#(this is why other than henghill my only other ship for Dan Heng is dango trio haha)

[feroluce]

Boothill doesn't pull his hair back very often. Dan Heng can count the times he's seen him do it on one hand. The man's right eye is gone completely but his left is a cybernetic, and it means Boothill can "see" whether his hair is in his face or not, so there's simply never much need for it.

So it surprises him when Boothill asks if he can put his hair up for him Xianzhou-style.

"Do you even own a hairpin?"

"Ya got chopsticks around here, don't ya?"

Which is how they end up awkwardly sat on the floor of the archives, Boothill sitting criss-cross and Dan Heng knelt behind him to make up for the differences in their height. Boothill doesn't say why he wants this done, but Dan Heng can guess: long life species are rarely allowed to leave the Xianzhou ships. It's not as rare as running into an actual, real-life Galaxy Ranger, but it's still pretty uncommon. Boothill is just trying to indulge his curiosity about little cultural things like this while he's able. Dan Heng can never say no to that kind of curiosity.

When his own hair was long, he never put it up. But there are memories, just little bits of things that nip at Dan Heng's ankles in the night when he's alone in the dark. And he remembers something like this, something similar. Dan Feng's hands with a hairpin, long hair grayed with age flowing in rivers between his fingers, quick and easy practiced motions revealing ears and nape and soot from the forge.

Boothill hands him a chopstick when he asks for it, because Dan Heng finds he needs both hands to keep his hair in place. He's not quick enough the first time, and the bun unravels, and the second attempt is better but it's messy and held so loosely that he goes at it for a third.

Boothill doesn't comment on it. Instead he just sits there and admires the picture of it that Dan Heng shows him on his phone, chatters a bit about what he knows of Xianzhou culture, how he'd met a Foxian woman not too long before Penacony with elaborate decorations done up in her hair and he'd wondered how anyone could even do that. A hairpin maybe would have been easier, but really the chopsticks probably fit him better, pretty little things like that don't suit me, anyhow.

Dan Heng catches like. Half of it. He's too busy staring at his hands.

Dan Feng had been good at doing other people's hair for them. He'd had a lot of practice. Dan Heng had seen it. But in the molting rebirth, his body had reset. The simple knowledge could be inherited. The experience could not.

That skill, that muscle memory, belongs to Dan Feng, and to Dan Feng only.

There is no mourning, no sense of loss with this realization, just relief. An extra confirmation of something he had already known.

But Dan Heng looks up at Boothill, who is running his curious fingers over the back of his own head, and he thinks about how there are some things he can have just for himself, too.