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She looks like Tess.
She doesn’t know if that is a good thing, a bad thing, or some secret third thing slotted in between. But if she tilts her head just so and the light hits the mirror at this precise angle and she reaches back in time for a comforting presence she only knew for twenty-four hours, Ellie can see echoes of Tess when she looks at her reflection.
It’s mostly in her hair.
Part I: Tess
Tess shaved her head in an act of petty rebellion when she was a teenager. It drove her mother mad, which was precisely the point. She thought about getting a tattoo in place of her hair, to really put her mother’s sanity over the edge, but ultimately she didn’t follow through.
(She’s glad she didn’t.)
She always had such lovely long hair (her mother certainly said so often enough), and that was the most frequently mentioned thing about Tess: her hair. Though she was loathe to admit it, she was proud of her hair. She cared for her hair and styled it and she looked beautiful.
Then everything came crashing down around her and suddenly hair was the very last thing she cared about.
(She watched everything she cared about turn and die and burn.)
In the aftermath of the end, Tess shaved her head to the scalp, bent and sobbing silently behind a field hospital tent. Determined to survive because someone had to.
It just made sense, getting rid of her hair. One less thing to worry about, one less item on the long list of things that now had to consume her every waking moment or she herself would be consumed instead and have no more waking moments. Hair wasn’t something Tess needed to survive. It wasn’t even in the vicinity of the realm of things from her old life that she yearned for in the rare instant she wasn’t trying to make it to the next sunrise.
So she let it go.
And she scraped her scalp bloody with whatever she could find when it began to grow back in stupid defiance of the world in which she lived now. A world in which hair was more a liability than an asset.
She joined the Fireflies almost by accident. They were recruiting men and mistook her for one, what with the shaved head and the baggy clothes hiding a rail-thin frame. After a while, it was a joke, the misunderstanding, and no one ever asked why Tess would show up to missions with blood-nicked skin.
But just like everything in life, the Fireflies don’t last long. Tess leaves them and Michigan behind and wanders until she finds herself near the Boston quarantine zone. It takes a long time, but she starts to feel… Not quite comfortable, but stable. She’s carved out a place for herself in the vast smuggling network in the QZ, and she’s proven herself formidable and not to be fucked with. The complete lack of hair certainly helps.
But over time, she begins to slip. She forgets to religiously scrape her skull, and her hair becomes longer between each shave. She’s allowed to think about something other than breathing and living from minute to minute.
When she meets Joel Miller, her hair is still short but it has begun its comeback. At first, she doesn’t know what to make of this man, then before she really understands what has happened, she trusts him with her life, they are partners — in more than one sense — and she yearns for something other than merely continuing to be alive.
She makes hair ties for herself and always keeps a few on her wrist. (Joel can be counted on to have one or two somewhere on his person.) Something about her hair swishing across her shoulders makes Tess feel alive, makes her feel young again.
(In another universe, she keeps it out of her face with a bandana, but that is not here.)
Tess’s hair is long enough to require actual care, and she is pleasantly surprised to find the process calming, grounding, hopeful in a way nothing else in this forsaken wasteland has been. Maybe it’s not the smartest move to have long hair when you’re in the smuggling business, but she manages it and no one is stupid enough to mess with her now.
Then a little girl with a fly-away ponytail comes into the last twenty-four hours of her life, and Tess leaves this world surrounded by a beautiful, tangled mess.
Part II: Ellie
Ellie kept her hair out of spite.
Oh, FEDRA would have loved if she shaved it all off and kept on shaving. Hell, they encouraged that shit for the orphans recruits. All Ellie has ever known is FEDRA school, and they kept hair short for boys and girls, sometimes to the point of not quite being able to tell at a glance which was which. But as soon as she was old enough to put up a fight, put up a fight she did. She found a length that she liked and then she kept her hair that way. It doesn’t matter that it was rarely not in a ponytail; what matters is the little act of rebellion her hair signified.
The few women who worked at the FEDRA school kept their hair strictly in regulation: either shaved or pulled mercilessly back. No matter what Ellie tries, the wisps at the base of her neck and around her face just will not stay in place.
When her life intersects Tess’s, she is fascinated by this woman’s long hair. It’s definitely pretty, but from what she knows of Tess and Joel’s life, Ellie doesn’t understand why Tess would wear it so long and so loose. It could easily be used against her. (Ellie has personal experience with that: fistfuls of hair yanked during combative practice.)
Ellie screams and fights when that beautiful, long-haired woman is left behind to die alone.
…
Her hair stays mostly the same as she traverses the country with Joel. She rarely washes it, certainly doesn’t have a brush to drag through it, and the number of days when it stays in place even after she removes the hair tie is higher than you’d think. Maria’s confident and quick fingers carding through and snipping the dead ends is the first time anyone has ever touched Ellie’s hair with kindness. With care. Even Ellie herself doesn’t know how to do that. Not yet anyway.
Maybe she can learn.
She takes the hairbrush Maria packs for her and begins to start each day by caring for her own hair.
It is not an act of rebellion anymore. It is a reminder that she is alive.
(In the midst of winter, Joel finds the hairbrush and gently tugs it through Ellie’s hair after the faithful ponytail is contaminated with smoke and blood and fear. Ellie seriously contemplates shaving it all, ridding herself of the memories associated with it falling ragged around her face as she heaves the machete again and again. But then, after the worst of her nightmares, when she needs calming, Joel comes out of himself to stroke her hair in a rhythm that soothes like nothing she’s ever experienced. So she keeps it.)
It’s not until they return to Jackson after the hospital, until they settle into a little two-story house in which she has her very own room for the first time in her life, until she begins to sleep through the night. That is when Ellie thinks she begins to understand Tess’s long hair.
She starts small. Going to school with her hair down. Swimming lessons with Joel, her hair floating around her in the water. Falling over her shoulder as she curls around the moth-marked guitar.
One day, Ellie looks at herself in the mirror and realizes her hair is about the same length as Tess’s. She spends most of that morning playing around with her hair, trying to put it half up the way Tess had. She doesn’t think she gets it exactly right, but it’s pretty damn close and she’s proud of it. Joel pokes fun at her for spending so much time in front of the mirror until he looks at her with tilted head and allows himself a small smile. It opens a door Ellie didn’t know he had the key to, and they talk about Tess. When Joel starts a story about Tess, just like when he starts one about Sarah, Ellie goes unnaturally still and quiet, even now afraid that if she startles him, he will stop talking. Eventually, she dares to ask questions, and Joel seems relieved to answer them.
When she has rotation in the gardens or the greenhouses, Ellie experiments with tying her hair back with colorful bandanas.
She gets used to the half up hairstyle. She likes it. She hopes Tess doesn’t mind, wherever she is, that Ellie is doing this. Dina believes in an afterlife, where loved ones are waiting and watching. Maybe Tess sees Ellie from wherever she is, maybe she understands it’s a sort of homage, a way to honor Tess. After all, without Tess, Ellie wouldn’t be here, safe in Jackson. She probably wouldn’t be alive at all.
When she arrives home from patrol, she takes down her hair, Tess winking in and out around her, and brushes it quickly. Joel is downstairs, waiting with dinner and a new movie for them to watch together. When she falls asleep on the couch, he will stroke her hair and carry her upstairs to her room, despite the protests of his creaking knees. Her hair will splay across her pillow in the moonlight.