Chapter Text
Bob
Bob never liked getting his hair cut. Such a simple act always brought back memories he’d rather forget. When he was little, his hair would hide the bruises his dad left. His dad always made sure to hit him where the bruises wouldn’t show, but sometimes, when his dad had drunk a little too much and his mom wasn’t enough of a punching bag to satisfy the anger, his dad’s punches got sloppy. Other times, the whelps and bruises the belt would leave would creep just outside of his collar. Several times he had to go to the hospital because of the breaks and bruises but no one ever questioned his father’s stories of bike accidents and clumsiness. None of his teachers would ever look him in the eye when he’d come in with casts or stitches.
As he got older, he found more and more ways to hide the bruises, the cuts, the scrapes. He'd always worn his clothes a little baggie. The longer sleeves made it easier to hide the hand shaped bruises around his forearms. His hair would curl around his face but always managed to hide the dark purple that would blossom on his cheek. And feeling someone’s fingers so close to his neck, his ears, it made him really uncomfortable. Made his body go all tingly and his heart race painfully. So, he avoided them at all cost.
He knew he should keep his hair shorter, show the bruises, let his teachers know what was going on. And he knew the longer hair always gave his father something to grab at when he was angry. But even at a young age, he knew he had to choose the lesser of two evils. The more his dad beat on him, the less he beat on his mom.
His mother never laid a hand on him, but she had her ways of hurting him. Her words always stung because her love was like two sides of a coin. Some days she was pure sunshine. She would sing along to the radio as they drove with the windows down, his hair whipping around his face. Her voice was always so saccharine sweet. She would take him to the library, and they’d read together in the park. He loved reading because he could escape it all within the pages of the books he borrowed. They’d read in the shade of a tree while his father was at work. She’d run her fingers through his hair, twirling the curls around her fingertips, humming to herself.
Some nights his father would be working late so she’d sit him in the kitchen chair and trim his hair as she sang along to whatever love song was playing. She’d finish, look him over and frown.
“I always forget how much you look like him,” she’d say as she put away the scissors and left him alone with the hand held mirror. He would look at himself, pulling at the short hair, willing it to grow back out, knowing that it would take weeks. He avoided mirrors for those weeks.
Eventually, he asked her to stop cutting his hair all together.
But as quickly as the sunshine came, the darkness would blot it out. She would be so low. Sometimes not getting out of bed all day, other days she would sit at the kitchen table all day staring out of the small window above the sink. She would be there when he would leave for school in the morning. He would tell her that he loved her and say goodbye, but she would never respond. Then, hours later when the bus dropped him off in the afternoon, she’d still be sitting there. In those days, he would feel like he needed to protect her. He’d put himself between his father and his mother, take the pushes and slaps, but every time, the blame would always fall on him.
She would look at him with such disgust and her words were always sharper in those darker times. Dad would storm out and she would just sit and stare at the broken dishes for what felt like an eternity until she would look up at him, her angry blue eyes meeting his tear-filled ones.
“Bobby, why did you egg him on? You’re just making it worse. You’re always making it worse. I should have gotten rid of you when I had the chance. I wouldn’t have had to stay with him, I’d be free,” she’d say, each work stabbing deeper into his chest.
By the time he was 13, there was a voice in his head that would always echo her words, slowly shifting into a darker, more hollow voice.
“Worthless....unloved....unwanted,” it would taunt him. It only got worse after the car accident. His father had been drunk, the car was totaled, but only he and his mom had gotten injured. At the hospital, the nurse had given him two little pills. He took them and for the first time in months, the voice in his head quieted. He found ways to find more morphine and when the morphine started to not work, he moved on to other drugs.
His father found out and another argument started. His father calling him a junkie, an addict. Lost in the drug haze he had spat back, “Like father like son.” He can still remember the shock of pain as his father grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and threw him into the closest wall, his face hitting a picture frame and shattering the glass. He felt the cut across his chin as he sank to the ground, his head swimming. His mother pulled his father off him and screamed at him, “Go.”
So, he did, he grabbed what he could, and he ran. The next decade of his life was running from one place to another. He’d work to get a fix, eventually he’d screw it up, the voice would return, and he’d run again. He may have looked like his father, but his mother had left him with a gift of her own. When the lows came, his memory was fuzzy. He’d wake up and not know where he was, having hitched hiked from one state to the next. He was in an out of jail cells but never stayed longer than a few months. He’d get clean and the voice would come back. He would try to fight it, but he would always lose, and he’d always relapse.
So, he kept running, somehow ended up halfway across the world in Maylasia. Withdrawal had already started kicking in when Oxe found him. They’d offered him a chance to finally silence the voices in his head that kept telling him how worthless he was. Finally, he would mean something. It wasn’t like he had anything else to lose.
So, he said yes.
Yelena
In the Red Room, Yelena never had a decision that wasn’t made for her. Her appearance was never her own, it was always a tool to complete the next mission. A way to distract the next target until her knife slid into their back. But when she had been a kid, those few precious years when she and Natasha were a family, she learned what it meant to be an individual. Every few weeks, she would find Natasha in their tiny bathroom, box dye pieces scattered across the sink countertop. She’d watch as her sister would strip away the oldr color and turn it into varying shades of blues and greens.
She remembered all the times she had begged her sister to dye her hair too. She hated being blonde. It was boring.
“No, it’s you, Lena,” she would always say with a smile before asking her sister to help her wash out the excess dye.
Afterward, while Natasha’s hair dried, she would run her fingers through Yelena’s hair. She always loved these moments when her sister would braid her hair. She’d learned the french braid the summer before and had practiced on Yelena. She never complained. It meant she got to spend more time with her sister.
“Why do you dye your hair so much,” she’d asked her sister once. This time her hair had turned a blueish purple tone.
Her sister went quiet for a moment, her fingers stilling as she thought, “Because it’s like art. It’s a way to show what I can’t say.”
She had wanted to ask more questions, but she was young and all she’d thought about was how cool her sister was. She wanted to be like her sister when she grew up. But back then, she only knew the little life they shared. She had no idea that soon, the Red Room would come take them and she would lose all sense of self.
She was a weapon. She trained. She rarely saw Natasha in those years. She just focused on keeping out of the eye of her watchers. Years passed and Natasha escaped. Yelena had thrown herself into mission after mission. She had been so angry with her sister. She got out but never came back for her. Then, while on a mission in Quebec she saw the reports on the tv.
The Avengers had saved New York City. The aliens had come, and they’d fought them off and in the middle of this group was a face she didn’t think she’d ever see again. Natasha stood among these men as Tony Stark completed the press conference. Weaving stories about the how The Avengers would always be there when they were needed.
Natasha was a hero. From then on, her sister would pop up all over the news and Yelena saw that while her hair always stayed red, it was ever changing. So, why couldn’t she do the same. The Red Room had so much control, but she found ways to keep her hair like Natasha’s. She couldn’t be with her sister, but she could at least have a part of her sister with her. She kept working, her ledger growing redder and redder. The years blurred together, and she was lost in a haze of killing until one day, she was gifted freedom. A rogue widow had gifted her the freedom she never felt she deserved.
First thing she did was find her sister and for a brief few days she had her family back. They may not have seen it as one, but this was her sister, her mother, and her father and she would die for them. She almost had but Natasha had saved her once again. They’d left on the unspoken promise that they would see each other again and she really believed that.
And then she lost five years in the blink of an eye. She lost her sister and then she let herself drown in the grief. She let Valentina convince her Clint was to blame. Clint, the person who took her sister away all those years ago to a “better life,” had been responsible for her death. That was the only thing she could make sense of. Natasha wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t have thrown herself into the pit, she wouldn’t have knowingly left her.
But on the ice of that rink in New York, the cold biting at her skin as she prepared to end Clint, she realized that she hadn’t been the only one to lose Natasha. She left that rink knowing that her sister loved her so much that she had sacrificed herself for the chance to bring her back.
She hadn’t been worth it.
That’s what she would tell herself when she was on a mission, alone, stinking of vodka in a dirty bathroom. She looked in the mirror and she saw her sister staring back at her. The braid she had kept in her hair practically taunting her about what she lost. So, she grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors and hacked at her hair until it was short and jagged. If hair had reflected how her sister felt, so would hers.
She worked mission after mission, growing number and number by the day. She barely heard from her father, her mother had spoken to her in over a year. All she had was work. She knew she needed change. She knew she needed something that would pull her out but all she knew was work. So, she asked Valentina for a change.
Sure, Valentina had tried to kill her, but she couldn’t lie, there had come a change in that base in Utah. She just hadn’t expected the change to be a person.