Work Text:
Someone was banging on a door, somewhere. Bette knew this because there was a distinctly door-knocking-ish sound in her left ear that felt like it was miles away. Miles, and miles, and miles, and…
There was shouting, too, she registered. It was an odd thing to be shouting about, a door. Doors, last Bette checked, were a pretty simple obstacle to overcome. All you had to do was shove yourself into it hard enough. Unless it was made of metal, or something. It might’ve been, except the ever-persistent banging sounded more like wood.
Wood. Something important about that, something Bette had to tell someone. Or do something about. Oh, yes. It had been raining, and she’d gotten water all over the floor, so the floorboards would be wet. She had to tell Kathy, and maybe mop it up first, not that Kathy would care. But when Bette put a hand to the floor to try and drag herself off of it, it was colder than wood should be.
She curled her fingers, and they slipped past the coolness into a groove in the floor. Grout. So tiles, then. That was fine. Bette just misremembered, that was nothing to worry about. Door, people, tiles. The door and the people sounded like they were getting closer, little by little. The tiles were still under her, until they weren’t, and then they were again, and something pressed harshly against her skull, though she felt disturbingly little pain.
Fruitless as logic told her it probably would be, Bette tried again. Up you get, Bette, you need to get your endurance up if you want to fight with the Teen Titans again. This time, she managed to slump against a wall. Which, on second thought, may well have been what she was doing anyway. Her vision sparked with little black dots as she did so.
It was at that point she realised her eyes had been closed before. Now that they were open, they refused to focus on anything at all, and although Bette knew the logic there was flawed, the banging only seemed to get louder.
Before it could come any closer, Bette shut her eyes tight again, bringing her hands up to her ears. What had she been doing to get whoever was outside so worked up, anyway? Why was it always her?
She still needed to mop up the mess in the hallway. Maybe Lilith had noticed it, and that was why she was outside the door. Bette wished Lilith would just come in already. Everything around her had looked so strange, and Lilith was always normal.
Finally, the banging ceased. Bette didn’t move an inch. She curled her hands again, reaching for the hair she knew was tucked behind her ears, always there for gently tugging on. All she found was bare skin.
Oh. It was gone. Slowly, Bette’s hands slid back down to the tiles. Thinking back, she found nothing at all. Nothing to tell her how this happened. Some villain of the week, maybe, with a knife, or a sword. She was… fighting (in the rain, because a floor was wet somewhere, she was sure of that), and her hair… she lost it.
And then the tiles. So she made it home (to who — it was someone’s home, at least), and she took a look at the damage.
Before Bette could register what she was doing, she was crawling forward, her eyes slipping open again to blurred vision and a world devoid of colour, and reaching for the sink. The sink was colder than the tiles by a little. She didn’t flinch away.
This time, thankfully, she made it just about as high as she needed to. Half draped across the sink, the top half of her head was visible in the mirror (cracked, a piece missing in the middle). Her hair, she’d been growing for… well, she wanted to say years. Still, the way her own eyes were staring into themselves didn’t change, not as her hand slipped and found a clump of wet hair plastered to the bowl.
In the absence of the ruckus outside, Bette’s ears were actually starting to ring a little. So much so that she had to let herself down from the sink and crawl back into the corner of the bathroom she’d been hiding out in before. Where she decidedly buried her face in her knees. Her tights smelled damp and felt like home.
“… Bets?” The voice outside the door sounded weary. Bette understood that, but she couldn’t really find her own words. “C’mon. It was you who said no large mammals in the house, you’ve gotta open the door, at least. I’ve only got skinny arms.”
Gar. Gar was outside this whole time, and he didn’t— why wouldn’t he come in? Upon second glance through two wet knees, there appeared to be a chair up against the door, hooked under the handle. That shouldn’t have stopped him. Still, Bette reached out a leg and pulled the chair away with her foot until it crashed to the ground all too loudly. Then she went back to hiding, because at the end of the day, she was a coward.
A moment later, the door was opened — at first by just a crack, and then all the way — and someone that was presumably Gar stepped in.
“Jeez. Looks like a tornado went through here.” he noted, ever tactful. “Can I…?”
Bette said nothing, and made no move to give a response either. She didn’t react when she felt Gar’s presence at her side and heard the soft sigh as he, too, slid down the wall.
For all she knew, a tornado might’ve blown into the apartment. It’s not like she had a better explanation for the lack of hair anywhere it was supposed to be and the chair on the floor. All she knew is that she hated it, and she wanted that hair back on her head. God, it itched. And still, all she wanted to do was tear the rest of it out.
Thunder weaselled its way through the walls and bounced off the tiles. It was still raining, then. Bette could remember the rain a little better, now, could feel the way it dripped off the back of her beloved hair as she stood, alone, on a rooftop. She was alone for a while before moving, she knew that, too. Long enough for the water to seep into her dress and for the cold to stick around.
She should probably get changed, is what she thought when she finally pulled her focus away from that. But she should also be cleaning the floor, or brushing up some of that hair, and she wasn’t doing that.
“You’re bleeding a bit, you know.” Gar pointed out. Bette didn’t know — and she also hadn’t realised that Gar had shimmied closer so he was just about touching her arm. “Would that have anything to do with the blood on the floor?”
Great. Blood on the floor, too. Was there anything that didn’t need mopping up? Everything was a mess.
“Alright,” Gar sighed. “We’re just going to sit here in silence until Matt gets back from whatever he’s been doing. Beast Boy and Flamebird, quiet. There’s a new one.”
“I’m not Flamebird.”
The noise seemed to catch Gar off guard. It caught Bette off guard, to be honest.
“What are you talking about? Sure you are.”
“I can’t be. Your stupid friend said so, and God knows he’s in charge of everyone for some reason.”
He’d stood there, stone-faced and glaring. It had meant nothing to him, the way he said it. It meant everything to Bette, though. And now there was water on the floor. And blood, apparently. How long ago was that, anyway?
“Nightwing? Why, what did he do?” When Gar was met with silence, he only continued, a little more confidently. “Fuck him. Who even cares, right?”
“Me.”
The room dropped into silence again, for longer than it was usually likely to, given its occupants. “I could probably fix that hair, you know. Not that you don’t look gorgeous either way. The catch is, I only know one style, so you might end up looking like, uh… Wally, maybe.”
Bette just shrugged. Anything was better than this. She hoped so, anyway, because the itching really was making her want to hit something.
“Okay. Okay, cool. I have no idea where you put the scissors, but I have my own. Somewhere. And I’ll grab the first aid stuff from the kitchen, too, to fix up your head. And then we go sit on the couch and watch Friends. Stay here.”
That got Bette to glance up through her knees, still taking shaky breaths but no less quick to acknowledge the obvious; she clearly wouldn’t be going anywhere if she wanted to. Gar’s lips quirked up into a smirk, and he stood to leave.
A moment later, he came running back down the hall and skidding into the bathroom, now carrying the first aid kit, some hair scissors, and a small mirror. He set it all down on the floor, his smile steady, and sat cross-legged in front of Bette. A couple of minutes of wiping blood away from her temple later, he brandished the pair of scissors.
“Scooch. I can’t do anything if you’re pressed up against the wall like that.”
Bette reluctantly obeyed, twisting so she was facing the wall instead. Gar hummed in appraisal.
“… Can you fix it?”
“Sure I can. I’m gonna get going now, okay?”
Bette nodded, and then felt the coolness of the scissors touch her neck. Her agonisingly bare neck. Gar managed to work in silence for a full two minutes before saying anything else.
“You know,” Gar’s voice was softer, now. “You kind of scared me. The way I got home to find you’d just shut yourself in here.”
Oh. “Sorry.”
“Maybe next time you want to give yourself a haircut, you could do it out in the kitchen.”
“I didn’t want this.”
The scissors paused mid-movement. “Yeah, no, that’s my bad. Bad wording, I just… you didn’t answer me. I was stood there forever. Checked the clock when I went to get the first aid kit, it was almost a quarter of an hour. And, yeah, if there was a problem, maybe I should’ve called someone, but it’s not like I was thinking about that. I was thinking—” He paused again. “Shit. I should stop talking. You’ve had enough.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not really. But okay.” Gar hummed, appraising his work for a moment. “Wow. You’re really blonde, you know that? It’s almost scary. I was never this blonde.”
“You were blonde?”
“Yeah. Have I never said? My hair was pretty sandy before, you know, all of this. I have exactly one photo…” Gar trailed off, going back in for another cut. “… and it’s of me in my trunks in a river. So you’re not seeing that.”
Bette said nothing. She was kind of out of words. And it was fine, because nobody complained in the minutes it took for Gar to finish, and then thrust the mirror in front of Bette.
“See?” He sounded a little proud. “Gorgeous. Flamebird 2.0. Or something.”
“Or something.” Bette echoed, staring at herself in the mirror until she caught sight of her face, and quickly averted her gaze. Gar pulled the mirror away, but Bette nodded quickly. “It looks good. Thanks.”
“No problem. Don’t worry about the floor, I got it. Or the other floor. Or the mirror. If anything, a lack of mirror will do wonders for my ego. You want to get up?”
Bette did so, wincing at the dizziness and then finding herself leaning on Gar. Which was funny, because she was sure there should’ve been some kind of transition between those two moments.
Gar then walked her out into the hall, around the trail of rainwater leading down one side of it, and to the couch. And Bette was absolutely still soaked, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Nor could she muster up the pride to prevent her from letting Gar curl up at her side.
Gar wanted to do that a lot. He kept trying, too, both in animal and human form. It was like he needed it, sometimes, but Bette never could stay still long enough.
Thankfully for both of them, she was asleep within five minutes of Gar turning the TV on. It wasn’t a sound rest.