipper into position. That’s where Georgie finds him when she bumps the ajar bathroom door fully open with her hip, toothbrush stuck in one corner of her mouth. She lets out a startled chuckle that sends the toothbrush clattering onto the tile.
“Oh, Christ,” she says, voice still lilted upward with humor even as she squints dejectedly at her now-unusable toothbrush. “Right, into the bin that goes.” As she stoops to pick it up, she says, a bit more composed, “What on earth are you doing, Jon?”
Jon had jerked his hands away from his head when the door had swung open, but with no place to hide the clipper, he’d simply clutched it tighter. Now, he runs an absentminded thumb over the smooth plastic surface as he says, a bit brusquely, “I rather thought a man’s bathroom habits were his own private business.”
Georgie’s nose wrinkles like it does when she’s straddling the line between humored and irritated. “Right, okay.” Her eyes catch on the clipper in his hand, just before he can pull it away and out of sight. “Were- were you trying to cut your hair?” Her tone wobbles for a moment before landing firmly on the humored side of the line, and she catches his eyes for a moment in the mirror before he looks away, a hot flush coloring the back of his neck. “At eleven at night?”
“I don’t see why the time of day is relevant,” Jon says flatly.
“Okay, okay,” Georgie says, the levity in her voice tapering slightly. “Seriously though, Jon. Why not just make an appointment with the barber in the morning? It’s better than turning our bathroom into a crime scene when you inevitably nick yourself.”
Jon opens his mouth, then closes it. The flush on the back of his neck rises past his hairline, hidden by the heaviness of the curls that hang there. Georgie, ever patient, just stands there staring at him expectantly before he finally says haltingly, “It… just seemed easier? It’s a- a rather simple endeavor, after all, and as I only intend to remove the bottom layers of my hair, I reasoned that any mistakes or errors would be sufficiently hidden. I’ve just been… attempting to determine the best angle of attack.”
“Jon,” Georgie says with a smile just barely tamped down by exasperation. “You’re trying to give yourself an undercut? And you thought that this was something that you could accomplish yourself?”
“Yes?” Jon really doesn’t mean to phrase it as a question but, well. Georgie’s eyes, firm and chiding, have a tendency to do that to him.
The sigh Georgie gives is full-body, but not want for affection. “And you have to do this now?”
Jon’s free hand comes up to fiddle with the clipper’s cord. “I… I suppose not. Though it- it would be easier to get my hair to stay pinned up if there were less of it, and it’s terribly inconvenient when it starts to slip out in the middle of a performance because then I have to fix it, and you know how I hate to go off-script, and—”
“Jon,” Georgie says firmly. She points at the clipper. “Just- just give it here.”
Jon’s forehead folds inward in confusion, but after another insistent, “Jon,” he hands it off. She has him face the mirror and makes short work of pinning the top layers of his hair back and out of the way. It’s only when the clipper turns on with a gentle hum that Jon thinks to ask, “Do- do you know what you’re doing?”
Georgie hums and meets his eyes in the mirror. “I seem to recall you saying it would be a ‘rather simple endeavor.’”
Fair point. Jon’s fingers drum against the vanity as the clipper carves away a swath of hair; it tickles his neck as it falls and leaves behind a sudden chill where the skin beneath is now exposed. He shivers involuntarily, and Georgie’s free hand settles on his shoulder. “Don’t move,” she chides. Jon almost nods before correcting himself and letting out a small noise of assent instead.
It’s no time at all before Georgie steps back and the clipper’s turned off, leaving an aching silence in its wake. Jon’s fingers itch to reach back and brush against the freshly shortened hair, to feel the sharp bristle of it against the pads of his fingers, but then Georgie’s hands are pulling the pins from his hair and it falls back against his neck and shoulders.
It’s a strange sensation, the familiarity of the length he can feel against his back without the heaviness. He reaches back tentatively, cards his fingers through his curls, reaches beneath to feel the lack thereof. He pulls his hair up and away, trying to see the reflection of the back of his head in the mirror, but all he ends up doing is straining the already-sore muscles in his neck from one too many late nights spent hunched over a textbook.
“What do you think?” Georgie asks, taking the opportunity to ruffle his hair in that cheeky way that he hates, that makes him feel like a child being teased. His scathing glare is cooled slightly by the feel of stubble against his fingers as he rubs them absently over the back of his head.
“It’s… good. Um, great, actually,” he says, allowing a bit of genuine vulnerability to come over him as he gives Georgie a small, soft smile in the mirror. “Thank you.”
Georgie cards her fingers through his hair one last time, running her nails over his scalp in that way that has him almost melting into the side of the vanity, and says, “You could have just asked, you know. From the start.”
“Yes, well.” Jon clears his throat and tries to damp down the smile still lingering stubbornly on his lips. “I still maintain that I could have done it myself.”
“Mm hm. Okay.” Georgie presses a quick kiss to the crown of his head before stepping back and eyeing the floor with that same wrinkle of her nose that, this time, definitely means irritated. “Christ, we’ve made a mess, though. Don’t move—I’ll be back with a broom.”
Georgie presses the clipper back into his hand before she leaves, and Jon finds himself running his thumb over the plastic again in repetitive circular motions as he studies his own reflection. He reaches his free hand up again and tugs at the curls. If he pulls, just so, he can see the shadow of the undercut, tucked just behind his ear, a secret hidden in plain sight.
It’s nice, he thinks. Maybe he’ll start wearing his hair up more often.
Tim had mentioned it in passing once—that he knew how to cut hair. Jon distinctly remembers it, because it had been a particularly windy day and his elastic had broken somewhere between his flat and the Institute. It had left his hair a tangled mess that he’d been desperately trying to wrangle into something remotely less similar a bird’s nest when Tim had walked in, seen him, and said with a Cheshire grin, “That’s a new look for you.”
The glare Jon gave him could have cut through stone, but it bounced uselessly off Tim’s unwavering grin as he continued, “Honestly, Jon, I had no idea you even had this much hair. Where on earth do you keep it all normally?”
Jon sat down at his desk with more force than was strictly necessary, knocking a few pens and papers off as he did so and ignoring the way this only fueled Tim’s enjoyment of the entire situation. “I’m a bit jealous, really,” Tim continued, placing a hand on Jon’s desk and leaning his weight on it until he was fully within Jon’s eyeline. “It would take me ages to curl my hair like that—Sasha’s tried before, you know, and we never even got close to—”
“Tim,” Jon said through grit teeth. “I would appreciate it if I could just get to work?”
Tim’s grin didn’t falter in the slightest. “Right you are. You know, I have quite the collection of elastics, should you need one.”
The headache building behind Jon’s eyes had almost reached critical mass. He pressed his thumbs to his temples and muttered, “At the moment, I’d really rather just take a clipper to it all.”
“As a matter of fact,” Tim said in that jaunty tone he used when he stumbled upon something he knew that Jon didn’t (as infrequently as that occurred), "I happen to know a thing or two about that.”
Jon looked up through his fingers. “What,” he said flatly.
Tim shrugged in feigned casualness, betrayed by the excited glitter to his eyes. “Took a few classes with my boyfriend when I was in uni. I might not be England’s best barber, but I could get the job done.” He made a scissors motion with his fingers. “Just say the word.”
Jon stared at Tim’s hands and knew for a fact that he was never, ever letting them anywhere near his hair.
Now, as Jon stands at the threshold of Tim’s house, he finds that he can’t look away from those same hands, one gripping the doorframe and the other tucked casually into a pocket as Tim stares at him and says, “You want me to what?”
Jon’s face is aflame as he says, “I believe I’ve articulated my point quite clearly already.”
“Okay?” Tim says, disbelief turning the end of the word up into a question. “Can I ask why you want me to cut your hair? Oh, and follow-up question: why do you want me to cut your hair?”
Jon can’t tell Tim that he remembers their conversation from what must have been almost a year ago. He definitely can’t tell him that he’s been growing more and more restless since he’d been notified of his promotion to Head Archivist, tugging at the curls that suddenly seemed much too long for days until he’d woken this morning with the unshakable conviction that they had to go, that shorter hair would be more professional, more authoritative. And he most certainly can’t tell him that he’d spent all morning desperately looking for an opening—at a barber, a salon, a cheap-cuts shop, anywhere—and had come up completely empty, and that since tomorrow is their first day in the Archives, it has to be now.
It’s- it’s fine. Jon’s sure he has a clipper sitting in a drawer in his flat somewhere. He’ll just have to find it and figure this out himself. He takes a few steps back from Tim’s doorway as he says, throat tight with nerves, “Just- just forget about it, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
A hand closes around his wrist, and then Jon’s doing it again—staring at Tim’s hands. “I didn’t say no,” Tim says.
So then Jon’s sitting in Tim’s bathroom, his hands clasped in his lap and his back ramrod straight as every snip of the shears in Tim’s hands makes Jon’s head feel just a bit lighter. He hasn’t had short hair since—Christ, maybe since he was in primary school. He clenches his fists tighter and tries to will away the tight knot of nerves in the pit of his stomach.
“I can practically hear you overthinking,” Tim says casually as there’s another snip, and Jon feels the tickle of hair against the back of his neck as it falls away. “Nervous about tomorrow? Or is it something else?” Tim lets out a dramatic gasp, and though Jon can’t see his face, he’s sure it’s contorted into a parody of shock. “Is it me? Oh, it’s me, isn’t it. Don’t worry, Jon, things are looking very good back here.” He gives another snip with the shears, as if to prove his point.
“I- I am not nervous,” Jon says sullenly, feeling the corner of his mouth turn down into a pout like a- a sulking teenager. He wills his face back into a neutral expression and continues haltingly, “I… it’s just strange.”
He doesn’t elaborate and Tim doesn’t push, just hums and continues to clip away the curls that his grandmother had spent so much time teaching him to manage, her own fully grey corkscrews carefully cultivated with not so much as a split end or a single frizzy strand. He sees some of that same grey streaked through the hair that now litters the bathroom floor. Perhaps that marker of age and maturity, combined with the short, clipped style he’d shown Tim on his phone as a reference, will finally settle the twisting sensation in the pit of his stomach that reminds him how deeply unqualified he is for this.
“Done,” Tim announces, tearing Jon away from his thoughts and making him very acutely aware of the fact that his head feels so very, very light and that the back of his neck is prickling with goosebumps. Tim steps around into his line of sight, his tongue poking out between his lips as he studies Jon in a way that makes him want to shrink back into the chair and disappear. Whatever Tim finds must be satisfactory, as his lips pull into a wide grin and he says, “Gotta admit, Jon—this is a good look on you. Very ‘distinguished professor.’”
Too quickly, Jon stands, his socked feet brushing against the loose curls on the ground, and twists to see himself in the mirror. For a brief, terrifying moment, he doesn’t recognize the face staring back at him, too-thin and angular in ways it shouldn’t be. Then, in between one blink and the next, his mind adjusts and it’s just him staring back, eyes blown wide like a startled deer’s.
Tim’s right, he thinks distantly as he brings a hand up and runs it through the short, clipped curls that still coil against his ears; they offer no resistance at all to his fingers, slipping through them as easily as water. It does look very… Head Archivist. Which he supposes was rather the point.
Flattening his expression into something vaguely appreciative, Jon turns to Tim—who’s watching him with an expression not unlike a child waiting for praise from a parent—and says with what he finds is genuine gratitude, “Thank you, Tim. It’s… it’s quite satisfactory.”
Tim scoffs. “’Satisfactory.’ It’s bloody masterful is what it is. Those classes were years ago, I’m surprised I even remember how to—”
At Jon’s slightly panicked glare, Tim changes course and says, “Of- of course it’s satisfactory! Yup, no doubt in my mind whatsoever that I could do it. Really just a- a totally expected outcome.”
“Tim.”
Jon ends up staying for dinner on Tim’s stubborn insistence that he ‘consider it a form of payment for services rendered.’ They have pork tonkatsu and Tim regales Jon with a surely exaggerated story of the time he got lost for three days on a hiking trip and had to use his, quote, ‘expert wilderness survival skills.’ Jon can’t stop brushing his fingers against the nape of his neck, ghosting them against the bristly hair that remains there.
Strange, he thinks again. But not necessarily in a bad way, he decides as he steps out into the cooling night air and issues one last thank you to Tim. Strange as in new, he thinks. Strange as in change. As he looks in the mirror again that night, the phrase ‘strange as in professional’ crosses his mind, which he doesn’t care to think about in great detail.
Strange as in nice, he decides firmly, and turns away from his reflection.
Of course, all professionalism goes out the window the next day when he has to spend two hours attempting to wrangle a dog that’s loose in the Archives. But it feels nice all the same.
There’s so much grey in his hair, Jon thinks absently as he runs the curls through his fingers rhythmically. Back and forth, slipping the fine hairs between the pads of his index and thumb, letting them fall away before turning his attention to another clump and repeating the process. Back and forth. Back and forth.
The hair slides free from his fingers once again, and an image slips in in its place: hands grasping at the dirt, fingernails chipped and dirty and stained with dried blood from where the cuticles had split open in their frantic motions to extract themselves from the crushing soil that had consumed them entirely, their fear hot and sticky on Jon’s tongue.
He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, like that will keep him from seeing the terror that lies just beyond the creaking wooden walls that surround them, and takes another curl between his fingers.
Part of him wants to consider the grey streaks as a sign of his humanity. Humans age, after all; humans can get hurt and humans can get sick and humans can die. Humans get prematurely grey hair. But he doesn’t get sick, not anymore. He’s much harder to hurt now—especially now, something in the back of his mind tells him, in this new world that’s risen from the bloodied remains of the one he slaughtered. And death…
Death is a relief now. And it slips from the fingers of those who grasp for it, hoping for an escape. Perhaps none of them are human anymore, then.
Or maybe monsters just get grey hair too.
There’s motion in his periphery, catching his eyes and dragging them toward the corner of the cottage near the door where Martin has set a twin pair of backpacks and is currently rifling through one with his back to Jon. Jon can see the tension in Martin’s shoulders, hinting at the nervous set to his eyes that’ll probably be covered with a reassuring smile for Jon’s sake when he—
Martin turns, and Jon blinks at the deep concern that’s etched in the lines of Martin’s face, at the nervousness he wears plainly and openly. It occurs to Jon, then, that he’d been expecting it all to… slip away. The vulnerability they’d cultivated in rays of sunshine dripping through the cabin windows like warm lemon drops, in the heat of the fireplace as the chill of the highlands crept in through the paper-thin cottage slats, in the drowsy hours of the early morning when Jon studied the soft curves of Martin’s face resting inches from his and felt love and affection curling so intensely within his chest that he thought he might choke on it. It didn’t feel fragile, that happiness, so much as too gentle for the darkness that now seeped in through the corners and turned every joyful memory against them.
Jon hadn’t thought it would survive. So when Martin says, with that same care and kindness but also with an unsteadiness to his voice that betrays his nerves, “About ready, then?” Jon feels tears prickle at the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, Jon,” Martin says, and then he’s across the room, cradling Jon’s face gently in his hands and brushing away the wetness on Jon’s cheeks with his thumbs. “I’m sorry.”
Jon shakes his head, the motion pulling Martin’s hands along with it. Whether he means don’t apologize, or it’s not your fault, or I’m sorry too, he’s not sure. What he ends up saying, in a voice barely more than a whisper, is, “Can- can you cut my hair?”
Surprise colors Martin’s face a light pink. “You- what?”
Jon takes a long, slow breath and repeats, “Can you cut my hair? It- it’s gotten rather long, and I don’t imagine I’ll be able to- to take care of it while we’re… traveling. I- I saw a pair of shears in one of the bathroom cabinets that should work.”
Can we have one last moment? he doesn’t say. One last moment of safety. One last lovely thing.
Martin seems to understand anyway. “All right,” he says softly, and goes to retrieve the shears.
It’s easier this time. Jon knows what to expect as the snip of the shears releases his curls in clumps, knows how the back of his neck will prickle with the loss, knows how incrementally lighter his head will feel with each cut. But the gentle scrape of Martin’s nails against his scalp as he brushes Jon’s hair back from his forehead and the grounding press of Martin’s stomach against his back as he works and the low murmur of Martin’s voice as he talks in circles, just to keep Jon’s attention away from the insistent press of fear that lurks beyond the cabin—that’s all new, and Jon lets it consume him. He closes his eyes and focuses on the press of Martin’s hands and just breathes, until there’s a gentle kiss against the crown of his head and Martin murmurs, close to his ear, “All done.”
Jon doesn’t look in the mirror. He reaches his hand up, but instead of running it through the newly-shortened curls that tickle the shells of his ears, he searches for Martin’s hand and laces their fingers together.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice cracking around the words as he pulls Martin’s hand down and lays a kiss across his knuckles. He allows himself to sit for one moment longer, letting the warm, calloused pressure of Martin’s hand against his ground him, before saying quietly, “I- I think I’m about ready now.”
Martin squeezes his hand, letting it linger a moment longer before stepping back and taking the warmth with him. “I suppose there’s really no use in sweeping,” he says, voice taking that upward pitch it gets when he’s trying quite hard to maintain the illusion of levity. Jon appreciates it; he allows himself to smile, ever so slightly.
“I suppose not.”
“Who knows,” Martin says with that same almost-lightness as he crosses the room to where their backpacks sit and slips his arms through the straps of the larger one. “Maybe it’ll still be here when we get back.”
Jon looks at the pile of curls on the ground, more grey than brown, and knows that there won’t be a when. Maybe Knows. He’s not sure if there’s much of a difference anymore. All he says, though, is, “Maybe.”
He shoulders his own pack, noting with a small twinge of satisfaction the lack of the necessity to extract his hair from the straps, and reaches automatically for Martin’s hand. It’s warm and heavy in his, and a bit of tension bleeds out of him as he holds it. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” Martin echoes.
He opens the door. And Jon really, really wishes that stepping over the threshold didn’t feel like the beginning of the end. But this isn’t a world where he’s allowed to wish—not anymore. All he can do is clutch Martin’s hand tightly and hope that he won’t let him fall.