Hair: The OTP: April Fools!

Rude woke up feeling very strange. There’d been an office party last night, the ordinary kind with crappy drinks and people standing around uncomfortably. Reno had gotten a little too hammered and hopped onto the Xerox machine. Everyone there now had a copy of his ass. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the redhead hadn’t magic-markered ‘From Reno with Love’ onto his left ass cheek before he did it. That was a level of premeditation that defied all expectation. While nominally the party was to promote camaraderie among the staff, in reality it was to make them guinea pigs for the new hairline that was possibly being released soon. Shin-Ra was branching out, that was for sure. Rude thought he was automatically disqualified but no, he’d had to use some gel on his goatee.

Rude lifted his head and realized everyone was still passed out there at the offices. That was deeply strange. He was still dressed and the place didn’t look like much of a mess except for all the people lying around. Everyone was dressed. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought. He reached up to scratch his head and actually yelped, jerking his hand away as if his head had bitten him. Well, it had in a metaphorical sense. He scrambled to his feet to look in a mirror. There, on the top of his head where there should be a shiny pate, there was now rather stiff, oddly patterned HAIR. He poked at it disbelievingly and it squeaked and twitched. Rude, to his great embarrassment, screamed as much like a girl as a man like him could. He slapped madly at the hair and it ran down his back and skittered under a couch, followed quickly by a smaller bunch of hair. Rude’s face felt… colder. He touched his chin and yelped again. Now he really WAS bald! His goatee had just run under furniture with—

“MY BEARD!” Reeve shouted. “Who did this?!”

At all the noise, Tseng and Reno sat up and stared at the two men. Reno went to scratch his head with the tip of his EMR as he so often did but this time, the hair was ready to strike back. His ponytail slapped him in the face and then the spiky mass of red scurried away while everyone stared.

Hand shaking ever so slightly, Tseng reached up. His hair was still there and purred at the light touch. Somewhat relieved and very confused, he began to scratch his chin. His dark eyes went almost round. Slowly he turned to look in the nearest reflective surface. There was soft blonde hair clinging to his face. He slowly turned to look to Rufus, still slumbering. He was as bald as Rude. The ‘beard’ and his hair were cooing to one another, some of the strands entangling. Tseng shuddered.

Meanwhile, Reeve was searching for both his hair and his beard. He and Rude got on their knees to try and coax their facial hair out from under the couch. Sounding horrified, “Reeve? Are they--?”

“It appears they are,” he whispered back, mortified. The two clumps of hair became still then a swarm of little soul-patches came skittering out, scattering everywhere. Rude managed to slap a hair down on their beards but they kept trying to elope. Finally they stuck them in separate jars and prayed it wasn’t permanent. There was chaos for days as hair was found in the strangest of places. It took a week to coax Reno’s thatch out from the air ducts; it seemed to enjoy randomly falling on people. The upshot was that Hojo was never, ever, ever allowed to pitch an idea on April Fool’s Day again.