Chapter Text
It isn’t when he first decides to leave college and turn his hobby of playing with hair into a full-time profession that Stiles feels like he’s finally made it in the world. It isn’t when he takes out his loan to open the salon. It isn’t when he finishes nailing his sign above the entrance; though he did frame the picture of himself that day, his beaming smile almost as bright as the glowing neon ‘Hair Stiles,’ above his head. It isn’t even that day two months into his new life, when his stats show that he’s going to pay off his loan in less than three years if he keeps going on the way he is. No, when Stiles realises he’s finally, finally proved himself is when Lydia Martin strolls into his hair salon, looks around with a smirk, catches his eye, and asks ‘What does a girl have to do to get a decent deep conditioning treatment in this place?’
Because, the thing is, Stiles knew that for as long as Lydia could drive, she’d been taking the two hour trip uptown to have her hair done in some fancy salon run by some fancy celebrity B-lister, where she pays four hundred dollars for a trim. Even when all the werewolf shit was going down, she would still make time twice a month to get her hair done, and sometimes she would drag Stiles along to keep her company as she sipped non-alcoholic strawberry wine and read through her ridiculously complicated college textbooks.
Sure, Lydia made her support known from the very start, when he’d quietly confessed down the phone that he was leaving college and going back to Beacon Hills do a hairdressing course and get a part time job at the barbers in the town centre. She’d been the one to help him pick out the spot for his salon. That was four months ago, during the summer after she’d graduated college, and they’d chosen a little place up the street from the tattoo parlour, the one where Scott had gotten his first of a long line of Allison inspired tattoos. So, yeah, Stiles knows that Lydia approves of his life choices, which means more to him than he’d ever let on.
But it’s an entirely different story knowing that Lydia Martin is willing to let Stiles ‘clutzy goofball’ Stilinski touch her flowing red locks. Like, with scissors and everything.
He stares at her stupidly for a moment, before coming out from behind the shiny reception desk and breaking into a wide smile.
“I was thinking we could go for a graduated bob, maybe some feathering around the front; have you ever considered bangs?” He says, gesturing wildly with only half-exaggerated enthusiasm. He raises his eyebrows, staring at Lydia’s face expectantly.
Her response is a raised eyebrow and look that says ‘No way in hell, Stiles,’ so clearly he can practically hear it in her voice. The corner of her mouth quirks into a small smile, and he knows his excitement has infected her when she gives a theatrical eye-roll and a little giggle.
***
It wasn’t as though Stiles’ life-plan had been to drop out of Berkley and become a hair stylist. He’d been perfectly content with his engineering course. Totally. So content, in fact, that a month into his first semester, he was willing to do almost anything to put off finishing his 6 page essay. In hindsight, perhaps Stiles should have taken his penchant for procrastination as a sign that his ability to write essays was severely lacking. Or maybe it was his ability to pick college majors that was lacking.
Either way, while everybody else seemed to be settling into their college lives just fine, Stiles couldn’t help but feel slightly out of place. Between half-hearted attempts at projects that didn’t interest him in the slightest and going to parties that didn’t really live up to his high school self’s expectations, he found himself spending a lot of time thinking about his friends longingly.
Scott had decided to take a part-time veterinary course back at Beacon Hills college, juggling shifts at Deaton’s practice with time with Allison and running around in the woods naked. Or whatever it was that werewolves did when they weren’t being attacked by random supernatural creatures. Ever since his dad had nearly been ritualistically sacrificed by Derek’s crazy ex-girlfriend, Stiles had done his best to mostly stay out of the way. Despite Deaton’s warning that Beacon Hills would become the coolest place in town for all things that go bump in the night, Derek had assured him that things had been even quieter since the whole Alpha pack showdown.
With the supernatural silence in his home town, Allison and her dad had started a Sam and Dean-esque family business of driving all over the state to save people and hunt things. Honestly, Stiles thought it was less badass than it sounded, especially when he had to listen to Scott crying down the phone about how worried he was about his girlfriend getting mauled by a ghoul or some other equally weird creature.
It was strange watching Derek say goodbye to his pack – Isaac, Boyd and Erica had all decided it was time to skip out on Beacon Hills and come with Stiles to the busier part of California to make the most of their teenage years and pretend to be human for a while. Stiles supposed it had something to do with three of the four of them being werewolves, but they’d somehow bagged a sweet three bedroom apartment right near the college, next door to a Chinese place that did the best spring rolls. They were pretty good roommates, even if it was sort of weird to walk past Isaac’s room in the morning and find them all bundled onto his tiny single bed, sleeping soundly (“It’s called pack bonding, Stiles!” Erica had shouted shamelessly, but they’d kept the door shut from then on.)
Mostly Stiles just pretended he couldn’t hear their four-way conversations on the phone with their Alpha Derek and Cora, because adding the two dysfunctional Hales to that mix would just cross the line between ‘hey, whatever, I’ve seen weirder,’ to ‘seriously, no.’
Lydia had gone as far as possible from Beacon Hills to some tiny college that specified in maths and science, and informed them all on their group skype chats that she was the top of her class, as they’d all expected. Just before their conversations ended, Stiles would always ask about Danny, and Scott would always roll his eyes and tell him to “just call Danny if you miss him that much!” But Stiles just shook his head and sighed a little in longing as Scott told him all about how Danny was doing in his teaching course and part-time job at Beacon Hills Elementary School.
It wasn’t that Stiles had been particularly discrete about his crush on Danny Mahealani – oh, no, his motor-mouth had taken care of that. Stiles still often woke up in the middle of the night cringing after a vivid nightmare where he relived all the occasions he’d asked Danny whether he found him attractive. Subtlety was never a particularly evident quality with Stilinski men. It was just that Danny had been dating Ethan, and then he had been getting over his break up with Ethan, and then Stiles was heading off to Berkley with intentions of not coming back until he had his degree.
Those intentions pretty much vanished after that night Stiles had tried to do his 6 page essay. It was strange to think that if not for that particularly daunting word limit, Stiles might never have ended up hairdressing at all.
He had been sitting in his room, forcing himself to not scroll through Facebook instead of typing. He sighed and shut his eyes, running an absent hand through his hair. He’d let it grow out through his last years of high school after much assurance from Scott and Lydia and Allison that ‘yes, Stiles it suits you,’ and ‘no, Stiles, we don’t think you’ve become a different person since your hair’s grown out.’ It had gotten pretty long, and with all his preparation for college, he hadn’t had any time to get it cut before he’d started school.
He remembered squinting at his laptop screen around an unruly strand of hair that hung down between his eyes. His typing was getting more and more sloppy as he got more and more exasperated with his inability to focus on anything but the tickling on his forehead. After fifteen minutes of a torture that surely had its own level of hell, he’d let out an almighty cry of frustration and stormed off into the kitchen he shared with his three flatmates.
He stood in the tiny empty kitchen and squeezed his eyes closed as he lifted the scissors up to his face and cut off the strand of hair. Only when he heard the satisfying squeak of the blades and felt the hair fall through his fingers did he open his eyes. He looked down and smiled at the assaulting hair littering the floor triumphantly. He felt like one of those people from the laser eye surgery adverts on the TV, blinking around with a huge smile on his face as though granted with the gift of sight for the first time.
Once the moment had past, he into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror over his sink. He winced when he saw the damage he’d done, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. At least he could see. He leaned a little nearer to the mirror and used the scissors to straighten up the wobbly line. When he decided it was as good as it was going to get, he stood back and inspected his work disparingly. It wasn’t completely dreadful.
He bit his lip and twisted to the side, snorting a little when he realised he would have to attack the back too, or else he would be left looking as like an aging rock star. As great as Stiles thought his cheekbones were, even he would have trouble pulling that off. He leant forward and let the sink catch the strands as he cut the back short, hoping to god it was straight because he had no way in hell to know for sure.
Before he’d realised it was happening, he was snipping the hair around his ears, tidying up the edges and combing through his with fingers as though he’d been cutting his own hair with kitchen scissors all his life. He had a sudden urge to make small talk with himself about holiday plans, but decided he’d better start concentrating before he gave himself a skinhead – he’d been without that look long enough to know that he was never going back.
He stepped back from the sink a far as he could in the small room and looked critically at his hair, eyes narrowed in thought. The top was still long, sticking up naturally from 18 years of running his hands through it, but the front was short enough that it didn’t hang forward limply into his eyes. He pushed it back from his face again and watched as it lifted up and then flopped over to one side, leaving him with something halfway between one of the English major hipsters he saw swanning around outside Starbucks and a fighter pilot from some old black and white movie.
He couldn’t stop himself from licking his palm to run over his hair, Danny Zuko style, flashing a wink or two at the mirror. He couldn’t deny – it looked good. Better than before, for sure. Maybe better than ever before, he mused silently. He twisted awkwardly and found that as far as he could tell, the back looked pretty good, too.
“Not bad, Stilinksi,” he praised himself under his breath with a slow nod. He ran the tap for a few minutes to wash the hair down the sink and tried not to stare at himself.
A few hours later, after Stiles had given up on his essay and gone into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich, Erica, Boyd and Isaac came home from whatever bar they’d hit up that night. There was a chorus of wolf whistles and catcalls and Stiles blushed a little, hiding behind his BLT. A surprised silence fell over them when he announced that he’d done it himself, making him blush even harder.
“What?” he asked, hand flying up to his hair self-consciously. He swivelled around frantically to check his reflection in the microwave door. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, no,” Isaac assured him. He rubbed the back of his neck and blew a huff of air up to flick his over-grown curls out of his face. “I was just – think you’d want to do mine? I would pay you, obviously,” he added after a moment.
Erica and Boyd nodded enthusiastically in agreement. Erica had been complaining about her unruly long locks getting too unruly and long for a while now, and she wasted no time before grabbing the scissors from the countertop and holding them out to Stiles. “And then mine?” She asked hopefully, before lowering her voice – “And then Boyd, because lord knows, we can’t let that abomination get any longer,” she said with a sympathetic wince over her shoulder in Boyd’s direction. Boyd just raised his eyebrows and Stiles sent a silent kudos his way for not lifting a hand to touch at his admittedly slightly fuzzy head.
Stiles glanced between their hopeful faces, surprise written all over his features. If people were willingly going to let him mess around with their hair and give him money for it, who was he to deny them? “Sure,” he’d said enthusiastically with a smile.