#jai and auggie now have another thing to fight about because they have the same girlfriend so this is a gift really

[shanastoryteller]

Happy birthday! FMA is possible or dealers choice

Annie grew up with so many things being good but not quite good enough.

She hated it and swore to live a life of too much, to indulge in excess, to gain fluency in not one new language, but four, to travel and eat and fuck until she was sick from overindulgence.

Loving like that hadn’t been her intention, but pattern recognition can be a bitch that way.

Of course she was the first to jump out of the plane during training at the Farm.

She loves the sensation of falling.

~

Ben had been like being struck by lightning.

She’d been sand, shifting and impossible to grasp and disappearing with the next tide. Then with a single strike, she was glass. Changed forever, with no choice but to adapt or break.

Annie had thought that for Ben, she could refocus her heart, if not shrink it. He was a feast, surely enough to sustain even her greed, so there’d be no need for hunger to draw her elsewhere.

In the end, she hadn’t had time to find out. He was there, then gone.

Even when she gets him back, when there are a glorious few months when she thinks that just maybe –

But, well. Pattern recognition is a bitch.

In the end, Ben can only be an indulgence. It’s sweet, when she can, but she learns not to rely on it, to rely on him.

~

Jai isn’t someone she sinks into. She wants to, thinks that he could, but that pattern recognition gets in her way. Something about him never feels quite right to her, but so few things feel right to her.

Still. He’s dependable. He looks out for her. Even when things sour, when he turns angry and biting while jockeying for power with Joan and Arthur, he’s still there for her. He protects Eyal because she wants him protected. He goes back onto the field to help her.

When he discovers something terrible, and believes he can trust no one, he trusts her.

He dies in fire right in front of her and her glass heart shatters.

He was her friend, he cared about her, she trusted him despite all the reasons not to, and now he’s gone.

Why does this keep happening? It’s hard not to focus on the common factor here.

Herself.

~

She should know better when it comes to Eyal, but it’s hard. He’s a foreign operative for a competing agency and he’s an ass but every single time she’s needed him, he has been there.

Pattern recognition is a bitch.

Annie is so desperate to be right about someone, to hand someone her heart and have them treat it gently. Eyal is always sweet to her, always has her back, but she’s learned her lesson. She lets herself like him, because she should like him, and that’s safe.

Then Russia happens. Then he goes off book to break her out of a Russian prison and smuggle her out of the country when what should have happened was her dead on those filthy stone floors.

She knows how it will end, because it’s how it always ends.

When he betrays her, it’s almost a relief.

Except as he confesses, it feels like he’s lying to her – but what does she know, anyway? Her blind spot is always the men she thinks she can trust.

~

Then there’s Auggie.

He’s not an indulgence. She doesn’t fall in love with him so much as step into it, head held high and eyes wide.

She hopes that mean it can last.