FIC: ST RPS -- Turnabout Intruder in My Pants (5/7)
Title: Turnabout Intruder in My Pants (5/7)
Author: the_deep_magic
Pairing: Pinto
Rating: PG-13 (NC-17 overall)
Word Count: 2,701
Warnings: crack, overused fandom trope, a bit o’ angst
Disclaimer: so very, very untrue
Summary: bodyswap!fic
A/N: It’s a Halloween treat! Okay, so I didn’t really mean to lie last time, I just wasn’t expecting the “bit of a delay” to last eight months. But believe it or not, it pained me for every day of those eight months. Well, I took a couple of Sundays off. But seriously, this was never far from my mind, even though it took this long to get started again, and I hope it lives up to your expectations. I'm mucho nervous. I know it’s not much, but part 6 is in the editing process and part 7 is about half-written, so you really won’t have to wait that long again. Just the fact that people haven’t forgotten about this fic amazes me - thank you, guys. You keep me going. And my deepest gratitude to ewinfic, who never tires of encouraging me. I’ll post the whole thing at pinto_fic when it’s complete.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday
Friday
“Chris, what-”
“Quick, get in here before anybody sees us.”
“Oh my god, this is insane.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t even know-”
“That’s really you in there?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“Are we completely losing our minds?”
“Maybe? I don’t know.”
“God, this is so… It’s… It’s good to see you. Or, um, me. But mostly you.”
“You too. Sorry I was so pissy on the phone, but I’ve kind of been…”
“Yeah, same here. So… now what?”
“Well, I’m tired, so you’ve got to be exhausted. Maybe if we just sleep on it for now?”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
“It’s your place, so you can have the bed. I’ll take the couch.”
“My mom would probably kill me for not arguing, but I’m going to take you up on that. Thanks.”
“Go for it. And, uh… Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“Is that really what my ass looks like from the back?”
“Affirmative, Captain.”
&&&
Turns out there’s nothing like seeing your own face staring back at you across your doorstep to make all your other problems seem very, very small. Chris remembers arguing with Zach about something, but for the life of him, he can’t think what.
He wakes up on the couch, then as reality slowly comes to him, he shoots up, staring at his hands and hoping to see his own- Nope. Goddamn hairy wrists. It was stupid to think that mere proximity plus sleep would magically do anything about it, but every time Chris wakes up, even from a quick nap, he has that split second of hope before it gets squashed like a bug under a steamroller.
He must have made a noise, because from the bedroom he hears a resigned “Motherfucker” and realizes Zach’s awake, too.
Chris doesn’t think he can deal with looking at his own face right at this (pre-coffee) moment, so he just yells to the other room, “You wanna use the bathroom first?”
“Yeah,” comes the answer, and Chris has a feeling Zach’s in the same state of mind.
Chris stumbles into the kitchen to fire up Zach’s ancient Mr. Coffee. After four days, he’s a pro.
&&&
“Okay, on three.”
In the opposite corner of the cleared living room, Zach huffs. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
Chris flaps his arms in annoyance. “No, of course I’m not fucking sure. But this is the very last thing I could come up with, and you didn’t have any reasonable objections on the off chance it might work.”
It’s true - they’ve spent the morning and into the afternoon trying everything either of them can think of. Chris had gotten a jumbo box of fortune cookies from the store the other day, and they each opened them again and again until Zach got “Alas, the onion you are eating may be someone else’s water lily” twice and they had to admit it wasn’t working. And that fortune cookie fortune writers were running seriously short on inspiration.
They had tried chanting various things, both while facing each other and while standing side by side in front of a mirror. So really, Chris was just spitballing when he threw out, “Hey, why don’t we just stand on either end of the room and run into each other really, really hard,” and was astonished when Zach actually took him up on it. Or, well, didn’t give him a resounding “no,” anyway.
Together they’d cleared a path through the living room and gotten all items with sharp edges or corners out of the way. Chris had even piled up blankets and pillows in the center of the room, despite Zach’s insistence that it wasn’t going to do any damn good since head injuries were the major concern here and they didn’t have helmets. After which Chris pointedly asked Zach if he thought head injuries could possibly make the situation any worse, and when Zach didn’t have a reply, Chris just stuck out his tongue and added another pillow to the pile.
Plus - and this is kind of weird, and that’s saying something considering Chris’ new threshold for “weird” - Chris feels physically pulled toward his own body like a magnet. All morning, he couldn’t help setting a hand on Zach’s (his own) shoulder every chance he got, or huddling close in as they bent over the computer, trying to pull up any missed possibilities. It makes the idea of crashing into each other, trying to get as close to his body as possible, less insane than it sounds. That’s the excuse he’s going with, at least.
But now Zach looks like he’s having second thoughts. “I’m starting to come up with a few reasonable objections.”
“No,” Chris says firmly. “Thinking is the enemy. We can’t think. We have to just… go.”
“But-”
“Do it for Louis, Zach.”
Zach contorts Chris’ face to look like he’s going to be sick. “Oh, fuck you.”
But he stops arguing. Maybe he feels it, too, the magnetic pull - Chris seems to remember Zach brushing his fingers against Chris more often than usual, getting into his space when ordinarily he would keep a healthy distance. Chris takes a deep breath and says, “Okay, right after I say three, we run as hard as we can and just… try to avoid knocking heads. One, two… three!”
Chris has to hand it to Zach - on three, he goes full tilt, and Chris does the same. They’d agreed to sort of aim chest to chest. But as fast as Chris’ body is, Zach’s legs are longer, so Chris gets to the pile of pillows first, still at full speed, and is just starting to trip over them when Zach gets there, so Chris’ shoulder (under Zach’s control) sort of ends up hitting Zach’s body (under Chris’ control) square in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, and knocking them both to the floor in vaguely opposite directions.
Thrashing back and forth on the floor in the mess of pillows, Chris wheezes until his breath comes back.
“Shit,” he hears Zach repeating. “Shit shit shit. Chris, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Chris says at last. He can breathe and it hurts like a son of a bitch, but not in a way that feels like anything important’s been broken or ruptured.
“Do you need me to… do anything?”
Even imagining sitting up makes Chris dizzy. “How ‘bout we just lie here for a little while?”
“Oh, um. Okay. Sounds good to me.” Chris hears Zach shuffling around a bit, gets a quick glimpse of him as he gently stuffs a pillow under Chris’ head. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? I mean, I don’t want you to be hurt, but also because I’m kind of hoping to get that body back in one piece.”
“Yeah, no, it’ll just be sore. You just knocked the wind out of me, is all.”
“Shit,” Zach says again, flopping back onto the pillows. “I should not have agreed to that.”
“Yeah, let’s not listen to my ideas anymore,” Chris says, even though that crashing touch, fleeting as it was, felt momentarily perfect. The bit before the lancing pain, anyway.
“Except the idea about lying here for a bit. That one I can get behind.”
“Uh-huh,” Chris says. It’s actually not so bad, lying on a pile of soft stuff and staring up at the ceiling. He’s almost gotten used to talking to his own voice, but staring at his own face is still fucking with his brain.
“So,” Zach says, in a peculiarly conversational tone, “did that jar loose any particularly startling new insights?”
“Well, I don’t know if this counts, but I forgot to tell you, I talked this whole thing over with Corey-”
“You what?” Zach groans disbelievingly.
“I called Corey.”
“Did you tell him about the…”
“Yeah.”
“And he believed you?”
“Disturbingly quickly, as a matter of fact.”
Zach groans again, and Chris can actually hear his own palm hitting his own forehead. “My own brother wouldn’t believe me. He thought it was a prank.”
Ouch. “Zach. I would think it was a prank if I wasn’t currently stuck in your body. I wouldn’t believe me.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Zach says, glancing down at the floor, and Chris is a little taken aback at the clearly audible hurt in his own voice. Is he usually that transparent?
He figures he’d better change the subject. Or, well, change it back. “Has Corey always talked like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like…” Chris struggles to encapsulate Corey in a few words. “Like Aristotle on heavy narcotics.”
Chris feels a motion on the pillows like Zach shaking his head. “Peyote, actually. Summer between junior and senior year, he went to Arizona on a ‘spirit quest.’ But the best Neal and I can tell, he actually spent three months stoned off his gourd in a makeshift yurt behind O’Flannery Brothers Auto Repair in Sedona.”
“Yurts aren’t Native American.”
“Yeah, neither are the O’Flannery brothers. Anyway, Corey was never quite the same after that.”
“Well, he had some, uh, interesting theories about our predicament.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He said we ought to think about why this happened. Not just, you know, what did it, but… what we’re supposed to learn from it, I guess?”
Zach takes a few long moments to process that, then says, “Yeah, that’d be Corey.”
“So… now what?” Chris asks, daring to slowly sit up. It’s a process that must be taken in stages. “Is there some kind of voodoo priestess in the neighborhood? Do you have a copy of the Necronomicon?”
“No such thing,” Zach sighs, his face turned away from Chris on the pillow. “Besides, all we’d end up doing is summoning the Old Ones. Read your Lovecraft.”
“Never was one for short stories,” Chris says, grabbing a pillow and scooting over to where they’d moved the couch against the wall. Actually climbing up on the couch seems a bit ambitious, so he just props himself up against the base and closes his eyes, trying to imagine a world where this - any of this - makes sense.
Chris has been turning it over and over in his brain for four and a half days now, and he simply can’t think about it anymore, at least not right now. But he’s got his friend here in their peculiar predicament, and with some serious denial in place, he can have some fun with it. “Heeeeey, Zach?”
There’s a sigh from the stack of pillows. “What?”
“Did you ever figure out if my body turned you straight?”
“Did I… oh. Oh.” There’s a meaningful pause. “Well. I may have perused some, uh, adult viewing materials on the internet. And certain… acts and/or anatomical structures which once puzzled me are now… clearer in their appeal.”
“So you jerked it to het porn, huh?”
He hears Zach roll over. “You know,” Zach says, “for someone who was all ‘ewww, don’t touch my bathing suit area’ a few days ago, you sure are being cavalier about this.”
Chris knows he’s blushing now - Zach’s cheeks are absolutely the worst at hiding it - but whatever. This isn’t real. None of this feels real. Not the ache in his chest, not the couch against his back, not his own voice across the room. Here, ensconced in Zach’s body with his eyes closed, he can say whatever he wants. “I’m kinda getting used to it, you know? The whole gay thing.”
Zach snorts, and there’s an unexpected bitterness in his tone. “Good for you. That only took me all of my adolescence and most of college to come to terms with.”
“No, no, I’m not trying to say I understand what it’s like to… y’know, go out in the world and be something that you feel like you have to hide, something ignorant people condemn. I’m just saying… a dude with another dude. I get it. It’s hot. Or it can be, anyway. Depending on the dudes in question.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t think…” Zach’s tone is so compelling that Chris opens his eyes. Zach is sitting up now, wide-eyed. “You don’t think that’s the revelation we were supposed to come to, do you? You know, Corey’s thing?”
The thought had occurred to Chris just the day before, but when he heard Zach’s admission just a few moments ago, he knew that couldn’t be it, whatever it was. “We’re still in the wrong bodies, Zach. If that was the thing, we’d probably have switched back.”
Zach sighs, looks down at Chris’ body dressed in an old Berkeley sweatshirt and pair of jeans. “Yeah.”
He sounds so forlorn that Chris says the only thing he can think of to placate him. “Y’know, I’m actually getting used to this body. It’s not so bad.”
With a snort, this time one of laughter, Zach looks up. “Why Chris, that might be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. My body is, and I quote, ‘not so bad.’”
Chris laughs too. “Seriously. You’ve got some nice muscle tone going on here. And your abs? I’m totally jealous.” He leaves out the body hair bit. Something about that seems… inappropriate to share at the moment. “It just took me a couple days to learn how to move right.”
Zach grins. “You’re not so bad yourself. I feel bad about the chicken legs comment - you can run pretty fast, especially when you’ve been delayed by security and your flight’s about to take off.”
“You still didn’t tell me the full story. I want to hear all about Bev.”
“You can’t have Bev. She’s mine. Our wedding will be small, but we’re honeymooning in the south of France.”
After mutual chuckles, they fall silent again, and Chris forces himself to look at Zach, really look at his own body tangled amongst the blankets on the floor. “Zach?” he says, more somber this time.
“Yeah?”
“What if we…? I’m saying… maybe we should prepare ourselves. Not give up, you know, but just start thinking about what happens if…”
“…we never switch back,” Zach finishes for him.
&&&
Chris is in the unenviable position of trying very, very hard not to be jealous of his own body. Zach can and has gone out for food, and though it was never said aloud, a bit of a walk so they can both be by themselves to process. For Chris, at least, the fact that he might never be back in his own body had never even occurred to him until he spent a whole day staring at it, trying not to touch it.
By now he’s pretty sure Zach had felt it, too, the need to put his hands back on what’s his. It’s part of the reason why they needed a little time apart - Chris found himself repeatedly drawn back to his own body, past the point of comforting pats on the shoulder. At one point, Zach had simply taken Chris’ hand - well, his own hand - and looked at it, rubbed a thumb over the smooth palm and turned it over. It felt strange to Chris, of course, but he wasn’t about to say anything about it. Not when he was burning with the desire to do the same.
It’s his body, dammit. He’s supposed to be able to put his hands on his hips when he’s frustrated. Zach isn’t supposed to be licking his lips without even realizing he’s doing it. The simple wrongness of it is… indescribable.
Not that Zach’s body is an awful place to live. It’s certainly got better posture than his own, and it actually craves healthy food (well, okay, it craves unhealthy food, too, but Chris has never once in his own body had the thought, “God, I’d kill for an edamame and chickpea salad with a light vinaigrette right about now”). And it functions a hell of a lot better in the morning than Chris’ does, though that’s not saying much.
He stretches out his hands in front of him - he’s not ready for the mirror yet. They’re pale and long-fingered and slightly hairy at the wrists. He tries, “These are my hands. These hands belong to me.”
Nope, he’s not buying it.