Breadth
Author's Note: I've been asked if there will be any official pairings in this fic. Well, to make everything perfectly clear, Lain will become the official love interest of every single male character whom I personally find attractive. Why'd you even ask? Just kidding. So far I just have a general rule of Cloud/Tifa, given that it's pretty standard. Well, unconsummated Cloud/Tifa, anyway. I'm thinking of hooking Lain up with a Tonberry, but that would be a twisted relationship at best.
…
Silly humans. You'll just have to wait and see what pairings emerge.
Disclaimer: The disclaimer died. The world will fall into chaos at this moment.
Chapter Four
"Bloating, heartburn, INDIGESTION. Upset stomach, DIARRHEA." It was a pepto bismol commercial that was the final straw.
That was it, she'd had it. This had to end. Lain couldn't take it anymore. Desperation had driven her to the point of no return. It was all or nothing, and if this was what All looked like, she was very willing to just end this and go with Nothing. It just wasn't worth it anymore. The weeks of pain were going to end. Right now.
Lain was cutting her hair. All of it.
It was disgusting. Seriously. Even if she liked the color pink it would still be hideous. Everything about it made her want to kill something. The bleach made her hair stringy and coarse. The pink wasn't even offensively fluorescent and therefore cool; it was like old paint meets pepto bismol—that was why the commercial had pushed her over the edge. Lain had found some scissors in a kitchen drawer, and had gotten up early so she could do this without an audience. She'd cut it, then clean the scissors and return the scissors and wear hats for the rest of her life.
The fed-up seventeen-year-old was just about to make the first cut when—
"STOP!"
Without warning a blonde blur slammed into Lain, tackling her and making her drop the scissors in the process. The sudden force took Lain completely by surprise, and she was sent flying across the bathroom with Cloud Strife taking every measure possible to get full control of her hands. They stopped with a sickening crunch against the wall, crumbling into the bathtub, Cloud scrambling to pin Lain.
"You don't have to do this to yourself!" Cloud exclaimed, quite serious, as Lain tried to kick Cloud off her. The minor contact her feet had with his shins and stomach (twisted together as they were) had little to no effect. Goddamn Blondie with goddamn cinder block muscles. "Get off me!" she tried, finally, when physically removing Cloud from her person proved useless. Cloud didn't listen.
"Lain, listen to me! It's not worth it!" At first Lain was under the impression that Cloud had mistaken her intended use for the scissors as something entirely different. That didn't stop her from trying to head butt the rather heavy blonde and scramble out of the bathtub toward her abandoned scissors. Who cared what Cloud thought? She was cutting her bitchfuck hair whether he thought she was suicidal or not. No such luck. Cloud wrapped an arm around her throat firmly when she made a dive for the bathroom floor, pulling her into his chest and rendering her immobile but managing not to crush the breath out of her in a way that Lain decided was way too perfect. Stupid bastard.
"Whatever it is, we can fix it! You don't just give up; you work through your problems. You ask for help!" Cloud reaffirmed, apparently very affected by what he had just seen. Lain finally stopped struggling, breathing hard from a lot of effort that had produced very pathetic results.
"Will you chill out?" Lain said finally, still huffing and puffing from exertion. "I'm not trying to kill myself, you dipshit." Lain couldn't see Cloud's face, but when he next spoke Lain could picture a look of consternation and confusion paint his features.
"Kill yourself? What?" he said incredulously. Lain blinked.
"Yeah, no, I was just gonna cut my hair."
"No just about it! I know that's what you were doing."
"Can you stop choking me?" Cloud released her, and Lain climbed out of the bathtub and sat on the floor of the bathroom. "So, you seriously tackled me because you couldn't bear the thought of me cutting my hair?" she asked, wondering just how much blackmail material she was about to get out of this guy.
"Cutting's no laughing matter, Lain," Cloud said sternly. "If you were feeling this strongly, you should have said something." Brushing himself off, he got up. "If this is what you want, I'm going to handle it, and we're going to do it right." Lain was a little bit worried at this point. If Cloud truly took what one did with one's hair this seriously, it was a little less difficult to believe that his hair looked the way it did on a daily basis. She'd almost started to think it was naturally that way.
"So what are we supposed to do?" Lain asked. Cloud gave her a dirty look and pulled a stool from behind the toilet. "Sit," he said. He then opened one side of a mirrored medicine cabinet and took out a packet of black hair dye, some shiny scissors, tin foil, and plastic gloves. Then he reached into the shower and withdrew two bottles, one of shampoo and the other full of conditioner. He turned on and adjusted the hot and cold taps of what Lain now recognized as a purposefully large bathroom sink and held a pale hand under it.
"Get your hair wet in here," Cloud instructed. Deciding it would be best to cooperate with the psychotic delivery boy/hair dresser, Lain scooped up her hair and got it sufficiently soaked in the surprisingly perfect-temperatured water. The sound of shampoo being squeezed into Cloud's hand broke through running water, and Cloud started washing Lain's hair thoroughly, rubbing scented shampoo into her roots. It was a strange experience. Cloud went about it like a military operation, but it was immensely soothing at the same time. Cloud muttered disparagingly to himself about the state of her hair like a car enthusiast presented with a fixer upper. Rinsing, Cloud proceeded to condition with the vigor of a Civil War veteran. Lain had to make an effort not to fall asleep in the streaming water filling the sink. When he was done, he snapped his fingers as a way of telling her to flip back. She did, and saw Cloud roll his eyes at the stripe of pink droplets that now ran across the ceiling. He combed through her hair, giving her a solid middle part. He wrapped a towel around her shoulders and picked up the scissors.
"Close your eyes," Cloud told her, opening the scissors.
"I'd rather not, actually. If my hair looks like yours when I open them I'll feel like I'm on the show Punked."
"Just close them."
"Suck a dick, Cloud."
"I said close your eyes or I swear I'll give you an ungelled Mohawk."
"Fine. If you weren't a psychotic badass I'd be giving you the finger with my eyes open."
"It's for your benefit."
There was no more talking after that. Lain obediently closed her eyes and listened as high speed snipping overtook all other sounds. Every so often Lain would feel a piece of hair fall onto her face, then feel it pulled back again. Then it started to brush her chin. An image was starting to form in her mind. She could see something up angling and spiky in the back with chin-length bits at the front. It was hideous. Then, there was a snap of plastic gloves that reminded Lain a lot of Rocky Horror Picture Show. She got an ominous feeling, but remembered the dye was black. There wasn't much terrible you could do with black dye.
"Wait, why do you even have black hair dye?"
"A friend of ours used my bleach on Tifa once when she was passed out on the couch after a long night. I kept it in the cabinet with the risk that the friend might dye mine because Tifa didn't want my bleach in the house." Cloud said all this with a perfectly dull tone, and Lain could imagine a straight face, but Lain burst out laughing.
"Tifa—blonde?"
"Stop laughing so I can wrap this in tin foil." A loud crinkling noise followed the cease in Lain's laughter. Lain was familiar with this process. It took a while for Cloud to go through her whole head and dye it black—or at least, that's what Lain hoped he was doing. Finally, he stopped.
"Okay. Obviously your head isn't going to look like an alien launching pad, so you can open your eyes since you won't know what it looks like." Lain opened her eyes. Her head did look like an alien launching pad, tons of tin foil under a plastic shower cap. It kind of looked like the crystal skull from the newest Indiana Jones movie or something. Lain chuckled, but only because she'd never used a shower cap before. Otherwise this was routine for hair dying.
"Let's eat something while that sits," Cloud said. Lain nodded, surprisingly hungry after her tiring tussle with Cloud in the bathtub and sitting up straight for nearly and hour now. She got up, cracked her back, and was followed by Cloud down to the kitchen. This time there was no falling asleep in the choco puffs. For the remaining time it took to dye Lain's hair they watched TV and fought over the remote. Cloud won, probably because unlike with the younger members of the household, Cloud didn't seem to feel guilty twisting Lain's wrist with his thumb and forefinger until she dropped it. Muttering foul language tied to Cloud's sex life and various farm animals native to Chile, Lain accepted defeat and tried not to gouge out her own eyes when Cloud flicked to something called Midgar 9-1-1. Mercifully, it went to a commercial and Cloud switched the channel with an air of disgust. Lain was relieved, but rolled her eyes when CSI Midgar came on instead. Another commercial came on and pretty soon Lain was burying her face in a pillow to Shinra's Angels, which featured a redhead, a black-haired personage, and a baldie. All were men.
Finally, Cloud poked at her metal-encrusted head, nodding as if in approval. "Up, interventionee." Plodding dutifully back into the bathroom, Lain sat back down on her stool and, at a glance from Cloud, closed her eyes once more. More crinkling followed by some tugging and the separation of one or two hairs from her scalp.
"Ow. Dickface. I'm better at this than you and look how my hair turned out last time."
"Shut up and be appreciative that I didn't put you in a straightjacket." Hauling her to her feet, Cloud guided Lain over to the sink, where he turned on the cold water this time and bent her body from the waist so that her head was lowered under the water. Lain hit her head on the tap.
"Cock monster!"
"Okay, there's got to be medication for whatever it is you have that makes you say stuff like that…" Cloud said as he rinsed. Toweling her hair first, then combing it to his satisfaction, Cloud backed off for a while. Lain listened intently, trying to figure out if he'd left her sitting there like a moron or something. Then, the recognizable sound of a hair dryer permeated the air. After a fairly painful fifteen minutes, Cloud turned off the hair dryer. After hearing Cloud step back audibly, Lain tilted her head, then stood up and opened her eyes. Holy. Shit.
"I'm damn sexy."