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You are sitting on the ground curled up on yourself, tail metaphorically and literally between your legs.
There's nothing else to do besides waiting, and you make a point of looking at everything in the storage room where you are that is not the chunk of polished metal in front of you, working as your makeshift mirror. It would be pointless to look, as you know very well what it is going to show you, so you just nibble on your hair. It's wet and tastes like soap; Gamzee shooshes you and takes it out of your mouth. You pout.
You're badly in need of a haircut.
Trolls couldn't give a fuck about fashion, but grooming was completely different. It was a power thing, a warning about your nature; one of the few forms of self expression in a world of practical gray and black clothes and hemocolor everything else.
Grooming was also a moirail thing, which is why you put sharp scissors on the hands of your murderous clown palemate and turned your back on him.
You've had long hair for sweeps when you were young, in a juvenile attempt to seem tougher, like a highblood, wilder and more dangerous than you were. You liked your hair long; the weight took a bit of the volume and made your horns seem bigger than they were, and it suited you a little. In its natural state, it didn't looked quite as good as Aradia or Vriska's, who were dormant volcano and out of control psycho bitch respectively, or Feferi's, with her grandiose Heiressness, fuchsia seadweller royalty and power and strength. It didn't have enough body to go anywhere near Gamzee's, but his hair was too subjugglator anyway; straightened it just looked like the awful spawn of Equius' sweat-slick aberration and a toilet brush: Kanaya assured you it was a look too sterile and compliant to suit you, and you kind of agreed. For that same reason you ruled out Sollux's short, symmetrical crop: it was his thing, not yours. Nepeta's hair under that atrocious blue hat was a mystery, and Kanaya spent way more time than you were willing to allocate into straightening and re-curling her hair.
You were aiming at Terezi's look at that time. It was perfect for you: Long enough to hint at strength; short enough to be practical and humble; straight roots for a calm and collected mind and a little wickedness in the curl of the tips. Almost the perfect hair for a leader like you; it only needed to be in the head of a leader like you, no scalpings involved. Unfortunately, if your hair wasn't volumous enough for subjugglator 'do it was too poofy for a legislacerator's careful coiffure, and you kept choking on it in the middle of your most exaggerated leaderly speeches.
So you cut it in a fit of frustration a perigee before your wriggling day, but you weren't happy about it. You didn't look like yourself, but it was just another of the endless tiny annoyances of your life.
Gamzee is very gentle with you. He takes forever to wash your hair, working on it a little bit at a time with warm water and soft soap, so careful to avoid splashing your sweater that it makes you drowsy; he rubs little circles on your scalp and on the back of your neck with his fingertips and you have to fight to not yawn. He hums and clicks softly, his voice dripping pale; you've never felt more pitied.
He is lazy and choppy, without even bothering to section your hair, and he murmurs jokes and commentaries and even some of his shitty raps; you almost doze off a couple of times. When he's done he throws a towel at your head and laughs and laughs while you fight against the beast and lose, screaming expletives; he dries your hair for you and when he's done you are too nervous to look at the mirror.
He brushes the hair in the ground between you and comes closer, hugging your waist and resting his chin against your shoulder. You trust him, so you look up, and he smiles.
"You look damn motherfucking fine, palest" he says, and messes your hair with a hand. "It's good. Angry as yourself."
Gamzee's right. Your hair is still a little wet, but when it dries it's going to be just about everywhere, but now an everywhere with a purpose; it's choppy and messy but deliberately so. Anger and good intentions; strength and reliability. It doesn't even make your horns look that much smaller: you are two steps away from a religious revelation based solely in the fact that you just witnessed a true miracle.
You crack a tiny smile, because you finally look like yourself.