Mourning?

He stood there at the mirror, green eyes staring back as he held a pair of sharp scissors.  Slowly raising the cutting implement, Mal sighed and lowered it again with a shake of his head.  It wasn’t worth it… HE wasn’t worth it.  Not that cold, heartless bastard who had denied his grandson any sense of closure in the matter.  Dying of lung cancer, the man had held out his stubborn streak until the very end as he refused to understand that Mal had been trying to reach out to him.  Trying to make things right between them.  The younger man thought that maybe… just maybe… it could have been a real moment of something good.  A moment where they put aside the past and just… were.

But Mal realized now that it had been a stupid thought.  He had dragged Chloe all the way back to Oklahoma with him for that trip.  Sure, she had gone along willingly for support, but he still had felt guilty about it afterward.  Especially with the insults his grandfather had hurled at her.  Surprise that he was with a woman, warning that she dare not be pregnant….  And that was it.  That was all Mal could take.  Nothing he did was ever good enough.

Staring down at the scissors, he now thought of his grandmother.  She was alone now, the woman who had raised him as his own.  The disease had taken its toll on her husband, on her life.  Surely she had taken this step in mourning, her own long grey-streaked hair now chopped off and burnt to ashes…  He could do it for her, if nobody else.  Mal grabbed a hair tie out of his pocket and pulled his mane of hair back at the base of his skull.  Picking up the scissors, he lifted them and turned so he could see the back of his head in the mirror.  Yes…

…No!  That was too short!  He would look ridiculous.  But.. that was part of the point of it, he surmised.  Putting aside the vanity of such long hair in order to pay respects and let the death take its toll.  But, he guessed there was no rule that said he had to chop it ALL off…  He held onto his hair and moved the tie a little lower.  At this point, it would still be shoulder length.  That was still a dramatic cut, considering his hair was nearly down to his ass by now.  And it did grow fast.  

Raising the scissors once more, he closed his eyes and prepared to do this.  It was the right thing to do, he told himself.  But… he couldn’t.  They had all done it when his uncle died- well, great-uncle.  But what did that matter?  The man had been more of a father to him than his real father, or even his grandfather.  HE was the one who deserved the mourning;  the world stripped of a decent, kind, caring man who loved to make others laugh more than anything.  Straightening his shoulders as he faced the mirror again, Mal snapped the scissors closed, the SNIP sound echoing through the quiet room as he then placed them on the counter and walked away.

No hair fell to the floor that day, and it wouldn’t any time soon.