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Hohenheim wanted to braid his hair.
His estranged father wanted to braid his hair. Ed was in hell. The exact words were something similar to " Your hair is dry and brittle. Let me fix it or else it could start falling out. "
Which, well .
Ed didn't want to acknowledge it but he was right. Alphonse had been blessed with their mother's hair, thin and easy to handle with a brush and some soap. Edward had definitely gotten his father's-- which he hadn't even known, because it turned out Hohenheim straightened his hair to blend in more in Amestris. (The thought left a sour note in Ed's mouth.) Thick, frantically curling around itself, unable to be tamed with anything but oils and combs and braids.
When Hohenheim had first shown up, situating himself and happy to spend as much time with Ed and Al as they would allow, he must’ve given them a heart attack when the sleek ponytail they had come to associate with him was replaced with a wild mane of violent curls.
Which was how he found himself here, with Al eagerly taking notes somewhere to his left because: "This is important, Ed! We don't know anything about Xerxes anymore, now is a chance we can learn from a direct source." In Ed's personal opinion, his brother was more concerned with the history instead of the fact that their father somehow popped back up from the Promised Day, well and miraculously alive.
Anyway. (He wasn’t unhappy that his father was here, now, alive. He just wished it had happened sooner.)
The aromatic tenses of lavender oil floated through the air, along with rose and some strange concoction he had made out of something in their kitchen under Winry's supervision, and Ed sat as still as he could while sure fingers easily combed through the knots and dry patches that had accumulated throughout the day. Oil rubbed into his scalp, that cream along his edges and the ends of his hair, lavender and spices of all things massaged all throughout the mess-- he smelt like cardamom and it was somehow familiar.
From Winry's face, whatever Hohenheim was doing was working.
“I smell like a loaf of bread,” he couldn’t stop himself from complaining, hearing Hohenheim chuckle behind him while Winry nods, to his offense. “Hey- you weren’t supposed to agree.” It’s a joke and she knows, so she only smiles brighter in response.
Despite the gripe it was… nice. This was nice. It was weird to correlate anything nice with his cold, unreachable father. Except this wasn’t the man he remembered-- still the same person, but real and no longer a fragmented part of his memory. Warmer. Warm like the spices he could smell in the air, and Ed wondered faintly if he could try to memorize one of the recipes Hohenheim had written down shortly after they first got back in Resembool.
Hohenheim was humming something familiar behind him, but Ed couldn’t place it and didn’t know if he wanted to. Instead, he decided to break the silence that had settled as Winry went over blueprints and Al did… whatever he was doing. “So, where’d you learn how to do hair?”
The man was silent for a minute, and Ed was starting to get nervous when he finally answered. “Through experience, mainly. My hair was nearing my waist when I was about your age, so I had to learn how to care for it.”
“Near your waist? ” Al broke in, sounding faintly horrified. “In a desert? How did you not die?”
Winry nodded emphatically. “Yeah-- I can barely handle having it down in the summer here , I think if it got any hotter I’d just get a bob.”
“Simply a matter of adjustment, I’m sure. You have to remember I was born and raised in Xerxes, so I was much more used to the heat than I was the cold that met me here, or the humidity in Xing.”
“Makes sense, didn’t Mei say Scar hated the snow?” Ed chimed in, watching as Al nodded.
“Yeah, said he got cold faster than anyone else there, too.” They both glanced awkwardly at Winry, but she seemed oblivious to the stare and continued on with her blueprints as if no one had spoken.
“Scar is Ishvalan, yes?” Hohenheim, sensing the atmosphere, asked it in a much lower voice than normal. “The temperatures there are rather similar to Xerxes. Less dry, though.” Ed tried to nod, but yelped instead when it pulled at the hair still in the Xerxesian’s hand. “Careful, Edward. Your scalp has always been sensitive, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Always been sensitive. That rang out strangely to Edward, and with the strange nostalgia everything was bringing he realized something that was probably obvious from the beginning. “Have you done my hair before?”
“Ah-” Hohenheim sounded faintly surprised. “I didn’t know you remembered! I did when you were a child, every other Sunday before school began again.”
Al and Winry looked just as shocked as Ed felt, which was some relief.
“You did? What for?” Ed knew it felt familiar but he couldn’t remember , and Al obviously wouldn’t be able to either. “I’d always assumed mom did everyone’s hair.” Talking about mom with him was a slow healing thing, not quite a wound but never something to completely scar over either. He was glad Alphonse didn’t have the same issue, but some part of him still wished someone else understood the foreign, familiar ache.
“Hm, it’s a bit difficult to put into words, if i’m honest.”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t wanna, dad.” It was the first time Al had really spoken, and of course he sounded worried.
“Nothing like that, Alphonse. Just give me a moment to formulate my thoughts.” As he spoke, his callused hands dutifully braided Edward’s hair, stopping only to tie it off with a stray ribbon sitting besides him. “Trisha was not well adjusted to hair unlike her own, at first. It makes complete sense, Amestrians have straight, fine hair-- I certainly did not.”
“Until you started straightening it,” Winry echoed what he didn’t say.
With a nod, he continued. “I did my own until Edward was born, and when his hair turned out like mine I simply took over caring for it,” a shrug. “I enjoy it, Trisha actually said it was our ‘thing.’” They could practically hear the quotation marks, and his voice was teasing. “I still can’t believe straighteners exist, though. In Xerxes curls were considered a sign of royalty, and natural ones all the better for it.”
For some reason, Al was even more invested than he was before. “Do you know why, or was it just a generalized movement?”
“Nothing quite that complex, it happened similar to how straight hair became popular here, just in the opposite direction.” Al, ever the historian, immediately fired off with more questions. Eventually they circled back to Ed’s hair, and the products Hohenheim had whipped out of nowhere as far as Ed himself was aware. “It’s nothing complex, just what I do with my own hair when I leave it natural.”
Natural . (Ed wondered how it felt to be the only person left in a civilization, hiding your eyes with glass and burning your hair to fit in that last little bit. When did escape feel less like freedom and more like another prison?)
Winry’s voice cut through the descent of his thoughts, raised lightly in complaint. “You can’t leave it at just that though, what does all this stuff do ?”
“... Do you actually want to know?” His dad sounded vaguely doubted, but Al and Winry both nodded rapidly and Ed couldn’t stay quiet with such insistence, could he?
“Come on man, what’s everything do? I gotta learn someday.”
Oh-- well, I-” He floundered for a moment and Ed snickered, “I uh, typically start with warm oil so the soaps don’t make it brittle,” Winry looked fascinated. “Baobab was rather common, but Amestris doesn’t grow the plant so I’ve started using olive instead. Maybe even rosehip, if the money was available.”
“And then-?”
“We would use lye to wash, and then typically a cream of sorts to condition. I can’t tell you exactly what was in it, but when I was a child lard was fairly common.”
“Wait, ew.” Ed was suddenly incredibly concerned about what was in his hair, and his ire only rose when Hohenheim started laughing. “Did you put animal grease in my hair-?”
“No, no! This is just aloe vera and some spices; cardamom, lavender, rosemary. It’s all very good for hair growth, and acts as perfume too. It can be washed out in just a few more minutes, and then all i’ll need to do is add more olive oil and style it however you want.”
“Okay…” Ed’s voice sounded doubtful, but if he admitted it to himself his hair did feel much better, and the nostalgia of the spices made something in his chest loosen. “Wait-- you aren’t just going to braid it back?”
“Do you want me to just braid it back?”
Well, good question. Ed looked at Al in mock desperation, but his traitor brother just shrugged and smiled. “You should let him do something traditional.”
“Of course you’d say that,” but Winry was nodding too, and even without speaking Ed could feel Hohenheim’s contained excitement behind him, and he caved. “Fine, fine. Just don’t make me look like too much of an idiot, alright?”
He didn’t know how they all went from Hohenheim asking to braid his hair, to washing and oiling it, to this.
Well. Let it never be said that Edward Elric wasn’t willing to try new things. (He refused to talk about the first time Hohenheim cooked, because his pride and tongue still haven’t recovered from the peppers he had somehow found. Where do you find spicy peppers in Resembool? )
“Can I watch?” Winry asked first, but Al nodded behind her and scooted closer to them both, finally setting his notebook to the side along with Winry’s automail blueprinting.
He did not sign up to be a mannequin, though. “What do I look like, a model?”
He was promptly ignored while Hohenheim beckoned the two closer to watch him. Ed could feel him loosen the braid, and a wide comb stroking through his curls sleekly. “First, you should know this would normally be much easier, except Ed’s hair hasn’t been treated very kindly.” He ignored Ed’s noise of protest. “I’m surprised the ends haven’t fallen off-- easily reversed though, it’s just going to need some more attention than normal.”
“So what would you normally need to do?”
“The same thing while washing and oiling, but with more water involved to keep the curls nice. Less oil while you would style it, though.” Ed could feel fingers threading back through his hair, separating chunks and deftly moving. Winry was cooing at something, while his father calmly explained each step he took in a hushed voice Ed had a hard time paying attention to.
If he was honest, it was soothing.
“Huh.” That was Al. “This seems easy, but I’m pretty sure it would be impossible without help.”
“No, it’s doable. This was oftentimes how I wore my own hair when I was working out in public.” Ed was somewhat drowsy now, but opened his eyes when his father mentioned “working” in what he could only assume was Xerxes.
(He tried not to remember his dad’s childhood. Something about it ached deep in his chest.)
“What did you do for work?” Of course Winry would be the only one brave enough to ask.
Hohenheim didn’t seem phased by it, and shrugged. “Indoors it was a lot of cooking and cleaning, laundry, sometimes I took care of the Head Alchemist’s children-- that was only because he had me since childhood, though. Most of us only cleaned.”
“And outdoors?”
“Lots and lots of ploughing, and cotton work,” He held a smile in his voice as he spoke. “It wasn’t that bad when others were outside with me, but it dragged on for hours when it was just me.”
Ed wanted to ask something dangerous, with the potential to ruin the entire evening they had worked up to. “Do you ever miss Xerxes?” the words slipped out of his mouth before he truly realized it, and it felt like a band had tightened around his throat.
His father’s hands froze in his hair for a millisecond, before starting again as if nothing happened. “Everyday, Edward. That does not mean I regret anything , though.”
The silence spread out like scented oils and spices, and Ed fully closed his eyes into it with a small breath.