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After the Devil, Jupiter gets a haircut.
It's been coming for a long, long time now. Most barbershops-for that matter, most shops in general don't take eldritch abomination lesbians as clientele, even when they fold their little inhumanities into a separate plane- something about OH GOD and PLEASE DON'T KILL ME and WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE YOU ABOMINATION. Plus, they don't tend to leave the camp- they can't, the rebuilding is still going on and the situation is so delicate. New Summer Scouts keep coming all the time- children running from their families and friends and the world towards something that might accept them, and child soldiers who keep telling themselves that this is Right alike. Both need their help desperately.
So they can't leave for a haircut, which means Venus and Neptune have to do it. Jupiter asks for them to do it in the bathroom of the main lodge, which despite all the changes to the rest of the camp, is still dingy and ugly, lit too brightly by bulbs far too potent for the fixtures. It's small and it's ugly and Jupiter insisted on it.
That's how they ended up here, a chair from the dining hall dragged in, a pair of dulled kitchen scissors wavering in Venus's hand and an electric razor buzzing in Neptune's.
"You know I'm not good at this, I hope," Venus says. She's worrying her bottom lip. One of her teeth keep dragging over the eyelid of one of her eyes on a different plane. "Just because I'm a femme doesn't mean I know how to cut hair."
"No one here thinks femme is a synonym for three years of salon school," Neptune rolls her eyes and pats Jupiter's shoulder, leaving a distinct ichorous handprint on one of Jupiter's millions of arms in another echelon of existence. "Jups only wants you to snip what needs snipping."
"Well, still," Venus pouts. "My gender hair moments in this body mostly consist of wishing it would grow faster and contemplating buying a wig. Not cutting it all off." She'd paused, genuine concern showing on her face. "You know... you could have called in another camper for this. I know a bunch who are a lot more experienced with this than I am."
Jupiter shakes their head. "No. I couldn't..." They resist the urge to go for the hairband. It's long since gone, but some days they swear they can still feel it curled around their wrist. "I wouldn't trust anyone else with this. C'mon. Who else would I go to? I don't really, um. Trust anyone the way I trust y'all. It has to be you two."
"Oh." Venus's eyes are bright and shiny with glowing tears, and she wipes one away with a sizzle, kissing the top of Jupiter's head. "Dear one. You ought to know... of course."
Neptune snorts, but she presses a kiss to the spot behind Jupiter's ear, almost furtively. Ey's still somewhat uncomfortable with public displays of affection, or visible ones- all of them are, really, and Neptune likes to save eir lipstick kisses to places where only the three of them can see. "Yeah, yeah. Same goes for us, you dumbass, you know that. Let's get started."
Jupiter's mom never liked them getting haircuts.
When they were little, they remember looking at all the pictures of haircuts on the wall of the hair salon that their mother always brought them to, the crisp edges of the photographs and the perfect white-teeth smile of all the customers. Jupiter had pointed to one such picture and tugged on their mom's sleeve once in fourth grade.
"I want to look like that," they had told her with an attempt at a confidence they did not feel.
The picture had been of a young boy in a softball uniform with somewhat shaggy bangs, buzzed in the back. Jupiter is still unsure of what had drawn them to that particular photo- the haircut, the boy's confident smile, or the uniform itself, which was a baby butch's dream- but they do remember how their mother responded.
"Oh, Jupiter," she'd said, with a lip that had curled to show its distaste. "Girls can't look like that. It's ugly. Unbecoming. You are getting a trim, and that's final."
Jupiter had gotten a trim, because that was final. But they had carried that softball boy's haircut in their head for years, wondering. Once they'd even contemplated telling the hairstylist that no, they didn't want a trim, they wanted all that hair chopped off, and the sooner the better please. Then they'd considered what their mother would say upon finding out about it, and they decided that they did not want to know exactly what words would be used.
Mother had not gotten to the point of out and out calling them a dyke yet, but they really didn't want to test that finite mercy.
So instead Jupiter carried that moment, that picture, in their heart. They had not wanted to be the boy in the picture- but they had wanted some part of him, and so they'd kept it, the boy with the sunny blond hair that fell in his face and the shaved back, and it had been a point of pride to keep him with them.
Now, of course, there's nothing holding them back. Jupiter keeps their eyes closed and thinks of all the things they've read and learned from younger campers they've saved- thinks of the children who adamantly insisted on not being called girls or boys, and the lesbians who had cut their hair so close to their heads they might as well have been bald, and the kids who bound their chests with what little supplies the three Devils of the Clarke County Camp Summer Scouts could scrounge up for them.
Jupiter knows what they are now. What they want to be. They want to be a butch, and a lesbian, and they want to be something that's not a girl but not quite a boy, either, they want to eschew any bounds of gender they have left. And they want- they really really want short hair.
These are all things the Devil lets them have now. And Jupiter wonders how they ever could have lived their whole life with all that blocked off; how could they have possibly lived knowing that they would never, ever be what they were?
(Sometimes Jupiter thinks that they, and Neptune, and Venus, were all destined to die before the age of eighteen. That if they'd kept going, that's where all of them would have ended up. Maybe not all by choice: Venus speaks, sometimes, of the statistics for transgender women and death rates, and sometimes she wakes up weeping from dreams of a grave where her parents called her something that was not daughter as an epithet. Neptune's pretty sure eir disease would have killed em. She says she wouldn't have let it take her out- she would have gone first.
And Jupiter's only question on the matter is if they would have used a rope or a knife to end it, and where they would have left their body.)
They are glad, now, though, that all those futures feel dead and empty. None of them could possibly be real anymore. They are free. All three of them: from whatever burdens were placed on them by either themselves or the rest of the world. They are, finally, free.
"You're done."
Jupiter looks at the mirror and sees three things staring back.
Or rather six: first they see the Three Devils of the camp. They are red and blue and yellow, violent-hand-blood-bruise and rot-mouth-pure-water and feather-eye-wing-light, and it is very difficult to tell where each of them end and begin. Jupiter is holding both of them, as they always are. Venus has a thousand open eyes all looking down at them. And Neptune is covering them all in a very warm comforting blanket of ocean-black.
And beyond, or perhaps above that, there are just three kids in a very ugly looking bathroom, where the light turns the ginger tones of Jupiter's hair to washed out brown and makes Neptune's lips and eyes shiny from makeup, and makes Venus look like a pale spectre, it washes her out so badly.
There is hair on Jupiter's shoulders and in a circle around their chair, but very little on their head. It is just like the little softball boy's hair- bangs still shaggy and unkempt up front but the sides and back buzzed. Jupiter touches the back of their head almost instinctively; the hair there bristles, and they make a soft oh as they run their hands through it.
"Do you like it?" Venus asks, biting her lip again. Her human eyes are narrowed as she stares at Jupiter, trying to gauge their reaction. And normally Neptune pounces on any of Venus's self doubts; but this time she's also staring at Jupiter in the mirror, as if to ask the same question all over again.
Jupiter stares at the kid in the mirror, who is not a girl and not a boy, who is a butch and is a lesbian and is in love and is free, finally. Then they burst into tears.
Happy tears, of course.
Why wouldn't they be? Finally, finally, Jupiter is free.