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Kai's drill instructor in basic wouldn't stop bitching at her about her non regulation hairstyle until she gave him such a hardcore handjob he cried when he came. After that, whenever he would open his mouth and draw in a breath to complain whenever he saw she had to pause in reassembling her gun to irately sweep some long locks of hair away from her face she's just raise her eyebrows at him like really bro? You want to go there? Because I've got some incredible dirt on you, just amazing. She had very expressive eyebrows, she took good care of them. And then he'd close his mouth and slink away to go and bother someone else without a single word for her hair. Pussy.
Women soldiers in the UNSC army were allowed to grow their hair out past their shoulders (which was some double standard gender normative bullshit, really), and Kai ignored it like she did every rule that was in the slightest bit inconvenient to her: without hesitation or care, remorselessly and shamelessly. Her hair went to her hips, and it was curly and thick and near impossible to tame, and she'd dyed the last foot of it a color bright enough that she could see the variations in grey and black as the color slowly shifted from the natural black of her hair to... whatever color the hair dye was. She'd bought it at the basic commissary, and she couldn't exactly ask anyone around here "hey, what color is this?" People as colorblind as her technically (actually super) weren't supposed to/allowed to enter the army because it made them bad at shooting people, apparently? And telling the difference between enemy and ally. Hey, it wasn't her fault some GENIUS out there had decided to differentiate the two sides by color coding them. That sounded stupid as fuck to her, and she wasn't no Harvard graduate herself.
So, anyways, no one could find out she was as colorblind as a dog. Hey, no skin off of her back. Remember: inconvenient rule? Ignore without hesitation or care, remorselessly and shamelessly.
Her hair got stuck in the barbed wires during the obstacle course so badly that in the end she decided to just cut the barbed wire apart and untangle the whole mess later. ("VANDALISM, RECRUIT GRIF!")
Her assigned portion of shampoo wasn't enough for all of the hair she had, so she stole just a little from some of the girls in the stalls next to her. They barely had anything on their heads, so it was okay, right? It's not like they were using it. ("THEFT FROM YOU FELLOW OFFICERS, RECRUIT GRIF!?")
She ended up being the slowest to assemble and ready her guns in her entire squad even though she'd studied them inside and out, just by a few seconds, just a couple of seconds slower. She had to keep pausing to blow hair out of her face, head bent over the pieces, long locks of hair obstructing her vision. ("QUIT YOUR DAWDLING, RECRUIT GRIF!")
She'd never cared about doing more than the bare minimum back when she'd gone to school, just enough to keep from getting kicked out or held back, because her brother so desperately wanted her to graduate and "have a future" (whatever that meant), because high school was where all of the people were at. It's not that she was lazy, exactly. It's just that she had her priorities straight. Having the most amount of fun possible should always be your first priority, or else you just weren't living right.
Joining the army isn't fun at all. It feels like she constantly has to work at getting everyone around her to just relax and remove the sticks up their asses (and put something else up there instead ha ha, that innuendo would've worked better if she had a dick wouldn't it), and she actually has to care. She has to try and do more than the bare minimum. She has to try and succeed, and she swiftly finds out that it hurts so much more to fail when you can't just shrug it off and say "eh, I wasn't really trying anyways." She doesn't want to work so hard. But she has to. She needs to be good. Good enough to pass, good enough that she'll have her pick of outposts and one of them will coincidentally have another Grif posted at it already, and why shouldn't the army grant her request, seeing as she was their top recruit and all that and a bag of chips?
She wasn't their top recruit. Far from it.
She thinks, maybe I'll do better if I cut my hair. And then she immediately dismisses that thought. Cutting her hair would defeat the spirit of the whole thing, the entire reason she was doing this in the first place. She wanted things to be like they were before. To have her brother at her side, making shitty jokes and taking care of her, telling her what color she's dyed her hair now and not fucking with her about it because she's so fucking sick of that prank by now, to help brush her hair and braid it just right while they watch the sunset or Jeopardy reruns together.
She can't braid her own hair. She gets impatient and bored when brushing and ends up yanking at the brush too hard, too fast, pulling at her sensitive scalp and making herself yelp. She can never get the angle right when braiding, it always ends up lopsided, fraying, too loose, pulling at her scalp all wrong with every twitch and movement of her neck. It's really kind of amazing just how shitty she is as braiding her own hair.
Her hair was long, it was getting in her way, and she wanted to go back to wearing it the way she'd always worn it, for as long as she could remember. So, clearly, her only option had been to join the army to hunt her brother down, hairbrush and ties at the bottom of her rucksack.
(It turns out though, as she finds out much much later, that her shittiness in the military is the sole reason she was put in the only canyon in the whole galaxy that had her brother in it instead of some shithole that actually saw action, god forbid. So she had been right to keep her hair as it was. Suck it, self doubt and tearful drill instructor!)
And when she comes to Blood Gulch shit is hectic and confusing and she's apparently already made some mistakes? But Dex is there to figure shit out for her, to get her on the side of the canyon that isn't supposed to kill her, and it's almost like old times again, almost, it's so close. But then it isn't, at all, Dex is ripped away from her by the fucking UNSC again and she hates this army so goddamn much, and she's alone again with her awful, wild hair, an empty base, and her raging insanity.
She makes time pass. She rebuilds the Blue base into a nightclub, and after a while it actually starts working, people start coming in to get fucked up, and she's good at distracting herself from her thoughts when there are people around to claim her attention. She starts organizing conventions, huge fuck off parties, an orgy here and there, selling merch too because you can never have enough money, there's always another rainy day around the corner (Dex, worrying over the bills in the kitchen when he thought she was asleep). Logistics and organizing is distracting, there are always complications and she's a whirlwind, an overwhelming tsunami of a person that bulldozes over anyone who gets in her way. All of her parties go off without a hitch.
It's almost fun. Almost.
And one day, a ship comes falling down from the sky into her little canyon just the way she'd arrived years ago, except the crash landing is far more graceful, controlled, and her heart beats wildly, she hopes.
Armor whose color she can't identify. But she recognizes that gait, that height, that width, it's--
"DEX!!!" she calls out without hesitation or care, remorselessly and shamelessly.
She manages to run down to him faster than she ever managed her laps back in Basic.
"Why is there body glitter on your armor?" he asks her. And, "By the way, that blue hair dye totally clashes with your yellow armor, I'm gonna get you something better."
Dex has always been downright fucking allergic to sincerity. He returns her tight hug just as tightly, though.
Words are beyond her, so she just nestles in closer into the crook of his neck. He strokes her back.
"Your hair is a mess," he says softly. "Let me braid that bitch."
And everything's fine again. Her hair's nice, at least.