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Fox walks in about five minutes before the Senate session begins with his kriffed bucket in his hands, looking scuffed to all Hells, but Stone’s eyes are drawn immediately to the woman. The senator.
Wow, she’s pretty. Even with blood on her cheek and one of two buns undone, tumbling brown hair down her back—Stone might be saying something a little controversial but she looks hotter like this than if she would professionally. Her clothes look to be a non-synthetic material, layered an infinite time above each other, and even though parts of it are ripped, there’s no peak of skin.
Her aide, a quiet, nondescript, but also infuriatingly pretty man, lurks behind them both. He’s the most put-together out of the three of them, save for the split lip. If Stone isn't wrong, there should be another aide, but something must have gone wrong. Hopefully, they're still alive, because Fox is going to be a kriffer about the paperwork if they aren't.
“Sir.” Stone salutes. Fox waves him off immediately, but Stone is-
Stone is curious. And Fox isn’t going to call out the blatant insubordination if Stone just…stays there. Plus, each pod in the Rotunda has its own attached room, and each Coruscant Guard has to guard one, so he’s technically not breaking a rule here. Yeah, he’s staying. He’s doing his job, technically, and no reason to stop.
But the way Fox watches the new senator as she moves to the mirror, eyes intense—see, that’s a reason to not stop.
“No weapons beyond this point, ma’am,” Stone says when Fox—the lovestricken idiot—says nothing.
Fox, the lovestricken idiot, does however sigh very minutely. He turns to the aide. “You as well, Sai-san,” he intones, affecting an air of defeated boredom. For some reason, this is the tone that natborns took to the best, so Fox has been doing it for as long as Stone has known him, which is pretty karking long, in his humble, not-actually-a-sentient opinion. “There are no weapons allowed in the Rotunda due to safety reasons. Any issues with this matter can be directed to the Commander of the Coruscant Guard—me—or the Chancellor himself. Please remove anything that might constitute as a weapon, such as projectiles, any object that resembles a projectile, a blaster or a slugthrower, any object that resembles blasters or slug-”
Stone tunes him out. It’s a long list, anyway. He does, however, take that long moment to observe the dynamic between Fox and the senator. And then, he just observes the senator because she jerks her hands upwards, letting her sleeves tumble up her arms, and reveals the most glorious set of knives ever. Stone is-
Stone is in love.
Fox, the bastard, is unfazed as she unlatches the holsters, one-by-one, letting it drop into the bin. The forearms underneath, now exposed, are just as pretty as the knives themselves. She reaches down, and those lovely forearms are hidden away under her sleeves again, but she pulls out two more pretty knives from her boots.
“Alright, let’s get started.” She makes to move past Fox, but he thrusts his arm out, blocking her way. She bumps into it, slanting him a serious look, and Fox’s eyes are equally as stern—dare Stone say, impassioned—and Stone silently cheers in his head. Yes, Fox, go get the girl .
He didn’t expect him to be good at flirting.
But Fox is Fox and immediately proves his assumption wrong by taking on the resemblance of a plastoid wall. The next words out of his mouth are slightly unnecessarily harsh. “ All your weapons, Senator.”
She sighs, seemingly not taking any offense. “You’re ruining all my fun, Commander.”
“Dismal,” he says blandly, and Stone bemoans his lack of flirtation. Hells, this is not how picking up a woman works–even Fox should know this. Where is the eye contact? The flair? The tension, the romance?
Well, at least he's doing the broody thing. Some natborns are into that.
Petulant, she steps back. Her fingers dance up to her sash, fumbling for a second on the knot, and Stone averts his eyes to Fox because he’s polite like that. But Fox is still watching her, so he sneaks a peek, and she’s wearing a mesh top and then a tanktop under her outer covering. He also very fortunately gets his with the glory of her arms which.
Wow.
Just wow.
They’re so muscular. Her body is Force-kriffing amazing, and she has a whole armory on that body, not limited to the many knives she's dropped into the bin, and-
He could go on. About the knives, but also her.
She twists, her well-muscled arm reaching over her back, muscles straining, and Stone is almost a little too enraptured, but he does catch Fox’s cold bastard act crack, letting that flicker of interest ripple out as he takes in her—her hot, kriffing arms, veins bulging, sinewy forearms dragging a karking battle-axe, and oh, Fox, what a strong man he is for resisting that. He hadn't even noticed the battle-axe; her shoulders are broad, deliciously so, and her get-up is almost as elaborate as the Naboo.
She drops a couple more weapons into the case, a handful of knives, two guns, a folded-up sword, another handful of knives.
“There,” she says, and maybe, it sounds a little mournful. She casts a longing look at the axe. “My weapons. Happy?”
“Senator…” Fox breaks finally with the tiniest of sighs. “All of them.”
Black eyes, round, blink twice, beguiling. “That was all of them, Commander.”
Charmingly strong woman, meet impenetrable wall, Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard, Stone thinks wryly. He adjusts his stance, drawing the flicker of a glance from the aide who stands behind the senator, blank.
“The sessions starts in seven minutes,” Fox informs her blandly, and he arches his eyebrow in a move that surprises Stone. “You wouldn't want to be late for your first session, would you?”
“You wouldn't want me undressing in the Senate Rotunda, would you?” She counters, chin tilted upwards.
“This is a private room, Senator.” Fox says, and it's years of working with him that Stone catches the tilt to his shoulders, the playful set to his jaw. This ass is enjoying it.
“Not private enough for the two of us, Commander,” she damn-near purrs.
Stone is so setting them up together. He doesn't know how but he's going to.
Fox doesn't react.
The senator doesn't twitch either at his stoicness. It’s a standoff.
The aide—Sai—sighs. “Just get rid of them. We’re going to be late.”
“I don’t have any weapons, though,” she says, saccharine sweet. She looks perfectly innocent too. If it was Stone up there, he’d say something about those illegal guns she has as arm-muscles and get court-martialed then decommissioned, but it’s also her tone that tips him off.
It’s always the innocent ones.
“Senator.”
She huffs, rustling her bangs. “Fine. One knife.”
“No knives.” Fox tips his head downwards as a challenge.
“I’m a Shinobi, Commander—we like our knives.”
“Off.” Stone thinks maybe Fox is flirting. He’s probably wrong, though. It’s Fox. He probably doesn’t know how to flirt.
“If you insist.” The senator takes her skirt off. She has shorts on underneath, but her thighs, Force, her thighs-
He probably makes a sound because the aide slants a sideways look at him, and Stone holds himself very, very still. He’s just a plastoid wall. He doesn’t exist. He’s a Guard. Those thighs of hers are phenomenal. He’s a part of the plastoid wall.
If Stone was just a little bolder, he’d proposition her.
Anyway, she also has a veritable hoard of weapons under that skirt, and she divests herself of all of them. Stone notes a couple more knives, a folded up sword, a vibroknife, some sort-of chain weapon, two fans with wicked-sharp edges, another smaller battle-axe, a couple blasters, etc. It takes nearly five minutes to unlatch every buckle from her legs and pull every knife and mini-blaster out of her hidden pockets, and he can tell Fox is slightly impressed as well. She’s redressed in under a couple minutes though, with a little help from Sai, her aide, who puts her hair up almost effortlessly. When the man bends over, though, to pick up a hairclip, Stone sees the imprint of a blaster over his ass, and he flashes Fox a signal. Blaster.
If they weren't actively making his job harder, he'd say these guys were fun.
Fox lets out the barest hint of a sigh. “Sai-san, all of your weapons as well.”
There’s a sense of false sheepishness as the aide removes the last of his visible weapons—though Stone’s sure there’s a couple more. The most impressive one, however, is a giant sword with a thin blade. Apparently, it was tucked down the back of his shirt.
The senator arches an eyebrow. “Ten seconds, Commander.”
“Senator Tenten,” Fox nods, courteous, and Stone damn-near flinches outright because- “Welcome to the Republic.”
Her name is Tenten.
The irony is perfect, and Stone might be smiling a little too forcefully under his bucket as he stands guard, and the aide gives him a strange look because his body language must be karked six ways to Hells by now, but-
Senator Tenten, he thinks and nearly giggles out loud.
She’s regal, untouchable in the way that Amidala usually is, when she steps past Fox and through the doorway to the booth, her aide trailing behind her. The door whooshes shut.
Stone and Fox stand in silence.
“So…” Stone begins, and Fox sighs like he’s been ordered to blow up the Guard’s barracks. “‘Tenten’, huh?”
“That’s Senator to you, bastard,” he says sharply.
He continues as if he didn’t hear Fox. “I know a guy, y’know—CC-1010-”
“Stone-”
“1010 and Tenten.” Oh, Stone is the funniest man alive. The deadest man too, but at least he’ll go out knowing what he knows now.