some notes at the end

haircuts & homecomings

and she came home looking quite a bit different from how he'd remembered her

She lay there; still and unmoving. They'd rushed to her as fast as they could but time was something they could not control in this situation. Even while Miranda had tried so hard to cease the seconds from ticking away, it was useless under Road's nightmare realm.

The Branch's security had been breached when she was dropped directly in front of the gates of the Headquarters. The whole Order went into a panic as alarms went off announcing that a Noah had gotten through their protective fields; there had been a lag—a lack of manpower, to be more accurate—in their security measures these days.

Allen felt it before everyone else, of course—with his demonic eye and the queer entity he sometimes feels inside himself. His heart rate quickly raised; it's been three weeks since she'd gone missing from their last mission together. He ran out, trying to discern where the trouble was using his cursed eye, but it was different tracking a Noah and tracking an akuma. He saw her though—he saw her being dropped from an altitude that could easily snap any human being's neck; he saw Road's cruel smile before she vanished into thin air leaving him gasping for air, way too late to have caught what he had lost three weeks prior.

Above her had lain, sprinkled all around her and the green grass, was hair. Dark, shining hair, detached from a human scalp. Allen's eyes widened even more as soon as he'd noticed. And when Lenalee and Lavi came closer to where Allen had knelt before her battered body, Lenalee started to cry and Lavi stood there, watching and unwillingly etching every single detail of the scene in his memory as a Bookman must.

Kanda had stood a few feet away; he'd also come running because of the alarms. As soon as he found where his teammates were, that's when he confirmed that his hunch about what the alarm was sounded for was right. His face was bearing a stark look of anger; even he wasn't able to make it on time.

Miranda, Komui, and the rest of the order they all held dear, stopped in their tracks after Allen had knelt beside their formerly missing Exorcist. No one had thought that what had happened was impossible—considering that they know of what a Noah's rage could bring—but none of them were ready to face the fact that it had been done; and hauntingly so.

No one was saying anything; and all that was heard was Lenalee's sharp gasps of air from her unceasing cry. Allen had been staring, at the ground, where she lay; her uniform torn off her, openly displaying the blotches of purple and black and strips of thick red on her arms and on her neck. Her face had on it the look of lifelessness; like nothing of what they are now seeing had ever been done to her.

What seemed the most heartless and gruesome mark to all of them, however, was the sight of her head. Parts of the back of her head was shaved and bleeding, blood clotting in some areas, lines drawn across it-horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or even in hurting crisscrosses by something razor sharp. What hair was left to her framed her face, as Allen brushed off the cut strands that Road had sprayed on the ground, most probably for a more cruelly dramatic effect—the strands of her hair that was now so much shorter than his—and started to place his arms under her cold body and carry her into the Headquarters.

Part of him was hoping—praying to that so-called God of theirs—that the nurses in the Infirmary could still repair her and bring her back to exactly what she had been before; what she had been before this war had even cradled her in its rough, cruel hands.

It was ominously ironic to him now, this whole situation, as he once again took a peek at her head—once full of long and wavy hair, now short and limp—sticking together with a mixture of blood and sweat, as he remembered what she laughingly told him after what they thought was a successful mission;

「I think I really need a haircut, don't you Allen?」

Allen's chest slowly heaved with his low and tired chuckle, tears now spilling down his face, as Lavi, and Lenalee followed close behind him, and Kanda, a little more far behind; the three fearing Allen's calmness might burst on the way to the Infirmary.

He thought, with his arms holding her a little bit more tighter, trying to get her a little bit more warmer, feeling for the tiniest, softest, littlelest bits of the flutters of her pulse,

「Welcome home, Sapphire.」

i wrote this while waiting for the PTC at my school to end, so it's pretty much just something of a drabble my messed up mind thought up after it heard some kid say they needed a haircut