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Mori wasn’t exactly young. He wasn’t walking on a cane or going grey just yet, but he certainly was an elder to most of the Port Mafia.
However, it hit him he was turning into an old man when he developed a receding hairline. Often he would stand affront the mirror and pick apart his hair with overdramatic sighs, much to Elise’s amusement. “You look like an old man!” she’d always say, and Mori would always respond: “But you’d still love me as an old man, right, Elise?”
There was only one problem — Mori was too young for a receding hairline when it started. Nowadays he was about the right age, but the issue had actually started years ago. Why? Well, it started with a certain aristocratic family who had connections but no direct affiliations with the Port Mafia, with the surname Dazai. Their youngest son was called Osamu.
Osamu was often a quiet, contemplative boy, smart and skilled in nearly everything, met expectations without complaint while also having a cheerful personality… while also having qualities that would make him easy to manipulate into the Mafia, such as being suicidal… Mori knew that one day he would likely join the Mafia directly after Mori killed the boss at the time — who was Dazai’s grandfather oddly enough (whom he’d already planned to kill).
However, this boy was not only an executive in the making, he was also a mischievous clown; he belonged more in a circus than in a rich family or a crime organisation — not that Mori cared where he belonged over where suited Mori best.
Nearly every day, Mori sat on a tack or whoopee cushion on his chair placed by Osamu, or found a fake spider hidden in his coffee, earning a high-pitched shriek and a giggle from Elise whenever he had her as a child and words of concern whenever he had her as an adult. He knew these antics came from Osamu.
There was one that he didn’t notice, though.
The young boy had been sneaking like a snake into Mori’s room each night to pluck some hairs from Mori’s head. On the first night, he took one. The next, he took two. This pattern continued until it became noticeable, much to Osamu’s amusement and Mori’s horror. Why did he do this? Well, he didn’t like Mori very much, and it was just plain funny, which was the business of Osamu’s life other than a painless suicide. At this time, Elise wasn’t made to be bratty and often comforted him when balding made Mori feel insecure. He begged her to keep watch when he felt this was someone else’s doing, which she agreed to. This meant that Osamu could no longer steal his hair without getting caught by Elise.
When Mori left for the war, his hair began to grow back, meaning that half his hair was normal length and the rest was all baby hairs. This looked spectacularly ugly, so he shaved it away. Hence the receding hairline as a young man, which others always teased him about.
He never found the cause until one day Osamu, now in the Mafia, disappeared. All that he left as a goodbye note was a jar on Mori’s bed labelled “stolen hair lmao.”