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“Whoops,” Star says with a wince, tapping her wand against her cheek. “Soooorry, Marco, I missed!”
Marco sighs, and parts his suddenly much longer hair to shoot her a baleful look in the bathroom mirror. Star winces again and bites one of the wings of her wand. She reeeeally needs to work on the aim thing, especially when they’re both getting ready crammed into the same tiny bathroom. This is, like, the third time she’s accidentally zapped Marco with a spell she meant to use on herself.
. . . this week.
“It’s okay!” she says, brandishing her wand again. “Just hold still and lemme--”
“No, Star!” Marco says crossly, yanking his hood up over his hair. Most of it spills out, loose brown curls tumbling down his chest, but the point gets across. “You tried that last time and turned it into snakes. Mad snakes! Who were mad at me! I’ll just go get it cut after school.”
“But I can fix it right nooooow!” Star whines in protest. It’s not even really a fix, honestly, Marco actually looks really cute with long hair, but the last time she told him that he got all squeaky and self-conscious and wouldn’t come out of his room for half an hour, which nearly made them late to meet Pony Head and get to the warnicorn fights and just really put a crimp in the whole afternoon. And he wouldn’t even let her crimp it, either!
So unfair.
“It’s fine, Star,” Marco sighs, tugging his hoodie strings tight. “It’s still better than the snakes. And the butterfly wings. And the fire.”
“Oh yeahhhh, I forgot about the butterfly wings,” Star remembers distractedly.
“And the fire!” Marco hisses shrilly.
“No, I totally remember the fire,” Star says, then laughs to herself. That’d been a looot of fire. Marco gives her an inexplicably bug-eyed look, but finally loosens his hood enough to tug it back down. His hair bounces out all at once in a sparkly chestnut cascade, accompanied by the glitter of leftover magic, and Star reflexively coos and reaches out to pet it. “Sooo prettyyyyyy.”
“Don’t be weird, Star,” Marco manages, voice cracking and face turning red. He doesn’t swat her off or jerk away or retreat to his room again, though, so Star doesn’t resist the urge to keep petting. Marco takes pretty good care of his hair in general but the magic still falling out of it is making it so soft and so sparkly right now.
Sooooooo spaaaaaaaarkly.
Marco makes a weird noise and finally pulls back, and Star automatically follows and nearly over-balances. Marco hurries out of the bathroom, his curls back to their sparkly chestnut bouncing, and Star trails after because duh, they’ve got school to get to. And also sparkly chestnut bouncing to follow, in her case.
Marco heads out into the hall and onto the landing and Star bounces after him in time with his hair. It sets a pretty good pace.
“Marco! Your hair is so cute today!” Mr. Diaz exclaims as he looks up at them from the center of the living room with a casserole dish full of breakfast, sounding surprised but pleased.
“Oh, Marco, it’s lovely!” Mrs. Diaz says, beaming up at them. “Did Star do it?”
“No, Mom, it just maaaagically grew like this overnight,” Marco grumbles, rolling his eyes as he jams his hands into his pockets and hunches his shoulders. Star gives him a puzzled look, not really understanding the reaction.
“. . . hm. Star, honey, maybe you and Marco have been experimenting a little too much with--”
“YES, MOM, OF COURSE STAR DID IT.”
“Oh! Well alright then,” Mrs. Diaz says, back to beaming. “Who’s ready for breakfast, kids?!”
Breakfast is delicious. Marco grumps all the way through it. Star pokes him with her wand a few times, but it doesn’t seem to help. She pokes him a few more times just to be sure and he storms out, and she frowns and chases him to the bus stop. He doesn’t talk the whole way to school, except to grumble incoherently at everyone who comments on his hair.
“I can still turn it back,” Star reminds him, and earns a withering glare in return.
“Snakes,” Marco says. “Snakes and fire.”
“Marco and grumpiness,” Star counters. Marco just scowls.
They get to school without snakes or fire, which is kinda boring but maybe not the worst thing ever. Marco seems to be in a moooood today, because there sure is plenty of him and grumpiness. It’s probably best not to poke the rabid warnicorn.
“. . . are you suuuuure--”
“Yes, Star, I’m sure!”
“Well fine, but don’t come crying to me when everyone wants to goblin-braid your hair and you can’t get to class past the crowd!” Star huffs indignantly, tossing her hair.
“. . . what’s a goblin braid?” Marco asks warily. Star lights up and immediately goes for her wand. “NEVER MIND.”
“Awwwww,” she says, drooping in dejection. Marco tries to hide his hair under his hood again. It doesn’t really work. He has a lot of it, for one thing, and also clearly zero experience with having said “a lot”. Aside from at Saint O’s, she guesses--it was even longer there; heck, it’d been even longer than hers is--but hiding it was kind of the opposite of the point, then. Hiding it actually might’ve gotten them found out and doomed? Badly?
Well, probably not really. Marco’s pretty good at being a girl when he wants to be. Actually pretty much all the time. Not that it’s come up that many times or anything, just he realllllly brought his A-game the ones it did. Like, Star’d really expected much more dramatic effects when she’d initially cast that princess spell but the wand had barely bothered changing anything.
Probably she should’ve made it make the dress red, though. Marco really likes red. Not that he didn’t look super cute in the pink, just she figures he’d have liked red better.
Next time, she promises herself.
“AGH,” Marco says, and Star’s attention snaps back into the present to find Janna with her hands jammed into Marco’s hair and ruffling it aggressively.
“Whoa, what’s up with this?” Janna asks with a fascinated expression. “Can I braid it? Is it gonna bite me?”
“Should you maybe have asked those questions in a different order?” Marco asks, eyeing her dubiously.
“I don’t see why,” Janna replies reasonably. Star knew he was gonna get mugged for braiding, and gives him a smug look over it. “Soooo? C’mon, Marco, I need a yes or a no or a hair tie here.”
“I didn’t think doing hair was your kind of thing,” Marco says, eyeing Janna suspiciously.
“I dunno, there’s just something kinda hypnotic about it. Like, the whole look,” Janna says, squinting speculatively at his hair and waving her hands in the air to mimic the shape of it. Marco shoots Star another suspicious look.
“Star, did you give me hypno-hair?!” he hisses under his breath.
“What! No! I would never!” she protests indignantly. “Literally, I would never, that spell is so hard. I spent like a whole day trying to figure that spell out and didn’t even make it through the subliminal suggestion pre-rinse.”
“That’s . . . probably reassuring,” Marco says with a weird look on his face. “I think. No, what am I saying, that is the least reassuring thing you’ve said--well, at least in the past ten minutes.”
“Excuse you, that was very reassuring!” Star huffs. Again, she’d warned him about the braiding. Who could see such cute hair and not want to braid it, seriously?
“You’re so uptight sometimes, Marco,” Janna says. She’s started braiding a pigtail into his hair, because obviously. Star puts her wand in her mouth and collects the other half of his hair to do the same, because obviously. It’s harder without magic, but braids aren’t too complicated. Mostly.
. . . okay Marco’s hair is definitely unrulier than hers, though.
“Help,” Star stage-whispers to Janna, giving her a briefly panicked look behind Marco’s head in the hopes he won’t notice she’s accidentally braided her fingers into his hair. Janna sniggers, but frees her pretty effectively. In the end Marco stays still, Star magics up some sparkly spiked hair ties, and both the braids turn out kind of lumpy but they’re at least matching levels of lumpy so she figures that’s alright. The hair ties are awesome and distract from the lumps anyway.
Marco refuses to wear the braids to class, which in Star’s opinion is a total waste, but he wraps the hair ties around his wrist before they go in and her stomach flips in a funny, fluttery little way at the sight. They look cool, almost like real bracelets, but there’s no good reason for her to feel that way about Marco keeping such a tiny piece of her magic when she’s always throwing around so much of it anyway. At this point there’s not a place on Earth they regularly go that isn’t at least a little bit touched by it.
Marco isn’t usually wearing it, though, so maybe that’s the difference. And it’s not like zapping him with a disguise, where he looks different all over and they’re pretending to be people they’re not--it’s just Marco going to school like normal with his hair a little longer and prettier and two cool-looking hair ties that she made wrapped around his wrist. Everybody here knows he’s Marco, and everybody here knows it’s her magic on him.
Star can’t really pin down the way that makes her feel.
Well. She sort of can, but that’s another problem.
The day goes on like normal, except for the painfully obvious little touches of her magic on Marco. Everybody says nice things about either his hair or his bracelets, and Jackie says nice things about both, and Marco spends most of the morning with a really weird look on his face.
He’s blushing a lot, Star notices belatedly, and sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking he’ll touch one or the other and get an even weirder look on his face. Not sad but . . . kind of like sad? Except for how a couple times he smiles a little, too.
But mostly he’s uncomfortable, because, well. Marco. Star feels a little guilty but he already said he didn’t want her to cast any more spells on his hair, so she’s not really sure what to do. She does go out of her way to tell him how nice it looks a few more times, at least, although she’s really not sure if it helps or makes things worse.
She looks at his wrist a lot. It’s--kind of hard not to.
“I still don’t know why you’re so bothered, you look great with long hair,” Star tells him at lunch around a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s always really pretty on you!”
“‘Always’?” Janna repeats. “Dude, how many times have you gotten zapped?”
“Whatever,” Marco says, tugging uncomfortably at one of his curls. It bounces back into shape prettily. Star coos.
“It does!” she says. “Everybody said so, didn’t they? I mean, not, like, Brittney but I don’t think I’ve heard Brittney say something nice about anybody else’s hair since, um. Ever? And I don’t think Skullnick likes anything you can’t bash someone over the head with. But otherwise! Even Janna likes it!”
“I did take some pictures,” Janna says agreeably. “They’re going in my scrapbook.”
“Your--what,” Marco asks, staring at her.
“Hey, if I can admit I like pink to you people, I can admit I have a scrapbook.”
“I guess,” Marco says, glancing away from them. He still seems uncomfortable and Star still doesn’t get why, but, well--it’s Marco. Sometimes she thinks “uncomfortable” is just his default state. At least, she hasn’t seen him out of it too many times. “I’m cutting it after school anyway.”
“Why?” Janna asks as Star makes an involuntary disappointed noise.
“It’s weird,” Marco says.
“It’s cuuuuuute!” Star whines in protest. She is, admittedly, getting unnecessarily invested in Marco’s appearance today. But it is cute.
“Jackie Lynn Thomas said so, right?” Janna asks with a sly grin. Marco turns red and pulls his hood up, although his curls all immediately spill out the front again anyway. It is unbearably cute. “And isn’t tonight Friendship Thuuursday, anyway? Are you gonna have time for a haircut?”
“It’s still weird,” Marco mutters, though he looks a little guilty all of a sudden.
“It’s okay, Marco, it’s my fault,” Star says, briefly glum before making herself brighten. It is her bad aim that caused the problem. “I know! We can do Friendship Friday this week!”
“You’re not going to the game?” Janna asks, tilting her head with a mild expression, and Star winces at the reminder--they had told Fernando and Alfonso they’d go with them, hadn’t they. Marco scowls at Janna.
“What do you care, anyway?” he asks. Janna just shrugs.
“I dunno, man,” she says, and Marco’s scowl deepens just a little. “Seems like a lot of fuss over nothing, that’s all. Also, haircuts are like twenty bucks? And Star could just zap you right now?”
“It’s fine,” Marco says irritably, then gets up to throw out his trash. Star frowns after him, then glances back to Janna.
“He is the weirdest dude I know,” Janna says.
The afternoon’s quieter, since pretty much everybody’s already seen Marco’s hair and not-bracelets by then. He still seems embarrassed, but Star catches him playing with both a few times, although he keeps stopping himself when it’s the hair. She reaaaally wants to play with it too, but mostly restrains herself.
Well, only gets yelled at by Skullnick about it, like, three times. Which is pretty restrained, she thinks!
After school they leave the building together. Marco’s frowning and looking at his feet, something awkward and hesitant about him, and Star isn’t sure which direction to head.
“Want me to walk you to your haircut?” she suggests for lack of a better idea.
“Honestly? I’d way rather just do Friendship Thursday,” Marco hedges, biting his lip as he tugs at a curl again. Star tries not to be too obvious about how much hearing that just made her perk up, but probably she isn’t super-successful, she knows. “I don’t--maybe I could try and go before the game tomorrow?”
“If you don’t cut it tonight, I could show you how to do a goblin braid?” Star suggests hopefully, putting her wand behind her back and rocking up onto the balls of her feet. “They’re reaaaally coooooool, Marco.”
“You kinda suck at braiding, though,” Marco says wryly.
“Earth braids are weird. I’m way better at doing Mewni ones!” Star slightly-exaggerates brightly, trying really hard not to bounce in place. She would way rather do Friendship Thursday too, though, Friendship Thursday is really--it’s very--
And, well.
She wouldn’t mind Marco keeping her magic on him a little longer.
And he really does look really, really pretty with the long hair.
“I dunno,” Marco says, glancing over at her. There’s something . . . weird and shy and kind of not Marco about the look, but also something very, very Marco about it. Star very firmly ignores the fluttery things in her stomach. “Um. There aren’t actual goblins involved in this process, right?”
“Do you want there to be?” she asks, immediately whipping out her wand.
“I don’t think we can afford that much pizza,” Marco says--which, fair point, although still a disappointment.
“Okaaaaay,” Star sighs, letting her wand fall to her side. Marco bites his lip again, shifting in place. His face is all red again.
“I could probably just get it cut Saturday, actually,” he says tentatively. “Like. Now that I think about it.” Star lights up.
“You could!” she says excitedly. “Oh, we could go to the mall and hang out, it’d be great!”
“I guess,” Marco says. His face is still red and he still looks uncertain, but he’s smiling at her and Star is not gonna complain.
“But Friendship Thursday first, right?” she asks, grinning back at him, and his smile cracks into a grin of its own.
“Yeah,” he says, tucking his long, pretty hair back behind his ear. “Definitely Friendship Thursday first.”