“Goddamn,” Walter muttered at the sight of it. He looked back up at the helicopters, suddenly worried about his own property. He hadn’t been stupid enough to cut down and dig out all of his trees like his neighbor had the previous summer, but who knew how sturdy anything was now. He looked at the Doug Firs on his property with a wary eye, half expecting them to topple over down the hill and take his house with them.

Trying not to think about it, Walter stepped back inside to finish getting dressed. He snatched up a clean t-shirt from the top of a dresser drawer, and as he pulled it over his head he stopped at the sink to trim down some of his whiskers that were getting out of control. But he stopped short at the sight of his hair - starting to get more grey than black in some places. That was going to have to be taken care of as well. Sighing about it, he decided not to bother doing anything about his hair as a result, and just focused on the rest of his grooming. Once he had his whiskers trimmed, he reached for the electric trimmer to get some of the extra fluff out of his ears. Sometimes he felt like if he let it, it would never stop growing until it reached the floor. Once he was done with that, he fluffed up his cheeks and cleaned out the sink, and went to go pour himself a mediocre cup of coffee. Somehow, even with the automatic machine that did it all for him, it was the one thing he still couldn’t seem to get the hang of, and probably never would. It was bitter, and tasted almost burnt, so he masked it with too much creamer and sugar until it didn’t resemble coffee at all.

He hung around just long enough to watch the helicopters spin around above the hills while he drank his coffee, before taking the cup to the sink and heading back downstairs. This time, he put on the black skate shoes, which weren’t in danger of having their laces snap apart, because he’d tied them once three years ago and never untied them again.

Traffic on the roads was starting to pick up, but the salon wasn’t much farther away than the gym, so Walter only had to put up with idiots in Slabtown for about fifteen minutes. There were a few stylists that he liked, and that morning the one that was in was the tall kid who wore too much eyeliner. The young fox would have looked just fine without it, but there were days it almost seemed like he was trying to pass himself off as a bright orange raccoon. He liked to talk too much sometimes, but he knew what to do with hair that wanted to curl, but didn’t quite have the energy to pull it off properly.

“Back for another touch up?” he asked as he signed Walter into the computer.

“Yeah, I’m sick of it,” Walter said, wondering how he’d let it get so bad. “Make it black again.”

The stylist nodded as he entered the order in, before inviting Walter to follow him back to his station. While the kid took a few seconds to just fiddle with Walter’s hair while he figured out what he wanted to do, Walter took off his glasses and leaned back into the seat to pretend he was trying to fall asleep.

“I want to strip out what we put down last time. It’ll be easier than trying to match the same undertones.” He ran his fingers through the shorter hair in back. “But your hair looks like it’s a little red underneath anyway.”

“Do what you need to,” Walter said.

The stylist went back to fiddling with the longer hair on top. “Do you want to even out the cut then? Make everything look a little smoother?”

“Just make it look nice,” Walter said, not really caring what happened as long as he didn’t have to keep coming back every other week.

The fox worked with his hair, trimming it and fixing the style first before they started messing around with color. Walter mostly tuned him out, assuming the chatter was directed at other stylists in the building.

“You’ve got really long fur for a raccoon,” he said in the middle of whatever conversation he was carrying on. Walter didn’t realize it was directed at him until the fox continued. “I’m going to have to trim some up back here to get a clean fade.”

Walter looked at the blurry image of the fox in the mirror. “That might be because I’m not a raccoon,” he said.

The fox immediately began to stumble over his own words. “Oh. Uh. I’m so sorry,” he got out eventually. “Uh…”

Walter sighed. “Do what you need to,” he said again. He watched the fox continue to squirm uncomfortably in his own skin, dancing around a question he didn’t seem to know how to ask. “Tanuki,” Walter answered so he didn’t have to watch the fox keep doing that. “We have long fur back there.”

“Okay,” the fox said, nodding. “Sorry.”

Walter hummed quietly, not really caring either way. He just wanted to get out of there. He’d hoped this appointment wouldn’t take three hours to get through, and he was almost pleased when it didn’t. Almost. Two hours was less than three, but still longer than he wanted to spend in the salon on his day off. But in the end, his hair was completely black again, and the cut had been somewhat evened out on the back, but not as much as he’d expected. If anything, it almost looked like a slightly more grown-up version of the mohawk he’d had in his 20s. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since he knew what the style looked like when he neglected it and let it grow out, and it wasn’t entirely awful. He paid, leaving the kid a generous tip just like every other time he’d been in, and retreated back to his car to find a good shoe store so he could get a new pair for the gym, before his current pair smashed up his heels or got torn to shreds by his claws. Slabtown was a trendy enough district that he could drive around and find something that suited him easily enough, and by that point, all of the stores had opened for the day.