Haikyuu!!, Split Ends

Title: Split Ends
Rating/Warnings: G
Summary: Asahi can’t exactly go to job interviews looking so ‘wild.’ Sugawara and Daichi help him with a style change.
AN: Written for the prompt fill round of SASO 2016: Remember when Asahi cut his hair?

Split Ends

“Just do it,” Asahi said, eyes closed tight and looking miserable. Sugawara and Daichi looked at each other over his head. Daichi frowned, looking pointedly down at Asahi and then back up at Sugawara; Sugawara raised an eyebrow like what do you expect me to do about it?.

“It’s just for interviews,” Daichi said, trying as always to smooth things over with logic. “You can grow it back out.”

“When’s he gonna do that?” Sugawara said in an undertone. “Isn’t the goal that he actually gets the job?”

“Will you shush?” Daichi hissed at him.

Asahi opened his eyes to roll them up at the other two. “I can hear you two, you know.” He shrugged, making the towel wrapped his shoulders shift. Daichi looked sheepish, but Sugawara sighed, fingering the ends of Asahi’s hair, damp from the shower and falling against his shoulders.

“Sassy beard,” he accused. He gave the piece of hair he was holding a yank. “You should go to a salon. If I do a terrible job it won’t look any better than you just keeping the long hair.”

Asahi shook his head, jaw set stubbornly. Sugawara was right, but if Asahi was going to cry, it was going to be in the privacy of their clubroom and not in public. Plus Daichi’s nervous hovering was making it worse. And anyway, it wasn’t really about hair which, as Sugawara said, he could always grow back out.

It was about high school ending, everything ending. A bunch of other things would start, Takeda-sensei kept saying, but at just this moment Asahi didn’t care so much about that. He cared about not seeing his best friends every day, about having to start new things without them and having to be strong for them even when he felt the most scared. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he might as well start right now.

“Just do it,” he told Sugawara again. He closed his eyes. “I trust you.”

“Even if you say that,” Sugawara grumbled, but Asahi heard him pick up the scissors, then the soft, sharp noise of the blades sliding against each other.

Asahi focused on taking slow, deep breaths and visualized how he was calmly going to look when it was done and tell Sugawara he’d done a nice job. He might look like his dad, as far as he remembered, or the wedding picture of his grandfather that sat on his grandmother’s desk. Sugawara and Daichi’s presences were somewhat calming, except for how every now and then Sugawara made a noise of dissatisfaction, and Daichi was shifting restlessly from one side of Asahi to the other.

“All right,” Sugawara said what felt like fifty years later to Asahi. “Go ahead and take a look.”

“I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to,” Asahi said plaintively.

“Really, you baby,” Sugawara scolded poking him right between the eyes so Asahi’s eyes snapped open on their own. His eyes were sympathetic as he handed over the mirror. “Take a look.”

“It’s weird,” Daichi said, then caught himself. “Oh, but not bad! I like it!”

Visualization had not prepared Asahi for the first look of himself as a respectable job-hunter, and he couldn’t help the wave of panic and sadness that washed over him. Just as he opened his mouth, the clubhouse door swung open and Shimizu strolled in with a basket of washed uniforms.

“Oh!” she said when she saw, blinking in surprise. “That surprised me! But it suits you, Azumane-kun. Should I get a stylish haircut too, I wonder?”

“Stylish?” Asahi spluttered, but then the moment for panic was over, and Asahi resigned himself to moving into the future reluctantly, reaching up to touch his hair with a scrunched expression. And just because he saw the wink Shimizu gave Sugawara on the way by, that didn’t mean Asahi didn’t appreciate her sentiment all the same.

Seniors had to stick together, after all.

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