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Melanie is 11 years old when she dyes her hair for the first time.
She saves up her allowance for a month, sticking the bills and coins her dad gives her in a shoebox she keeps on her dresser, then takes the whole thing down to the corner store after school and buys the first box dye she finds that she can afford. It costs her £8.59, leaves her with less than a pound, but she’s unbelievably pleased with herself regardless.
The lady behind the counter is older than Melanie’s parents, and gives her a look— the kind of look Melanie’s already getting used to from grownups, something she won’t be able to name as distaste for another few years— but she still rings Melanie up and gives her her receipt and lets her leave without contest.
Melanie hides the box in her backpack before she gets home so her parents won’t see it. Then she locks herself in the bathroom, pulls it out, reads the instructions on the box twice. She carefully pulls on the set of gloves the box gives her — too big, much too big on her young hands — and shakily mixes the ingredients, just as the instruction sheet set told her to.
The gloopy stuff that Melanie squeezes out of the bottle starts out a bull beige-brown, but as Melanie carefully coats her hair, strand by strand, it starts to darken and darken and darken, until the promised shade of Midnight Black stares back at her out of the mirror.
It’s still a natural color, technically, even though it’s not her natural color, so she thinks there’s no way they can get mad at her for it in school. But it’s still… intense enough that it’ll stand out more than the mousy auburn-brown she inherited from her dad.
Someday, she thinks, he’d like to try something bolder. Blue or pink or green or any of the other vibrant colors she sees when she rides the Tube or goes out with her friends, but the idea of bleaching her hair by herself had intimidated her and she doesn’t want to have to ask her parents for help, even if there was a chance in hell they’d ever agree. So for now she sticks with black, because it’ll actually show up against her already kinda dark hair, and it’s definitely not her natural color.
She sits on the bathroom floor, dye-wet hair wrapped in a shower cap, keeps time on her mum’s little egg timer that looks like a tomato until the box’s instructed 35 minutes is up. She doesn’t want to take a shower in the middle of the day, so she bends over the sink to wash her hair off, standing there dutifully until the water runs clear.
Her mum yells at her for twenty minutes when she sees, but Melanie goes to sleep with a fierce sense of pride in the pit of her stomach. It feels like one of the first decisions she’s made entirely for her.
—
Melanie gets her first tattoo two days after she turns 18.
Even though she’s old enough, now, she still feels like she’s getting away with something. Maybe it’s because she knows her parents would hate it. Maybe it’s because she’s spent so long clawing to define herself by her terms, it feels strange when the pushback stops.
Whatever it is, Melanie walks into the first shop she passes with as much bravado as possible. She’s not nervous, she tells herself. Her ex-girlfriend showed her how to do stick ’n pokes with India ink and the needles from her gran’s old sewing machine when she was 16, so she’s not scared of the pain, or the permanence.
The shop smells like disinfectant, but not the way a doctor’s office does. It’s sterile, but… sticky. There’s a woman in the back doing something to someone’s shin, and a man behind the counter flipping through a magazine who looks up when the little bell over the shop door dings when Melanie walks in. She puffs up, marches right over to him.
It’s surprisingly easy. The artist behind the counter has frosted tips, a broad smile, and knuckle tattoos that he moves too fast for Melanie to read. He tells her he has time for walk-ins today, and he can see her now, does she have time for that? And that’s not what Melanie was expecting, but she’s not about to turn it down. Tries not to let her surprise show. The immediacy makes it feel more real.
This is happening.
Then comes the hard part. He asks her what she was thinking of getting. Melanie can’t let herself show hesitation, but she didn’t really get that far. What does she want? She wants something that belongs to her; she wants to paint the walls in the house of her body until it feels like a comfortable place to live.
She blinks, plays her deer-in-headlights indecision off with what she hopes is a casual care-free shrug. She does the first thing she can think of, and settles on pointing to the first flash on the wall she thinks feels like her. It’s simple: a red rose with a dagger shot through the middle, colored in basic greens and reds and browns, but she likes it.
He makes a photocopy of her ID, hands her a clipboard and a pen with a form, which she fills in standing at the counter instead of taking one of the seats in the waiting room. He keeps up a steady stream of friendly chatter the whole time he sets up his station behind the counter. Melanie’s not sure if he can tell how nervous she is — if it’s obvious she’s walking on fawn legs, no matter how hard she tries to pretend she’s got a full set of antlers — or if he’s just an outgoing person by nature.
Melanie finishes her paperwork and he tells her to come back behind the counter, then disappears into a back room on the other end of the shop. He comes back with a printed stencil of Melanie’s design, asks her where she wants it. He eyeballs her arm, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, carefully places the stencil just above the inner crease of her elbow. He peels it away, and they both look down at the blue stenciled lines on her skin.
He tells her to go look in the mirror on the far wall. Melanie stares, twists her arm this way and that, flexes her fingers, turns to one side, then the other. Something swells in her chest, and she allows herself one moment to smile, small and sharp, before she turns back and nods her approval.
She sits in the chair he indicates, rolls the sleeve of her T-shirt up to her shoulder, lets him move her arm until it’s in what he must deem a suitable position. “Ready?”
She nods, just once. “Yes.”
Needle meets skin, and Melanie watches the whole time, keeping her eyes firmly on the machine inking art into her body.
Two hours later, he tells Melanie she sat like a champ, and for some reason that sends a strange, hot spike of pride through her whole body. When she leaves, upper arm bandaged and sore, most of her birthday money gone, there’s a solidness in Melanie’s chest she hasn’t felt for a long time. She rubs at her arm below where the bandages start, fingers tracing reverently over her own skin, skin that belongs to her and her alone, and grins like a switchblade.
She now has proof, permanent and indisputable and pasted right on her arm, that this body is hers and no one else’s.
—
A decade and change later, Ghost Hunt UK implodes, taking what little bits of Melanie’s life she’s been able to cling to over the last year with it. With nowhere else to go, she turns to the Magnus Institute, and when that blows up, too, she turns to… she turns to….
For the past couple of weeks, Melanie’s been spending a lot of time at Georgie’s, darkening her doorstep almost everyday since Basira and Jon’s impromptu surgery. She’s not sure if it’s… because she can’t stand to be around them anymore, or if there’s finally some little part of her reaching out through the self destruction to try and cling to the one good thing she hasn’t entire wrecked yet.
It’s not like they’re strangers. She’s known Georgie for… Christ, six years now? Seven? So she’s been coming over here long enough to watch the Admiral go from timid kitten to huge, shameless tomcat.
But it’s — different, now, than how it used to be.
It used to be Georgie would call up Melanie with some hot new ghost-y tip, or Melanie would drag Georgie out to drink after a long week, or Georgie would say hey, there’s this new restaurant I’ve been dying to try but I don’t want to go alone, so won’t you please come? or something like that. It was always something.
It’s… not like that, now.
Sometimes Melanie comes over and all Georgie does is read while Melanie watches trash TV, or Melanie hangs out and drinks tea in the living room while Georgie records, or they don’t do anything at all. They’re just — there, together. They don’t need to be doing something, don’t need the excuses anymore. Melanie just likes being here, with Georgie, and for some reason Georgie seems to like having her around.
Like now: Melanie on the couch with the Admiral dead-asleep in her lap, Georgie sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, laptop up on the coffee table while she works. (A habit of hers that confuses Melanie as much as it charms her, even though she happens to know she shares it with Jon. It’s a laptop, she’d said, the first time she’d seen it, just put it on your lap and sit on the couch. Nah, Georgie had replied, this is more fun.)
“Georgie?” Melanie starts, hand curled in the Admiral’s fur.
“Hm?” Georgie hums, not quite looking away from her work but perking up, shifting towards Melanie.
“Would you help me with something tonight?”
“Sure, yeah,” Georgie agrees. She finally takes her eyes off her laptop, tilts her head. “What is it?”
“Will you help me with my hair?”
“‘Course. What do you wanna do with it?”
Melanie runs her fingers through the ends of her hair; it’s longer than she’s let it get in ages, and the once-vibrant blue has faded to a few inches of ugly chlorine-green near the ends. There’s not been much time for anything as normal as haircuts in Melanie’s, er, recent line of work. Even the idea of taking a pair of household scissors to it like she’d taken to doing when she was a teenager had felt like too much effort when everything around her has devolved into its own unique kind of nightmare.
“I just want to take it all off,” Melanie tells her.
“Like, buzz it?”
“Yeah.”
Georgie smiles. She doesn’t say, can’t you manage that yourself? or are you sure? or anything else, she just says, “Definitely. Pretty sure I’ve got a razor somewhere in the bathroom. Gimme, like, an hour to finish up here and then we can?”
Melanie relaxes back into the sofa, fingers curling into the Admiral’s fur. “Sure,” she says, and then, quiet, soft, “thanks.”
So an hour later finds both of them in Georgie’s little bathroom; a chair dragged in front of the mirror so Georgie can stand behind Melanie. Georgie’s already taller, but the way she towers over Melanie now makes something swoop in the pit of her stomach.
Georgie’s hands dance over her neck, fingertips sweeping across her skin delicate and gentle. Melanie breathes out, slowly, letting her eyes flutter shut, arms prickling with goosebumps. So, so softly, like she’s holding something precious, something that deserves to be treated with care — like Melanie has never really been treated before — Georgie pulls Melanie’s hair back, off her forehead, behind her ears. Melanie feels her collect it into a loose ponytail in one hand, feels her lean forward, hears the clatter of plastic and Georgie snags her hair brush (Melanie’s brush, that she keeps here, because she spends most of her nights here, anyway) off the countertop.
Melanie’s mum used to brush her hair for her when she was little. Melanie always hated it; she would rip through tangles and yank on Melanie’s head no matter how much Melanie fought and wiggled and complained and even when she’d lose her battle with the silent, angry tears collecting behind her lashes.
This isn’t like that.
Georgie runs her fingers through her hair, making sure to work out any tangles before the brush even comes anywhere near her. Even then, the motions are smooth, and soon enough all of Melanie’s hair is slicked back, kept safe in the circle of Georgie’s fingers, then wrapped up in an elastic.
Georgie’s hands fall to Melanie’s shoulders, squeezing briefly. “This okay?” She asks quietly, bending down so her lips are right by Melanie’s ear.
Melanie blinks her eyes back open. She sees herself. Sees Georgie standing behind her. Finds Georgie’s lovely brown eyes in the reflection. “Yes.”
“Alright. Hand me the scissors?”
Melanie passes them back, handle out, and Georgie’s fingers brush hers in the exchange. Melanie bites her lips against a smile. Georgie’s attention falls to the task at hand, so Melanie watches her shamelessly in the mirror; watches Georgie take the blades to Melanie’s hair, feels the slight tug on her scalp as they methodically chew through Melanie’s ponytail.
With a final snip, Georgie holds up 12 months of Melanie’s hair, grins at her in the mirror, doing a little ‘ta-da!’ gesture. Melanie can’t help it, she snorts, grinning back.
“Now the fun bit,” Georgie says.
“Now the fun bit,” Melanie agrees.
Georgie pulls a towel off the rack behind her, drapes it around Melanie’s shoulders. Melanie instinctively clings to it, holding it together around her neck to protect her shoulders. She’s already stripped out of her shirt, but she’s not unfamiliar with buzzcuts and all the little bits of hair that itch and prickly the skin of your neck for hours afterwards might be Melanie’s least favorite thing in the world.
Georgie plugs her razor in, runs her hand through Melanie’s now-short hair. “Ready?”
“Go for it,” Melanie answers decisively.
A familiar buzz fills the room as the clippers go on, and Melanie’s eyes slip shut again. Georgie tilts her head back, and a second later she feels the guide running through her hair once, twice, again and again and again. She lets Georgie tip her head this way and that, stays pliant until it’s time to pull one of her hands out from under the towel to fold her ear forwards so Georgie can get the weird little patch right behind it that Melanie always seems to miss when she does this herself.
She can feel the tickle on her neck, hear the soft shushing of hair as it falls past her ears down to the floor. Georgie’s very thorough, careful with Melanie in a way she’s almost forgotten exists in the world; she goes over Melanie’s whole head three times, making sure it’s an even cut.
Finally, a faint click, and the air goes still and quiet again.
“There,” Georgie says, “all done.”
Melanie opens her eyes, sees a different Melanie King sitting with the same Georgie Barker staring back at her in the bathroom mirror. She shifts, about to reach a hand out and run it over her head, but Georgie stops her.
“Oh! Wait!”
And then she ducks around Melanie, pulls a hand towel out of a drawer near the door. She squeezes between Melanie and the sink. Melanie pulls her feet up on the chair to accommodate her. Georgie flips the tap on, wets the cloth, rings it out and unfurls it.
“Here,” she says, turning back to Melanie. The cloth is warm when Georgie runs it over her head, her neck, her ears, even her shoulders, and Melanie can’t hold back a pleased, contented sigh.
“Okay, now I’m really done,” Georgie tells her, standing back.
So Melanie lets the towel fall down to the floor with her own cut off hair. She’ll pick it up later. They’ll have to sweep after this for sure. For now, Melanie leans into the counter, runs a hand over the few centimeters of hair left on her head. It’s the first time she’s seen her hair without any dye in it since the early days of GHUK, when her dad had just left for Ivy Meadows, and she’d briefly gotten obsessed with the idea of looking “professional,” hoping it might stop people noticing she was a 24-year-old on her own for the first time with no clue what she was doing.
As if picking up on her thoughts, Georgie leans in, asks, “gonna keep it brown this time, do you think? Or dye it again?”
“Dye it,” Melanie answers. She misses the color. Her life has felt so dull since she started at the Institute, just something that happens to her.
“Yeah? What color are you thinking?”
“Might do blue again,” Melanie answers. “Maybe green? Haven’t done green in a while.”
Georgie smiles, leans in, holds her pink braids up next to Melanie’s ear. “We could be like… cotton candy.”
Melanie responds by slipping her fingers around Georgie’s wrist, pulling her hand to her mouth, and kissing her palm. “We could. We could do couples costumes.”
That earns her a soft puff of Georgie’s laughter, her eyes crinkling around the corners with one of those smile that take over her whole face.
“Maybe, if you’re free…” Melanie goes on, “this weekend, you could help me with that, too?”
“Sure,” Georgie says, “I can do that.”
They both know Melanie normally does this kind of thing herself; has been since she locked herself in the bathroom back in primary with a box of bottle black dye. She’s not asking ‘cause she needs the help. That’s not the point.
The point is: this is how Melanie knows how to be vulnerable. This is the only kind of olive branches she knows how to offer right now. By letting Georgie help her, by asking for help in the first place, she’s bringing Georgie into these choices she makes.
She’s still working on it. Some days it’s easier than others.
She huffs, lets her head fall, bonks her forehead into Georgie’s shoulder, which makes Georgie giggle.
“Your hair tickles,” Georgie tells her, running her other hand the wrong way over Melanie’s hair, which manages to make her giggle, too. Rebelliously, Melanie nuzzles closer, rubs her head against Georgie’s neck. “Hey!”
“What? You’re taller than me, this is my only advantage. I’m gonna use it,” Melanie teases, poking one of Georgie’s love handles with her knuckle.
“Oi!” Georgie swats her hand away, snags her wrist.
Melanie grins, and then the whole thing dissolves into a performative struggle that just ends with their hands twisted up together, swinging playfully between their bodies.
“You’re devious, is what you are,” Georgie says, the fondness in her voice soft as a blanket.
Melanie’s lips quirk up, a smile finding its way onto her face despite everything. “Yeah, but you love me.”
“I do, yeah.”
Sometimes, Georgie’s whole fearless schtick still manages to take Melanie’s breath away.
She leans up on her toes, presses a firm kiss to Georgie’s lips. Georgie’s shoulders slump, whole body relaxing. She hooks her hands around Melanie’s hips, pulls her in so Melanie has to shuffle forward, bare chest pressing into Georgie’s T-shirt.
When they break apart, Melanie falls back onto the flats of her feet with a sigh. She lets her head fall onto Georgie’s shoulder again, feels Georgie’s arms sliding around her back, palms flat against her spine.
She’s still learning. How to be present, how to be a good partner. These things don’t come easy to her anymore, but right now, surrendering herself to Georgie’s hands feels like the simplest thing in the world. Here in the circle of her arms, Melanie can’t help but feel anything but loved, and what’s more freeing than that?
—
Melanie quits the Institute a month later.
There’s a moment after, in the hospital, when she first wakes up, where she’s so shocked and alone she can hardly breathe around it. Her heat picks up, beating against the heavy confines of her chest like it wants to break out from behind her ribs.
The frantic beeping of a heart monitor somewhere off to the side brings in a steady stream of doctors and nurses, and suddenly she finds herself wishing she was alone again more than anything. One man, identifying himself as Melanie’s surgeon, tells her he’s sorry, but they couldn’t save her eyes. Melanie has to bite back a sharp laugh, equal parts ecstatic and bitter.
She can tell, by the way they handle her like a spooked animal, delicate and patronizing all at once, what they think of her. It gets harder and harder not to snap the longer she’s there.
They don’t know a damn thing, can’t possibly grasp the reality of Melanie’s decision, Melanie wants to live so fucking much that she fought for it, like she’s been fighting for it all her life. Sometimes that fight looks like bad box dye job snuck under her parents noses, sometimes it looks like scraping together a crew to go out and hunt ghosts on YouTube. Sometimes it’s grizzlier — sometimes it looks like this: doing whatever it takes to be back in control of her life. Even if it hurts.
Even without her sight, Melanie can tell when Georgie finally gets there. She doesn’t know how long it’s been, but she’s been bothered and prodded and finally alone again at least twice when she finally hears the door open. She feels her whole body react, turning towards the familiar earthy scent of Georgie’s perfume, a fresh bloom seeking sunlight.
“Georgie,” Melanie says, voice gone a little hoarse.
“Melanie,” Georgie breathes. Melanie tries to gauge how far away she is by the sound of her footfalls, but she’s still a little out of it and winds up startling when Georgie’s hand slips into hers sooner than she had anticipated. “Oh, sorry, are you— should I—”
Melanie grips Georgie’s hand tighter, catching her fingers before she can pull away. “No, you’re fine,” she assures her, “just… Um. Still adjusting. Not used to…”
“Right, yeah, of course. That makes sense.” There’s a scuffing on the hospital lino, the familiar sound of Georgie’s bag hitting the ground as she folds herself into a chair at Melanie’s bedside. Her fingers are reassuringly cool. They’re always a little cold, but now they’re the perfect balm against the clammy heat of the hospital room. “How are you feeling?”
Melanie hums softly while she takes a minute, turns the question over and over in her head. Really thinks about the answer. She shifts towards Georgie.“Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” Melanie nods, once, slowly. “I… I don’t feel… Seen, anymore.”
“Oh. Oh, right.” Melanie hears Georgie exhale softly. “It, it worked, then?”
“It did,” Melanie confirms, marveling at the truth of the words even as she says them. She feels… solid. Real, in a way she hasn’t in months. More human, more like a person, than she’s felt in recent memory. “God, I wish I could see Elias’s face right now.”
Georgie huffs out a startled laugh. “Kind of thought the whole point of this was so you’d never have to deal with Elias again.”
“Yeah, but it’d still be nice to rub his nose in it.” She sighs. “He’d deserve it, smug bastard.”
“Well, I don’t disagree,” Georgie says, her thumb dancing along Melanie’s knuckles, “but I’m not keen on him being anywhere near us, really.”
She doesn’t even mean to, but before she can do anything about it, Melanie’s smiling; the soft, fond thing only Georgie can really bring out in her these days. “You’ve got a point.”
Georgie hums, and then they lapse into silence, lessened only by the bustle of a busy building, the sound of machines and vague chatter in the distance and a clock ticking on somewhere in the room. Melanie’s not sure how long she’s zoned out for when Georgie squeezes her fingers and pulls her back.
“By the way,” Georgie says, more subdued now, “I… I had to call Laverne. There was, er. Your doctors, they were talking about—”
“They think I tried to kill myself,” Melanie says, “I know.”
A moment of stiff silence. “Yeah.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, she was… she was kind of pissed.” Georgie huffs. “But I think she managed to talk them out of putting you on some kind of involuntary hold when I told her you were going to come and live with me.”
“Right. People who want to die don’t generally try to do it right after they move in with their girlfriends.”
“Yeah,” Georgie says, and even though Melanie knows Georgie doesn’t get afraid, there’s still something like relief in her voice. “You’re still gonna have to go see Lavern soon, though. She wants you to call as soon as you’re out of here.”
Melanie sighs, presses back into her pillow. “She’s going to have some words for me.”
“And knowing you, you’ll have plenty of words for her, too,” Georgie says fondly.
And Melanie, despite everything, laughs; a surprised, bark from deep in her chest. “Just whatever words it takes to make her believe this was the right choice.”
Georgie shifts in her seat, and the next moment Melanie feels the soft press of lips against her knuckles. “Hey,” she says, when she pulls back, “I love you. And I’m proud of you.”
Melanie scoffs, but she can feel the tips of her ears going all warm. She’s spent so long trying to make her body a place she likes to live in — from the way she dresses, her hair, the piercings, the tattoos, even this, the blindness — it’s all been in pursuit of being able to know that the Melanie King that exists in the world is the same as the Melanie that exists inside her chest.
This is just another in a long line of decisions that have made Melanie Melanie. “Y’know,” she finally says, roughly, “this is the first time I’ve ever actually lived with a girlfriend before.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Melanie tells her. “Just… I dunno, an independence thing, I guess? Cheesy as it sounds, I just always liked having my own place to go back to.”
“Is this your way of telling me you’re moving out? We won’t have to haul all your boxes back across London, will we?” Georgie asks, and Melanie can hear the teasing in her voice.
Maybe it’s the sedation still wearing off. Maybe she’s just giddy with finally being free. Either way, she can’t seem to manage anything but the truth. Anything but vulnerability. “It’s my way of saying… I trust you. And I love you, too.”
The noise that earns her from Georgie fills Melanie with the kind of fierce pride, an electric glow behind her ribs.
Melanie King has gone to a lot of trouble to convince the people around her that her life, her body, belongs to her. Here, now, in this moment, in this place, with Georgie, might be the first time Melanie thinks no one needs convincing.