Chapter Text
Trinity doesn't do friends.
That's always been true. Even as a little kid, starting school - there's something about her people don't like, something bossy and prickly and too-sharp, always, something that gives them a bad taste in their mouth. Trinity'd figured out the world was easier without friends somewhere around third grade, and she'd never looked back. (What was the use in even trying to make friends if other kids were never going to like you? Trinity had better uses for that energy.)
Raina was different. She and Raina called each other best friends, but just because there's no word for what they were - two sides of one coin, mirror images, each of them a photo negative of the other. Raina was like Trinity would be if she did people better, and Trinity was Raina if she stopped caring about what other people thought. (If you could combine the best parts of Trinity and the best parts of Raina, Trinity thought you could make one perfect person.)
There'd been a stretch, from thirteen to maybe sixteen (maybe, a thought that makes her feel dirty and small, even longer), where she'd thought Danny was her friend. (I never meant to make you feel uncomfortable, sweetheart. Or confused. We're buddies. You know I'd never want to upset you.)
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
It doesn't mean there aren't some days where the loneliness howls through her - times where the missing space of Raina aches like a phantom limb, when she misses the way Danny used to laugh at her jokes with full throat. (Moments like that make her feel sick, disgusting - how can she miss that, still want it when it came with such tight strings attached, when it had cost her so much?)
So, yeah. Trinity doesn't do friends. It's safer, and smarter, and Trinity's a lot of things, but she's not stupid. (Not anymore.)
Which is why she spends most of her intern year trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Dennis Whitaker.
The first couple of days after she brought Huckleberry home like a stray puppy, Trinity had been second-guessing herself - because she knows better than anyone that men who seem kind and gentle and quiet can do just as much harm as the ones who scream how much of a dick they are at the top of their lungs, if not more. But then Whitaker spends the first week in the apartment doing nothing but sleeping, it seems - passing out on the couch with her Netflix homepage pulled up, collapsing into bed practically the minute they get back from the hospital, dozing off in the passenger sea of her car, and once, tragically, falling asleep on the kitchen table in front of an anatomical textbook, panicking when he woke up that the puddle of drool on one page meant the campus bookstore wouldn't accept his rental back.
Trinity wondered if he had some kind of sleep disorder - narcolepsy? Circadian rhythm disruption? Parasomnia? - but since she's got her own nighttime quirks, she doesn't ask about it. (No need to open the door to those kinds of conversations.) And after that first week, she notices Huckleberry's sleep starts to even out - he spends less time snoring in weird places, and the bags under his eyes recede a little. (A little - once they're a month in and still there, she figures that people from Bow and Arrow, Nebraska, or Iowa, or whatever, probably just all look like the ghosts of 19th-century farm children who died from consumption or plowing accidents, some quirk of Midwestern genetics.)
It doesn't mean it's not surprising for him to ask her, almost shyly, one Thursday evening two weeks into their uneasy cohabiting project, to help give him a haircut.
"Why are you asking me?" Trinity asks. He blinks at her from under his admittedly shaggy bangs. "What, you think a woman's place is in the hair salon?"
"No! No, I - my dad always did our haircuts at home," Whitaker offers, and Trinity raises an eyebrow because - what? "I just - there are some parts I can't reach great, in the back, and I figured, since - since we live together, that maybe -"
"I only know how to give dykey haircuts," Trinity warns. "Seriously. "
"Um - " Whitaker blinks at her. She can almost see him thinking, but can't quite read what those thoughts are - what, had he not known she was a lesbian? What the fuck had he thought she'd been doing with Garcia? Fuck, is he going to break his great streak of sleeping and staying out of her way to hassle her about who she hooks up with? But the thoughts all vanish, and he just blinks again. "O-okay? I mean, I don't - I just need it shorter and I - you don't have to, if you - I can, um, do it myself, if that's - "
Trinity snorts. "Yeah, just because you don't have to look at the back of your own head doesn't mean the rest of us want to see you looking like a hedgehog who lost a fight with a lawnmower." Whitaker touches the back of his neck, looking a little crushed, and Trinity bites the inside of her cheek - shit. "Chill, Huckleberry. I'll do it, I'm just warning you that you'll probably look super gay at the end of it."
Whitaker blinks again. "I - that's okay," he says. It's half a croak. He swallows, then says again, more firmly, "I mean, about it looking - that's fine. I - I don't mind. That."
Which maybe tells her a little more about Huckleberry. Okay.
"We're using your bathroom," Trinity says, because Whitaker is bright pink and looking like he wishes he could hurl himself through their third-story window rather than continue this conversation. "I'm not getting hair all over mine."
She does her best - she wasn't lying, she can cut hair, but it's been a while. There'd been a reciprocal haircutting ring in the queer affinity housing she'd lived in during undergrad - a complicated ladder where everyone ended up cutting someone else's hair to fuck the salon patriarchy or something. She'd had her own hair short, for a while, but it hadn't suited her - she'd ended up looking like a mestiza Leonardo DiCaprio from when he played that homeless kid on Growing Pains, the hair too straight and slippery to do anything but fall into her eyes. Her head had felt weird, too, without a ponytail; without the pressure of it pulling back against her skull. (The only upside to the 'do had been how much her mother hated it.) Whitaker has texture, at least - it'd been hard to tell, originally, with that slicked-down Amish bowl cut he's been sporting, but his hair is decently wavy, now that there's some length to it.
"What have you been doing for haircuts until now?"
Whitaker looked rabbity. "Um - there's - one of the shelters does, like, career days? Not like, in school, but - they get suit donations and do interview prep and give haircuts, so I've been - and then I'd just touch it up, when I could, so - " His hand hovers self-consciously over the crooked angle of his bangs. "I mean, I know it wasn't technically, like - I wasn't looking for a job, exactly, but I figured in order to keep one, I needed to stay - I mean, not that med school is a job, except - it is, kinda? So it didn't really feel like lying, or taking advantage of -"
Trinity regrets asking. She doesn't know what Huckleberry thinks her financial situation is - the PGY1 salary isn't anything to write home about, and while Pittsburgh's cost of living is working in her favor, a two-bed two-bath is more than she should be able to afford on the hospital's dime. It feels shitty to hear him defending taking a free haircut when unhoused to her, like she's in any position to judge how he made it work. (Like she's not making it work by taking advantage of her own shit.) "You're gonna want a towel," she says instead, abruptly, and Whitaker almost seems grateful for the excuse to stop talking.
The towel he scrounges up is one of the thin, scratchy ones that the hospital offers patients - only way the worse for wear, the kind of thing any patient would pitch a fit over, so worn thin it'd be pitiful at mopping up anything. Trinity bites the inside of her cheek. Did he steal this from some abandoned supply closet or something? Does Huck think she's such a bitch that she'd begrudge him the use of a towel that isn't made from sandpaper and hope?
She wraps the thing over his shoulder like a cape. "Hair in your shirt is literal torture," she says, and Whitaker lets out a little laugh.
"Yeah, I don't think cilices are for me." It's Trinity's turn to blink, and Whitaker's smile fades a little. "I - it's a hair shirt? Like the kind monks used to wear? For - never mind."
"I didn't know you were Catholic." Trinity fluffs Huck's hair out a little and scrutinizes it in the mirror. Huckleberry jerks under her hands - because of her playing with his hair or because of what she said, she's not sure.
"I'm not."
"Lucky you," Trinity deadpans. "Or, as my mom would say, there's still time!"
Huckleberry seems to understand that's a joke, at least - his shoulders relax a little, and he lets out one of those short, awkward laughs; more an exhalation of relief than anything.
"So, what - are you just really into body mortification or whatever? Kinky, Huckleberry..."
"No!" Whitaker turns his head to look towards her, and Trinity nudges him back towards the mirror - she likes this version of Huckleberry, facing away from her, the one that's a little flustered, a little off-kilter. "No, I just - I studied theology in college, and we did a sub-unit in one of my classes on body theology and asceticism, so it - came up there."
"Yeah, the only word in there I know is body." Trinity grabs the spray bottle she normally uses to mist the air plant in her room and spritzes Huck's head, just to dampen it. He shivers. "So if you're not Catholic - " He couldn't really be Amish, could he? Is he spending his rumspringa pursuing advanced medical education?
"Oh, um. Lutheran? Missouri Synod."
"Yeah, I don't know those words either. Okay, hold still - I'm starting to cut." Whitaker obligingly holds still - she can feel him watching her in the mirror, tracking the movement of her hands as they disappear behind the back of his head. "How'd you get your pre-reqs for med school knocked out pursuing theology? Did you just cross your fingers and hope they'd misread it as biology - "
"I - it was a scholarship? From my church? So I needed to major in theology to qualify. I minored in biology and chemistry, though."
"Fancy." It's quiet for a while - just the snipping of scissors, the light sound of hair hitting the tile floor or getting snagged in Huckleberry's ratty-ass towel, two people breathing in a small, confined space. Trinity finds herself enjoying it - she likes cutting people's hair. She's good at it (if they don't mind looking queer as hell.) She feels an urge to give herself bangs after this and tamps the feeling down. (No, Trinity. Bangs are never a good idea, Raina's voice whispers in her ear, the two of them in a hotel room at one meet or another, Trinity fucking around with the little scissors in the sewing kit from the bathroom.)
"What did you, uh, study? In undergrad?"
"Pre-med," Trinity says. "Gotta say, think I got the better deal - my classes had virtually no God stuff attached, and all I had to do was land a back-full dismount off beam to pay for it." Huckleberry looks startled. "Gymnastics," she clarifies, because he thinks Krav Maga is apparently her close personal friend and not a threat to knock his head off if he lays a hand on her, so she's not totally confident he knows anything that happens in a gym. (Or maybe his dumb huckleberry head is so naive he doesn't understand that he could be threatening.)
"You do gymnastics?" He sounds surprised, which - why? Is she so out of shape that he can't picture her in a leotard? (Not that she wants Whitaker picturing her in a leotard, but still.)
"Did, before I got old and decrepit." She hasn't done any gymnastics since that last season at Penn. She doesn't miss it. It'd all felt stupid, anyway, after elite - she'd seen how some of the other girls on her team had embraced it, the looser atmosphere, the lower expectations. Trinity'd struggled, especially with floor - the goofier song choices and moves making it feel more like dance than competition. Her coach had brought candy to practice on Mondays and called in 'Monday Funday,' for chrissakes, to ease everyone back in after the weekend - Marshall would have shit bricks if he'd known that anyone had taken a weekend off, let alone the idea of candy anywhere near his gym. (It'd been one of the ways Danny had, subtly, shown up for her - doling out gummy bears in ones and twos, their little secret.)
If she'd been different - if Raina had been alive - maybe she'd have liked it - the way the pressure eased off. But without gym, without Raina, without pressure and strain and pushing, Trinity couldn't figure out how it worked. She'd never gotten the rhythm of it, not like she'd been able to in elite. It'd been a relief to finish, to get her degree and leave the whole sport in the dust where it belonged, to find other ways to move her body, to push herself.
"Cool," Whitaker says. "I didn't - really play sports."
Clearly not, if he thinks of sports as play rather than work. "Yeah? No history of competitive haybaling? Huckleberry, I'm shocked."
"Why do you call me that? Huckleberry?"
"What, have you never had a nickname before?"
"Um. My mom calls me Denny, sometimes."
Trinity keeps her hand from jumping - stupid. Danny is one of the most common names ever - she hears it constantly, kids, women, men. It doesn't affect her like this, not anymore. It's hearing it in her home, maybe - in her own space. She tightens her grip on the scissors. "Well. I'm not calling you that. What are you, a stack of pancakes?"
Whitaker blinks at her. Do they not have Denny's in Broken Ankle, Nebraska? Shit, they even had Denny's in Quezon, for fuck's sake.
"Uh. No?" Huckleberry says, like he's not totally sure if he's a stack of pancakes or not. "But I'm not a huckleberry, either?"
"Says you," Trinity says. She scrutinizes Whitaker's reflection in the mirror - the haircut is only mildly dykey, the kind of thing that could read as ironic hipster or unironic hick depending on styling. "Okay, I think I've done all I can do here. What do you think? With a reminder that I warned you it'd be hella queer and that I can't glue anything back on."
Dennis looks at himself in the mirror too - his puppy-dog eyes veering up towards Trinity, a shy, almost childlike smile breaking over his face.
"It's great. Thank you. I - "
"Great," Trinity says briskly. "Don't flush the hair - if we have to call a plumber, I'm taking it out of your rent." She waves a hand before his shoulders can tense up. "Joke, Huckleberry."
"I - yeah, I know," Huckleberry says. (And maybe it sounds like he does.) "Thanks, Trinity."
"Whatever." She leaves before he can thank her a third time.
(And if she gives herself a trim in her own bathroom mirror that night, Raina's voice in her ear the only thing keeping her from going full bangs - well. It's nobody's business but hers.)