Summary: Carolina recognises a familiar habit in East.
Notes: Written for @fanvsfic‘s Pick ‘n’ Mix event! I really wanted to write something with the new girls and well, being brand new characters, it feels perfectly in the spirit of the event. Spoilers for the second episode of season 18.
Well, now wasn’t that a familiar sight.
Carolina stopped in the threshold of the mess hall and leaned against the door frame. East and One had their backs to her, but she could clearly see the personal feast spread out in front of East. Containers filled to the brim with carbs and proteins—rice and vegetables and meat, bread rolls and more—mouthfuls of which were being shovelled into East’s mouth at alarming speed.
Across from her, One took a bite of her comparatively modest plate of chicken fried rice and snorted.
“Don’t choke.”
“Shut up.”
Carolina chuckled and shook her head. Popping the seals of her helmet, she pulled it off and set it down by a free seat at the table as she skirted by on her way to the counter. In the corner of her eye, she saw One and East glance her way, then share a look, and she smirked.
Returning a minute later with her own tray, she pushed her helmet out of the way and sat down.
“That’s quite the array you have there,” she said with a nod of her head towards East’s food, before taking a bite of her own and leaving the air open.
East’s only response was a gruff little grunt of acknowledgement. Chopsticks in hand, she continued to shovel rice into her mouth without a word, hardly taking the time to swallow.
One, on the other hand, seized her chance. “Oh yeah. She crashes the fuck out if she doesn’t eat her entire body weight in food every day. It’s nuts.”
East glared at her, but her stuffed cheeks and babyface undermined the gesture.
“Not every day,” she said, setting aside the latest empty container to grab another.
“Close enough,” One retorted.
East’s brow wrinkled, as if she were thinking about whether it was worth it to respond or not.
“You know,” Carolina said, making the decision for her, “I used to be very similar.”
“What, ‘back in your day’?” One asked, a smirk at the corner of her lips.
Carolina ignored the jab and continued, “When I used my speed unit regularly, I used to eat as much as the team heavy and more. Even steal from their plate. If I didn’t, I’d crash.”
East kept eating as if she hadn’t heard, but Carolina saw her back straighten, her gaze flicker over towards her.
One cocked her head. “Speed unit? You mean your armour’s amps?”
“No, not quite. See, ‘back in my day’,” Carolina said, earning nothing but a shameless grin off of One, “that sort of amplification was highly experimental. Even now, what you can do with your suit isn’t as extreme as the unit I used to use. Once, I got into a chase where my unit allowed me to outrun cars and jump the length of entire city blocks to keep up with a target.”
East put her chopsticks down. One blinked.
“Shut the fuck up, no way,” One said, leaning back. Carolina raised a brow. “Oh, sorry, shut the fuck up, ma’am.”
Carolina bit back a laugh.
“Yes way,” she said. “I wasn’t strictly supposed to, but it did the job.” No need to tell them that about her collision with the truck and the events that followed. “After that, I about ate the ship out of its highest energy MREs and I still crashed.”
East swallowed. “Ugh, MREs. Didn’t you have like, an actual mess?”
“Let’s just say that day was very… hectic,” Carolina said. “The mess staff couldn’t keep up. On training days, they’d be more prepared.”
East tore a bite out of a bread roll, chugged half her drink, then barely seemed to even breathe between putting the bottle down and diving back into a hefty serving of potatoes. She had it down to an art, never so much as choking on a morsel that went down the wrong way.
Carolina took a sip from her cup. “It’s because of your Burst Step, right? It affects your metabolism?”
East side-eyed her, still chewing. Carolina waited patiently, eating her own food at a pace a little to the left of normal and ignoring One’s outright staring as a result.
“I guess,” East said, finally. “Or, that’s what we figure. Don’t really know.”
Carolina frowned. How little seemed to be known about what had been done to East at Starlight Laboratories, about how her little power actually worked, was… concerning, to say the least. East had obviously learned ways to handle it and its side effects, but this was something much more permanent than an armour unit.
“Well, now you know one thing,” Carolina said. East raised a brow, face already once again stuffed with half a container of fried rice. “It definitely affects your metabolism, because that’s exactly what used to happen to me. The way moving that fast hits your body is unlike anything else and you have that ability built in.”
“…if you say so,” East said, and though it was as dismissive as Carolina was coming to expect from her on the surface, there was something else there, too. “Guess you won’t be giving me shit for eating on the job then, huh?”
“Obviously not,” Carolina said. “Do West and—?”
“Well, no, but.” East shrugged. “You never know.”
Carolina made a note to keep some high-energy snack bars on hand, just in case.
“Hey,” One said, waving an unopened box across the table, “trade you my dessert for some potatoes.”
East squinted. “…why?”
“What? Can a girl not crave some potatoes? Do you want the dessert or not?”
“…give it here.”
East all but snatched the container out of One’s hand replaced it with a half-finished pot of potatoes. She tore open the box and immediately dug into the cake inside, not bothering with cutlery.
One hid her grin in the potatoes, and Carolina disguised hers in her drink.
