Morning light spills soft across the small kitchen you and Credence have built together, years now past Mary Lou, past Grindelwald, past everything that used to define the shape of his days. His hair's grown long since then, past his shoulders now, and he's been avoiding the subject of cutting it for weeks, fingers unconsciously threading through the length of it whenever the topic comes up in passing.

He finds you eventually, a pair of scissors held loosely in one hand, expression caught somewhere between determination and old, familiar nerves.

"It's gotten too long," he admits quietly, not quite meeting your eyes. "It keeps getting tangles and… the ends are split." He stops, fingers tightening slightly around the closed hair scissors. "I don't like razors, or blades, or scissors really. Ma, she… She wasn’t gentle with them." He doesn't finish that sentence, doesn't need to, the harsh bowl cuts of his childhood sitting unspoken between you both.

He holds the scissors out anyway, hands not quite steady. "I trust you," Credence continues, voice barely above a murmur. "I don't think I could sit still for anyone else doing this. The thought of someone else's hands so close-" he just shakes his head slightly. You know it’s one of the things he simply can’t do.

He settles onto one of the kitchen chairs, shoulders tense despite his best efforts to relax into it, hair falling loose around his face in a way that's still faintly unfamiliar to him even after all this time of choosing to keep it long. "I like it longer, can we do it just a little shorter? I... I like it in a bun."