Haircuts and Histories

 📅 December 13, 2011

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ: ᴅɪsᴄᴜssɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀɴᴏʀᴇxɪᴀ & ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɴᴇɢʟᴇᴄᴛ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴏᴘɪᴏɪᴅ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ】

Methadone made things easier. That wasn’t to say easy, and Anarchy wouldn’t be caught dead saying that, because easy wasn’t part of the equation. But methadone took the edge off, made unbearable bearable. He could keep food in his stomach. He could think straighter. He could focus on mundane issues now, like his fucking hair.
He’d first really noticed it that first night after coming back from the hospital. He’d known it had gotten long; he could feel it on his neck and shoulders, it got into his face, it tangled easily. But somehow the backdrop of the new life he was stepping into threw it into stark relief: Years had passed, his hair had grown, and something about it bothered him.

Chey’s sleek black hair had always looked good worn long; edgy and rockstar-like, especially with his piercings. Sethfire’s long dreads suited his tall, thin silhouette, and Kato managed past-shoulder-length hair too; dirty-blond and held in a ponytail so his face tattoos remained on display at all times. When he turned on his heel or snapped a response, it would whip behind him to accentuate his aggression. It fit.
Anarchy had used his own hair to hide his scar at times, but mostly hadn’t given it much thought unless it was being pulled, and now he grimaced at it in the bathroom mirror, leaning over the sink. He gathered it up into a ponytail at the back of his head to mimic Kato’s, but it didn’t suit him at all and seemed like it made his cheeks look hollower. He let it hang and frowned, feeling alienated by his reflection.

Athena’s head appeared in the doorway at that moment; she leaned sideways, comically peering around the doorframe like a character from Scooby-Doo.
“Oh, good, you’re not puking,” she quipped, abandoning the cartoonish posture and casually propping herself in the doorway, comfortably crossing her arms. “You disappeared into the bathroom so long I thought maybe your medicine stuff wasn’t working. What’s going on?”
Anarchy sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t realize how long it had gotten out on the streets...I look like a dirty mop,” he said. Athena started laughing.
“No you don’t, no you don’t! You look like...Beau Bokan.”
Anarchy raised an eyebrow. “I have no idea who that is.”
“He’s a vocalist in a band K-O listens to. He has long brown hair like you do. You don’t like it, though?” 

Anarchy responded with an antipathetic shrug toward the mirror, so Athena unfolded her arms and walked in to stand beside him, then reached up and fluffed his hair into his face. He thousand-yard-stared through it, into the mirror, and she laughed again. 
“I could cut it for you, you know,” she offered. “I do my own hair usually. Yours would be...different, but I probably won’t fuck it up too bad.” Her grin made Anarchy smile too and he shrugged again, this time in something like surrender.
“Psh, you can’t make it worse than it is now, right? I dunno what would look good though. I had bangs when I was a kid but...”
“I mean I could try to give you a Beiber-cut if you wanted—”
“Please don’t,” Anarchy said, with a wince pronounced enough to make Athena wrinkle her nose with amusement.
“Okay, okay. What length do you want, though? I feel like you’d look good with it short.”
“I mean, I definitely want it shorter than this…” Anarchy looked into the mirror and tried to picture his possibilities. “How short are you thinking?”
He must have sounded apprehensive in some way, because Athena smirked and messed his hair up again.
“Not like Calliou, don’t worry. But hm...sorta like...David Beckham from last year. Maybe.”
Anarchy sighed softly, feeling as out-of-the-loop as ever.
“...I have no mental image for that,” he said. “David Beckham? The name is familiar, but if I knew at one point…”
“Right, sorry. He’s a soccer player. I’ll grab my phone and pull up a picture—and while I do that, can you haul in one of the chairs from the kitchen? If we’re doing this haircut thing I’m gonna need to reach your head more easily.”

She left for her room, and Anarchy obediently pulled in one of the chairs from the breakfast nook. When he returned to the bathroom, he found Athena ready and waiting with an assortment of pictures which she immediately started thumbing through for him. 
“See, here he is at the 2010 World Cup,” she said in lieu of thanking him for the chair, which she climbed up onto to stick her phone in his face. “His look was sort of a fauxhawk kinda thing, right, but for you I was thinking maybe we could keep the top longer and make the sides shorter.”
Anarchy looked at the picture and tried to visualize the changes Athena was describing.
“...So you want to give me a mohawk?” he asked incredulously.
“No, no! An undercut, I think it’s called. It’s like a fauxhawk but a bit edgier; the sides are cropped closer.”
“So...a mohawk?” Anarchy knew he was being difficult but couldn’t resist, and was gratified by the face Athena made at him before she yanked her phone back and started googling furiously.
“It’s not a mohawk! Here, look.” She thrust her phone under his nose again, a new picture up on screen. To her credit, the hairstyle was decidedly not a mohawk, or at least not his garish conception of one. It really was as Athena described...a fauxhawk with shorter sides.
“See, it’d look excellent on you: You have a really nice jawline you’re hiding under this mane,” Athena said in response to his non-reply. She brushed his hair back as she spoke, her fingertips grazing his skin, and Anarchy couldn’t quite parse how he was supposed to feel; again suddenly aware of how ill-adapted he’d become to normal socialization. He tried to break it down in his head and felt like a caveman: Girl touch hair. Say nice things about face. How feel?

Luckily he was saved from introspection by her scrambling off the chair and motioning for him to sit, while she dug through the cabinet in search of hair cutting supplies. She retrieved a pair of clippers and a loose rainbow assortment of plastic guards for them.
“See? I’m prepared,” she said brightly, dumping everything into the sink instead of moving any products off the countertop to make room; “Worst-case scenario, if I fuck up I’ll still be able to execute a passable buzzcut.” 
She retreated back under the sink in search of scissors, then suddenly made a delighted noise and emerged with a flat iron.
“It’s K-O’s,” she laughed, apparently able to read Anarchy’s confusion as he looked from it to her short-cropped, coiled hair. “So—are you sure about skipping the fringe? ‘Cause with this we could scene you up real good.” Athena clacked the panels together, halfway between teasing and threatening. “Buuut somehow it doesn’t seem like quite your look… I have nothing to base that on though. What music do you listen to?”

While she returned to rummaging in the cabinet, Anarchy huffed something halfway to a sigh and sat back in the chair, thumbing through his memory banks.
“I mean...I don’t listen to music much, right? Or I haven't in a while. Haven’t had the chance that often. Like, for a while it's mostly what I’ve heard on the radio or wherever I was, you know, what people were playing...Lots of them had kinda shit music taste, though.” He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “But...I mean, I don’t know how fuckin’ basic this is gonna sound. I’ve liked the Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park songs I’ve heard.”
Athena turned around triumphantly, with a pair of scissors and a comb in hand. 
“Not basic, Linkin Park is the bomb,” she said. She put the scissors in the sink with everything else and started combing his hair. “I see why you’d like them, too. ‘Numb’ was one of the first songs K-O and I really bonded over, actually. D’you have a favorite song by them?”
“Uhhh…”

Anarchy fumbled for a response, momentarily. His hair being combed felt nice but somewhat jarring: He remembered running his own fingers through Chey’s hair a winter ago and the sadness that welled up in his chest at the memory was too painful to acknowledge; swallowing hard, he forced himself back to the present and the question at hand. 
“Numb—‘Numb’ is great,” he said, racking his brain for songs and their titles. “‘What I’ve Done’ was playing on the radio basically every fuckin’ day for a while, so I remember it well...And, uh, the opening of ‘Points Of Authority’ gets stuck in my head a lot still.”
“You’re speaking our language, haha, God—K wasn’t wrong at all with saying that you fit in: Points of Authority was another song he and I were both into. You relate to the lyrics?”
Anarchy couldn’t quite tell if the last four words were a statement or a question, but he opted to answer regardless. He tried to recall the song properly and snapped his fingers to get himself on track.
“‘You like to think you're never wrong; You live what you’ve learned / You have to act like you're someone; You live what you’ve learned / You want someone to hurt like you; You live what you’ve learned…’” he quietly half-sang, then glanced up at Athena out of the corner of his eye; “...Yeah, I relate: That’s my dad.”

Athena had reared back at his impromptu karaoke and her open staring was starting to make Anarchy self-conscious.
“Okay, you were barely even trying there, but that was good,” she said, shattering his self-doubt. “Do you sing? And...you got the beat right instantly. From memory.” She sounded impressed to the point of disbelief and Anarchy felt his cheeks flush slightly from the praise, though it confused him. He hadn’t really been trying.
“No, I mean...Yeah. No. I don’t do anything musical. Like I said, I barely know what shit I like. Linkin Park is one of the only bands I really know that’s, like, mine. Hunter played country in the car...And I mean...I let him.” Anarchy made a face; one that could only be pulled by someone forced through grief into feeling reluctant nostalgia for country music, and Athena laughed. He gave a tentative smile and a shrug. “But yeah, it sucks, right, ‘cause mostly I had to tolerate my dad’s music taste back home, and on the streets it wasn’t my choice either. I don’t know my own taste in music.”
“That does suck,” Athena agreed. “We’ll catch you up, though. The only reason there’s not shit shaking the walls right now is ‘cause K-O went out for smokes, normally he just blasts his stuff. And I mean...Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit? I’d say you do know your taste in music: The Good Shit. For real, once I’ve prettied you up in here I’m gonna throw some tunes at you and you’ll like them.”
Anarchy laughed. “That almost sounded like a threat.”
“It was.”

Anarchy couldn't figure out a witty reply and, after enough seconds ticked by, gave up on making one—so they wound up lapsing into an ambivalent-feeling silence while Athena continued combing his hair. It seemed strangely intimate and he couldn’t decide how he felt about it all; mostly awkward, somewhat tense, definitely like he didn’t know what to say or do with his eyes. She’d finally worked her way all around his head, and grabbed the scissors as if the real haircut were about to begin—but seemed to hesitate. Anarchy felt the warmth of her hands behind his head, but they were still; he chanced a glance up at Athena through the mirror, and found she’d already been staring at him through it, waiting for him to raise his eyes. She gave his reflection a friendly, inoffensive eyeroll and a smile.
“Hi. I’m about to start choppin’ and I don’t wanna be doing this in total silence; it feels weird as shit. So talk to me! What's going on in your head? Spill your secrets.” Her teasing tone and the way she wiggled her fingers with the word ‘secrets’ elicited a snort from Anarchy.
“I would, but I know Kato already took the liberty of telling you about my home life and I just spent three days letting you all get really fuckin’ familiar with how I sound puking my guts out. I don’t have any secrets left,” he said, half-joking but also feeling too vulnerable already and wanting to deflect. Athena had pulled back a lock of hair from the left side of his head and snipped it off as he spoke, then, the task begun, her confidence seemed to gather and she’d picked up; snip-snip, snip-snip.

Watching her expression in the mirror, Anarchy was suddenly reminded of something.
 “...Thinking back, though, you actually owe me one,” he said.
“Oh really?” 
“Yeah. My first night here you said you’d tell me all about your ‘weird’ eating disorder sometime, and then I got too busy shaking and sticking my head down your s-bend to hear it.”

—

Oh. Athena blinked. She had said that, hadn’t she? Anarchy must have seen something in her expression or felt her hands pause, because he shrugged one deferential shoulder and offered her an out;
“You don't really gotta tell me: Otherwise I can just talk about the time a gopher snake bit my dad because he stepped on it and then he tried to kill it with a shovel but hit himself in the big toe and had to get stitches. Me and Hunter were cackling. That’s why I’ve got a snake tattoo. I don’t wanna make you talk about your whole deal if you’re not actually down to.”
“No, I mean, that sounds like a great story, I do want to hear the details on that one,” she said. “But no...I don't mind talking about my ED. If you wanna hear about it. I did offer.”
“I do want to hear it.” Anarchy’s posture shifted slightly and his eyes met hers through their reflections in the mirror. “It meant a lot to have Sethfire and Kato, like...listen to me spill my shit. You know? To feel heard. Kinda...I dunno. Would be cool to offer that, too.” 

He seemed uncomfortable with the vulnerability the softness of his tone betrayed, and Athena felt halfway to bowled over. She seriously doubted his answer that he didn’t have any secrets left to tell, but she also wasn’t offended by it; they’d known one another less than a week...and in that time Anarchy still managed to seem to be the most intriguing person she’d ever met. She hadn’t had as many misgivings from the start as Kato’d had, but five days into knowing him had left her surprised anyway. Scarred up both physically and emotionally, he had the same tendency to talk harshly that Kato did, and that had come as no surprise from a heroin addicted street kid...especially one who was apparently used to being used. But now he clearly had this, too: This softly-spoken whatever-it-was, where he’d experienced kindness and wanted to give back. Not like he owed it—just...it ‘would be cool to.’

“Well, I mean, I guess it starts with my parents,” Athena said haltingly, busying her hands with his hair again, “I dunno what you know already about me and Seth. He didn’t say what you talked about the other night, so…”
“He didn’t?” Anarchy asked. He seemed genuinely surprised. Athena smiled; she knew why. 
“Nah, Sethy isn’t like K. Doesn’t blab.”
“I guess not,” Anarchy said, tucking his tongue to his cheek as if in indecision. “I mean...it was just my stuff, really, um. I guess I do have more shit to tell you at some point, then. But he didn’t tell me anything much about you guys. I just kinda picked up on the fact that you ditched your folks. Were they shitty? Like…” He trailed off.
“Not—not like your dad or anything, uh,” Athena half-stammered. Mulling it all over, it felt unfair to bring the word ‘abuse’ into the conversation when facing the reflection of Anarchy’s facial scar and all he’d been through. 
“I dunno,” she said. “My parents are just kinda...snooty shitty people, I guess. They’re really about image. Who you know, where you went to college, what job you have, what neighborhood you live in, how much money you make… And smarts, too, they’re big on grades and all that. They wanted Seth to get into Mensa. He...He was the favorite. He’s a genius. Like a real one.” Her voice had grown soft by the end of her sentence and she frowned, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Anarchy didn’t speak, but looked quietly up at her through the mirror. Athena was taken by how he managed to look curious but pressureless, and that the dominant feature in his expression was the compassion in his eyes.

“I...I can’t do math, like, almost at all,” she said. It felt a bit like a confession. “Numbers fuck with me. Seth thinks I have dyscalculia...it’s like math dyslexia. And I dunno, I like learning about stuff I care about, right? I’m not stupid! But I’m not a genius and I just...I like sports and people more than school. Always have. So Seth’s always been perfect to my parents and I’ve always been a letdown and they’ve never been shy about letting me know: ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother’ ‘Sethfire got straight A’s this semester,’ ‘if you applied yourself like your brother did…’ All of that and more, y’know.”
“That sucks,” Anarchy offered quietly. “That really sucks.”
“Yeah...I mean...It would've been worse if Seth thought it was fine! But he’s always...he’s always cared about me and tried to keep mom and dad from being so shitty. It didn’t work much, but he always tried.” Athena went quiet again and tried to focus her attention on snipping Anarchy’s hair down to a length where it wouldn’t jam the clippers. She glanced at the mirror. She remembered kneeling in shards of one, once, and the smell of blood in the air.

“I don’t blame Seth for that or anything else,” she said, preemptively, “and I don’t wanna talk about this part too much because it’s still...hard. But you saw Seth's arms...I was the one who found him like that. I was eleven, and I had to...apply tourniquets and call 911 and everything. He died and had to be revived, like you, and...Like, I just remember still all the blood and everything—” A lump had risen in her throat and Anarchy’s left hand jumped upward on instinct, stopping just short of her scissor-free hand and then curling his fingers in hesitation, as though suddenly uncertain of their closeness. She appreciated it, though, and offered him an affectionate bump to his knuckles and a smile in the mirror.
“Can’t bald you if we’re holding hands,” she joked, somewhat thickly. “I’m ok. Thank you.”
He looked serious, almost grave, and blinked at her.
“...Losing my brother destroyed me,” he said softly. “The other day when I was jonesing so fuckin’ bad, I kept hearing his funeral and my mom screaming when we got told he was dead. I know Sethfire came out alive—thanks to you, apparently—but you still went through losing him, it sounds like. I know how you feel, alright? ...That’s hell, Athena.” If the empathy in his tone had been any thicker it could have made the air too heavy to breathe, and as it was Athena felt a hiccup catch in her chest. She swallowed hard.
“...It was. It was hell.” 

His hand was still there, halfway raised, as if he knew it might be needed, and she seized it. She could feel his pulse where their palms met, and there was some divinity, it seemed, with their heartbeats being in sync here, finding out how completely they understood one another. They stayed like that, quiet and close, for a few moments.

“Ok, you look like an idiot,” she finally joked, releasing his hand and gesturing to his incomplete, uneven haircut. “Back to work. Um.”
He huffed a laugh and relaxed, but Athena felt some bond between them that hadn’t been there before, or not as strongly as now. She knew his hand would find hers if she needed it. 

“So...My food stuff didn’t really start right after all that, but...I guess a bit of it did,” Athena started again, focusing again on Anarchy’s hair and the scissors in her hand. “It wasn’t in an actually anorexic way though: I just got really freaked out by red meat and sometimes just any meat and...I became the world’s least committed vegetarian, I guess? I didn’t have real rules for myself; I’d just avoid meat a lot and it felt better. But, like...I did okay, y’know? I kept doing my sports and going to school, and Seth went to college, and I tried to ignore my parents being mean all the time. It was hard but it wasn’t…” She trailed off. Anarchy patiently let her.

“Some of this might sound bad, but—I don’t blame K-O for anything either,” she finally said, firmly, “People in school being shitty and my eating and all, like, that’s not...That’s not on him. But I met him in ninth grade and people had already been, like, sometimes shitty to me just because I’m a tomboy a bit, I guess, and ‘butch’—I’m not, I’m just not femme—but whatever, just kind of dumb judgement about ‘ooooh you’re a lesbian’ or not pretty. Plain old kid stuff. But for K, it was...I mean—”
“He, ah, mentioned that school was hell for him,” Anarchy awkwardly interjected. Athena almost laughed.
“I know he already told you his psycho shit he tried to do. He seemed…thrilled by your response. You’ll have to watch out, on the way back from the station he kept saying ‘He just seemed to get it, Athena, he just seemed to get it.’ He might propose.”
Anarchy laughed. “Shut up.”
“He gets attached, I'm just warning you! But yeah, no, I mean...school was a nightmare for him. He was on the outside of every clique and people were just trash to him and even other misfit kids would be kinda leery, because being seen with him would put a target on your back. But...I dunno, like...I saw one of the footballers smack him in ninth grade and I couldn’t just...not do shit. I ended up befriending him. I was running with the jocks before and one of my old friends ended up dating the guy who fucked with K-O the most...I just fell out of my old social circle, and school life got harder. It’s not Kato’s fault though.”

“No, of course not,” Anarchy said. The understanding in his voice took Athena aback. 
“I got...Like, drug running and then...everything afterwards?” he continued, somewhat awkwardly, “I got sucked into it all with...someone else, like, but it was never his fault: We both got the short end of the same stick. But he kept blaming himself ‘cause I was with him.” Anarchy blinked rapidly and glanced away. “Sorry. Keep talking.”
Athena studied him. His posture had hunched slightly, closing; he’d averted his gaze. She’d managed to trim the hair on the back and sides of his head to a clippable length, though the top was as long as it had started at and shrouded the unscarred side of his face. 
“No, I mean...you’re fine. D’you wanna talk about that? Your friend?”
“No. Thanks.” He frowned; his eyes stayed distant, dark. “Keep telling me about your thing.”
Athena pressed her lips together; she remembered Anarchy mentioning that he’d been alone for a long time that first night and wondered where this friend of his had gone. With a sinking heart, thinking about the close call at the hospital and catching the bob of Anarchy’s adam's apple as he swallowed hard, she thought she might know.

“Well...school. Yeah. I'm gonna start clipping you. I think a 2 guard would look good,” she said. “Sit up and look straight ahead?”
He appeared to relax as the topic shifted. “Whatever you say, chief,” he responded, sitting up as instructed.
Her lips twitched at the moniker and she started running the clippers, the drone of their vibration somehow grounding.
“So...school just got pretty unbearable. Like, at lunch, K-O and I would just skip going to the cafeteria in 10th grade. Go sit in the parking lot. He started smoking, I’d bum a cig sometimes...We wouldn’t eat but no one would throw shit at us out there usually, insults or otherwise, it was only a couple times we got drive-by’ed with trash. It was better than the cafeteria for sure, so...it was self-protective, kinda.” She shrugged, but Anarchy’s reflection’s brow furrowed and he raised a concerned eyebrow.
“Christ...That still sounds like a nightmare, though. Getting chased out of your own school so you can smoke and dodge garbage anyway?” He frowned. “But...so that’s where you started, like, skipping meals?”
“...Yeah.” The clippers stuttered, then stopped. She shook the hair out of the blades and resumed.

“...K has his own issues. With everything, clearly, but, like...food too.” Athena felt awkward telling this part, worried it would sound like blame. “I made all my own choices and he never encouraged anything and I’d actually hit someone if they tried to make this seem like his fault. But he...he didn’t eat lunch, right, and his parents were just...his dad was always disappointed, like my parents, and his mom couldn’t seem to care about him. He’d do stuff to try and...get their attention.” Athena frowned, a deep sadness for her close friend and all his struggles washing over her and tugging at her heart.
“I almost wanna wonder why he bothered, when he’d go home with bloody noses from school and they wouldn’t ask questions, but he wanted them to be different. He wanted something to work, ya know, I wanted the same thing with my parents. So he’d, like...act out. Or in. And see if they noticed. And something he’d kinda try was, ya know...losing weight.” 
The clippers stopped again. She fiddled with them.

“I didn’t choose to choose to do it, at first, really,” she mumbled, “But something about that idea sorta got into my head, I think, like...When Seth was in the hospital, my mom and dad visited him. And talked to his doctors. Fretted a bit...I think part of me felt like, well...maybe if I got really sick, they’d realize they loved me too. I had this kinda fantasy about getting so sick I’d need a tube, and my mom draping herself over my bed and begging me to get better…” Athena went quiet, uncomfortable with the admission and whatever connotations it had. To her it was juvenile, almost; a sniveling, weak way of thinking that now she desperately wanted distance from, having regained her footing as a fighter. She worried revealing that old daydream might undermine her. Anarchy’s eyes weren’t pitying or scornful, though.
“Did you end up getting that sick?” he asked, fresh concern in his voice; “They had to have noticed, right? You shouldn’t’ve felt like you had to do that.” 
Athena quickly shook her head and managed to get the clippers going again.
“It was all gradual...I kept up with my sports but started eating less, and...My parents would sometimes argue with me about school at breakfast or dinner, so I started dipping out of those more often. I lost some muscle, and my mom...she’s pretty feminine; she always took issue with how I looked ‘boyish,’ like, she said something that fall about how my legs were finally looking… ‘womanly’ or something. But that I should shave, duh, she had to have an insult in there somewhere. But I just held onto that one time she noticed. I was like… ‘it’s working.’ But it wasn’t, I was just getting sicker.” 

Athena thought about how it’d felt, then, and pursed her lips: It had been so cold, all the time, and the world had felt so unbearable to be in: Hands on hers couldn’t lend them heat; even sitting up had felt exhausting. Kato had been so close, but his body had been warm and hers hadn’t been and so somehow he’d still felt distant. It had seemed like her eating disorder had slid some icy shard of separation between her and the rest of the world, even people she loved, even people she wanted to reach. It had been a dark spring, a cold spring, a bleak and unbearable winter-spring where she felt alone even sitting beside her best friend. Thank god he’d gotten fed up with watching her die alone and inches away.

“...I finally fainted at school and K got me to call Seth and tell him what I’d been doing to myself...That's kinda where everything changed,” she said. She was finally finishing up the right side of Anarchy’s head and he was starting to look changed, too, as she swept his hair back in preparation to trim it. With his hair out of his face, the lengths she snipped off falling to his shoulders or the floor, Athena was able to catch the admiration in Anarchy’s eyes and his touched expression as she talked about how quickly Sethfire had gotten her out of her parents’ house once he knew she was in trouble, that he’d picked her up from school that day and she could count on one hand the number of times she’d had to set foot in her old room since. 
“...Even being here, though, I was so scared for a while,” she said softly, only barely louder than the shut of the scissor blades; “My ED was just so deep in my head. I felt like if I got better too fast, or at all, then Seth would send me back home. Or he wouldn’t love me anymore, or would love me less...just all of it. It was awful.”

Athena didn’t think she could do it justice, the irrational isolation of anorexia. The biting, hunting whispers that hissed rescue wasn’t enough, being sick once wasn’t enough; love wasn’t real, it was fake, it depended on her retreating indefinitely back to that lonely, sickly, miserable tomb of starvation. She sniffed as she continued to snip away at Anarchy’s hair.
“I really thought that I couldn’t be loved without being anorexic. In my fantasy with my parents, you know, I’d be sick and they’d realize they loved me and want me to get better, and then I’d get better and they’d love me for that. But eating disorders don’t really work like that. They don’t just go away when people love you. People love you and the ED doesn’t let you believe them.”

“So that’s why you said recovery was hellish,” Anarchy said. “That was your hell. ...What worked in the end? You’re better, right?”
“Yeah. Seth...Seth’s what made the difference. I owe everything to him: I could sob for hours into his shoulder about how scared I was that because I’d eaten dinner he’d send me away and he’d just hold me. The whole time. And tell me he wasn’t going to. And now even though I’m better and everything...He’s just stayed, it never changed. I wish I’d just asked to move in with him before it all because I know now that he’d have been here like this the whole time. I can’t explain it, it just feels...Stable.”
“Unconditional.” Anarchy tapped the dog-tags at his chest. “It’s brothers. I know what you’re talking about. With Hunter...I could look at him and just know, right? Know that I didn’t have shit to prove...” Anarchy trailed off, then chanced a glance up at her through the mirror. “I felt it, kinda, with Sethfire. With both him and you. I know I do have to prove that I can do this,” he said, gesturing to the collection of track scars on one inner elbow; “Like, get over this. But...I don’t know, I didn’t prove jack yet and you already believe in me.”
“Well, is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“See, Sethfire said that too,” Anarchy chuckled softly, before letting his expression grow pensive. “You really are doing it, it seems like...I overheard the other day. You said Sethfire was being a good person to counteract your parents. You both are, though.” He paused. “Hard to believe someone like me seems worth that. Though the haircut helps.” He cracked a smile, but Athena studied him past it, mulling over his words and her ED and the battle for ‘good enough’ or ‘to deserve.’
“What tells you you’re not worth it?” she asked.
He looked back into the mirror at himself and his smile fell; his brow furrowed in thought.
“Nothing except me, now, I guess...I think I got stuck feeling weak and accepted it and now I’m pissed at myself for it.” 
“See, you just gotta put that anger somewhere else.” Athena snipped the last of the top of his hair into shape and floofed the new undercut into a mohawk, thinking about his rendition of Linkin Park.
“There, you’re done. I know K-O asked the other day...But I really do think you’d make a good rockstar. So c’mon. Start a band with us, write angry music.”
Anarchy laughed. “You know what, fine. Yeah. What’s our band name?”
“We’re still working out the details.”
“That’s a bit long, isn’t it?” Anarchy joked. He stood up and ran his fingers through his newly short hair, studying his reflection. Athena looked over him, too: His angular jawline and defined cheekbones no longer hidden, he looked sharper in some way; more masculine for certain but it seemed too like he’d shed more than just the weight of his hair. He was holding his head higher; his determined eyes were no longer shrouded. Athena wondered if he was seeing himself for what he was, now: Capable.

“You did a great job, Athena. It looks great,” he said. He turned away from his reflection and looked at her, concern in his eyes again. “...You know now, right? That you matter without being sick?”
“Wha—? Yeah. I don’t ever want to start starving myself again; I know I don’t need to do it to matter and it...it sucked so much.” She hugged her arms to her sides. “Sometimes I get scared that I’ll relapse even though I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“...Good,” Anarchy said after a moment spent assessing her. He looked down at his arms and his gentle expression hardened somewhat. “I’m scared to fuck of relapsing, too. Methadone helps, right? But heroin’s just...there. And I have to be stronger than it is. I’m guessing it feels the same to you. So...if you need to talk about shit, you know...Maybe I’ll be able to get it.” He relaxed his arms and shrugged as he looked back to her. “I’m not good with words, really. But I can listen.”
“So can I,” Athena said, privately feeling that Anarchy was far better with words than he thought himself to be. “Recovery buddies, huh?”
Anarchy blinked quickly and his breath seemed to catch for a split second before he returned her proffered fist-bump.
“Recovery buddies. For sure.”