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timeofjuly · 3 months

Text

still you take up all my mind

Summary: Quinn and the reader mess around with hair dye and some shears. Inspired by @bones4brainz's amazing art of the electrician and Quinn; I was so taken with how they drew the MC and their blue hair that this just poured out of me. Title taken from Laufey's Let You Break My Heart Again, which I listened to on repeat as I wrote this.

Tags: Fluff, yearning, teenage shenanigans.

Read it on AO3 or read it below :)

“Maybe we should read the instructions before you just start pouring dye all over your head,” Quinn says, watching you dump the contents of the cheapest box of blue hair dye at the beauty supply store on your bathroom counter. A pair of plastic gloves topples out of the cardboard, along with two packets of shampoo and conditioner, a paper leaflet, and a nozzled bottle that must contain the dye.

“It’ll be okay,” you say, but you snatch up the paper leaflet anyway, then angle it so she can read it. Well, read isn’t really the word, since there’s just pictures. Three, to be exact - one showing how to open the bottle, one of a cartoon character applying the dye to their hair, and one showing the same character washing the colour out.

“How long do you reckon I have to leave it in?” you say, head cocked to the side as you consider the instructions. “It doesn’t say. Do you think all my hair will fry off if I leave it on for too long?”

“I don’t know? I thought you said you’ve done this before.”

“Yeah, with like, semi-permanent colour. This is the real deal.” You put the piece of paper down. “Ah well. It’ll be fine. I’ll either end up with blue hair or really, really short hair. Either way, I wanted a change.”

You’re being very blasé about the possibility of leaving this bathroom bald. You’ve been very blasé about this whole thing, actually; four hours ago, you’d sat up from where you’d been lying on your bedroom floor playing Mario Kart with her (and losing, she’s proud to say) and had declared that you were going to dye your hair blue, and would she please help you do the back?

She’d agreed, of course. You’re going to do it either way. At least she can help make sure the colour’s even.

Since the instructions are a bust, she moves onto the next best thing, because even if you’re fine with the idea of looking like a plucked chicken, she’s not. “Let’s just find a video, then.”

You concede with a nod, thankfully putting the bottle of dye down. After a quick search, the two of you sit side-by-side on the edge of your bathtub, leaning over your phone. Your shoulder and arm, mostly bare in your ratty t-shirt you use as pyjamas, is warm against her. The bathroom fan is on, but she feels almost too-hot, like the air is thicker than usual.

“So we should section the hair out,” you say, following along with the video, “and do the middle of the strands first?”

Quinn watches the girl in the video applying the dye to her hair. She’s using a little brush - which you don’t have - and has a bunch of clips separating her hair - which you also don’t have - so she can see exactly where she’s putting the dye. She’s also using a natural brown colour, not blue, and she’s a proper adult, not a sixteen year old girl standing in her mom and dad’s bathroom on a school night.

Unnatural hair colouring is definitely against dress code, and it’s Sunday night. Whatever happens in this bathroom - you’re going to have to go to school in the morning regardless.

Quinn hopes you have a beanie stashed away somewhere, just in case.

“Then the ends, and then the roots,” she says, parroting the video. She gives you a sidelong glance. Your eyes are still trained on the phone. You’re biting your lip in concentration. You smell like the cookies the two of you baked (and ate, a whole tray’s worth) a few hours ago. “Are you a hundred percent sure you want to do this?”

You pause the video, then put down your phone. “Why, don’t you think I can pull off the blue?”

You wink, and even though she knows you’re joking, because of course you are, she feels stupid, pathetic heat in her cheeks. “No! No, that’s not - you’ll look great, obviously. It’s just - won’t your parents be mad?”

She hasn’t actually seen either of your parents this afternoon, which is unusual. The four of you normally have dinner together when she sleeps over (which is often), but tonight, you’d just ordered a pizza to share with her. It’s close to nine now, and the house is still silent, save your combined chatter and the hum of the various appliances.

“Nah,” you say, waving a careless hand. “As long as I don’t stain any of mom’s good towels, they won’t give a shit. We’ll be able to clean everything up before they even notice, anyway - dad’s working late at the hospital tonight and mom’s shoulder has been really bad all day, so she took her pain meds and went to bed hours ago. They’re super strong; she won’t wake up until the morning.”

“If you’re sure,” she says, still worried. Your bathroom is all clean, white tile, colour-coordinated towels and bathmat, a shower with a glass door, not a curtain. And the hair dye - it’s so fucking blue. There’s no way you’ll avoid making a mess.

“I am,” you say, and then you smile at her in the way she likes best, the way that makes her feel like she’s the only person you’ve ever smiled at, ever, braces and scrunched-up eyes, and Quinn thinks fuck the white tiles, fuck the towels, and fuck the bathmat, too. You want blue hair, and if having it will keep you smiling like that, she’ll make this place look like a poor impression of a Pollock painting.

Together, you pull your hair into sections, then stand in front of the mirror, you in front of her. There’s only two gloves in the packet, so you each take one, sliding it over your dominant hands.

Unceremoniously, you take the bottle to your hair and squirt a generous amount of dye into one of the sections and god, it’s so blue.

“It’s so blue,” you say, grinning. “It’s gonna look so cool. I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

Privately, Quinn thinks that you do care, very much, actually, but she’s not about to tell you that.

The bathroom fills with the smell of ammonia as both of you work the dye into your hair. She’s never really touched you like this before, which is probably a weird thing to think about a friend; it’s not like people go around giving their besties head massages, after all. Still, it’s nice; you’re warm and your hair feels and smells good, despite the chemicals. You give a pleased shiver when she accidentally scrapes her nails over your scalp and she needs to duck her head behind yours to hide her blush from the mirror.

The bottle of dye is soon emptied and your head is drenched with the colour. The dye isn’t just contained to your hair; it’s all over your forehead, your cheeks, your ears, your neck. It’s even gotten on your t-shirt. Quinn’s too; luckily, it’s an old hand-me-down she doesn’t care about, one that belonged to her sister that probably belonged to one of their cousins before that. It’s so stretched and faded that the design on it is illegible.

She sets a timer on her phone for twenty minutes, as suggested by the lady in the video, then helps you secure your head beneath a shower cap to stop the dye from going everywhere. The twenty minutes passes quickly - the two of you finish your game of Mario Kart to pass the time and after a dicey moment with a blue shell, Quinn emerges victorious - and then she’s waiting in your bedroom, listening to the shower run as you rinse off the dye. The whirl of a hairdryer follows, and then silence.

“I’m ready!” you eventually call. “You can come in.”

She re-enters the bathroom to find you standing in front of the mirror. Your hair - it’s blue, of course, she knew it was going to be blue, but she finds herself breathless all the same. You’ve given yourself a trim too; there’s a pair of haircutting shears on the sink and the tiles below you are littered with blue dust. You’ve put on a new set of pyjamas, your old, dye-stained ones tossed in a careless ball in the corner. Your skin is clean, makeup-free, still faintly wet. Your cheeks are flushed from the shower, your eyes bright.

When you see her reflection in the mirror, stopped dead at the door frame, you whirl around, beaming. You run a hand over your head. “It’s so bright!” You turn your head left, then right, like a bird admiring itself in its tiny mirror. Your forehead is dotted with blue stains and so are your ears, she realises, their tips looking almost frostbitten. You look like a fucking fairy. “Do you like it?”

“I love it,” she breathes. Your face lights up. Teasingly, she adds, “Why? I thought you don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

“You’re different,” you say. “You’re my best friend. You’re you. Of course I care what you think.”

Her stomach squirms. How does she even reply to that? Best friend. Has she ever had a best friend before? She doesn’t think so. Maybe that’s why she feels so strange around you sometimes; perhaps this is just how girls feel around their best friends.

… Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, and she knows it. It doesn’t matter, though; if this is all she ever gets to have of you - clean, bare skin, hair dye, baking cookies, your smiles, honest, unguarded, just for her - she’ll still be satisfied.

“You look really pretty,” she says, suddenly not shy at all. “This was a good idea.”

If you pick up on any of the emotion in her voice, the way the words come out too steady, too seriously, you don’t show it. You just smile again, that same grin, the one you always give when someone compliments you. “Thanks for helping me. Hey, you know, I have leftover dye,” you say, like you haven’t been trying to convince her to do something with her hair ever since you decided on a whim that you wanted to dye yours. “We could give you a streak? Or maybe highlights? I think I have bleach and developer somewhere. Oh, oh, what about a haircut?”

Quinn has never had a proper, professional haircut. Her mom cuts the whole family’s at home with a pair of kitchen scissors. As a kid, she’d had the classic bowl cut, but now that she’s older, it’s just all one length and long enough that it gets caught whenever she sits on a particularly high-backed seat.

It’s fine, she supposes. It’s her hair. It’s always been long and red. That’s just what it looks like. She’s never put much thought into how she feels about it, outside of some teasing from other kids in elementary school. She’s certainly never considered changing it. Her mom never asks if she wants to do anything different with it; she just tells Quinn to sit down at the kitchen table underneath the big light and to remember to sweep the hair up afterwards.

Two years ago, her mom cut her own hair short - not even a pixie cut or anything, just around chin length, because the summer had been unusually hot and she’d wanted to keep her neck cool. It looked really nice, actually. Different.

When their dad had seen her that night, he hadn’t been happy. It wasn’t about the hair, he’d said. It was because she hadn’t asked his permission. She was his wife, after all. She should’ve asked.

Her mom’s hair is back below her shoulders now, and still growing. Long and red, just like Quinn’s. She’s forever tying it back, pinned away from the heat of the stove and the oven. Soon, it’ll look just like it did before. Like her haircut, that small, accidental moment of rebellion, never happened.

“A haircut,” Quinn says. “I want a haircut.”

You look surprised. “Wait, really? You were so against it before. I haven’t peer pressured you, have I?”

“No, no, you haven’t, I promise. I just - I just wanna go shorter. I think it’d be a nice change. Something different.”

“Okay,” you say slowly. Your mouth looks nice around the sound, all wide around the oh, like you’re blowing a kiss, before relaxing on the kay into an adorable almost-smile. “How short?”

Oh, right, the haircut.

“Uh, like, around shoulder-length, maybe? Like this.” She takes the hair elastic off of her wrist and ties her hair in front of her chest at the desired length. The elastic sits just above her shoulder, just long enough that she’ll be able to tie it back once it’s cut. There’s so much hair left below it. Looking at it makes her chest go tight, like she’s going to laugh or puke, or maybe both. It’s the same way she feels when she looks at your lips for too long. “Here. Cut here. We can fix it up afterwards to make it straight and stuff, but this is how short I want it.”

For a moment, she’s afraid that you’re going to question her. Ask her if she’s really sure, if this is a good idea. Tell her that in the morning, she’ll have nothing but regrets. You’d be right. There’s going to be hell to pay at home, once her parents see what she’s done. You should second guess her.

But you don’t. Of course you don’t; you’re fucking fearless. And as you bring the scissors up and close them just above the elastic with an audible snip, Quinn feels fearless too.

#just in time for the end of pride month!!!#this was so so fun to write #silver string #quinn/reader #quinn lawson #the electrician #it's nearly midnight here and i wrote this in like two hours lol so if there are mistakes i'll fix it in the morning

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