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Edward is rather loud.
Loud, yes, and also unable to communicate much of his needs outside of starting to fuss. Something about the slow wind up to caterwauling while everyone in the house came up with ideas and were proven false in their estimate of what was wrong drove Trisha to tears.
The birth had been hard for her, as had the week afterwards, and Pinako had fixed her shrewd eyes on Hohenheim.
“Trisha needs a break,” she’d said. She’d started to shrink, by then, her skeleton constricting with the weight of years Hohenheim’s spine had seen without so much as stuttering.
“Of course,” he’d said.
“Take care of your boy while she spends some time with me.”
“Of course.”
Hohenheim sits in Edwards room, where the boy is settled in his crib. He’s seen many different cultural approaches to childcare. Amestris’ is rather stagnant, comparatively. Xing believed in gentle movement for infants, and built all sorts of wood cradles and hammocks for rocking their young. Ishvalans kept infants on their backs for most of their early years, tied and swaddled in place with cloth, and shielded from biting sand.
Xerxes, well...
Here, and now, Amestrians believe that a baby should be kept indoors for its first few months–to protect their health, and their developing systems.
Hohenheim knows just enough about childhood development to question this, but not enough to truly challenge it. Time had proved him wrong before, science and understanding crawling away from him as he spent years turning over other stones. It was as if the world moved rapidly every time he blinked, blurring past him without notice.
Edward lies in his cot, one leg gently twisting as he squirms. He will be walking soon, and then talking, and running, and feeling his body start to complain with age and old injuries. Those milestones will come screaming by, whipping past without Hohenheim having even moved.
Hohenheim has dragged half of his study into the nursery, his alchemical books placed beside the few children’s storybooks that had been given to them second hand from various townsfolk. He hopes Edward never finds interest in his father’s work, only ever stays to the light and gentle worlds of bedtime stories.
He should probably talk to Edward. All cultures talk to their newborns, inculcating them with language as soon as possible. He should pick up one of those books and read it, letting the sound of Amestrian fill the quiet room, let Edward’s brain start picking apart the mouth shapes and the sounds he needs to learn.
Hohenheim, for all his skill in reading, has always been bad with speaking. The idea of saying anything into the quiet of the nursery–the air dead and still air around them besides his son’s occasional movement–makes his throat feel closed and his tongue heavy.
He reads his own books instead, letting Edward’s roving eyes wander and get pulled back towards him with every page turn.
Edward’s gold eyes, nearly a perfect match to the shade of his own. Hohenheim hopes they fade with age, but he knows that’s not how Xerxian genetics work. His eyes will stay bright, and his near white blond hair will darken and saturate in the coming years. His son is dripping in the markers of things Hohenheim hadn’t wished to pass on. Hopefully, it’s all just external, and Hohenheim hasn’t given him anything deeper than skin. He looks away, back to his books.
Blink.
Edward starts making a discontented noise in the back of his throat. Hohenheim snaps the book shut and puts it away, knowing it’s best to act immediately before Edward starts building in volume.
There’s a simple checklist to run down of things Edward might need. Food, cleanliness, comfort, interaction are essentially everything Edward requires. Just in different forms. Hohenheim is better at giving some of those things than others.
He is patient, though, and that means he can carefully eliminate his options.
The conclusion he arrives at is that Edward is bored. Edward is often bored. Hohenheim had watched as Edward, just born, had been nestled against his mother’s chest and refused to close his eyes, demanding to see the Rockbell’s surgery room, even though his underdeveloped eyes rendered the world a blurry smear.
Demanding Hohenheim look at him back.
Edward has toys, of course, but they all feel strange fitting and clumsy in Hohenheim’s hands, different from the cloth dolls his mother had made him from scraps in the slave quarters, different from everything Hohenheim has held since.
He pokes at Edward’s mobile, letting the sheep dance. Edward is not amused by this. His face remains scrunched and red. He can get very red, when he puts his mind to it.
Hohenheim sighs and digs through Edward’s toy basket for a noisemaker. Xing was fond of these, he remembers. He hadn’t brought any back with him.
The shaker is strangely weighted, drooping in his hand. Hohenheim shakes it anyway. Stimulation, sensation, noise and movement. Things Edward’s brain needs.
Edward attempts to grab the rattle, something he’s recently figured out. Hohenheim lets him gnaw on the smooth wood for a while, but Edward loses interest quickly. None of his other toys hold his attention for long. He stays fussy and irritated, moving restlessly.
Hohenheim leans against the cot and reaches through his memories. After the opening of the Gate, Hohenheim’s memory became crystallised. They no longer faded with time, as they had when he was a man. Instead, they were stored in spiralling fractals, tucked away but infinite once he started peering closer. Over the years, he’d seen thousands of parents with their young children. A hundred different techniques for overcoming this problem. He cringes away from all of them, every single one foreign and clumsy gestures he can’t imagine in his own hands.
He could call on the memories of the souls nestled at his sternum, but he’d sworn to himself to do this without them.
Edward lets out a particularly loud and drawn out complaint–insistent to the last–and Hohenheim thinks about his mother.
He doesn’t have many memories of her, not any more, but a few have remained buried at the most intricate and internal part of his fractal body. Senses, mostly, but one moment remains strong.
Hohenheim remembers his burial. It was a few days before he was taken and sold into a new household. Finally, after years of petitioning, his mother had been allowed to lead Hohenheim out from the city’s gates and into the desert.
It was an old tradition, early medicine, superstition. The high desert that cradled Xerxes was an indiscriminate killer, uncaring in the face of the humans burying rock foundations into its back. Desert born or not, it would kill anyone foolish enough to be careless. Once Xerxians started building cities–breaking dunes against city walls and drawing water up from the deepest of veins–a young city born Xerxian was to be taken out into the desert and buried up to their neck in the sand.
It was a reminder not to be cocky, not to forget what realities awaited them outside the walls. It was also an introduction, in a way. For the desert, to feel the heartbeat of the child. For the child, to feel the dry heat of the sand and the sun burning into their eyes. Then, maybe, if the child was killed by the desert, then the desert would welcome their body as a piece of itself rather than a foreign element.
Slaves were killed by exposure the most, through flight and through gruelling work in the dunes. They remained the strongest in their protective wardings against callous desert deaths, even as the Xerxian city dwellers grew further and further away from the sand as their buildings grew taller. It had taken several years, but his mother had persisted in demanding Hohenheim’s burial. It was granted and given to her before he was sold off.
His mother would have been horrified at the Amestrian way of child-rearing, Hohenheim realises.
What Xerxians believed was most necessary for young children wasn’t the quiet indoors, or easy motion, but sunlight.
Hohenheim looks at the windowpane, bringing ample light into the room. He had pulled back all the curtains once he’d been given free rein of the house. Most of the windows were either east or west facing, something he’d subconsciously decided when building this house. Old habits.
Edward starts crying in earnest, frustrated and angry about it.
Hohenheim rubs at his forehead, and then sighs. He was taught how to swaddle under Pinako’s sharp tutelage, but he just knows Edward will be even angrier if restrained.
Instead, he picks up his squalling, wiggling child and spends a few seconds trying to arrange him so he’s supported but still easily able to see his surroundings. There are a few moments where Edward shifts unexpectedly, and Hohenheim has to catch his weight again. Even now, Hohenheim still feels that stab of fear that he might drop his son.
Edward’s uncoordinated fists end up bumping and brushing at Hohenheim’s arms and hands, snagging fabric. His fingers aren’t coordinated enough to successfully grab things on every attempt, but that isn’t for lack of trying. Hohenheim feels a deeper pulse of emotion, something like fear and something a lot worse.
He takes the both of them out through the front door and cuts down to the main street through a few fields to avoid the Rockbell’s. Just in case.
Edward bawls, still, and Hohenheim tunes him out as they walk.
A few passing townsmen give Hohenheim very pitying looks as they cross paths, but all seem more inclined to get away from the screaming infant rather than talk.
Eventually, though, Edward starts paying attention to the rolling hills, gaze snagged by the sheep and occasional cows. Edward calms, stills, and Hohenheim slows to start showing Edward things more intentionally.
Hohenheim should talk, probably, give Edward the names for the animals and the things he’s seeing. Instead, Hohenheim lets Edward’s gurgling fill the silence as they both watch a foal prance around its docile mother.
By the time Hohenheim arrives at the stream bank, Edward is back to being peaceful and calm, though tired.
Blink.
The sun is starting to skim towards the horizon.
Hohenheim sets Edward down on his stomach on the gentle grass slope. Already, he can hold his head up. Soon, he’ll be walking. Soon, he’ll have walked so much he’ll be tired of it.
It’s a useless, long forgotten superstition. Edward will never know the desert. He’ll never know of Xerxes, if Hohenheim can help it. He’ll know Amestris, and its rolling hills and military blues. Edward will know dirt, and the soil, rather than sand.
Hohenheim can’t remember his long dead mother's face–she’s not a soul trapped in his stone, having died years before it’s creation–but he feels her scorn from beyond the Gate. Edward’s grandmother fought tooth and nail to give Hohenheim that one, simple protection against a harsh death of exposure.
He takes off his glasses and stares at the sinking sun for a long moment, before he bends down and starts digging a hole.
By the bank, the soil is softer and sandier. Hohenheim rolls up his sleeves and digs with his bare hands. This wasn’t a place for alchemy.
He keeps an eye on Edward as he goes, but the child seems content for once to be left to his own devices.
By the time Hohenheim has carved up enough earth, he’s got dirt coated and pressed into every inch of his skin up to his elbows. The wet bank soil clings to everything.
Hohenheim doesn’t bother trying to wash his hands off before he goes and picks Edward back up, who grunts in protest. His simple one-piece is made of scrap fabric, and already stained, so Hohenheim decides to leave it on for some comfort.
Hohenheim settles his son in the hole, being sure to leave his head supported by an earthen wall, and starts packing the soil back around him. Doing this in the desert must feel much more like a burial, but here it’s a bit more like planting a vegetable. Edward is clearly confused, the feeling of wet earth strange and new. He scrunches his nose.
Hohenheim packs Edward in up to the chin, then steps back. It looks beyond odd, that tiny head nestled in a ditch staring back at him.
Hohenheim… doesn’t know what to do next. Was something supposed to be said, over the half submerged body? Was he supposed to think about how Resembool should spare his son pain, now that they had been truly introduced? Looking at it now, he likely got the age wrong for this by a few years.
Edward is just a baby buried in soil.
Instead of pleas to the universe, Hohenheim stands still and mute as he comes to the striking conclusion that he will bury his son a second time, one day. All of him, lying supine instead of with his head towards the sky. Buried next to his mother, and possibly beside the siblings Trisha had mused over. It will be a simple, sunny day, in simple, sunny Resembool, when this earth greets Edward a second time. When Hohenheim has to wash the soil of his son’s grave off of his hands in a river, just like this.
Blink.
Edward, visibly confused and uncomfortable, starts scrunching his face up in utter disgust. He has decided he doesn’t like the dirt, clearly. His son’s face–tiny and wrinkly like a strange tomato sprouting from the riverbank–makes Hohenheim burst out laughing.
Edward manages to look affronted.
“Alright, alright,” Hohenheim says, coming back to crouch in front of the boy. Both knees pop noticeably. He sets his fingers to the disturbed soil and starts to dig. Hopefully, he’ll manage to excavate Edward in time before he starts screaming.