Work Text:
It feels like some theft of teenage rebellion that there are no blunt craft scissors in the house, that, instead, Franziska holds an ignored pair of embroidery scissors, their angular filigree falling into disrepair. She is vaguely cognizant of the continuation they hold, the way the actions of her youth have always been filtered through filial obligation and shining histories. There is an irony in the whole of Franziska’s house, in its beautiful heirlooms, and for all her thrashing she cannot break from its cruelty.
She clicks the scissors twice in quick succession, feeling for the sharp edges they retain and the blades’ weight in her hands. She looks into her bathroom mirror, an ancient thing with a gilded fleur-de-lis frame, and is met with steely confirmation: her hair is altogether too long. Robbed of impulsive childish croppings and unable to merit the time away from the courtroom a twice-yearly haircut would require, it falls past the limit of her shoulders, into her eyes, and down her back.
It has not been short enough since she was three, when she was still a toddler, and not yet a child, and therefore not yet under the requirements of being a von Karma child. The rule, once she was five and it had grown out of its early bob, was that her hair was to never be cut above her shoulders, for the sake of convention and professionalism. Franziska once loved to strain her ties without breaking them, keeping her hair precisely able to brush her collarbone but never longer, but at fifteen she was beyond that naivete and returned to an ignorance of its length, spinning it into an austere bun each morning. Her old perfected revolt could no longer command her attention in the wake of greater things: with fifteen years behind her, Franziska relearned the art of living alone in Germany with her father and no brothers and felt the weight of Manfred von Karma’s eyes redistributed towards her. Franziska is seventeen and her hair hangs limpid, far away from the luster it held when she was three and everything about her was new.
She does not bother with sectioning it before she brings the scissors to the height where her jaw meets her neck, because if there is one thing Franziska wants from this it is to be messy – she wishes for uneven chunks sticking out from a body of choppy, unsightly layers. Franziska knows she is too exhausted to attempt straight edges and neat shapes even if she had wanted them, because the low-level law enforcement men who woke her up did not consider that Germany operates nine hours in the future from California, and although Franziska is used to moonlight she has never learned to recover from a sudden awakening. To prevent herself from envisioning how to go nine hours back in time and salvage a life she cannot decipher any feeling towards, she is cutting her hair in the way she knows her father would laugh at her for, and she is doing it in a fogged stupor that she does not know how to climb her way out of.
The men on the phone told her that her father is in a jail cell an ocean away, but her hand continues to shudder as she snaps her scissors closed and the first solitary lock drops onto the bathroom floor. She is, and will remain, invisible, eternally shut off from his harsh eyes and curling lip, but still she longs for another way: Franziska works at the hair around her ears and wishes her father’s house contained electric hair clippers for her to buzz the whole of her head. She swallows down the imagined texture of running her hands through coarse, uniform shortness as she snips jagged lines inches away from her scalp. Her father does not live here anymore, and he is not here to keep her hair at her shoulders, but Franziska is a fool who can never push into the rock or the hard place. She thinks about him grimacing at her from behind glass and she almost smiles, her tight lips filled with vitriol, and she thinks about the revulsion in his eyes at the sight of her, and she steals her hair’s grace but keeps its femininity.
It is a funny, sad sight that greets her in the mirror when she begins with her bangs, pulling more careful parts this time. Her reflection shows a girl with bitterness drawn across her face and puffed eyelids, and a wet shine in her eyes that threatens to break through surface tension and make its way down her face. She takes herself in grimly, and the rat’s nest that crowns the tower of flexed muscles and saved tears that create her body fills her with a strength she has not accessed since she was thirteen and fighting. She pulls her eyes away from the glass, looking tacky in its luxury next to a flurry of hair seventeen years in the making, and focuses on cutting a straight line above her eyebrows.
She is not beautiful when she is done, and her bangs fall in pointy, sleep-influenced hunks when she gives up on them. She does not fit in with her delicate scissors or the mirror’s intricate frame, and her hair on the floor obscures the painstaking designs of the tiles; Franziska resembles not an heirloom of the von Karma name but a scared teenager. She beholds the mess she has made of herself and, exhausted, thinks of a knife: all hard edges, cutting through a room that barely holds her.
Franziska looks at a girl with short hair and simple, dark sleeping clothes, and the girl is not quite who she needs to be, but she has hair that will not smother her in the heat or itch across her neck in the night and she wears clothes that are not stylish but smooth. The girl is someone who does not have a father or a dynasty behind her; she is young and fresh and new. Franziska leaves the hair that is no longer hers strewn across the ground and she steps out of the bathroom to hide her scissors back in the dusty study desk they belong to.
She knows that the girl in the mirror cannot last forever, but there is moonlight yet. Franziska knows what it is to be awake before the sun, the transgressions that may be committed silently and left for the people who walk through morning light. She has lain awake with thoughts racing around and through her skull and activating her pain receptors, and she has choked on dread, and she knows that the girl she saw in the mirror must awaken to the day. She will take off the black basics and put on structured layers, and she will cover the puff of her eyes with makeup, and she will brush her hair back. She will try to tame what Franziska knows is a mistake but can only hold close to herself and thank, and she will face how people kill even in the dead of winter, even in the intangible space between holidays.
Franziska will wake up with short hair and a father, and a brother she has not let herself think about in years and broke twelve years of rules to distract herself from. The girl in the mirror would fly to him, and condole, hold him until she was sure he would not break. Franziska does not live in glass, and she cannot touch anyone for fear they or she would shatter. She cannot condole, only apologize– all she knows is how to stew and blame, and she can cut off feet of hair but not the font of guilt within her, a well with a bottom she has yet to touch. She will open her eyes to the story that follows her: a story of ignorance, of inability, of complacency and of shame.
But she will walk her shame with hair that belies a wish, and she will call her brother when she knows he is asleep and tell him over voicemail she is sorry, profusely, unendingly, even as she is too afraid to say the words in real time. Her father will be in a jail cell an ocean away, and she will be alone in a house full of old metal to melt.