all_inclusive | Dude looks like a lady

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Dude looks like a lady

While the thought of Bucky and the continued fruitlessness of his search for the man weighed heavy on him, there was little different in the routine Steve had taken up in being reintroduced to the hotel. Rising at dawn for a quick, but calorie-laden breakfast, the usual morning run out on the grounds for endurance, time in the gym for strength and flexibility, followed by the insistent growl of his stomach that demanded he rush through his shower before heading back to the Bistro for a second breakfast. All simple, already familiar, and done before nine in the morning.

What was neither simple nor familiar was what happened when he stepped out of the shower with no thought other than that he needed to towel off and dress before he could go out and public to sate the near constant hunger in his belly. He dried his hair with a quick scrub of a towel, wrapped the towel around his hips and padded through the door between bathroom and bedroom with every intention of following exactly that plan. He did not, however, intend on stumbling, thrown suddenly off balance by the length of his legs and the width of his hips and the entirely unfamiliar balance of his body.

He crashed unceremoniously to his hands and knees, shaking his head against the disorientation only to find a cloud of blonde hair in his face. Even as he swept it back with a pass of his hand, wondering at the length of that hair as it fell long past his shoulders, he found himself staring at the delicate and most assuredly feminine hands he held out before him.

Steve looked down at his body as he knelt on the floor, only to just as suddenly jerk his head back up as he flushed red with embarrassment, pulling at the towel around his (too round) hips until it covered him more...more, just more. He didn't want to think of what or how it covered him. There he scrambled for his clothes, hurriedly trying to find something of the too large, wrongly fitted things that could fit over the shape of this too body. A shirt that fell to the top of his thighs and swamped him, a pair of boxers rolled at the waist to fit less precariously, a leather jacket he zipped up over the unfamiliar terrain of his chest, and Steve rushed out the door in the hopes of finding someone he knew or someone who could fix...whatever this was.

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Ed had his daily routine now. Every morning, he went around the hotel and tried to make three new doors in three new spots. No more, no less. He could have spent the entire time he was in the hotel making doors -- made doors until it drove him insane. But he knew that was pointless. So, he had picked the arbitrary number of three and tried to make himself stick to it. Some days were better than others -- although, to be fair, he hadn't surpassed ten doors in one day yet.

Some of the doors he event went in. They went to some neat places. Some he avoided, because they looked ominous on the surface.

The last door of today proved to be different. As it was his last door for the morning, Ed took a few curious steps inside -- and instantly regretted it. He could feel the instant the center of balance on his body shifted, an always unwelcome change. He was reminded abruptly of learning to walk on his automail leg. He stared down at himself -- at his chest. A deep flush instantly surged across his face.

Without thinking, he pushed off his suddenly too big red jacket, his gloves falling off his hands. Abruptly, he was just in his tank top and pants -- he stared at his automail arm, the metal glistening up at him. Even it felt different. Lighter, the hand gone smaller to match his flesh one.

"What the hell," Ed exclaimed, stumbling back out of the room -- and promptly collided with someone else.

The lowered center of gravity would have been disorienting on its own, but paired with the confusion over how he could have suddenly lost muscle mass for female curves (among other things lost and gained) and the distracting jubbliness of his body with every step, Steve had anything but his usual grace. There had been no Vita-Rays, no Serum scientifically applied and activated in sheer agony, and yet he stumbled and weaved with a total lack of understanding of how to work the alien shape of new bones and sleek muscle in anything like efficiency.

The loss of half his body mass and half a foot in height should have made something of the transformation more familiar, or at least allowed him coordination enough to make it to Natasha or Thor, or even to Martha, with her physician's knowledge. It did not, and he did not.

He found himself weaving down the hallway, nonplussed by the shift and sway of his hips as he forced himself to shorten his steps for fear of being thrown too off balance to continue forward in any manner than landing him flat on his face. The matter was complicated by the fall of his hair in his face to obscure his view every time he attempted to look down at his feet to better place them, the focus of coordination and thought required devouring his spatial awareness whole.

The crash of another body into his sent him sprawling, perhaps more for the disruption of his concentration and suddenness of the event than for the actual force behind the collision. It took him a second to realize that the high, surprised noise he heard had actually come from himself, much to his chagrin, and left him apologizing before he had so much as untangled himself from the other person or even noting that the body that had hit him was that of another blond woman.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry."

Ed hit the ground, landing somewhere near the other woman. The collision with the ground was enough to clear his head for a moment, enough for him to take a step back and take a deep breath. It certainly was upsetting that such a chance had happened so instantaneously -- and yeah, it was weird as hell. But weird as hell things happened in this hotel, and he was used to having his body dismantled and then put together again (as disturbing as it was to try and hedge it in that context). So. It just meant he needed to remantle. So to say.

"Yeah, yeah, me too," Ed answered -- and all his logic flooded back out the window when he heard how high-pitched his voice was. He could hear his own inflections, still, but his voice reminded him distinctly of Winry's now.

Reflexively, his automail arm went up near his throat, metal fingers hovering over where his Adam's apple should have been. He swallowed unevenly. Not for the first time, he wished his brother was here. Alphonse would know what to do.

Recognizing the lifted pitch of his own voice, the echo of which he could no longer feel in his chest, came second place to the realization that with the gain of certain...assets, he had lost something rather integral. A piece of himself he had rather liked, no matter Stark's (either of them) insinuation that it had gone unused for too long and was bound to fall off without use.

That loss in and of itself would have had him carding his hands through his hair (too long, his hair was far too long), but as he stood and looked at the person he had run into (or had run into him, which one was rather a mess at the moment), the feeling of disorientation only increased. In any other situation his embarrassment might have gone tenfold at realizing that he had bounced off of a shapely and gorgeous woman, but then and there with things ten kinds of awry and the woman having a right arm of metal, things were not so easy as simply blushing at having tripped over his own feet.

Oh, there was that as well, as it pinked his cheeks in embarrassment for his lack of coordination, but there were greater concerns of the moment. "I wasn't looking where I was going, I'm so sorry," he said, trying and failing to ignore the pitch of his voice, just as he tried and failed to keep from looking at the woman's arm.

It was nothing like the arm he had seen Bucky wear, nothing like the photographs in the file that Natasha had passed him, and yet its existence was a reminder of another place and another mission. "Are you okay?"

Ed pushed himself back up to his feet, and it was still weird to feel how much his center of balance had shifted. How in the world did Winry manage with this? He brushed his hands over his pants, trying to steady himself himself. He couldn't help but notice how tight his pants had gotten in the thighs and the hips. It was ... distracting, he supposed.

"Yeah, I'm all right," Ed managed to say, figuring that it wasn't all together untrue. He wasn't injured at the very least. Just ... not in his right body. Kind of.

"You?" Ed asked, tone brusque, looking back up at the woman.

No sooner had he asked the question did he realize that the other woman was looking at his automail arm. Right. People here weren't used to that sort of thing.

"It won't bite, I promise," Ed tacked on wryly, flexing his right arm upward, left hand balanced on his bicep for a moment, as if to demonstrate that it moved just like a regular arm -- which, for the most part, it did. Except that he could also use it as a weapon with his alchemy.

As well acquainted as he was with injuries great and small, Steve knew the routine of checking for bumps and bruises and while the body he then inhabited was three dimensions of wrong-fitting, he could tell with a little maneuvering that he was none the worse for wear. It was, as yet, the only advantage he could find in his having been reshaped, that at the very least he had not been given a body as fragile as the one he had worn for the vast majority of his waking life. Fond though he had been of that body, it had been too riddled with injuries and illness to be a comfortable alternative to the one Erskine's serum had gifted him with.

"Well, I, uh..." how exactly he was supposed to explain that he seemed to be fine but was having a little difficulty with the 'he' part of that equation. The then too-long sleeves of his leather jacket fell up slender wrists as he tried to clear his hair from his face, toes curling against the floor with a self-consciousness that came with remembering he had pulled on clothes that had gone from tailored to fit to a swamp of fabric.

The sight of the arm moving and flexing would have been enthralling all on its own, the Starks' commentary on his engineering knowledge aside, there was something of the same curiosity over a novel thing as had struck him at that very first Stark Expo. What held him, however, and had him pulling back in embarrassment for having been caught staring at the woman's arm, perhaps even making her self-conscious as he feared he might've, was that echo of Winter Soldier in his thoughts. "No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have stared. I- my friend has one like it."

"Your friend has an automail limb?" Ed echoed in surprise. This far, everyone had been surprised to see what passed for his prosthetic limb. He'd taken it as a sign that automail, for whatever reason, had only evolved to the level that it had in his own world. He didn't know if that meant this stranger was also from Amestris -- or had traveled there at some point.

"The Rockbells are my mechanics," Ed said, and maybe there was a hint of hopefulness in his voice that he'd found someone who occasionally knew what he was talking about. Winry had gained enough notoriety for her designs lately that it was possible that someone who knew something about automail may have known of her.

Despite Ed's fixation on automail -- a strange sentence for him to even hear his own head as he usually didn't care about automail in the slightest -- there seemed to be something else off about this interaction. Maybe it was a bit from the way the girl was moving paired with how her clothes didn't fit at all, but suddenly Ed couldn't help but burst out, "You're not usually a girl either, are you?"

Steve felt unaccountably guilty in the face of that hopefulness, wanting to do anything but disappoint the woman, for all the fact that she was a strange (and that the world was very, very strange in that moment). But with the only other option being to lie to the stranger, he was left to answer with nothing less than honesty.

The shake of his head came with a touch of annoyance as his hair fell again in his face, but already catching the habit of brushing his hair back out of his face, he dealt with it with no more than a second's pause before he continued. "Sorry, no, I didn't mean...automail? Not exactly anyway, I'm not all that clear on the mechanics myself." For every line blacked out in Bucky's file, there were two of technical jargon he did not understand himself. Strange mechanics built on a science that was cobbled together of Hydran tech and Zola's madness.

Where he never would've wished the confusion of having traded in one gender (or was it sex, the lines between the two were more blurred in the modern day) for another on someone else, he was not about to deny that he was relieved to hear that he wasn't alone in that particular boat. "Yes!" A beat, and then he shook his head. "I mean, no. Not usually a woman, no. Is this- is this normal here now? I've been gone awhile."

"Yeah, well," Ed said with a shrug, "Automail seems to be mostly from my world. Not a big surprise."

He couldn't even really blame Steve on not knowing the mechanics. Ed was pretty useless when it came to his own arm -- and it was his arm. Still, even if it weren't for having someone from home, it would have been nice to have someone who knew something about his arm here. He didn't like the idea of being without it if something happened, but so far nobody had surfaced with any mechanic knowledge. Mostly, he forced himself not to fret over it. Nothing he could do about it now.

"Normal?" Ed scoffed. "Not that I'm aware of. I'm pretty new myself, though. Name's Ed." He tacked on the last part as he held out hand in greeting.

The fact that it was not his first experience reorienting himself in new rules of biomechanics, in a vastly restructured skeleton and differing muscle attachments (or at least the strength of those attachments) made the situation doubly strange. His transformation before had come at the price of agony so intense he had, for all his attempts to control it, passed out from it. This transformation had come with no pain, no scientific team, no injections of either antibiotics or the combination of radiation and chemicals he hadn't half understood.

He had a hard enough time understanding how exactly he was supposed to stand with his skeleton feeling as if it had been stretched wider and shorter in some dimensions, and narrower and longer in others.

He reached out a hand to shake that of the other man's, "Steve. Steve Rogers."

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Dude looks like a lady

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