Chapter Text
☆ ☆ ☆
On earth, Grace didn’t feel the need to look completely put together. His stark white convers were always a light beige, his bright yellow raincoat clashed with every sweater, and his ties were always a little silly.
When he started teaching, he put a little more effort into his appearance to fit the uniform, but not much. His hair was never something he cared too much about. He cut it simply to fit into some societal norm that made sense for a little blonde boy in California
As a middle school teacher, he didn’t have the greatest salary, and most of it went to his students anyway. Buying things like snacks to pass to students during lunch, or a scale solar system with a disco ball for Jupiter and a red tape Petrova line.
With the lack of greater funds, he never went to any barber, or whatever men his age do. He learned over time how to cut his own hair.
He had it down to a science; he knew exactly where to cut and how to get it the way he liked. It was almost a ritual for him. He liked it out of his eyes and off his neck, the feeling being too scratchy or tickly for him to focus if it got too long.
He also wasn’t the biggest fan of how much he looked like his brother when it got longer. Not that he disliked looking like his brother, he loved him, but the matching outfits and jokes about being the same when they were children threw him off.
When Grace woke up on the Hail Mary with his hair down to his shoulders and brushing his cheeks, he didn’t know how to feel. To be fair, he didn’t know how to feel about anything other than “where the fuck am I, am I going to die?!?”, but his hair was an especially odd topic in his fresh amnesia-ridden brain.
He had a deep sense that it was wrong, not the way he liked it, whoever he was. But it was also a feeling that wasn’t his own. A feeling someone had told him to have when he was young and impressionable.
He eventually got around to cutting it; muscle memory after so many years kicked in, and he looked in the mirror and saw himself. But a small question remained in the pit of his stomach: Why does it have to be short?
☆ ☆ ☆