All angsty young men went through stages-stages in which they wore ripped clothing and dyed their hair unreasonable shades. Zephyr, an angst bomb in perpetual detonation, was no exception.
But heaven help them all when someone-either as a joke from someone who obviously didn't know Zephyr very well, or perhaps as a joke from someone who knew him a little too well- mentioned to Zephyr that blond was a good-boy color.
Oh, boy.
The only thing that Zephyr couldn't stand more than saints and angels was probably himself, and relating the two blew his rational mind apart better than any bullet could. So, like a man with something to prove, he scavenged a grungy canister of spray-in rose out of an exploded shop on Level 4 and doused himself bright, angry red.
He was angrily satisfied with himself (one should assume "angrily" preceded every adjective applied to Zephyr), up until Vashyron started making jokes about temperamental redheads. Zephyr, accordingly, became quite temperamental.
"Zephyr," Vashyron tried to reason with him half-seriously, "you're really not pulling off this whole 'strawberry blond' thing, kid. And you're really pulling off this whole 'rebellious teenager' thing, you know?"
But Zephyr wasn't one to quit. In a fit of offense, Zephyr did away with color entirely-Zephyr was an all-or-nothing sort of boy.
"Oh," Vashyron said when he saw Zephyr stomp into the base. "It's reverse Leanne."
And sure enough he had transformed his downy blond roots into artificial raven. He'd done a spotty job, so there were blackish smudges staining his skin just around his eyes and ears, and in some places a dirty, bruised-apple color could be seen where his slightly less spotty red job showed through. Leanne stared and snorted and called him a dork, but clearly his mind wasn't going to be changed.
For little more than a week, he drifted around like an inky raincloud, broodily ignoring the jokes (Vashyron) and bewilderment (Leanne) of his two teammates. This lasted resolutely right up until an untimely visit to La Chateau Noir, where the bartender's teasing, a proffered tube of liquid eyeliner, and the mention of the word "emo" had Zephyr back in his indignant huff.
He seemed determined to have a try at every hair color in Basel-well, besides the silver, which he wouldn't touch for some reason. (Actually, Zephyr had tried it once already, before Leanne had joined the team. Vashyron had taken one look at him when he stepped out of the bathroom in whitish-silver and said "Rebecca", and they hadn't talked about it then or since.)
But the last straw was as a fugly olive color that every shop seemed to have but never seemed to sell. Not even the shopkeepers could believe it when Zephyr declared that he was going to have it, not even when he showed them the money.
But no one could believe it less than Leanne.
As soon as she spotted him skulking down from the roof of the base, Leanne's cheeks puffed out and her hands went to her hips. "You look like something a Mad Goliath would vomit!" she shrilled, horrified to realize she might have to be seen in public with Zephyr.
"Good," Zephyr said in a snide hiss. He sauntered by her on the stairs, slouching low as ever, and muttered into her ear as he passed. "Not so funny now, is it."
It was at this point his friends decided an intervention was in order. (Or at least, Leanne decided "We should do something about Zephyr" and Vashyron said "you're right, you should say something to him.")
But trying to intervene with any course of action Zephyr decided on was tantamount to trying to bodily intervene with a charging Dwellest. Zephyr committed to most of his goals with about the same level of blind force as one, and outside interference simply bounced off-and then he sometimes threw grenades back at said interference. (Vashyron was keeping a weather eye on the grenade box, just to be sure.)
As a means of protest, Leanne kicked Zephyr off the couch and forbid him from returning to its cushions until he could get his act together.
This led to such intense in-fighting that Vashyron had to kick Leanne off the couch, too, so that he could see the television over their flailing squabbled, and then Vashyron had to kick himself off the couch, too, because they made a very bad-tempered team. He settled for leaning lazily against the back of it, instead, and put his hands in his jeans pockets to watch the showdown play out.
"I don't get why you're so upset I dyed my hair!" Zephyr was blustering angrily, in the stance of someone ready to catch a charging bull.
"And I don't get why you dyed your hair!" Leanne shouted back, looking like she was about ready to tear out a handful of her own hair (or Zephyr's, if it would get her point across better).
"I don't get why you haven't dyed it back," Vashyron put in amusedly, much too cheered by the huffy confrontation. Years of practice at dealing with Vashyron let Zephyr ignore him so completely he didn't even notice he'd spoken, but Leanne whirled on him like she might start yelling at him, too. Vashyron raised his eyebrows at her and bit back his smile until she hesitated and then whirled back to Zephyr.
""What was wrong with your natural color?" she insisted. "It was nice!" Wisely, Leanne did not say "pretty", though the thought was there.
"You dyed your hair," Zephyr countered self-righteously, but Leanne just stuck her nose up like she should have expected the response.
"Because of patriarchal oppression."
Vashyron, realizing he was safely out of the equation, gleefully took the opportunity to do something he normally wouldn't get away with. He put his hand to his heart and gave a dramatic, effeminate gasp. "Zephyr, are you treating your woman right?"
And get away with it he did-Zephyr kept his face screwed up petulantly at Leanne. "You wear glasses," he pointed out, like he was about to reveal a capital crime. "Even though you don't need them. What's wrong with your natural eyes, huh?"
Leanne blinked behind her fashionably framed lenses, not having quite expected that. "Well, I...they're cute. What you did to yourself is not cute."
Zephyr scoffed in that could-be-your-brother-could-be-your-boyfriend way that always so confused her. "Jump off a building."
"No way," she retorted immediately. "You'd come catch me again, and you are way too embarrassing to be rescued by right now."
"Rescue yourself for once," Zephyr grumbled mutinously, but Leanne would be having no mutiny. (Obviously, she had not realized that Vashyron was laughing behind his hand and doubling slowly toward the floor.) She changed tactics.
"You're right, no man would ever want me," she sighed tragically, with just the right amount of weepy blue-eyed demurity to make Zephyr glance up to see if she was serious.
There was a reason Zephyr did not usually win these arguments.
Most people were, well, sort of afraid of Zephyr. The exceptions to this were Vashyron, for obvious reasons, Pater, whose head was usually so far up in the clouds that Zephyr's "playful" whacks were barely even turbulence, and to the surprise of many, Leanne.
It wasn't that she had some deep-seated belief that Zephyr was a good person, who was really harmless and wouldn't hit a girl-well, actually, she did, though she knew from experience that he would punch anyone who annoyed him indiscriminate of gender. It was that, well, even if she might not know what was going on in his Technicolor head most of the time, Leanne knew Zephyr wasn't the type to kill/maim/break something he had risked his life to get.
Leanne, as far as she was concerned, was sitting pretty in the balcony seat of "you brought it upon yourself", and as such she chose to heckle Zephyr's drama, untouchably, from there.
Even if he couldn't admit this to himself, Zephyr knew it just as well as Leanne did, so he hastily made the decision to give her a new opening rather than face whatever consequences might come from reacting to that last bit.
"I mean," he said, floundering a little, "it's not like I actually look that bad."
"Oh," Leanne said with a deeply pained quality, at the same time that Vashyron snorted at the volume of a Rocketfoot sneezing.
For that, Zephyr stormed out and did not say a word to them until they had to go collect him for their next mission almost a day later. (Those words, naturally, were "fine" and "shut up".)
The hair was still olive, but they needed money and it was out by the empty Café Chelsey where no one hung around unless they were a someone who was about to make a hunter some rubies, so they put on their jackets and packed up their weaponry and tried really, really hard not to acknowledge it as they left Ebel City and navigated past the common, clear roads.
They stayed much more to the shadows than usual, ducking in and out of protective cover from the shells of the ghost buildings around the area. "Just to make absolutely sure," Leanne told them nervously, but whether she meant about making sure no one took them by surprise or she meant no one seeing The Hair who wasn't on their hit list was anyone's guess.
At Vashyron's gesture they stopped together-he gave half a sadistic smile and nodded around the corner. There was their man, loitering around antsily and unmistakably for the next client he was going to sell his stolen weapon parts off to.
Vashyron mouthed a battle cry to them-go get 'im-and then spun out into the open, guns akimbo. Leanne stepped out to from behind Vashyron to flank him, and then Zephyr prowled around to his left.
The gunman watched them apprehensively, one and then the other. All three across, angel hair and killer eyes, and-
He stopped.
And then he laughed. At Zephyr.
Zephyr's expression went from mocking certainty to rage and murder in less than a second, but before he could even move, it was Leanne's bullet that sent the man still smirking to the cement.
"How dare that jerk laugh at us," she seethed in her zebra-print high heels, and behind her and her smoking machinegun Zephyr for the first time looked the slightest bit shame-faced. The man was questionably dead, but definitely dead enough to consider their mission completed. All that was left to do was frisk the man for anything worth taking off him-it had been, all in all, underwhelming.
"Alright!" Vashyron, still holding both handguns, startled them with a sweeping gesture. He grinned at them crazily when they both reluctantly turned to see what he wanted. "What have we learned, kids?"
"That I look stupid," Zephyr muttered, angrily kicking a piece of scrap. And then, when Leanne opened her mouth triumphantly, "And that I hate you both."
"My golden-haired darlings," Vashyron said in exaggerated but half-sincere fondness. He swung a brotherly arm around each of them (which they both shrugged off). Then he shook his head exaggeratedly at the sour, sewer-colored Zephyr and sighed loudly. "Well, at least one of you is still darling. Right, Leanne?"
He winked and tried for the arm-around again to give her shoulder a friendly squeeze. Leanne glared at him over her glasses.
"Zephyr," she said, without breaking eye contact. "Is there any more olive left?"
And so Zephyr never died his hair again.
I love Resonance of Fate. I also love the character customization system-it's just that I also find it hilarious. So have a story with no point.
Cheers and happy reading (and give Resonance of Fate some love, the archive's looking a little sparse).