The first thing anyone ever noticed about Maki was the fact that her hair was much longer than someone who claimed to kill people for a living should have had it. She frequently switched up how she wore it, between pigtails and a single ponytail, between braids and buns, and yet no matter how it was styled it often still hung down to her waist and beyond. It was a nuisance in the mornings and after she'd take a shower, needing to give it ample time to dry before she could go anywhere and not worry about her hair soaking her clothing and any furniture around her, but she seemed to love it enough to keep in well-maintained so no one questioned why it was so long.
No one, except the people who'd learned to use it against her. Several times she'd been restrained by someone lacing their fingers through the thick, long locks, pulling her back or throwing her into something just by having their grip on her hair. Once she'd nearly gotten it caught in a bicycle chain, which she'd noticed just before any damage could have been done, and that led her to refrain from riding bikes unless she could pull her hair high up and out of harm's way. Vehicles were troublesome, her frequently getting the bottom portion of her hair stuck in the door or window as it closed, and she'd been wary of elevators and automatically-closing doors for the same reason. Even escalators could cause problems, and she had to hold her hair up just to keep it from being sucked into the mechanism.
But Maki's hair seemed to define her, more than her snarky responses or deadly glares, and she had accepted that fact for so long that Kaito couldn't imagine her any other way. So when she came home from a briefing about an assassin job she was being assigned, walked right into their kitchen, and grabbed the biggest butcher knife they had, he'd initially thought she was going to use the cookware as part of her work before she told him, "I'm cutting my hair, don't stop me."
"I'm sorry, what?" he asked, unable to hide the complete surprise in his voice at how sudden the statement had been. "What's gotten into ya, Maki Roll? I thought you loved your hair!"
"It's time for a change." That was the reply he got, brief and brash, before she went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her, leaving him confused on the outside. Whenever he banged on the door she'd yell at him to stop, reminding him that she had a knife and that she could kill him if he so wanted, but he was desperate to get inside and know what was going on. Several minutes later and the door unlocked, but she left it for him to open himself if he so chose.
Naturally, he chose to do it immediately, and he opened it to see strands of hair nearly two meters long piled up on the floor, her making quick work of shearing half of her hair to above her shoulders. "I can't believe this," he said, squeezing his way inside and feeling the hair on the ground tickling the exposed parts of his legs between his pants and slippers. "I never thought I'd see you cutting your hair!"
"I have to be honest, it was needed a long time ago. Years, maybe?" she confessed, as she grabbed another portion of her hair and began sawing at it with the knife. "I just didn't know what to do about it, so I kept it long like it always was. Today I finally decided that enough was enough so…there it goes." With the three words more of the hair fell to the ground, and she smiled at her changed reflection in the mirror, seeing Kaito's dropped jaw behind her. "Come on, it's not the end of the world if I give myself a haircut."
"Sure it's not, but aren't ya gonna miss it? If my hair was as long as yours, I would never wanna get rid of it because I'd always be wondering where it was!" Instinctively Kaito reached to his own hair, which he hadn't styled that day and was laying flat and unkempt against his head. "Like…how could ya do this to yourself?"
"Easily," she replied, slicing off another section of hair with relative ease. "I've cut ropes before, figured hair wouldn't be too much different than that. And it's not, I'm not having any trouble doing this at all."
He could feel himself growing sick at the sight of her getting rid of such long and lovely hair, but he couldn't let her know that he wasn't sure how to take what was happening right before his eyes. "Wouldn't it have been nicer if you had a professional do it? I bet one of our friends would've known someone who could do it for you."
"And pay all that extra money? Thanks, but no thanks. This is free, and, honestly? It's freeing. I'm not going to be trapped by my hair anymore, and that's going to be a real relief." Cutting a bit more, Maki ended up putting the knife down and turning around to face Kaito when she saw his expression was not changing even with her reassurances and explanations. "Look, if you're going to be this negative about things, why don't you let me finish and then you can see why this is a good change for me? If you're in here acting like I'm ruining my life, I'm going to screw up and then you'll be to blame for it."
He clenched his mouth closed tightly and shook his head, letting her know he didn't want to leave but also that he wouldn't say anything else on the matter. She sighed and muttered a few grievances under her breath before getting back to work, and soon enough she'd chopped away all of the hair rather evenly, exposing her neck without needing to have pulled away a small forest worth of hair to do so. There was some clean-up work she had to do, which she grabbed a pair of small scissors for, but when all was said and done she'd spent just over an hour giving herself the haircut of a lifetime, and she seemed to be at absolute peace about it.
Kaito, on the other hand, was nowhere near as peaceful as she was seeing the stark difference in her reflection, but seeing her look so happy made him feel a little better about things. "So, uh, are you gonna let it grow back out?" he asked, while she was bouncing the trimmed edges and playing with the new length. "Or is this how it's always gonna be?"
"Haven't decided yet, I just made this choice so I need to try it out for a while." Twirling part of her hair with her finger, once again Maki looked at him, this time with a serious expression on her face. "What do you really think about it, now that it's done? Be honest with me, Kaito, I'm not playing around."
"I, uh…" he stammered, feeling his face heat up now that he was looking at her head-on. The new haircut framed her jaw perfectly, and being able to see her shoulders without hair being around them made her look so much smaller than she ever had before. She was a tiny, perfect girlfriend in his eyes, but confessing that to her after how he'd been so negative about the haircut in the first place seemed wrong. "I'm gonna need some time to get used to it, but if you're happy about it, I'm definitely happy about it too. It looks good on ya, Maki Roll, even if it's weird seein' it."
"Yeah, I figured you'd say about as much." She laughed, and her laugh made him laugh as well. "My head feels so much lighter without all of that extra hair on it, it's crazy that I'd kept it so long for, well, so long." Her eyes drifted towards the piles of the hair that she'd chopped off, growing wide when she saw how much there was. After she'd bent down and grabbed a strand, she pulled it so that she was holding one end in each hand and had it fully extended between them. "Look at this, Kaito, look at how…much there was!"
"Almost as long as you're tall, yeah."
A realization dawned on Maki as she held the hair in her hands, looking around at all that surrounded them. "And we have to clean this all up ourselves. I didn't think about that before I did this. I was more worked up about getting it done and figuring out how my confession to everyone who loved my hair was going to be that I hated it that I completely forgot the hair's got to go somewhere."
"Guess there's no time like now to take out the rest of your bad feelings towards it," he pointed out, watching her easily break the strand in her hands in half with a swift pull. "I'll get some bags and we'll get right to work." As he slid out of the bathroom Kaito felt himself get overly excited about the idea that he now had a short-haired girlfriend instead of a long-haired one, and that she looked both much cuter and much more capable of murder with the sharp hairstyle.
A/N: welcome to my frantic week of posting a bunch of mmhr fics because it's mmhr week! the prompt here is "confession", which I subverted from being a romantic confession to being one a lot more relevant to what I wanted to write!