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For what must’ve been the seventh time in the past hour, Jack shoved his hair up and out of his eyes, hand growing slicker still with sweat. After multiple summers spent in Rivertown, he thought he should be used to the way the heat clung in the flatlands—a higher temperature than the shade of the Forest, more humid than thin mountain air. Somehow, his body had yet to get the memo. He plucked at his damp shirt and pushed his hair back an eighth time.
Well, at least it wasn’t quite as hot as the desert had been.
Long hanks of red had started to regularly fall down over his eyes, which meant he really was due for a trim, and now was as good a time as any. He may as well take advantage of the motivation drummed up by the sticky hold of the summer weather.
Besides, he had been meaning to corner a certain someone into doing something that wasn’t work for a while now—Rupert had begun to look frayed around the edges in ways the heat of the season couldn’t explain, and Jack didn’t like that this was the third day in a row he hadn’t personally seen Rupert leave his room. It was long past time for a redirection of Rupert’s immutable need to fix the world.
“Best cure is physical work,” Jack muttered, a phrase he’d learned—even if not from it being spoken aloud—from having it wielded against himself often by Bea and George. He levered himself to standing from his puddle of sweat on the couch and headed out in search of a pair of scissors.
When he reached Rupert’s room, the door was mostly open. Balancing on his prosthetic, Jack curled one hand around the door frame, leaning in and brushing his knuckles over wood in a quiet interruption.
“Mhm?” From his spot at his desk, Rupert looked up. He had several piles of paper neatly arranged around him and an aggrieved expression that meant Jack really didn’t want to know how long he’d been staring at small print.
“Can I steal you for a bit?” Jack put on his winning grin. “When you’re at a good point to stop, of course.”
“What for?” That he was asking at all instead of immediately making excuses to turn back to his work was a good indication Jack was correct in thinking Rupert had been trying to untangle this particular snag in Lower Rivertown’s standing for far too long.
Jack picked at his bangs, letting them flop back down limply over his forehead. “Gotta cut my hair sometime soon or the heat’ll kill me.”
Rupert gestured with the text in his hand. “I’ve got three more articles to look through after this.”
“You of all people know bureaucracy is slow enough to let you take a break when you need one.”
“But I should at least—” Rupert sighed, then glanced back at the papers on his desk. He bit at the skin around his thumb nail. “This is starting to all blend together. I can barely distinguish a plebiscite from a referendum.”
“I’m so glad I have no clue what that means,” Jack muttered just loud enough for him to hear.
Rupert pushed a hand through his own hair—a slightly more sensible length for the season. He made one more note to himself, stood up, and said, “You do know I’ve never cut anyone’s hair before, right?”
Several minutes later, Jack was sitting backwards on a kitchen chair they had dragged into the bathroom. Rupert stared at the scissors in his hand blankly, then met Jack’s eyes in the mirror.
“I think I’m going to need quite a bit of direction here,” he said with a grimace.
“Relax.” Jack grinned at Rupert’s reflection, arms folded over the back of the chair. “I’ve definitely had worse haircuts than anything you could possibly throw at me.”
“That’s not the vote of confidence you think it is,” Rupert replied, but his free hand reached for Jack’s head anyway.
“There’s not really a technique—”
“There definitely is,” he interrupted. “Your hair’s much straighter than mine. I feel like that would make mistakes much more obvious.”
Jack shrugged, and Rupert jumped a little at the movement, despite the fact that the scissors had yet to come anywhere even close to any hair. “Bea has a strategy, I think. I just wing it every time I do it myself. It turns out fine.”
With curious precision, Rupert started experimentally sectioning off different chunks of hair. Jack had gotten used to this particular tactical dissection on battlefields, had seen its precise results in Rupert’s notes and sword work and neatly packed travel rations. It was—interesting, to say the very least, to have that focus aimed at the unruly mop on top of his head.
Rupert seemed to decide on a plan, then held the shears closer. “You’re sure you want me to just—go for it?”
“Rupe, I really could do this myself if I felt like it,” Jack started. “I trust you. I want you to help.” Jack chose not to say, “I’ve seen how much your hands have been itching lately.”
“Ah,” said Rupert.
(If he had picked up on the fact that this was mainly for his benefit yet, he didn’t say anything about it.)
A snick of metal, and the first bits of hair fell to the ground. Jack kept still and listened to the sound as it continued, even and sure. His bare shoulders itched where hair landed.
Jack added, low, “Besides, if you mess up, I can always just shave it bald.”
Rupert poked him in the shoulder, and Jack snickered at the expression on his face.
“I could pull it off!”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” said Rupert. His smile was small and flipped backwards in the mirror, the opposite corner of his lip quirked up.
Once Rupert had found some sort of rhythm, Jack asked, “You’ve really never cut your own hair? Not even when you were a kid?”
“I was responsible enough to be trusted around scissors.”
“Hey, I was too—mostly,” Jack protested.
Rupert tilted Jack’s head to the side for better access, fingertips firm against his skull. Jack closed his eyes and resolutely ignored how much hair was sticking to his sweaty skin. He wondered briefly who he could convince to go jump in the river with him later—Leaf, for sure, at least, and maybe Laney if he tried the pout he’d learned from Bidi.
“I’ve always gotten it cut at the barber’s in town,” continued Rupert. “Every six weeks, at Henry’s—except for in the summers, when my mother would do it for me.”
“So no dramatic, experimental preteen look you did in the middle of the night? I feel like that’s a rite of passage.” Jack paused. “That, or chopping off random bits as, like, a four year old.”
“I’m very particular about the length.” Rupert tilted Jack’s head the other way. “Can’t stand it when it touches my ears.”
The blades of the scissors met to trim off several more inches on the side, then stopped.
“I—” The rhythm of the cuts started back up again, steady. “The longest it’s ever been was in Thorne’s lab.”
Jack opened his eyes again. Rupert was focused, first two fingers trapping hair to cut evenly, like he must’ve seen Henry do for him for years.
Soft, Rupert admitted, “I thought about asking Jill to help me cut it.”
“But you didn’t?” He let the question hang—an opening, if Rupert wanted to take it, and an easy out if he didn’t.
Rupert let out a measured exhale. “Three months for you all, and I didn’t even know it was happening. Laney and Grey looked—were different when they found me, and I—” He cut himself off.
It wasn’t an answer to his question, not really, but Jack knew what Rupert meant. He pictured familiar trees in the Forest, grown in new ways, how George’s face had changed after so long away from the mountains. Over the years, he had gotten used to leaving and returning to find things not quite the same, but he hadn’t yet gotten used to the way it made his chest twist.
“People change when you’re gone,” Jack managed. “That’s just how it works, even if you didn’t choose to leave them. We all do.”
“I mean, yes. It hurt to realize how much I missed out on—how much had changed for you all. But—”
Rupert’s hands paused again in his work. Jack turned to look at him, now that there wasn’t any danger of ruining the haircut. It was a long moment before Rupert continued.
“I like things to be reliable. I like to have contingencies,” he said. “I stuck to my routine as best as I could in there, given my status as a glorified lab rat. But that wasn’t always possible.” His fingers twisted on the metal handles of the scissors. “I think I wanted proof.”
“Proof?” Jack prompted when Rupert paused again. For once, he wasn’t entirely sure what Rupert was getting at here.
“Rhones used to dock points on my essays for focusing too much on details, for not leaving any wiggle room,” Rupert admitted. “You know I don’t like being surprised—or, I like to prepare for being surprised. The lab felt like one long Tactics assignment, with an emphasis on ‘adapting’ and ‘thinking on the fly.’ And I'd like to think I did better with it than I expected to.” Rupert ran a hand through his own hair. Jack could see a clump of red left behind, right at the temple. “It wasn’t just the rest of the world—I grew too, and I guess I wanted proof of that, even if I wouldn’t remember.”
“Oh,” said Jack. “That—makes a lot of sense.”
A piece he didn’t realize he’d been missing fit into the puzzle labeled Rupert in his mind, and he readjusted his position in the chair. He imagined his growth spurt of several feet happening between blinks, a reminder of fundamental differences with all the context stripped away, and had to physically shake the thought off. Thank god they'd found a way to (mostly) reverse the effects.
“I got it cut as soon as I could, though, in Rivertown,” Rupert added, humor returning gradually to the creases around his eyes. “I didn’t grow so much that I can stand it touching my ears. Henry was very surprised when I walked in.”
Jack smiled in response. “Does he do a discount for that? Resurrected heroes?”
A small huff of laughter, and Rupert picked up the scissors once again.
The bathroom in their shared apartment had one small, high window above the shower, good for letting out the steam but not much help by way of sunlight. They had lit the electric lights for Rupert to see his work more clearly, and they cast a fluorescent glow to the peaks and valleys of his face. The wood of the floor was cool against Jack’s bare foot, a blessing in the stuffy little room, and he pressed his toes more firmly into it.
“Would you duck your head a bit more?” Rupert asked, gentle.
Jack hooked his chin over his folded arms, and Rupert pushed his fingers through the hair at the base of his neck—once, twice, scissors down at his side. The faucet dripped.
“How short do you want the back?”
Jack’s eyes had drifted shut again, and he shrugged. Stray locks of hair tumbled from his shoulders at the movement. “As short as you can, and don’t worry about getting it even—it’s the back of my head, I never have to see it.”
“Well, I’ll have to,” Rupert countered. “With how often I watch your back.” The lilt of metal against hair started up again under his careful gaze.
In the hazy near-sleep caused by the humidity and the sensation of hands in his hair, Jack didn’t really feel time pass properly. Eventually, there was a clatter as the scissors were placed against the stone sink some number of minutes or hours later. Rupert ran his fingers more solidly across Jack’s scalp, shoving all the shorn hanks to the floor and checking for any remaining unevenness.
Jack opened his eyes, brushed off his shoulders, and tilted from side to side to catch sight of the fresh haircut. It was more or less even, and short enough that he wouldn’t have to worry about sweaty hair in his eyes, and that was all he ever needed from a trim, anyway.
“Should I go open a barber shop, then?” Rupert’s words were dry, but Jack knew him well enough to sense the worry under the joke.
“Way better than Grey’s first attempt.” Jack grinned. (For a boy who seemed to be able to learn anything a book could teach him, Grey was surprisingly terrible at making bangs symmetrical.) “But really, it’s great. Thank you.”
“Any time,” Rupert said, and Jack knew how much he meant it, and all the many reasons why he meant it, and he grinned even harder.
“Yours is getting longer, too,” Jack pointed out, twisting and reaching up to tug on a bit of Rupert’s hair where it almost brushed his right ear. The corner of Jack’s mouth twitched. “I’d offer to return the favor, but I’d hate to ruin your next date with Henry.”
“How courteous,” Rupert snorted. “But—maybe.”
Jack gaped. “Really?”
Rupert shrugged, hands already reaching towards a broom they’d propped up in the corner. “If you agree that there’s a proper technique here, and promise to follow it.”
One of Jack’s hands shot up, and the other flew to his heart. “Yeah, I’ll follow your technique. Swear on my life.”
His enthusiasm startled a laugh out of Rupert, who stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom. He tapped one finger against the wooden handle, glanced between the trimmings on the bathroom floor and the shears balanced on the corner of the sink, and finally rested his gaze on Jack’s newly cut hair.
Rupert put the broom back in the corner and nudged Jack in the shoulder. “Okay, up. Before I change my mind.”
Grinning, Jack swapped spots with Rupert and grabbed the scissors. He snipped them in the air a few times and said, “I promise you won’t have to go bald.”
“Gee, thanks,” answered Rupert, but his eyes when they met Jack’s in the mirror were warm.
hesitantskeleton Sat 12 Aug 2023 06:45AM UTC
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