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Here’s the thing about self-administered haircuts: they hardly ever go as planned. One minute, Collei is marching determinedly into the mouth of a Gandharva Village cave, brandishing Tighnari’s kitchen scissors in a tightened fist. The next she’s screaming into a shallow pool of water, and that same fist is a battering ram against her skull.
Wisps of green clump together in an algae mass around her knees. The pool is untarnished by movement until it’s not, ripples announcing the arrival of another figure backlit by fireflies. Drifting in from the cave entrance comes the all-important question.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Collei’s breath hitches. She risks a glance. Standing twenty feet away from her, squinting into the dark: Cyno’s crudely drawn poster of stranger danger personified, tacked onto her bedroom wall.
“Hat Guy!” she hiccups, and tries her best to blend in with the rock formations.
Hat Guy looks unimpressed. “I’m more than just my hat, you know,” he mutters, as his legs pick a path around stray lily pads. He takes in her bowed posture, her lopsided fringe. A corner of his mouth juts up into a mockery of a smile. “Call me Wanderer. What happened here?”
What Collei had reckoned was an insult now reveals itself to her as a simple demand, by virtue of the man asking. Wanderer isn’t exactly famous for his niceties. “I…” she starts, and trails off.
Her hands clench and unclench. Wanderer scrutinises her for the oddity she is. The brazenness is almost comforting.
“How did you find me?” she asks instead, heaving her head.
“Your howling reverberated off the cave walls. I heard it all the way from the cliffside.” Wanderer’s eyes slide over to the walls in question. He inspects them with distaste, as though happy enough to pin the cause of the racket on the cave rather than Collei. After some amount of glowering, he returns his attention to her. “This is an odd place for a haircut.”
“I know,” says Collei miserably. She debates lying to Wanderer about the reason behind it, then reasons that the situation is already too humiliating to salvage. “It’s, umm… I have trouble looking in a mirror, sometimes. But my hair was bothering me. Gets in my eyes during patrols and stuff.” She swallows. “I thought, if I could just study my reflection in the water while cutting it…”
“… You’d do a halfway decent job,” Wanderer finishes.
He re-evaluates Collei’s efforts. His arms fold over his chest. Their mutual silence is interrupted only by the steady drip-drip-drip of dribbling stalactites.
“You look like shit,” he concludes.
Collei casts her gaze back down to her soaked-through shoes. “Gee, thanks.”
“I can help,” offers Wanderer. This is quickly followed by, “Don’t tell anyone.”
He makes a motion for the kitchen scissors with an impatient swat of the hand. Collei stares at him for a moment, trying really hard not to think of cats knocking vases off tabletops, then slowly deposits the scissors into his outstretched palm.
“Alright,” he says, holds the scissor blades up to his face. He grimaces, but only just. “I can work with these. And what are you doing still soaking in the pool—you’re not a snail, are you? Get up.”
“Ah!” squeaks Collei, struggling upright. She feels the need to snap to attention; the very first customer at Wanderer’s bootcamp salon.
Wanderer rolls his eyes. “Go sit on that boulder over there,” he instructs her. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Eager to prove what a good pupil she can be, Collei scurries over. Her waterlogged tunic leaves a trail of damp stone behind. She wrings out whatever excess she can and perches against the front of the rock, putting all her energy into not seeming nervous—which would only serve to piss off Wanderer, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. Out of the corner of her eye she watches him carefully lower his feather-adorned vision to the ground, shedding himself of his detachable sleeves and finally his kimono.
Her plastered-on smile backfires seconds later. Wanderer takes one look at Collei and grinds his teeth so audibly Collei reckons they might crumble to dust.
“I’d prefer you just tell me to fuck off if you don’t feel comfortable,” he grouses, settling the kimono backwards over her chest and onto her shoulders. “You don’t trust me to fix your mess?”
A hairdresser’s gown! some part of her thinks hysterically, and almost shrieks with glee at the absurdity of it. “No, no—that’s not it at all! In fact, I’m… thank you, Wanderer!” Her mouth is working overtime to spit out excuses. “I’m just surprised, I guess? You don’t seem like the type to be good at cutting hair.”
Wanderer, who had been busying himself comparing the various different lengths of her locks, glances up sharply at this remark. It doesn’t go unnoticed to Collei that Wanderer has not yet bothered to ask after stylistic preferences.
“What do you mean?” he says, sounding defensive.
“Nothing bad!” swears Collei, waving her hands around. “But I’ve only ever seen you with that, um… bowlcut of yours. I figured that's how it's always been.”
“Hime cut,” Wanderer corrects her stiffly, “not a bowlcut.” He’s clipping up layers of her chopped-up mullet on autopilot. “I used to have long hair, actually. Like you, I cut it myself one day… on a whim, using a sword.”
“A sword?!”
“A sword.” There’s a hint of a smile on his lips, much gentler than the one he’d worn previous. “My friend at the time tidied it up. I’m passing down a kindness that was offered to me then. That’s all this is.”
Wanderer’s eyes go distant. He reaches for the scissors, and cards wet fingers through the back of Collei’s hair. “One haircut is all it took for me,” he says, so quiet Collei can barely hear him. “It’s never grown back since.”
Collei thinks this sounds a bit strange, as though Wanderer has willed his hair into staying the same forever simply by wagging a stern finger at it. His explanation as to how this would make him skilled at cutting hair is equally murky. “So where did you learn all this…?” she ventures, picking at the cuff of her sleeve.
“Like I said,” Wanderer replies. His fingers brush the nape of Collei’s neck. She shivers. “I had friends, back then. Friends in regular need of haircuts. They took care of me, I took care of them—until my presence was no longer considered a good fortune.”
This she understands, in a sudden, abstract sense. She repeats the words over and over in her mind and hazards a guess that her and Wanderer’s lives might be written in reverse: Collei never had any friends until she was found by Amber, whereas Wanderer was found and lost all his thereafter.
As Wanderer busies himself tidying up the left side of her mullet, a familiar taste starts to form at the back of her throat, grief that manifests as bile. Within minutes, her body succumbs to the shakes.
“Could you keep the vibrating to a minimum,” comes Wanderer’s voice, hardened again. “Wouldn’t want to fuck up a fuck-up.”
“Okay,” says Collei, in poorly contained falsetto.
“Your hair, by the way. Not you.”
“No, I get that. It was funny.”
The cold steel of Tighnari’s scissors nibbles at the ridge of her ear. “People typically laugh at funny things,” he says awkwardly. Like an apology: sorry for the misfire.
“I’m not typical,” Collei points out, after a moment’s pause. “Neither are you though, right? I haven’t heard you laugh at like, anything, ever.”
Wanderer’s snort near startles her. “Right.” The scissor-blade makes a sharp left turn. A flurry of spring-green obscures her vision at the edges. “You're right, Collei,” he says again. “In fact, who's to say we're 'people' at all? We were robbed of our very humanity.”
The way Wanderer tells her this should have been alarming—or at least slightly offensive. He delivers it in an offhanded sort of tone, like he knows everything about her without needing to be informed. And who was he to know, anyway? Logically speaking she should really be contesting it, if only to cover her own hide; she should be yelling “You’re wrong, I’m just like everyone else! And I can read books and write my name, too!”, showing off all the gold stars Tighnari had stuck to her exercise sheets as proof.
Something tips her off that Wanderer wouldn’t be interested in any of it. He’d peer at her homework with obvious indifference, then up at her face as if to say, well? Does putting pencil to paper undo a decade of trauma that easily? Does trading a bad doctor for a good one cure all your sickness in one go?
Collei’s tunic is open-backed. It hadn’t been, before, when her skin had been marred by Eleazar scales. She’d hated the sight of herself and still does, on days like today. But for some reason, she’d be okay with showing Wanderer. She’d be okay with admitting to the ‘barely a person’-ness of not being able to get out of bed, or crying herself to sleep sometimes.
“That’s why we’ve got to steal it back from them,” she mumbles, a little nonsensically. She has no idea who they are. Nor whether her and Wanderer share the same enemy, or if he was simply taking a stab in the dark at similarities shared, their mutual seclusion from polite society. “Our humanity.”
The scissors still against her throat. There’s a shuddering inhale. Collei wants so badly to turn around and stare at him, her new friend-not-friend, maybe brother, maybe twin—but she doesn’t dare with the blade pressed gentle to her jugular, and anyway she wouldn’t want to put him on the spot like that, knowing he is struggling to maintain composure behind her.
“Your hair,” says Wanderer, straining to get the words out. The scissors retreat, his kimono removed from her shoulders. “I’ve finished.”
Rising to her feet, Collei runs her fingers over her scalp. It’s shorter, a lot shorter, the longest tips curling just past her earlobe. All of her split ends and inconsistencies lie abandoned on the cave floor. The back of it is cropped, no longer pressed sweat-slicked against her neck in the Sumerian summer heat, and her fringe has been trimmed to just past her temple. She experiments by shaking her head wildly from side to side and is delighted to find no stray bits of fringe fall into her eyes.
Her hair is a freshly mown meadow. Collei twirls around with a flourish. There stands Wanderer, concealing bashfulness behind a pinched mouth.
“At least be slightly mad I gave you the same cut as mine,” he sulks, and she laughs at him openly. “You don’t even want to look at your reflection in the water? Just in case you’d like to shave it all off?”
“No, Wanderer,” she tells him, pulling him into a hug. “I love it. Thank you.”