happy valentine Shana!!! I can't believe i made it finally jgfcjjcgjgx i would love to see some fma (Sacrifice is free/ed&ling betrothed/What They Expect) or more of Lord Arthur De Bois, or time travel Jiang Cheng/drarry, or Avengers' Three Faced Goddess! (can anyone tell I Cannot choose favourites? They're all so gooood) and if none of those sound appealing, dealer's choice! thank you!!
continuation of 1 2 3 4 5
It's sort of awkward, because Eden insists on thick tights and long sleeves and keeps her gloves on, but Catherine takes it in stride and doesn't react with anything more than a single raised eyebrow. Maybe she thinks she has some sort of terrible skin condition on her limbs, or something, because she's perfectly fine with plunging necklines and the lacy bras Catherine shoves at her.
She hasn't worn anything besides a sports bra since she's had breasts. They're not exactly comfortable, but compared to the constant, background ache of the automail it doesn't even make a blip on her radar.
Besides. They make her look like a girl, shoving her breasts up front and center, and their size had been an annoyance when passing for a boy and a comfort when she looked at herself naked in the mirror, searching for the girl she was rather than the boy everyone saw, but this is different.
"Wow," Catherine blinks, tilting her head to the side.
Eden flushes and wishes that at any point she'd learned how to talk to pretty girls outside of life or death situations. "I hadn't realized they - I'm not used to wearing, um, girly stuff."
"You look good in it," she says, touching Ed's back and shifting her to face the mirror.
She's in black tights and boots with a chunky heel, taller than the ones she normally wears and sleeker, stopping just below her knees. She's wearing a dark green dress with a deep neckline. She's used to be hard lines and sharp edges, but she looks soft here, her hips and breasts curving out from her waist and the dress somehow minimizing the breadth of her shoulders, or maybe it's just that with all the skin on display in the center, her shoulders just don't get as much attention. She'd had to build them up, to make the automail balanced, to make sure her body could support it, and she'd always hated how masculine it made her look. But looking at herself now, she wonders if that just wasn't in her head.
Green's never been a color she gravitated towards, but the dark color makes the gold of her hair shine, brings out the warmth of her eyes and the pink of her lips.
"You're really good at this," she tells Catherine, throat tight.
Catherine grins. "You are a beautiful canvas, Eden. It was not difficult." Ed's face burns. "Do you have plans for dinner? We could have it at my home. I am, honestly, dying to curl your hair."
Ed hesitates, because her shade of blonde is rather distinctive, then takes a second look at herself in the mirror. No one is going to think she's the Fullmetal Alchemist looking like this. "Okay, yeah. Sure. That'd be great."
~
Catherine knows that Eden is military at first glance, seeing her elder sister in the way Eden stands and moves. She looks young, but she can't be that young, not when she has the stance of someone who's been enlisted for years.
She figures that Eden is looking for clothes to wear outside of her uniform for the first time and something in her softens at how insistent Eden is on keeping certain parts of her body covered. Her siblings have scars too.
When they get to their home, Eden seems slightly surprised at the grandness of her home, but gets over it quickly, which Catherine almost expected. She hadn't looked at a single price tag as they'd been shopping and had paid for her bags of purchases with a nonchalance that spoke of a familiarity with money, although that leaves Catherine to wonder how she ended up in the military in the first place. She hadn't gotten a last name out of her, but Catherine is familiar with most military families, and she would have heard if any of their daughters had enlisted.
"Your bedroom is so pretty," Eden says, looking around at her pink, frilly room filled with flowers and clothes and gilded in gold with a soft wistfulness.
Catherine loves her. "Thank you. Here, sit at my vanity, let's play."
Eden laughs and pulls her hair out of the hasty ponytail she'd pulled it into, letting Catherine run her hands through it and carefully brush out every knot. It's gorgeous, thick and silky and the most wonderful shade that Catherine's never seen on anyone else.
People always act so oddly with her because of her family, even those similarly situated looking down at her for her choices, to be neither an officer nor married to one, but that's just not what she wants right now. It's nice to hang out with another girl that just treats her like a friend.
"MY BELOVED SISTER HAS RETURNED!" booms from what sounds like the first floor.
She sighs.
Eden goes rigid in her chair, eyes wide. "What - why-"
"It's just my brother," she says soothingly, concerned with how pale Eden has gotten. "He's harmless, really."
"Brother," Eden repeats. "Fuck. Fuck! I'm so stupid-"
"It's okay," she says in alarm, "Eden, what-"
She gets to her feet, grabbing her hands and looking at her a desperation that Catherine doesn't understand. "He can't know I'm here. Who I am. Do you understand? It's important."
She doesn't understand. "Eden-"
There's the sound of heavy footsteps heading their way and Eden wrenches herself away, bolting for the other side of the room. She claps her hands together, then presses them against the wall, and in flash of light she's disappeared.
Catherine stares. mouth agape.
She's familiar with alchemy. The skill has been passed down her family for generations.
Eden didn't use a circle.
"I HEAR YOU HAVE MADE A FRIEND, DEAR SISTER!" Alex shouts, flinging open her door and flexing in the doorway. "I WISH TO MEET YOUR NEW COMPANION!"
She picks up a pillow from her bed and lobs it at him, hitting him right in his stupid curl. "We're having girl time, go away!"
"Ah, girl time!" he says. "A storied tradition that has been passed down the Armstrong family for many generations!" He looks around, seeing her empty room, and his eyebrows dip together.
She grabs a makeup brush, holding it up threateningly. "You know what else has been passed down our family for generations? The art of knocking! Go bother Momma!"
"Where's," he starts.
Catherine throws the brush, pointy end towards his eyes.
He ducks, retreating to the safety of the hallway and closing the door just in time for the brush to hit it.
She takes a deep breath, calming her racing heart and smoothing her hands down her skirt. She crosses the room, knocking against the wall and whispering, "Eden? He's gone."
There's nothing for a moment and then there's light and heat and she's looking at the the inside of her house, pipes and insulation, and Eden standing there in the center of it, eyes blown wide and lips trembling.
Eden, who won't let her look at her limbs and doesn't know how to wear girly things and uses alchemy without circles and recognizes her brother from his voice alone.
"I'm sorry," Eden whispers, arms wrapped around herself, trying to make herself small. "I just wanted-"
Catherine interrupts her, reaching out to place her hand over the arm Eden had been careful not to let her touch and is unsurprised to feel hard, unyielding metal. "The art of secret keeping had been passed down the Armstrong family for generations."
Eden's eyes snap to hers and Catherine smiles, squeezing her arm and hopes that she can feel it. Slowly, wondrously, Eden returns it.
499 notes
·
View notes
Half the jobs Fox is sent on are not within his jurisdiction. This certainly isn’t.
Planetary protection unit, they said. Military police. Orbital security force.
And now Fox is being pointed at Count Dooku on some backwater planet and told to fetch. How the mighty have fallen.
He’s pretty sure Kenobi, Skywalker and their units could’ve karked this all up perfectly fine on their lonesome; they don’t need three Guardsmen there to watch them do it. But the Chancellor says jump and Fox surpressed the urge to bash his head in with a durasteel chair. So it goes.
Which is when things start going terribly, terribly wrong, of course.
“Is that Spinder?!”, Skywalker exclaims, arms wheeling out in the air wildly to try and catch his balance. “The Count fucks?!”
Across the room, Cody rips his helmet off, several shades redder than a baseline human should be. “The Count fucks my brother?!”
Two lightsticks hover uselessly in the air, Skywalker’s zig-zagging in a relentless hum with his gesturing. Fox stands stock-still, in the hope that maybe he’ll spontaneously turn invisible if he does. Around them, 501st and 212th troopers gape through helmets. Behind him, Nuisance gasps for air amidst screaming laughter.
Ping, went Fox’s comm unit, in that unmistakeable lascivious jingle sound. Ping, answered Count Dooku’s within a split second. Match found close by.
For a moment, Fox considers what it would be like to run at the Count’s lightsaber at full speed.
…not like that.
“Count”, Kenobi says, with a face like he’s bitten into a rotten fruit. Not that Fox knows what fruit tastes like. “This is a highly… unexpected development.” He fwoosh-es his lightsaber shut, obviously having given up on fighting. “I’d call it a conflict of interest, but I’m not sure that applies?”
“Oh, it’s gonna be a conflict of something, for sure”, Cody hisses, fists clenched at his sides. He looks about ready to boil over, with Crys and Waxer inching closer in preparation. “What have you done to my brother, you monster?!”
“I don’t think you want to know that, Commander”, Nuisance gasps out between barks of laughter, proving why he’s eternally Fox’s least favourite. Cody’s splotchy red complexion slowly fades into ghostly white as a sheen of horror settles over the room. “Thanks for the fancy chocolate bouquet last week, Count!”
Dooku, who has been thus far staring at the floor with an empty thousand-klick stare, looks up at that. Fox has seldom seen a man that defeated outside of the mirror, he has to admit - but shudders when he remembers exactly what the chocolates were for.
Oh Force, he’s sexted Count Dooku into buying him gifts. Does that make him a Seppie spy? Traitor by proxy?
“I feel”, says the Count, gravely, still holding his long red laserknife in a white-knuckled death-grip, “that I have been taken for a fool.”
“Uh”, says Fox, nervously. All eyes snap to him. Oh Force, oh Force, oh Force. They’re going to invent a whole new kind of decommissioning for this and name it after Fox.
“Is it really scamming if you actually get what you pay for?”, asks Grids, considering. Fox slowly pulls off his helmet just for the comforting feeling of burying his head in his gloved palms. The sounds of a struggle ensue, and Kenobi makes a choked-off noise. Maybe if he’s embarrassed enough he’ll give himself an aneurysm.
“Grandmaster, why are you paying people for naked pictures of themselves on the holonet?!” Kenobi asks, despairingly. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“Oi, no one said I was naked!”, Fox exclaims, head whipping up.
“So naked”, Nuisance laughs, palm thumping against the floor. He might be crying.
“I’m not decrepit”, the Count blusters, and Skywalker makes a gagging noise. “I have - there are needs, and they are perfectly natural!” It takes three troopers to restrain Cody from launching himself at the Count.
285 notes
·
View notes