He doesn’t realise how odd it is for the infirmary door to be closed until it is shoved open, wooden frame crashing into the wall, making everyone inside jump to high heaven. Will stumbles in after it, and the sight of him makes startled shrieks and grumbles stop in all mouths; his eyes are red-rimmed and bruised with sleeplessness, staring cloudy and vacantly ahead. He walks like he’s unfamiliar with the shape of the ground, steps clumsy and hesitant, hands picking at bare legs. His faded, oversized camp shirt falls all the way down to his thighs.
He makes his plucking way to the nurses station, oblivious to or uncaring of the eyes on him. When he finally makes it to the door his hands shake too badly to unlatch it, and he tries for minutes before giving up, hoisting himself up on the counter and stepping over piles of paperwork, half-balanced on the spinning chair. He is barefoot.
“What’re you looking for? Austin is the first brave enough to speak, taking a half-step closer. “...Will?”
“Where the hell are the scissors,” Will mutters. He rifles through folders, opens and slams drawers shut. “I need the — scissors.”
“Second drawer down from the right,” says Kayla quietly.
The second drawer creaks, badly, tiny wheels wailing on their tracks as Will yanks it open, shoves it shut. He half-jumps half-falls off the chair, blades clutched in his fist, and shifts over to the back wall, squaring in front of the mirror.
In quick, thoughtless action, he lobs off the tangled ponytail low at the base of his skull. At the back, near the window, Lacy from Cabin 12 inhales like she’s been stabbed.
In the stunned, heavy silence of patients and healers and people in the wrong place at the wrong time, Will methodically pulls straight coils of hair, snipping them an inch from the root. He takes no care to line up the strands, no care to feather the edges. The office scissors are so dull that in some sections he has to saw through, hairs snapping like guitar strings. In minutes both hands are clenched full of dull gold, wiry snippets dusting his neck and shoulders. He drops them in a wastebasket at they flutter like leaves around the rim.
“Thanks,” he says, belatedly, dropping the scissors back on the counter. He turns without looking to the doorway by the shelves of salves, slipping quickly down the Big House hallway.
Austin is the first of them to move, too, darting past cots heavy with gaping campers He turns to Chiron.
“Should I follow him?” he asks, hesitating by the shadows.
For a moment there is nothing. The Chiron sighs, heavy and long, and puts his head in his hands.
“You can most certainly try,” he says, tired and muffled. “But it is the great failure of my life that Will Solace has spent more time in this building than I have in centuries. You wouldn’t find him with Ariadne’s string.”
