InsaneJournal

Zack looked in the mirror and sighed. “I look like I’m fifteen…”

He ran a hand over his hairless jaw, smoother than it had ever been from shaving. Not even a boy’s peachfuzz remained.

“I’d hoped to be like Angeal,” he said to himself, fingers still tracing the impossibly bare skin. Angeal had told him that dark-haired candidates didn’t always lose their body hair after the mako treatments. “Guess not, huh?”

He let his hands wander down across a chest restored to youthful hairlessness; only a diminished trail remained, marking the line downward from his navel. Legs that had once been dark with hair now seemed decorated with a youth’s first growth, modest and fine. Same for his privates, wreathed in delicate black.

Armpits, chest, arms, chin – all devoid of hair, skin blank as the day he was born.

He offered himself a crooked smile. “Guess it’s like being born all over again, even down to the blue eyes.” He crouched into a fighting stance, watched reflected muscles bunch and lengthen as he moved. “No baby here, though, that’s for sure.”

It would have been nice to emulate Angeal’s beard one day, but Zack resigned himself to copying his hair style instead.