A/N: Just a little headcanon I had about why Riza had her hair cut short when she was younger. You might see a little Royai if you tilt your head and squint.

Disclaimer: I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood or any of Arakawa's characters. I only own a laptop named Damian and a brain that loves to procrastinate when writing stories.

It was an extremely hot day in the office. While Amestrian winters were normally quite mild in comparison to always-frozen Briggs, the summers were horrendous. When the sun was high in the sky, it could feel as hot as the Xingese Desert in the middle of Central.

It was one of those hot Amestrian summer days when Lieutenant Hawkeye and Colonel Mustang were stuck doing overtime in a stuffy Central office. The air conditioner that normally cooled the office sat silently in the west corner of the room with a sign taped on it saying "Out of Order." Hawkeye dropped another stack of paperwork on the Colonel's desk. He sighed dramatically.

"I want to go home just as much as you do, sir," she said, not without irritation. "Maybe if you would have finished your paperwork on time, we wouldn't be stuck here in this oven." The woman fanned herself with a discarded envelope as she returned to her desk.

Hawkeye mentally chastised herself. She wasn't really upset with the Colonel; she was just cranky from the heat. She felt like she was roasting inside her heavy Amestrian uniform. She could feel the sweat drip down the slope of her neck as she bent over her desk to continue her work. Her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, lank and slightly wet from perspiration. She was having just as hard of a time concentrating as the Colonel was.

"That's it!" Mustang yelled with a huff. The Lieutenant looked up from her work to see her superior angrily unbutton his uniform jacket. "Forget protocol, if they're not going to fix the A/C, I'm not wearing a jacket in this office!" Hawkeye chuckled from her desk as she watched her Colonel wrestle his arms out of his Amestrian uniform jacket, revealing the light blue button-down he had worn underneath. Hearing her, Mustang turned to look at his subordinate. "Well, are you with me Lieutenant?" She arched a brow at his statement. "Are you going to continue to be stifled by that awful jacket, or are you making a statement with me?"

Hawkeye knew very well that no statement was actually being made. The two were the only people left in the office, so no one else would notice if their uniforms were discarded for an hour or two. With a smirk she unbuttoned her jacket and removed it, leaving her torso clad only in her standard black, short-sleeved shirt. There was no hiding her relief when the air hit her skin, and her sigh of contentment echoed through the empty office.

Mustang grinned as he watched her. "Doesn't that feel better?"

"Yes, sir, it does," she said genuinely. Still feeling heat on her neck, she swept her hair up with one hand and reached into her desk drawer to retrieve her hair clip.

"How come you don't cut your hair short again?" Hawkeye heard from behind her as she rummaged through her desk, searching for clip.

"Sir?"

"Your hair. When we were teenagers, your hair used to be quite short. As I recall, it was still short when we met again in Ishval and when you became my bodyguard. It looked nice like that. Why don't you get it cut again?"

Riza ignored the backhanded compliment and turned to look at her superior. "Sir, are you insinuating that my hair looks bad grown out?"

Before Hawkeye could even finish her question, Roy was out of his chair, waving his hands out in front of him. "No, no, no! I would never say that, Hawkeye. Your hair looks beautiful! I was only curious as to why you never cut it short again! It would surely be more comfortable in this heat."

She huffed and dropped her hair back onto her shoulders. She had searched her entire desk and her clip was nowhere to be found. She must have left it at home. Her gaze returned to Colonel Mustang. "I never cut my hair short out of convenience; I did it out of respect for my father."

"That awful man forced you to cut your hair short? I should have known. Of all the horrible things he'd done to you, it makes sense that he was the one—"

"No, no, no!" Riza shook her head angrily. "You have no idea what you're talking about! My father never forced me to do anything, first of all. He always gave me a choice. And secondly, I was the one who chose to cut my hair short."

"Why? You said it was out of respect for Berthold, didn't you?"

She sighed. She was hoping she could avoid telling him the story. It was something that she had never told anyone before, because it involved memories that she didn't want to resurface. She supposed there was no getting out of it now, though. She waved for Colonel Mustang to sit back down.

Looking down at a strand of hair between her fingertips, she spoke. "Before my mother died, it used to be her job to comb my hair and braid it for me in the mornings before I went to school. I was around seven years old, and was never good at braiding it myself. My father used to walk into my room on those mornings and talk about how pretty my hair looked, just like Mama's. Her hair was long and blond as well, and she normally kept hers in a similar braid."

Up until this point, Riza smiled at the memory she painted before her superior. Then, her smile faded. "After she was gone, it was his job to braid my hair. Some days he would get half-way through and then just stop. He'd leave the room and make some excuse about forgetting something somewhere else in the house. I could always hear him crying, though.

"Sometimes he would walk into the kitchen and see me doing dishes. He could only see the back of me, and when he saw the long braid down my back, he would mistake me for her. He would call her name out and sound so happy, it would kill me when I turned around and saw the disappointment on his face."

Roy, for once, sat quietly at his desk. He didn't dare interrupt her, not to scold her father for acting in such a way towards his child, not even to throw in a kind word, because he knew that wasn't what she wanted. He let her continue.

Her eyes were dark. "One day I realized that in looking so much like my mother I was inherently hurting my father every time he saw me. I knew he felt guilty about grieving so openly, and for making me believe that I was somehow responsible for his grief just because I looked like her. But I was young and willing to do anything to make my Papa happy again, so one day I stood in the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors and I cut my hair."

She remembered looking at herself in the mirror and silently promising her father that she would do her best to make him happy from then on. The quiet snip snips seemed to echo through the house like a promise as tendril after tendril of blonde fell to the floor.

"When I finished, it didn't look half bad. My bangs were kind of crooked, and I couldn't fully reach the hair at the back of my head to even it out, but the rest was soft and even. I figured it was good enough, so I swept the leftover hair into a pail and returned to the kitchen to do my dishes. When my father returned from the market, he passed by the kitchen and saw my haircut. He asked me about it, but I didn't want to tell him why I had done it. I simply said my long hair 'got in the way' and kept scrubbing."

Riza looked down at her fingers that had been absently toying with her hair throughout her story. She shook her head and looked up at her Colonel. "Later that day he helped my snip off the back pieces that I couldn't cut as easily. He told me it looked beautiful, and that was the last thing he ever said about it."

Roy nodded. "Do you think it helped him?"

"I think it did. He was still never the same, always sadder and quieter, but it wasn't as hard for him to look at me anymore. He saw me as my own person after that."

"So why did you decide to finally grow it out again?"

Riza thought about that for a moment. She remembered seeing Fullmetal's childhood friend, Winry, and her need to have long hair suddenly came back. But there was more to it than that. "I think I finally realized that I had protected my father for as long as I could. Once he passed on, there was no reason to keep it that way anymore. It was at that moment that I started living for myself again. And for new people as well." She met Roy's eyes and smiled.

"…But enough about me. If you don't finish your paperwork, we'll never go home."

With that, he groaned and returned to his desk. She could hear him muttering darkly about "not getting paid enough to work in these hellish conditions" as she returned to her paperwork as well.

Her thoughts returned to the day she cut her hair. Her Papa pulled her off of the stool she had propped up against the kitchen sink and instructed her to turn in a circle for him. She did, slowly, while he inspected her work. He bent down to her level and smiled softly at his daughter "You look beautiful, darling, but there are a few strays in the back that you missed. Do you want me to cut them for you?"

She nodded and smiled, turning to go retrieve the scissors from the bathroom. She didn't miss the glassy look in his eyes as he squeezed her hand before she left him. She also didn't miss the tiny "thank you" that echoed down the hall, for Berthold would never be able to tell her how much it meant to him what she did that day.

With those words, he, too, made a promise. He promised to try to be as selfless as daughter was, and to love as strongly as she loved. He didn't know if he would succeed, but he vowed he would try until his dying breath.

A/N: Ehh, the ending could have been better, in my opinion. I can never think of a good ending sentence.

Anyways, what did you think?