The scissors slice through silken strands with a quiet, deliberate finality, the severed lengths of Tseng’s hair slipping from your fingers and pooling at your feet. He sits before you in abject silence, shoulders taut beneath the weight of his grief. His reflection in the mirror is hollow-eyed, his composure cracked. Aerith is gone, and he couldn’t lift a hand to stop it, and now all that remains is this: the ritual of loss, of cutting away the weight he can’t bear to carry. Of shearing away his shame and dishonour.

You work carefully, your hands gentle, the likes of which Tseng thought he didn’t deserve. His gaze is fixed straight ahead, dark and unreadable, as if trying to recognize the man staring back at him. “Hair comes back,” he says at last, his voice quiet, almost distant. The last lock falls, leaving the length of his hair half of what it once was. He exhales sharply—a breath that barely shakes, a heart that barely beats—before his fingers curl against his knee. “But she won’t.”