#he'd take a coppery rose gold

[starman-john-tracy]

Pink Hair, Does Care [RP]

scramjettracy:

“Ha no, that one wasn’t the fish. Grandma bought it me because some retired pilot endorsed it.” Scott choked a little on the overwhelming cloud “the Gs must have taken out his olfactory nerves.” Scott pauses in his attempt to pick up glass shards using a pair of intact bottles as tongs and finds himself lost a moment, remembering his Mom’s arms around him as he breathed his panic and humiliation into her shoulder, much as John just had just now. “Gordon didn’t understand why I was so gutted… poor kid. I should have laughed it off but…” Mom had understood. “I had a date… prettiest girl on the cheer squad, only asked her out for a dare.” The sound from the shower could have been amusement or sympathy. Scott decided either worked for his current running-distraction purposes. “Slightly panicked when she agreed to be honest.. Anyway I spotted she had an autographed picture of this rock star stuck in her locker, he had spiky blue hair so… I figured… well. Yah. Mistakes were made.” If he thought back, his teenage self had probably been more worried what his friends would think if it went badly than whether the girl actually enjoyed it. Whatever it was, he’d got himself in a spiral and it had been the first time he’d cried on his Mom in years. And, as it turned out, the last too. He cleared his throat, John didn’t need to know any of that. “She told me she had an ill-advised purple dye incident the night before the wedding she met Dad at and the rest was history… I’m sure there’s a photo somewhere.”

"Lacey Hackett?" John remembers, because of course he does. "Blond, ninth grade?" The bathroom is filled with hot steam and the sharp smell of shampoo and desperation as John scrubs his fingers frantically through his hair. The shower water rushing down the drain is a promising neon pink, but his skin, with the heat turned up to practically boiling, is rapidly looking the same. "Did you ever actually get that date?"

He sticks his head out of the shower to look at his brother, foamy bubbles in his hair and pinks streaks staining his fingers. John catches sight of his blurred, alien reflection in the steamy mirror and finds it's like a stranger is staring back at him. Though no longer so neon, the limp wet strands, dark with water, are more of a dusky rose.

That's still... quite pink.

"I bet Mom pulled it off a hell of a lot better than us." John sighs, then ducks back in, scowling like the dye is mocking him personally with its stubborn refusal to fade. He squeezes another dollop of clarifying shampoo into his palm, weakly hoping for the best as, frustration etched across his face, he goes in for round two. Building up a lather between his palms he starts rubbing his scalp in frantic circles - hoping for some miracle against the relentless pink. The dye just won't budge though and the more John scrubs, the more his scalp starts to hurt.

He sticks his head out again to miserably appraise the mirror. Oh, maybe it is starting to look paler... or maybe that's just wishful thinking.