Chapter Text
The drift is quiet. It’s a subtle whirl of blue hues, a flurry of thought and emotion that rolls as easily as the ocean tide. Even a master of the drift has a difficult time letting the drift truly flow freely. It takes a mind wherever it wants, careless and incessant like riptide, and fighting it is just as difficult. It’s different each time, and yet always the same experience.
But this? This is pure chaos. This is a hurricane of darkness pulling his very skin this way and that as his mind turns summersaults in his skull. At least, that’s what Chuck is imagining is happening. His brain feels like mush, and it probably is, from the turbulence tossing his consciousness like a petulant toddler throwing a tantrum. The lack of memories through the darkness is frightening to him. Fear is the overriding emotion seeping through the drift, and he realizes with a start that it’s not all his own.
That start jerks his brain, jerks his very subconscious in a way that sends him screaming back to himself.
Chuck gasps for breath and clutches his knees. The helmet has already been ripped from his head and now lies helplessly on the floor. He braces himself for the expected quips of carelessness and abuse of equipment from the doctor nearby but Newt is uncharacteristically silent – something that should be setting off alarm bells in his already-ringing mind, but as his rolling stomach settles, Chuck thinks there’s nothing that could possibly startle him after that clusterfuck of a failed drift.
Until he looks down at the white-knuckled grip on his knees. The skin there is far too golden for his liking, and his prize scar from his first bar fight at sixteen is mysteriously missing from his left knuckle. Newt’s still staring at him like an incompetent fuck, so Chuck finally rumbles, “What in the fuck was that, mate?”
Except the words are lacking the familiar edge; rather, they’re low and even and feel far too foreign on his tongue. It’s not his. Whatever the drift just did, it’s not his voice tumbling from his lips. He turns from the doctor–
–and gets a face-full of himself.
Chuck starts again – so violently this time that he hits the floor. Who in the fuck is that staring back at him? The other him looks equally as freaked out. A stream of colorful curses come out in a haphazard, uneven accent, and that’s when it clicks. It’s not another him. It’s not even him.
It’s Raleigh.
As him.
And he’s Raleigh.
“Newt–” Chuck gives pause again at the American accent rolling from his tongue. “You’ve got exactly five seconds to tell us what the fuckis going on.”
“I – holy shit – never seen anything like –”
“You’re running out of time, mate.” The words don’t sound nearly as threatening without the Australian edge. The honey-smooth slowness of Becket’s low voice drowns the words in a nicety that Chuck’s never could afford. The stark contrast between that and his inherited dialect is so sharp that he almost misses the scientist’s next sentence.
“Something happened within that drift between you two,” Newt begins. “It’s like… instead of swapping memories, your neural connection swapped… you. Your essence, or soul, I guess, if you believe in that. Whatever part of the brain’s conscious that goes into the drift, it somehow got crossed in the middle and returned to the wrong head.”
Chuck exchanges a glance with – himself? Raleigh? – and quickly returns his gaze to Newt. Way too fucking weird to be seeing himself outside his own body. There was no way Becket felt any differently, if the expression he saw there was any indication.
“Okay, so how do we fix it?” Raleigh, ever the go-getter, rolls his – Chuck’s? – shoulders to square himself for whatever answer the scientist provided.
Newt gulp’s gulp was more than likely a trained response to hearing the accent rather than the actual question himself. The guy, after taking a second to collect himself, leans backward in his chair and says, “Guys, you know how shittily-documented the drift process was. It’s not like Lightcap had a lot of time to work with here. My professional opinion?” He ignores Chuck’s pointed cough and plows through with, “Drift again. Give me some time to set things up and we’ll see if re-doing the entire process will be enough to fix you.”
Chuck wants to argue. Everything about this feels alien to him – he’s not surprised, he’s in a completely different body, for fuck’s sake. The sooner he can get back into his own skin, the better, in his opinion. “Fine. And for fuck’s sake, until we fix this, nobody knows about it, alright?”
The complete and utter look of contempt Raleigh plasters all over his own features, a look he’s never witnessed personally, tells him that Raleigh is on the exact same page. And damn, if that look isn’t powerful.