Disclaimer: Do not own X. Clamp owns X. Sue not.

Many, many great thanks to my beta, Cait-hime-sama….wait for it….-dono.

Also, many thanks to Kakyou-chan and Gray Wings, the lovely reveiwers

Hair

Seiichiro knows he looks like a geek. He's very much aware of the fact that even in the thick river of homebound salary men flooding the streets and subway at rush-hour, he sticks out as one of the hard cases of it.

Shimako tried to tell him that it's his tweed suits and big soft eyes behind his glasses. Seiichiro nodded, completely accepting a woman's taste in style over his inferior masculine one, and tried to change what she noted.

But he liked tweed and soft earth colors. So he only stopped wearing completely mismatching ties and realized that a slightly humorous patterned tie will never stand out or look good with a tightly checkered jacket and pants. The ultimate death blow to Shimako's anti-tweed theory came when Yuka gurgled happily when caressing her father's suit's lapels. She clutched whatever fabric her chubby short fingers managed to grab and brought it into her mouth, sucking on it with an expression of ultimate happiness.

"Look sweetheart, Yuka-chan loves it!"

"She's in her oral phase, she'll put anything into her mouth, dear."

"O-oral phase?"

"Never mind. Wear whatever you want, dear, you look very handsome to me."

That was quite enough to keep Seiichiro in a bubble of happiness for a few weeks, sure that his current looks, as somewhat nerdy as they may be, suit his wife's taste and that she finds him very fetching in it, which is quite enough for him.

When he was nearly mugged by a group of knife-wielding teen delinquents who named him "four eyes" and many other unrepeatable phrases, the subject of which was what a pushover he appears to be, Seiichiro decided to resume his changes in appearance.

He tried contact lenses. The change brought about more than he imagined.

The biggest change seemed to be in the way women started treating him. They'd stare at him suggestively or simply flirt with him bluntly, ask him out on a date, and generally express a very obvious contentment with how he looks.

His fellow male workers treated him better as well, looking up to him as a leading figure and not an equal, younger workers treated him far more respectfully now and would tag along to him with sempai-admiring attitude.

Seiichiro, completely dumbfounded by this change, returned home after only one day of work without glasses, and took a long hard look in the mirror.

Sure, he was always a tall man with slightly more than average broad shoulders and chest. He was very keen of healthy food and exercise to keep himself fit for battle and, obviously, it showed. His hair is honey colored and softly wavy, which falls down charmingly on one side of his forehead. Seiichiro couldn't quite look himself in the mirror and exclaim that his face was handsome, but now that it lacked his glasses it seemed to have a mask removed from there. He did have big soft eyes and naturally well shaped eyebrows, features his relatively large spectacles blurred, and that must have been the biggest change.

The first time Seiichiro headed out to 'baby-sit' a mangaka into finally finishing his latest creation's chapter, leaving behind his contacts' kit, Seiichiro realized that contact lenses were not for him. He was, indeed, a very scatterbrained man, despite whatever discipline he forced himself to take on, and in this life on the road an editor like himself lives there is no room for small containers and liquid bottles the contacts came with. He assumed he could teach himself to get used to taking the kit with him, but he was an old dog, and old dogs can't learn new tricks.

Besides, Shimako thinks his bespectacled appearance is adorable and domestic and that's quite enough for him.

So Seiichiro forgot about it all until the day he came to meet the six other Seals.

There was something in the way Sorata ogled at him when his visit to Karen was spoken of that offended Seiichiro beyond what he expected.

Sorata was not an innocent gaping youth like Kamui and Yuzuriha still were, he was not blankly ignorant like Arashi; he knew what Karen's outfit meant, he knows what a 'soap land' is and he could add one and one together to realize what a visit to Karen's Flower could mean.

And still the youth stared at him in shock. His eyes did not read, "You, a married man, visited this woman's soap land!" It read, "YOU visited a woman in a soap land!" The boy was stunned to think a nerd like him made it with a woman like Karen, soap lands' habits of currency exchange or not.

What? He didn't look man enough? He didn't look like a guy who could get a woman of Karen's standard? Ah, if only Sorata was not a toddler when Seiichiro courted Shimako; to see how the mostly average, borderline bore of the campus made the campus babe's head spin. Maybe then he wouldn't gawk at him with such surprise.

Is he seriously thinking like that! Shame on him. At his age, with his lovely wife and daughter, he shouldn't worry about stupid things like potential female conquests.

But the nagging thoughts of his appearance clung like a pestering insect. Is he really that geeky-looking?

He never wore anything Shimako didn't color coordinate for him, he straightened his back whenever he noticed his shoulders were drooping, he even bought new, more modernly designed glasses instead of the huge ones he had been wearing since college's fashion days.

It was his hair, one of the features which only helped to add to his glasses-less charm. It was wavy and dry and would gain too much volume whenever he didn't apply the creams Shimako donated to him from her cosmetics collection.

He was never able to comb it backwards neatly and smooth it stylishly like some of Marketing's more popular workers; his hair would bounce right back and fall all over in a mess. To cut it too short made him look too thin, to grow it long in his status was absolutely out of the question. Whenever he'd go to the barber and ask for something new his hairdresser would cringe and move around awkwardly. If Seiichiro could walk around wearing a hat he would, but no type of men's hat looked even relatively aesthetic on him.

Seiichiro was then stuck with the same haircut he had sported since grade school, the only one which suited him, and sadly, the very same haircut that deals the final blow to any attempts by Seiichiro to not look like a complete work consumed average salary man nerd.

Shimako waves off his self beratings and assures him that he looks very dashing to her and that's quite enough for him.

(tbc)