Title: A Big To-Do

Author: Hawk Clowd

Disclaimer: Gravitation does not belong to me. Hardy fucking har.

Blood Type: hair dye. It causes more problems than it's worth, in my opinion.

Warnings: Shuichi stress; side effects include fangirl seizures and bad mental images.

Author's Notes: my roommate and I were talking one morning and I pulled up a picture I had on my computer of Shuichi with purple hair. We eventually began to discuss Shuichi's many hair colors and then she remarked that yon singer was probably doing Very Bad things to his hair by dying it so often. Thusly, when I went to my Physical Geography class that morning, the following managed to find a way out of my brain and onto paper. At the time it was made up entirely of dialogue, but I fixed that up.

Yuki Eiri woke that morning to the sound of his lover screaming in the bathroom. He considered the bathroom door with his steely-eyed gaze, wondering if it was something worth investigating or no, then went ahead and got out of bed. Shuichi was yelling for him anyway.

"Yuki! Yuki! YUKI! YUUU--"

"Shut up," Eiri interrupted, opening the door of the bathroom. "I'm right here."

Shuichi shot the writer an apologetic look. "Aa, sorry..."

Eiri grunted his reply. "Well, what's your problem now? Get it over with so that I can go back to sleep."

"Oh, right! Sorry, Yuki... I just wanted to... well... Look!" That said, Shuichi stood up on his toes and put the top of his head about equal with Eiri's chin. The writer only barely managed to avoid actually bruising his chin on Shuichi's head.

"Bleh..." Eiri pushed the singer's head away from his face. "Get your skull out of my face. I almost choked to death on your goddamn hair!"

"You may not have that problem soon! Look!" Shuichi pointed to his hair.

Eiri examined the boy's head skeptically, then shook his head. "Your hair looks the same as always, except it's orange this week. I'm not particularly fond of this shade, either."

"That's not what I'm trying to..." Shuichi's face crumpled. "You don't like my hair?"

"I don't like orange."

"But..."

Eiri sighed. "Let's just get this over with. What's wrong with your head?"

"It's going away!" Shuichi cried, tears springing to his eyes.

His head was going away...? Eiri frowned. "What?"

"My hair! Watch!" Shuichi began to comb his fingers through his hair, pulling strands out as he did so. Each time he put a hand through his hair, he ended up with a good bit of hair stuck between his fingers, which he would brush off before he combed through his hair again. "Every time I put my hand through my hair, more and more of it comes out!"

"Aa, I see it now," Eiri deadpanned, hiding a yawn behind his hand. "I can practically see your hair thinning before my very eyes."

"Yuki!"

"Calm down; I'm just teasing."

Shuichi sniffled. "You're so mean..."

"I don't see what the problem is, that's all," the writer said, shrugging. "So you're going bald. Big deal; it happens to a lot of men."

Shuichi's breathing hitched. "I'm only twenty-one! I'm not old enough to go bald! And... and... My dad still has all his hair! My grandparents never went bald! My one uncle on my mom's side is bald, but he doesn't count because he's a freak or something and we don't like to talk about him!" Shuichi wailed. "I can't go bald! I have too much hair dye squirreled away in here for that!"

"It's just hair," Eiri pointed out, well aware that the singer would probably just ignore him. "Get over it."

"You wouldn't be saying that if it was your hair falling out!" Shuichi sobbed. "You're older than me--you're twenty-five! Why isn't your hair falling out, too?"

Eiri shrugged off-handedly, stretching his arms until his shoulders popped. "I'm an Uesugi. Sexy, long-lasting hair comes with the genes."

"Yuki!"

"Look, what are you worried about? That your fans won't love you anymore? Fuck, if your lyrics didn't scare them away, I don't know how your lack of hair could do it."

"But..."

"Buy a wig," Eiri interrupted. "Hell, I'll buy you a wig, if it'll make you shut up." Mmm. Bed was sounding better and better by the minute, but if he stayed up too long, he'd never be able to go back to sleep. Perhaps it was time to ask for some closing remarks... "Are you going to st--"

Shuichi interrupted him. "I don't want to go bald! I can't! I'm not even old yet!" He wailed. "Yuki, what if I do lose all my hair? I won't be me anymore! You can't dye the hair on a wig; it'll fall out! I'll be stuck with the same colors and the same styles and... and... And what if I'm on stage one day for a concert and it fell off into the crowd? Everyone would start screaming and they'd go 'AAAAH, he's old!' and run away, and then everyone would laugh at me..." Shuichi sniffled. "I bet you Sakuma-san doesn't have this sort of problem!"

This was getting very old very fast. Who knew that the singer was so vain? "Go buy some Rogaine or something," Eiri mumbled.

Shuichi either didn't hear him or did not understand him, as he continued to babble on and on about his hair. "And what about all that hair dye I've bought? There's buckets of it! If I went bald tomorrow, it would all be wasted! I mean, I could probably donate it or something, but that's not the point!" He wailed. "BALDNESS IS SOMETHING THAT'S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE!"

Eiri was going to kill something. He honestly was. What sort of selfish... And hair dye. What did that have to... A thought occurred to him.

"Shuichi..."

The singer was running his hands through his hair again, pulling out more and more strands of hair as he did and sobbing over it.

"SHUICHI," Eiri repeated, much louder. When that didn't work, he planted both hands on the singer's head and forced him to look up at him. "Did you never stop to think that dyeing your hair every other week would make it fall out faster? All those chemicals can't be good for your head."

Shuichi sniffled. "Well... It's written on the package as a warning, but it's not actually supposed to happen..." He wiped his nose with his hand. "And I'm not gonna stop dyeing my hair just because of this, because then the baldness will win! I haven't seen my roots in years! I don't want to lose my hair! It's all so..."

For the love of... Why wouldn't this brat just stop talking? Eiri considered his options. Hit him, kiss him, or ignore him. Which one would work the best?

"And I don't think I'll be able to sing today, now that I know I'm going bald... It's very unnerving! I should call in sick and then you and I can think up ways to reverse the process. Baldness is a disease, right? What if..."

"You know, you're right... Your hairline does seem to be a bit higher up than I remember it being," Eiri said off-handedly, pushing up Shuichi's bangs. He wasn't being serious, of course, but he wasn't sure what else to do.

Shuichi wailed. "Yuki! What should I do!"

"I know exactly what you should do," Eiri said decisively. 'Shut up and get over it' would have been his normal response, but today he wasn't in the mood to deal with the crying fit that would undoubtedly result from such a remark. "Tohma had this same problem not too long ago," he lied. The day Tohma started losing his hair would be the day Eiri quit smoking. "Why don't you go ask him about it?"

The wailing stopped. Shuichi actually looked thoughtful, as though he was considering it. The brat was a bit scared of Tohma, yes, but for a crisis such as this, he was willing to go the extra mile.

"Maybe... Maybe I will," Shuichi said quietly. Then he hugged Eiri tightly around the waist. "Thank you, Yuki!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Eiri patted the singer's back awkwardly, and, when he was released from the young man's clutches, he backtracked into the bedroom and went back to sleep. Another job well done.

Half an hour later, Tohma had a wailing and bawling Shindou Shuichi writhing on his floor, unintelligibly screaming about his receding hairline.

--the end--