“Just don’t fuck it up and make me look like Shirley Temple.”
Remus bites down a steely snort of a laugh, worries his bottom lip between his teeth and stares through the scissors in his hand. “And how do you know who Shirley Temple is?”
“The pub down the street from us had public access on that shitty television, remember?”
Deciding not to dive to closely into what the two of them had, Remus heaves a light sigh to himself. “Sure. But you don’t even have curly hair, so you can rest easy.”
Rest easy. What a silly phrase to apply to Sirius Orion Black, recent escapee and current hideaway at Remus Lupin’s hideous shack in some northern hovel artfully scrubbed from the face of topography everywhere, magical or not. The perfect place for a presumed murderer to hide—the perfect place to quietly and accidentally rehash twelve years of absence and decaying fondness that, no matter how hard he’s tried to kill it over time, still burns fiercely at Remus’ core.
“If I had curly hair, I’d have kept it shaved short my whole life.” Sirius’ voice now is like sharpened ice, Remus realizes as he prepares to take up Sirius’ hair in his hands for the first time in far too long. It’s cold and jagged at all of its edges, only harboring evidence of his former warmth if Remus really squints at the sound and pretends that it’s there. It hurts his ears. He stops focusing so intently and sighs again.
“‘Shaved short.’ I don’t think you truly want that, you want it to your shoulders?”
Remus clenches his jaw and slips his fingers into Sirius’ hair, long and thick and just as lovely as his patchy dreams have dared to let him remember over the last decade. It’s a duller black like dawn-dark, greyer than Remus can remember it compared to the memories of youth—the midnight near-blue that used to shimmer across Sirius’ shoulders when he would smirk at Remus across a classroom or pile atop his head like a diadem in repose at their old flat—
Blinking once, yanked out of reverie, Remus realizes he has the hair wrapped through his fingers as though detailing a worry stone with a trembling touch. He swallows. “Want it a little longer than that?”
“No.” Sirius’ back is tense, and when he shakes his head it pulls the hair across Remus’ hand in a slipping sluice, black sand through an hourglass, and suddenly Remus wants to clench it all in his fist and hold fast to it to keep time standing still in this strange present in which they’ve found one another again but neither knows exactly where to go from here—here, this tiny little box of a loo with Sirius propped on the edge of the bath and Remus standing dumb with his trimming scissors like a wand at half-ready. Sirius’ shoulders slope slightly with his own sigh; “Cut it all off.”
Remus nods to himself, mustering courage in one breath, and gathers Sirius’ hair into a long, loose ponytail. He twists it once around itself, a black and bedraggled rope seemingly pulled up from the depths of the North Sea to pull Sirius’ own body up with it, a foreign body Remus knows at once like his own pulse and yet of which he can hardly make heads or tails with all those spidering tattoos and the gauntness he’s never seen beneath that skin—Remus twists the hair into a section he can slice off in one go and readies his scissors. “No turning back, you’re sure?”
When Sirius sniffs a bitter chuckle to himself, Remus tries not to feel the sudden press of emotion at the back of his throat for the sodden exhaustion that rings through it. “I’m sure, Moony.”
With that, the rebirth of the name nobody has called him since his world shattered in the middle of an autumn so red he thought he might never see straight again, Remus blinks a tear out of one eye and lets out a low breath. His scissors close around Sirius’ hair in a hiss, and time ticks invisibly over into the start of something largely unknown and slightly terrifying for all its silent potential.
