#wrenna

“How’d this even happen?” Anna mutters, brushing at it as best she can without hurting Lily, who still winces every now and then. “I mean, I think you’d have to actively be trying to get this to happen.”

“I was just sleeping,” Lily says, and Anna’s inclined to trust her, because she sounds as disbelieving as Anna feels. “I didn’t even know this was possible.”

“One of the Bottle Street guys needed to sleep with his hair protected by this--cap thing,” Anna says absent-mindedly. Lily quiets. Anna doesn’t talk about her past much, and even less with Lily. No need to scare the kid. “His hair was different, but we could get one.”

“I don’t want to be a burden,” Lily says.

“We still have plenty of money from the bank job, no worries,” Anna says, and smiles when Lily’s shoulders relax. It’s a lot harder to tell whether she’s overstepping when she can’t see Lily’s face. “Do you want me to get some of Wren’s fancy hair stuff when we’re done?”

“If we’re done,” Lily mutters.

“Hey, come on,” Anna protests, though they admittedly have not made very much progress. “We’ll get it eventually.”

“If you say so,” Lily says. “What hair stuff?”

“These--oils,” Anna says, pausing to brush at a particularly stubborn tangle. It does nothing but make Lily hiss, so Anna switches to her fingers. She can fix her gun, she’s got a steady hand, she can probably detangle hair. “They smell nice. I don’t know.”

“You sure those aren’t just for you?” Lily says, and Anna just knows she’s wearing a teasing grin.

“I don’t think so,” Anna says, cheeks warm and so, so grateful that Hall and Wren aren’t home. “But we’ll ask. You don’t steal from your own people.” Lily gets a little quiet. Anna sits with her for a few minutes, making progress, until she realizes what that might have sounded like. “That wasn’t--I don’t care that you were stealing from us before we knew you. That’s fine. I mean, we make our living off shit like that.”

“You swore,” Lily mumbles.

“Yup,” Anna says. “But seriously. It’s different when it’s--people you trust. You gotta make sure they trust you, too.”

“It’s how gangs work,” Lily says.

“You’re not...wrong,” Anna says. She doesn’t know how to get this tangle in her head out any better than she knows how to fix this hair, about how much it fucking sucks to know that your people chose to hurt you because they just didn’t give a fuck about you.

She’ll talk to Wren about it later. Wren’s always been better at the schmoozing stuff; Anna’s better as a quiet, terrifying presence behind her.

“How’s it look?” Lily says, interrupting Anna’s train of thought.

Anna frowns at it. “It’s definitely better, but there’s more knots underneath. You’re gonna have to start sleeping in a braid.”