Big Book of Rythna One Shots

Shades Of Purple (S)

TW: Teen!Cast, pining, unrequited crush, rivalry, hair-dyeing

"Hold still," snaps Rythian, batting Lalna's hands away from his hair for what feels like the hundredth time. "You're going to get bleach all over your hands, and that'll hurt. Not that I particularly care, but..."

"But it itches," whines Lalna, reluctantly drops his hands into his lap and twists his fingers together in an attempt to resist the urge to scratch. It had started off as a mild tickle along his hairline and down his parting as Rythian had first applied the bleach, but now his scalp is on fire. He can't even touch it or scratch it to make it better.

It's all Rythian's fault.

Rythian sighs, picks up the brush again and dips it into the pot of bleach solution on the window sill. He pushes Lalna's head down again so his forehead's resting on the toilet cistern, trying to get at the hair at the very back of his head. "It's bleach," he says, words a little muffled by the scarf perpetually wrapped around the lower half of his face. "Of course it itches."

Huffing out a sigh, Lalna reaches up to scratch again – catches himself this time and forces his hands down into his lap again. "I still don't why we need to bleach it," he says, tries to tell himself the whiny edge to his voice isn't there. "I mean, I'm pretty blonde already, I'm sure the stuff would work on it. Right?"

"You're yellow-blonde," says Rythian, carefully applies the last few streaks of bleach through Lalna's hair and steps back to admire his handiwork, stripping off his bleach-stained gloves and dumping them in the sink. "You add purple to yellow, you get brown. Trust me on this one."

Lalna's eyes flick to the blonde streak bleached into the front of Rythian's hair, and wonders exactly what Rythian tried to do to his hair to find that out.

The itching distracts him from his train of thought, though. He makes a low, sad noise, presses his forehead harder against the cold porcelain and grinds his teeth together in an attempt to distract himself from it. "How long does this have to stay in...?"
"Ten more minutes," says Rythian, shortly.

With a noise like he's dying, Lalna digs nails into his palms and exhales slowly. Rythian sets the timer on his phone, ignoring the other boy's dramatics. "You're such a child," he mutters, leans against the sink and eyes Lalna with something approaching disgust.

Lalna whines, scrubs at his thighs in an attempt to distract himself. It fails dismally, the itching still crawling across his scalp like ants, and he glances sideways at the timer on Rythian's knee. "How long now?" he asks, a little desperately, despite the fact that little more than thirty seconds could have passed.

"Nine minutes," says Rythian, sighs when Lalna groans in despair.

"What colour are you even dyeing it?" he asks, in a half-hearted attempt to distract the other teen. Amusing as it is to see him squirming in discomfort, the complaining is going to drive him mad if he has to listen to it for any longer.

Lalna blinks, surprised. "Uh, I was thinking purple," he says. "Like Nano's?" She's had her purple streaks for as long as he's known her, since the beginning of high school, a half-dozen stripes of colour permanently threaded through the otherwise solid black of her hair on the right side.

"Like..." Rythian's nose wrinkles for a second, and then he blinks. "Oh. So that's why you want it done."
"What?" asks Lalna, suspiciously, not liking the knowing tone in Rythian's voice. "What do you mean, that's why?"

Rythian hesitates for a second, curls his fingers into fists in his pockets for reasons he can't explain and doesn't want to analyse. "You like her."

"No!" squawks Lalna, flushing bright red and looking up from the cool porcelain of the toilet to gape at Rythian in faintly offended horror. "No, I don't- well, I do like her, but she's my best friend! I don't like her like that, I-" He breaks off into vague spluttering noises, not quite sure how to respond to such an unexpected accusation.

Judging by the expression on his face, Rythian isn't buying any of it.

"...That's why you asked me to do it," says Rythian, slowly, like he's coming to a revelation. "Because you didn't want to ask her. I was wondering why, you know. Given that you hate me." He'd only said yes because Lalna had offered to pay for it, and he was hardly going to turn down money for a little work and the chance to potentially torment the other teen with the joys of bleach.

"Hate- I don't hate you! You hate me!" Lalna pauses, chews on his lip a little anxiously. "I don't hate you much." That's a lie, but it makes him feel a little better to say it, at least. He feels the need to keep up appearances.

"You set my locker on fire," says Rythian – and Lalna doesn't have much to say to that because, yeah. He sort of did.

He chews on his lip, hands clasped tight in his lap. "It was an accident," he mutters, the words spilling out of him like a slow-motion trainwreck he can see coming but can't quite stop. His voice is quiet enough to verge on inaudible, and for a second he hopes it was quiet enough that Rythian didn't hear him – but then Rythian looks at him sharply, confusion and something like anger in those oddly purple eyes of his, and Lalna winces.

The timer on Rythian's phone beeps.

He breathes out a sigh of relief at the distraction. "Can we wash it out now?" he asks, and maybe he plays up the desperate whine to the words but he really, really doesn't want Rythian asking questions right now.

Nodding shortly, the confusion on Rythian's face dulls down to faint annoyance once again, the dislike reassuringly familiar. "Get up," he says, gesturing upwards with a sharp, aborted motion. "We'll wash it out under the shower."

Lalna stands up obediently, and lets Rythian stick his head over the bath to rinse the bleach out. Focusing on the feel of those long, careful fingers against his scalp, he resists the urge to mention that he wants his hair the exact shade of Rythian's scarf.

Credit to sparxflame on Ao3