Chapter Text
DREAM
Michael turns away from the gift Alex offers: a six-pack of beer, a thick, red folder, a guitar, and a key to the shed all at once in the palm of Alex’s right hand, which makes no sense. You’re dreaming occurs to him, too gently to collapse the dream.
“You have to take it,” Alex tells Michael, who remains turned away. “I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me nothing.”
“But it’s yours.” Warmth glows on the skin over his heart as Alex looks at the gift in his hand. The gift is small but as complex as a jewel holding a galaxy and contains the guitar and the beer and the folder and the warm nights in the shed. The sum of them is grand and complicated in the logic of the dream, to a degree that Alex can’t understand. “I can’t use any of this.”
“I’m saying no.”
“But it’s for you.”
Alex’s phone rang at four in the morning, yanking him out of a disquieting dream. It was Liz Ortecho, telling him that she had stolen Noah Bracken’s body by running Flint Manes off the road.
“Yeah, I know. Flint called me.” Flint had been apoplectic over the phone, accusing Alex of betraying his family, his country, his honor, his yankee-doodle-whatever. Alex had tuned him out, worried, because who else would have known the body’s whereabouts except for Liz? But Flint had found no one nearby to blame, so Alex knew Liz and her car were undamaged enough to have driven away, and sure enough, when he’d hacked into the traffic cam on Main Street, he saw Liz’s car roll on by, the front panel scraped to shit. “I told him I did it, to keep you off his radar.”
“Oh! Well, thank you?”
“Are you good? Do you need anything else?”
“No, I just. Someone reminded me that I should have called you earlier, and he’s right. I should have.”
“Tell Kyle thank you for me, then.”
“Actually, it was Michael who insisted.” Through the line, Alex could just hear Michael say, “Hey, I said wait for the morning. Let someone get some sleep tonight.”
“Tell him I was already awake.”
“But were you?” Liz asked pointedly.
“Goodnight, Liz.” Alex closed the connection and rested his hand on his chest, clutching his phone. Whatever he had just dreamed had slipped through his memory already, but Michael was in it, and the taste of rejection. Alex’s brain wasn’t subtle. Eventually it slowed enough for Alex to sleep until the midmorning sun sliced in through his window. Alex awoke with the thought, I keep giving him what I think he wants. Not what he actually wants.
He knew what he needed to do. He showered, dressed, packed the gift he knew he must give to Michael, and drove to the junkyard.
Nothing stirred as Alex approached the trailer, and knocking on the door returned nothing. He raised his hand to knock again, but then smoothed his palm against the door and looked down. Michael was here, but not in the trailer, and the bunker didn’t exactly have a doorbell. Alex clenched his fist and pounded next to the door. Before the metal walls stopped rattling, the trailer began to move. Alex stumbled out of the way.
Michael popped half-way out of the bunker’s hatch as soon as the trailer cleared, annoyed. “If this is about the body, it’s gone already.”
“No,” said Alex. “I brought you something.”
“Alex. Stop giving me stuff I don’t want.”
The rejection stung, but Alex told himself it’s not about me and said, “It’s not a gift. It belongs to you.”
“Fine.” Michael looked around as he descended the ladder. “C'mon,” his voice echoed up, “before someone sees you.”
Alex handed his backpack down to Michael and then followed. “Be careful. It’s fragile.” The hatch door shut as the trailer ground back into place, locking them both into the gloom.
Michael withdrew to the table and waited until Alex reached the end of the ladder before holding up the backpack, unopened. “What’s so important that you had to deliver it yourself? Or are you returning my stuff? It’s not like I had the chance to leave anything at your place.”
Alex joined Michael at the table. “You didn't leave it at my place, but it does belong to you.” He nodded at the backpack. "Go ahead."
Michael opened the backpack and glanced in, then up at Alex, surprised again. “Where did you find this?”
“At the cabin."
"Your place."
"It was Jim Valenti's first. I found that behind a wall in the basement."
"Jesus." Michael carefully drew the curved glass from the backpack. Under his touch lights scintillated across its surface, alternately obscuring and emphasizing the symbols along one side.
"At first I didn't know what it was, and when I did figure it out, I didn't know what to do."
"How long did you have it?"
"Too long."
Michael stroked the glass and watched the light show. Alex expected a demand for an explanation, or anger, maybe, for having kept the piece, but Michael said nothing.
“It looks like maybe it'll fit your console,” said Alex.
Michael looked up. “Trying to get rid of me?”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Alex said, “but I can’t exactly make you stay.” Alex nudged a burl of dark, alien glass with his fingernail to avoid Michael’s anger or worse, his disappointment. Green reflected through the glass, dimmer than a firefly. He knew Michael was looking at him. He knew it, and he didn’t know how he knew. “Maybe you’ll build a ship. Maybe someone from your world will come. I can tell you why I want you to stay, but the decision to go?” He finally met Michael’s gaze. “That’s up to you.”
Michael didn’t reply. He stared at Alex in that direct, unnerving way Alex had too often mistaken for a challenge. Alex let the moment hang. It was Michael’s move, now. Just as the quiet became unbearable, Michael resumed examining the glass, turning it over. The knuckles of his right hand were torn up; a grubby bandana covered his left hand. He muttered, “Not all of ‘em fit.”
“And you keep trying anyway,” Alex said, fond. The idea of Michael leaving filled him with anguish but, stay or go, Michael would always be stubborn.
“I’ve come this far.”
The console rested on the other table, uncovered and gleaming. Rounded curves and alien symbols made it hard to guess how complete the console was, but to Alex, it looked mostly assembled. It’s his choice, Alex repeated to himself. “How much more do you have to do before it’s finished?”
“You want to know?”
“It’s important to you so, yeah, I actually do want to know. What’s left to do?”
Michael scowled, and for a moment Alex thought he was about to be kicked to the curb, but then the scowl faded, and Michael actually answered him. “Find as many pieces as I can. I know where to dig. I just need a little luck.” Michael rummaged among a dozen chunks of glossy fragments. “Sometimes one will attach itself even if it’s a different color. Only a few don’t light up.” He picked up the hunk of oval glass Alex had noticed. It was roughly the size and shape of an Xbox game controller and appeared whole. Though etched with symbols similar to the others, it was dark, lifeless in Michael’s hand.
“Maybe it’s missing a battery.”
Michael scoffed. “Yeah, I’ll just run down to Wally world for some triple-alien-As.”
Alex reached for it. “It doesn’t look bro--”
Alex was on the floor. His left hip ached and pain stabbed his left elbow. The bulbs hanging from the ceiling buzzed like insects above him. He had been standing next to the table, talking with Michael--maybe making progress because he hadn’t been kicked out like he’d half expected--and in the next instant he was under it. Grit and crumpled food wrappers littered the floor. Other than the weird hum, the bunker was silent.
Alex struggled to sit up. The nerve in his elbow flared in agony. He clenched his teeth as he chanted fuck, fuck, fuck in a pained string of fricatives until the pain backed from a shrieking ten to a throbbing six.
His mouth was wrong. His arms wouldn’t push the right way. The lights were still on but everything seemed dull. His hearing had been affected -- by what, he had no idea, but something had happened -- because the hum continued, his own voice sounded off, and under it all his ears rang faintly, as if after an explosion.
“Michael,” he said, and cleared his throat because it wasn’t his voice coming out. He was injured, his hearing impacted, something was wrong wrong wrong. His pulse kicked. His breath heaved out of control until he bit it back, slowed it down.
Michael lay on the floor on the other side of the table, curled away from Alex, unmoving.
But it wasn’t Michael. Narrower shoulders. Short, dark hair. No one he recognized. He cast about, but they were alone.
Alex couldn’t stand, so he scrambled under the table, palms and knees scraping across the floor, to reach the man. Alex grasped the man’s shoulder, which roused a weak groan from him. Alex turned him gently, and a flash of confused recognition startled him. What the hell is Elliot doing here? Elliot, an older cousin who he hadn’t seen since before he signed up, the one his mother used to say looked more like him than his own brothers did. To find him, here, was a shocking incongruence that left Alex completely out of context in the moment. The man’s eyes fluttered open.
Alex flinched.
That’s not Elliot.
Blood beaded up from a scrape on the man’s forehead. He blinked and grimaced, peering around as if half blind. “Izzy?” He focused on Alex with the pained squint Alex saw in the mirror on hangover mornings. The man's deep frown smoothed out in shock. He reached toward Alex’s face, and then withdrew to touch his own hair. He trailed his hand down his face to his chest.
Alex took inventory of himself and found what he hadn’t processed before: henley, belt buckle, dusty jeans, boots. Sweaty curls on his head. And lying on the floor next to him, though he looked like Alex, was Michael.
“Michael,” he said. His voice was still wrong, but he had context now. This was Michael’s voice from inside Michael’s skull.
Michael looked wildly about, and then back again. “Where’s Isobel?”
“We’re the only ones here.”
Michael focused on him. Alex watched his eyes flick up and down, drawing the ridiculous conclusion. “Alex?”
“Yes, it's me.” Alex refused to look at his own face and kept his gaze on the pocket of his own jacket, there on his own body, which was occupied by Michael.
*
Moving another person’s body from the inside took concentration. Alex helped Michael to his feet. Both of them clung to the table. Michael swayed back and forth, frowning at the prosthetic. Alex shuffled a bit, wondering why suddenly having both feet did not feel odd. His elbow was still tender, collateral damage from fainting dead away onto a concrete floor, but the pain had faded. Michael's bruise under the scrape was darkening, but he seemed alert. He must have clipped the table on the way down.
“So,” said Michael. “This is…”
“Yeah.”
“It wasn’t random,” Michael said. He rummaged through the contents of the table with purpose. “It didn’t just happen. Must have been the--I don’t see it.”
“What?”
“The piece I showed you. The one that didn’t light up. Or didn’t used to light up.”
"What piece?" Alex vaguely remembered thinking about an Xbox controller.
“There aren’t many of the shards that don’t light up, and this one wasn’t even broken.”
“And you think it, uh.” Alex swallowed. “Switched us?”
“I picked it up and soon as you touched it--” He mimed an explosion coming from his temple with one hand. “Pshwooo.”
“Were you touching anything besides the, the thing? Were you leaning on the table? Anything in your pockets?”
“You have my pockets,” Michael said.
Oh. “Right.” Alex wormed his fingers into the front left pocket, felt weird about it and gave up. He patted himself down instead. Keys in the front right pocket, wallet in the back right pocket.
“And no, there’s nothing in them,” Michael added. He might have been amused, watching Alex fumble, but Alex couldn’t read Michael’s subtler expressions from Alex’s own face. “I keep all the alien tech down here.”
“Why do you remember it but I don’t?”
“Because I’m an alien?”
“Actually,” Alex said, struck by a thought, “you’re not an alien. Not right now. Technically speaking.”
Michael's eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “No."
Alex ground his teeth. He really did look like that. "Yes. One hundred percent human. Well, except for the leg."
"Ohhh, no. No, no, no, no, no, that is bullshit.”
Indignant denial looked just like Michael, even on a different face, which was a relief.
“We have got to switch right the fuck back.” Michael pawed through the contents of the table. “Help me find it. Chunk of glass, yea big, doesn’t light up.”
Michael found it on the floor, obscured by an edge of the tarp that usually covered the console. He fell out of the squat he attempted and bitched about it in frustration. Alex said nothing, partly out of empathy and partly out of reluctance to acknowledge his own difficulties. Feeling different aches and pains in this body was a logical outcome of swapping bodies, but the bunker looked off. The persistent hum was distracting. Mostly it was constant, but he was beginning to notice that the frequency fluctuated. A little higher, a little lower. Never loud enough to acknowledge but not soft enough to ignore, like the feeling of someone creeping up behind him.
"Wait," said Michael when Alex offered him a hand to rise from the floor. "If it works and knocks us out again, might as well stay down. My ass is sore enough, and not in the fun way. Well, your ass, since we're speaking technically."
Alex cleared his throat instead of saying and my ass appreciates that. He'd missed the obnoxious flirting, but Michael wasn't flirting--he was nervous. "Yeah, good idea."
They settled together, side by side. Michael picked up the piece. Alex remembered it: seemingly unbroken, shaped as if made to be held in two palms, dark. "It lit up?"
Michael nodded. "When you touched it. Next thing I knew, I was on the ground."
Alex touched the piece. It was smooth. He laid more of his hand on it and overlapped Michael's hand, which was warmer than the glass but cooler than he expected.
Nothing happened.
*
Not until after they tried touching the device in different orders and simultaneously, different positions in the hand, and in conjunction with shards from the table, did they realize their situation was more immediately dire.
"No," Alex said, refusing Michael's umpteenth demand to recreate their positions just before the switch. "It's not going to work, and I'm starving."
"You give up too easy."
"I'm here, aren't I."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Seriously, I've got to eat. You should, too." Alex wasn't going to explain if Michael couldn't figure out why he'd handed over the shard as soon as he set foot on the bunker floor. "The both of us have to take a break or we'll miss something. And I need the head."
Michael scowled deeply with Alex's face. The expression landed between pissed and migraine. "Fine." He turned toward the ladder and Alex watched the anger drain from him, lowering his shoulders. "I can't open the hatch."
“You have to be careful with the foot, but you can use a ladder.”
“You don’t get it! I can’t open the hatch.” He made a gesture at the ladder.
"What do you mean, you can't open the hatch?" Soon as he spoke, he connected Michael’s gesture with his distress: Michael was talking about his telekinesis. Michael was in Alex's body, and Alex could not move things with his mind.
"I can't move the Airstream." Michael sounded lost. "I can't move anything."
“So how do we get out?”
"You'll have to do it."
Alex climbed the ladder and opened the hatch the conventional way, but there wasn't enough clearance to wriggle out from under the Airstream. He climbed back down. They both stared up at the mouth of the shaft.
"So how do I move it?"
"You just--" Michael held up his hand, palm out, and glared up "--move it."
"So what do I do? Clear my mind, feel the Force?"
"It's not Star Wars. Jesus. You don't have to clear your mind. Don't think about it, just do it."
"Don't think about something I don't know how to do, but do it."
They bickered. Michael tried to pace but couldn't gracefully handle the prosthetic so he lurched around the table, holding on. The sight embarrassed Alex, then infuriated him, and the spike in blood pressure increased the background noise that wouldn't go away.
"Give me one useful verb here," Alex said. "A muscle that I can, I don't know. Aim? Flex?"
"There's no flexing your muscles," Michael said, disgusted. Alex scrubbed his face with both hands. "No, keep your arm up!"
"What the fuck do you mean?"
“I don’t know! Just move the damn thing.”
“Sure, just as soon as you walk across the room,” he snapped.
Michael staggered away from the table and marched all the way to the ladder. He gripped a rung as soon as he reached it, mouth open, surprised, and then smug.
“That was muscle memory,” Alex said, "and a lot of PT.”
“Moving shit around with my brain is muscle memory, too. I had to practice for years to control it.” Michael tilted his face to look up at the hatch, frowning deeply. “God damn, you can’t feel anything in this body, can you. Just … just … It’s the big metal thing above us. It’s metal, but it’s not really all that heavy. It’s hollow. Right above your head. C'mere. Look at it.”
Alex looked up the ladder to the dim underside of the trailer, a blur of gray. The faint hum continued, but it buzzed differently at the foot of the ladder. Higher in pitch maybe. Now lower, now wavering. He closed his eyes to shut out the weird shadows and concentrate on the hum.
“Why are you squinching your eyes?”
Alex glared at him. “I’m not squinching my eyes.”
“You were! And you don’t need to,” Michael insisted. He gestured up the ladder. “It’s right there! Just shove it out of the way!”
Alex couldn’t hear the hum over their arguing, but in his irritation he could feel it build. The nearest thing he’d felt before was scuffing his feet on carpet to shock his brothers when they were kids. Was it the hum? “Will you shut up! I can’t hear it.”
“Hear what?”
Alex glared at him, then looked up the shaft again. He reached, palm out, thought about the charge building, the humming, his mounting irritation with Michael, and then --
The trailer hopped straight up, three feet at least, and landed hard. Alex stepped back, elated and a little dizzy. Dust sifted down from the ceiling.
“What the fuck?” Michael shouted. "That's my house!"
Alex grinned. “I moved it.”
“Move it gently!”
*
It took three more tries to move the trailer sufficiently clear of the hatch. Michael griped bitterly about the state of his belongings and pointed out the growing possibility that someone might actually notice a 27-foot Airstream leaping around the junkyard. Alex worried, but elation from moving an object with his mind eclipsed all other considerations. Topside, he could muster only a little regret at the state of Michael's things.
"God damn it, Alex!" Michael hollered as Alex pulled him to his feet. "I have to live here!"
"I'll help you fix it.”
"Don't touch anything." Michael limped heavily to the door, muttering as he opened it. "You fucker, you got the coffee maker." Michael shouted him down when Alex suggested he could move the trailer over the hatch again. Instead he made Alex throw a tarp over the closed hatch, and then demanded his cell phone, which was in Alex's front pocket.
"Who're you calling?"
Michael typed quickly. "The mind is Isobel’s specialty."
*
Isobel emerged from the car and stopped cold as soon as she looked at Alex. "Michael," she said, shocked. "What did you do?"
Michael raised his hands. "It wasn't my fault."
She ignored him, staring at Alex as if she could bore through his skull with her eyes. "You're not--you're not--" Isobel's voice was deep, horrified.
Suddenly Alex was in a hyper-saturated landscape with Isobel. They were in the junkyard, but the junk was sparser. Colors exploded and smeared. The constant tinnitus attenuated into a frequency beyond hearing, which was a relief, but the lack of it flattened the space between them and the horizon so that the sky felt like a backdrop hung just beyond his fingertips.
"What is this place?" Alex turned in a circle, the details familiar but not, and nearly lost his balance because the foot of his prosthetic slipped in the loose dirt. He looked down--the clothes he'd put on this morning. He reached for his hair--short, straight.
"Alex?" Isobel gaped at him. "How are you here? Where's Michael?"
He examined his hands, flexing them before looking up at Isobel. "You fixed it."
"I've done nothing. Where's Michael?"
"He's--" Michael was gone, but Alex knew he was nearby, out of sight. "It had to have been some alien tech that switched us. We touched a-a device of some kind, passed out, and woke up in each other's bodies," Alex explained. He ran his hand down the front of his shirt. "But you fixed it."
Isobel stepped close. Alex stood his ground. She reached as if to pet his hair, and he stepped away. Her hand dropped, and she frowned deeply, her mouth a thin line. "This is…"
"What? What is it?"
"Impossible."
"I don't understand."
"I've never interacted with a human mind that can do what you're doing now."
"But." Alex plucked at his jacket and touched his face. "I'm--me."
Isobel slowly shook her head, and then Alex was back in the dull world of the junkyard wearing Michael's clothes and Michael's hair and Michael's everything else. Michael was steps away, wearing Alex's body.
Isobel got into Michael's space, forcing him back an awkward step. "What the hell happened?"
"I swear, I didn't do anything."
Isobel glared at him, and they shared a mutual stillness for a long moment before Isobel slowly shook her head, disbelieving. "You're in there, but you didn't get any of that, did you?"
"Get what?" replied Michael, blank, before he heated up, indignant. "Did you do a mind whammy on me? Iz. Iz! Did you just make me do something stupid?"
"I...have no idea how to fix this."
*
They agreed to retreat to the Valenti cabin. The junkyard would open tomorrow and Sanders would roll into the shop by nine in the morning at least, Michael explained, earlier if he was motivated. Isobel couldn't shut out her friends and social connections as they stopped by her house to check up on her in her widowhood.
Michael gathered choice bits of alien tech, including the device that had screwed them over, and packed them carefully into a crate. Apparently still pissed about the trailer, he warned Alex, "Don't even think about it," and used his truck to move the Airstream back into place. The truck kicked up gravel as it jerked ahead too fast, braked too hard. "Use your left foot," Alex yelled, but Michael ignored him and drove into a junked minivan, shattering the truck’s headlight.
Michael slammed the door of the truck and limped to the back bumper, hanging onto the truck the entire way. "This sucks, Manes. How the hell does anyone put up with this bullshit? I can't even drive my own truck." Michael's emotions often looked boyish on him, but with Alex's face, his mulish glare looked like poorly restrained rage. No mirror or video footage was as revealing or appalling. Alex looked away quickly.
"You'll get it," he muttered. "It just takes practice."
"I don't want to get it," Michael shot back. He thumped his chest. "I want out of here as soon as possible so I don't have to get anything."
Alex tried not to flinch, but he couldn't be sure what his face was doing. It wasn't his face.
Michael rode with Isobel. In his Jeep, alone, Alex played loud music to cover the drone that wouldn't go away. It didn't work. Isobel followed him the entire way to the cabin, and he knew it, even when her headlights fell behind a curve in the road. He knew her car, now. He could feel it like he could see the landscape fly by, and sped up to outrace the feeling.
The sun was fully set by the time he heard them pull up to the cabin. Alex stepped out to meet them, anxious because they were nearly an hour late. “Where were you?”
Isobel sailed by like an iceberg, entered the cabin and slammed the door. Michael trailed after, dejected, and stood with Alex, shut out of his own home. “What the hell happened?”
“She found out about Noah’s body. What we did with it,” Michael said. “Liz finally called.”
“She didn’t know?”
“They say it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, but whoever they are never met Isobel,” Michael said, and went inside. Alex caught the door before it shut and followed.
Michael slumped onto the couch. Without comment, Alex fetched painkillers, a protein bar, and a bottle of water. He held out the pills. Michael startled, then cracked the bottle and washed them down without comment.
"Eat the bar. Give it twenty. The meds will help."
Michael rested his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, and Alex said, "You look tired."
"I look like you, you mean."
That stung. "Really?"
"I’m in your body. I look exactly like you.” Michael’s tone implied moron, which stung worse. “You're the one who told me I'm tired."
“I meant because you were up all night.”
Michael licked his lip, glanced at Isobel.
“So remind me, Michael, what were you doing all night?” she asked, mocking. “Oh, wait. Playing mad scientist with the body of my dead husband. And don’t think you’re off the hook.” She glared at Alex. “I know you and Kyle helped.”
“That’s right, Isobel. Liz sucks and Kyle sucks and Alex sucks and I suck for attempting a longshot miracle to bring back Max,” Michael said, deadpan, “but Max isn’t going anywhere, and I’d like to focus on fixing this first.” He waved his hand at Alex.
Isobel closed her eyes and turned her head before inhaling deeply and facing them both, seemingly centered. “Yes. First things first.”
“Food.” Over the others’ protests, Alex heated leftovers in the microwave that Isobel declined with a curl of her lip but he wolfed down, as did Michael, despite his complaints about the food. Then the three of them fiddled with the lifeless hunk of glass, carefully at first because Isobel insisted she felt a spark of psychic energy when she first picked it up, then with growing frustration as the night ticked on and nothing else happened.
"It's late. We're all tired. Let's get some rest." Alex buzzed inside his skin, restless, and doubted he'd sleep, but he knew Michael would suffer if he didn't. "We need perspective."
"Do you really want to sleep like this?" Michael asked. "Locked up in the wrong body?"
"I don't see that we have a choice."
"I want to try something," said Isobel. She explained to Alex how she could enter any person's mind and also how she could take Max or Michael with her. "I don't know for sure what will happen. Probably nothing. But it's worth seeing what this looks like, with the both of you together."
She tried to complete an interactive, conscious connection with Michael first, making him sit on the couch next to her and holding his hand. They did nothing and said nothing with calm faces. Isobel soon sighed and shook her head. "I can influence him, but he can't hear me. Not on a conscious level."
Then she gestured for Alex to sit on her other side and took his hand. "I'm going to link with you like before, but this time, Michael will be there." And suddenly she and Alex were standing in the cabin, hand-in-hand, the world around them saturated once more in color. She dropped his hand as they faced Michael, who was still seated on the couch, staring into a blank middle distance. He looked like himself. He was not vacant, but he was not aware of them. He was on pause, idling in neutral. His stillness was unsettling, but Alex was grateful to see his face where it belonged.
"Can you see him?" Isobel asked Alex.
"Yes." God, yes. Alex was sick of avoiding the sight of his own face. Sick of not seeing Michael's. "And I'm myself again."
"That body is a mental construct," she said dismissively, before approaching Michael. Alex’s leg hurt, the stump aching from a long day. If he understood Isobel correctly, his mind told him to feel the pain; it wasn't really there. But he liked seeing his own hands again.
"Michael?” Isobel asked gently. “Can you hear me?"
"I can hear you." His voice was calm. Dull.
"I want you to look at Alex. Can you see him?"
Michael turned his head. "Yes."
"Come here," Isobel ordered Alex. "Get close. Hold his hand."
"But if this is all just a mental construct, what good is it if I touch him?"
"Oh my God," she complained. "Who is the expert on telepathy here? Just take his hand. No, better yet, sit next to him and then take his hand."
Alex did as he was told. Michael's hand was familiar and warm, but he continued to idle.
Nothing happened.
*
“This might spontaneously reverse. Someone should keep an eye on both of you, which will have to be me,” Isobel said before cupping a dainty yawn in her palm. Her anger was long gone, having been replaced by focus and worry. She asked Alex, “You mind if I take the couch?” Alex nodded even as he considered where Michael would sleep. The cabin had one full-sized bed in its single bedroom. The bunkhouse was full of bunks, but no mattresses.
“It doesn’t matter,” Michael said to Alex. “Put me on the floor. I’m gonna pass out as soon as I’m horizontal.”
Alex started to explain his nightly routine with the prosthesis. “Yeah, I remember,” Michael waved him off, and Alex said, “No, you don’t. That was one time and what you remember is not my normal routine.”
Michael glared as if he wanted to argue but said, “Fine. Show me.”
Alex led him to the bedroom and ordered, “Take off your pants and sit on the bench in the shower.” Alex talked him through how to remove and wash what needed to be washed, to which Michael snapped, “Contrary to popular opinion, I do know how to shower.”
“Whatever.” He could take care of things later. The water started as Alex went straight to the fridge. He deserved a beer after today. He deserved a 12-year-old single malt scotch.
Isobel’s proximity fell like a shadow he could feel on his back. “Don’t take it personally. He’s exhausted. We all are. It’s been an extraordinarily shitty few weeks.”
Alex turned from the fridge, beer bottle in hand, and popped it open against the countertop in a practiced move without thinking. He frowned at the cap and ran his finger along the edge of the counter, feeling for damage before he casually knocked back half the bottle.
Isobel accepted a sheet and blanket and made up the couch while Alex laid a fire and wondered if she’d be comfortable, comparing her expensive clothes and the dusty cushions. She said, “The thread-count is a challenge, but I’ll be fine.” I didn’t say anything, thought Alex as she continued. “You and Michael should sleep together.”
“Do you want a list of reasons why that won’t happen?”
“I mean sleep, not have sex, and you know it. Michael--I’ve never seen him so, so drained.”
“Look, I’m not about to let him sleep on the floor. He’s not used to dealing with--” Alex changed tack. “He was up all night. He can have the bed.”
Isobel cocked an eyebrow at Alex. “Yes, but in his own body. Why is he exhausted in your body? Or were you up all night, too?”
“I, uh, right.” He had forgotten. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“You should share the bed. Telepathy is strongest at close range. Your minds want to be in their correct brains. Proximity could help, while you sleep.”
“Just like that?”
“It can’t hurt to try.”
The bathroom door opened. The change in humidity was an invisible wall that rolled through the kitchen and thickened the air. “You got crutches? I’m not hopping out there,” Michael hollered.
“Oh shit.” Alex hustled to the bathroom as Isobel called out behind him, “Just take him to bed.”
Standing in the doorway of the bathroom, wearing a towel and hanging on to the jamb on each side, Michael said, “She thinks she’s funny but she’s really not.”
“I know.” Alex ducked into his bedroom for crutches. “She has a theory that proximity might reverse it, so we should--”
“Sleep together. Got it. Sure. You got any clothes I can use?”
“Help yourself.” Alex retreated to secure the doors and lights in the cabin. He asked about Isobel’s comfort again, but she repeated, “I’m fine. Go to bed.”
Alex took a shower to delay the inevitable, sitting on the bench partly out of habit and mostly because his elbow still ached and his knuckles stung and his ears rang and he was tired, weighed down by the day all at once, wondering just how the hell this clusterfuck happened. The accidental touch of a random piece of space debris was too pat, so what led up to it?
Alex had brought the glass to Michael hoping for anything but expecting nothing. The glass was a gift, and if Michael used it to fly away, so be it. If he smashed it to pieces and still refused to see Alex, so be it. If maybe they could go forward, friends or not, well. Swapping bodies had not been one of his projections, but did it change anything, other than to put one more bizarre experience between them?
Chuckling wetly, too mentally exhausted even to cry, Alex stood and washed. The only way out was through.
He knew Michael’s body well from the outside. From the inside, he felt no particular zing from soaping up nipples or balls. Washing Michael’s body with Michael’s hands was as mundane as most daily showers were, which made logical sense but disappointed Alex’s senses and frustrated his heart. The reality was, he felt distanced from the memory of sex he’d had with Michael, and now, even the slide of skin on skin under the tepid spray felt abstract. He increased the hot water past its usual setting until it needled his throat and chest, and...oh. The extra sensation primed the rest of his nerves, and suddenly his slippery hands raised pleasure from deep down to the surface of his skin.
Oh.
He finished washing and rinsed the soap off. Rinsed the hair again because it didn’t feel smooth, like it should if it was his own hair. Ignored the weight between his legs because no one knew the exact protocol for masturbation while in someone else’s body; because if he was going to explore, he wanted more time and privacy than a quick shower; because he wanted to tell Michael what he felt while wearing Michael’s body; because he wanted to hear Michael’s reaction to Alex’s body. Breathing and taste and the weird ache under his gut and fucking.
Michael would jerk off in the shower while in someone else’s body. Alex snorted. He probably had already and, if so, Alex didn’t grudge him the pleasure.
Alex dried off and indulged in a long look in the mirror. Curls dripping. Throat flushed from the hot water. He recognized the face, but the expression was wrong. By the time he slipped into his room, Michael was dressed in sweats, sprawled on his stomach, sound asleep, light on. With the eyes closed, it was easier for Alex to look at his own face.