Work Text:
“Sorry, sometimes little me makes an appearance
She's never on time and she's never convenient
She's why I under eat
Why I'm losing sleep
She only shows up when she's scared that you'll leave
Sorry sometimes little me makes an appearance
Could you tell her you love me?
Could you tell her you love me?”
Dennis doesn't notice his eyelashes falling out at first.
He’s a PGY-1; he lives in fourteen-hour increments now, measured by admissions, sign-outs, and whatever he can inhale from the sandwich cart. Until, he finds himself standing in Trauma 2 as Garcia evaluates a patient, when his eye begins to burn. Dennis rubs at it with the heel of his hand, thinking maybe an eyelash has come loose and gotten trapped beneath his contact lens — that happens all the time now that he wears contacts. He never bothered correcting his vision before. He’s spent years squinting at everything and pretending he could definitely read signs from across parking lots. But now, neither of the men he loves wants him to accidentally walk into traffic because he couldn’t properly see the flashing signal. So Dennis had eventually found himself sitting in an optometrist's office and leaving with contact lenses. He yanks out the lens and rubs it between his fingers to make it disintegrate before he tosses it out. But the irritation doesn't improve.
Later, in the ED bathroom, he leans toward the mirror to investigate what’s going on with his eye and hopes he hasn’t inadvertently picked up pink-eye from Chairs — again.
But there isn't an eyelash in his eye, in fact — there are no eyelashes at all on about half his top right eyelid. He figures that maybe they broke off or he rubbed them away somehow; stress does weird things. So he shrugs it off. But a day later the gap is even larger and he notices a matching patch on his lower lid. It’s weird. But he's already noticed his hair shedding more than usual too, though he hasn't paid much attention to it. Soft wheat-colored curls have started appearing everywhere: on his pillow, on his scrubs, on the bathroom counter, and in the shower drain of Jack and Robby's luxurious shower. Dennis notices them but dismisses them. Everyone sheds hair. Until two mornings later, when he runs his hand through his curls and feels smooth skin for the first time. He’s got bald spots, multiple, round and naked and each about the size of a coin, ranging anywhere from a penny to a silver dollar.
His stomach drops at the sensation under his fingers. They’re high on the back of his scalp where nobody will notice unless they're looking for them and his surrounding curls still look completely normal and he can use them to cover up the spots. But his hair is still coming out so fast. It's like whiplash and the curls keep falling, day after day after day.
So it isn’t a surprise when he gets the diagnosis of alopecia areata; he’s a doctor after all.
He remembers summers when his Meemaw would take him and his brothers to the county library. The words alopecia areata jog his memory of those warm stagnant days, like standing water, they make him think of a book he read once, about a little girl with alopecia doing a somersault and her wig getting stuck in the tape holding the gym mats together.
His dermatologist gently explains, talking to him like a patient and not a doctor, that alopecia areata is an autoimmune condition where the immune system mistakes actively growing hair follicles for something dangerous. She proposes intralesional corticosteroid injections, topical immunotherapy if it spreads, minoxidil as an adjunct, the possibility that it will regrow, the equally real possibility that it won't. “This isn't your fault, Dennis,” She assures him. “Would you like to try treatments or would you like a prescription for a wig?”
He throws up in her biohazard bin.
He tries treatments, he has to. He can’t let Jack or Robby know about this — he just can’t. Sure, they’re older men and sure, Robby jokes about the expanding peninsula of scalp at the crown of his head, rubbing it with a pout whenever Jack calls him ol’ chrome dome. Jack's curls have gone gray and thinned a tiny bit. But theirs is time. Theirs is expected. Dennis is twenty-eight, and pieces of him are disappearing faster than his mind can rationalize. He keeps having panic attacks in the ED bathroom, imagining that the fluorescents keep shining straight through the curls he has left.
Treatment hurts — the first injections make his eyes water and his sensitive skin burn.
His dermatologist parts his hair over and over with the blunt end of a cotton swab, exposing each smooth oval of his scalp, and every new patch she finds earns another tiny purple circle from a surgical marker. Dot after dot after dot. “We'll inject each lesion individually,” She explains gently, already pulling on fresh gloves. “It should help interrupt the inflammatory process.” Then the injections, needle after needle after needle. It feels like someone is inflating tiny balloons filled with acid under his scalp. She spaces them barely a centimeter apart, creating an entire night sky of burning points across the back and sides of his head. By the twentieth injection, his jaw hurts from clenching so tight. Somewhere around the thirtieth he begins silently counting to distract himself, but the numbers dissolve into static as each fresh burst of burning blooms beneath his skin. His eyes sting. He blinks furiously. The tears come anyway. He’s ashamed of them — they're humiliating tears, he isn't just sobbing. He isn't making a scene. Tears sliding silently down his cheeks while he stares at the anatomical poster across the room. It all hurts.
Afterward, his scalp feels bruised for days, and his remaining curls feel heavy and weighed down. Everything hurts, just resting his head against the car seat on the drive home makes him wince. Shower water stings. God, even the weight of his stethoscope around his neck shoots into tenderness along the back and sides of his head. Still, he tells himself soreness means the medication is there, doing something.
It has to be doing something.
He buys the expensive shampoo she recommends, but recommended with careful caveats — that none of these are miracles, but gentle hair care can help preserve what's still growing — it’s the one in the minimalist bottle with words like follicular support and clinical growth complex printed across the label. It's sixty-eight dollars for just a few ounces — he winces as he taps his card.
Then the conditioner, forty-two dollars.
Then the scalp serum, one hundred and sixteen dollars.
Then another serum because this one contains peptides instead of caffeine, another hundred dollars.
Then come the supplements specifically formulated for hair health, collagen powder that dissolves into coffee, biotin gummies shaped like berries, zinc, vitamin D, omega-3 capsules. Silk pillowcases advertised to reduce friction. Microfiber towels promising less breakage. Satin sleep caps he blushes to carry to the register. Rosemary oil because thousands of strangers online swear it changed their lives. He feels like an idiot buying scalp massagers, wide-tooth combs, and heat protectant spray despite the fact he rarely even uses a hair dryer anymore. Eventually he orders the laser cap everyone on the support forums argues about, a futuristic helmet lined with tiny red lights that costs nearly his entire paycheck.
He knows they could just be blowing smoke up his hind end, but he buys every single thing anyway, if only for one more night of Jack and Robby thinking he’s good looking.
But no matter how carefully he washes it, no matter how gently he combs through it with the expensive wide-toothed comb, no matter how faithfully he follows every instruction his dermatologist printed in neat bullet points — it keeps falling out. Every morning there are strands scattered across his white pillowcase despite the silk that promised less friction, more clings to the collar of his scrub shirt, more collects in the drain after his shower, pale blond against the dark metal strainer until it’s the size of a guinea pig. Every time he absentmindedly pushes his curls away from his forehead during a shift, two or three strands wrap themselves around his fingers. Every time he pulls a sweatshirt over his head, static lifts another little cloud into the air. It’s constant enough that he can’t think about anything else. He stops running his hands through his hair altogether. He catches himself always thinking and planning: if I lose this much every shower... if this patch doubled in three days... how long until there's nothing left? He knows hair doesn't work like that. He knows telogen cycles and autoimmune inflammation and the physiology of follicles. So he knows, it’s the beginning of the end.
One evening, after another fourteen-hour shift, he decides maybe a bath will be gentler than a shower. He fills the tub with warm water and the bubble bath Jack always insists on spoiling them with. He eases himself into the water with a weary sigh, closing his eyes for what feels like the first time all day. He only floats for a minute, then he opens his eyes because something is wrong with the surface of the water. He scrubs his eyes. It has a strange texture, faint ripples interrupted by hundreds of tiny pale lines drifting lazily around him. He reaches toward the surface and his fingers gather a tangled little bundle. His hair, it’s all his hair.
Everywhere he looks, delicate blond curls drift around him like strands of sea grass in slow motion. They collect against his shoulders, wrap around his forearms, cling to his knees. More float away each time he moves, rising silently from his skin before spreading across the bathwater until he seems to be sitting in the middle of a tiny golden pond.
He panics.
By the time he lowers his shaking hands after dumping everything he can think of on his sore head, his scalp feels suffocated beneath competing textures — foam, oil, cream, serum — all sitting atop his inflamed skin that has already endured injections, inflammation, and weeks of anxious picking. Within minutes the burning begins: overwhelming warmth, then prickling, then an angry, throbbing heat that spreads across his entire scalp until even the movement of air hurts when he turns. The rosemary oil tingles. The steroid cream stings where he'd scratched absentmindedly. The alcohol hidden inside one of the serums seems to ignite every tiny crack in his already sensitive skin like when he was little and used to pour bath oils into shapes and touch them with a lighter. He presses both palms against his head, not to rub, just to hold it together, as though he might somehow keep the remaining hair from escaping if he squeezes hard enough.
His poor abused scalp burns.
The circles aren't circles anymore, they're beginning to touch: tiny islands becoming continents. His pale scalp peeks through in every direction he parts the curls and his remaining hair hangs in uneven, unstyled clumps between them. It makes him feel sick to see.
The corticosteroid injections have done nothing. The expensive serums just leave sticky residue. The prescription foam dries his scalp until it flakes and his laser cap is just a pretty light show. None of it has done anything. He feels hollow, defeated, and finished. He’s so fucking tired of it all — so he reaches for the clippers, Jack’s clippers. He keeps a professional set from years of trimming his own hair and Robby’s between barbershop visits. Dennis lifts the case with both hands, it feels surprisingly heavy. He sets it gently on the countertop without opening it. His fingers rest on the plastic lid for a long time.
He shouldn’t be crying. He knows it’s stupid, it’s only hair. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s — fuck, his patches have merged across nearly the entire crown of his head, the back of his head is a sprawling landscape of bare skin interrupted by lonely little tufts of blond curls that somehow escaped. It’s painful to see, the way his remaining curls stick out in odd directions because there isn't enough surrounding hair to weigh them down.
He looks like those neglected rescue dogs on the ASPCA commercials, the ones with mange.
He reaches up and runs his fingers through what remains. His hair slides free immediately and when he looks down at his palm, half a dozen pale strands are clinging between his fingers. He doesn't even react anymore — he’s so tired. There just isn’t enough left. He opens the box and fumbles.
His hands keep shaking where he grips the clippers, and he isn’t at all surprised when he feels one of Jack’s arms wrap around his belly, gently taking the clippers out of his hand. “Ah, ah, ah,” Jack coos softly against his bare temple, his familiar South Boston rasp stripped of every ounce of teasing. His accent gets so soft when he’s doting. “None o' that.” Jack kisses the side of his head, “Let me do that, sweetheart.” His palm rubs slow circles across Dennis' belly. “Let's get you sorted, huh? Let an old medic do the honors, kid.”
Dennis just turns and buries his head in Jack’s neck, and lets him take the lead. Of course they knew. He never said it, but — Jack settles him onto the closed toilet lid first, he doesn't say it's only hair or it'll grow back, or don't cry. He just kisses Dennis' forehead once, then the bridge of his nose, then each damp cheek, nuzzling a little too. “Just look at me, kid, you don’t gotta say anything. I gotcha.” Without saying anything, Robby eases the door open and then himself down beside Dennis instead of standing over him, shoulder pressed gently against his, one warm hand finding his hand and holding it. Neither of them rushes him. Dennis just doesn’t have the fucking words. It’s not just hair, not really. “You ready, sweetheart?”
Dennis nods, he can’t say anything. Jack kisses the top of his head before the first pass. Robby wipes tears from beneath his chin.
When the buzzing finally stops, Jack quietly unplugs the clippers before Dennis can even think about turning toward the mirror. Robby reaches over and covers the floor with a towel so the scattered curls aren't visible beneath their feet.
“Thanks.” He sounds raw.
Jack cups Dennis' newly shaved head in both hands and his palms glide over smooth skin that still feels unfamiliar, careful around the places made tender by weeks of injections. Without a fuss, he starts peppering the soft skin with kisses and Robby does the same. Dennis gets sandwiched between two bristly sets of lips and the ticklish feeling has him giggling before he can stop himself. “Got me panting like a dog, kid. Fuckin’ looker.” Jack growls near his ear and Dennis just snorts, snuggling into them.