Chapter Text
The first couple of seconds after Mats wakes up, nothing feels out of the ordinary.
He stretches like he does every morning, eyes still shut tightly, and figures that the tingling feeling in his muscles is the hang-over from last night’s party.
Sleepily, Mats sneaks his hands down his boxer shorts and he’s already semi-hard even though he can’t remember any dream that could have caused it. Still, his thoughts instantly flicker to images of team showers. After the victory, he figures he deserves it so today he doesn’t stop himself from replaying the memories of water running down Benni’s sweaty skin and the way Benni throws his head back under the spurts of water and -
He manages a couple of strokes and it feels good but... different so Mats cracks open his eyes and looks down on himself.
The first thing he sees is the tattoo on his forearm.
For an irrational moment, Mats thinks ‘Marco isn’t even my name,’ then ‘Did I get Marco’s name and date of birth tattooed last night?’ and finally ‘How fucking drunk was I?’
Now, Mats is no stranger to poor choices after celebrating a win but he scrambles to sit up on the bed and looks around to find himself in Marco’s bed in Marco’s room in Marco’s house with no recollection of ever getting here and that’s when the first alarm bells start ringing.
Marco is nowhere to be seen either so Mats staggers out of bed and finds himself facing a life-size poster of Marco hanging on the wall.
Mats frowns and writes a mental note to make fun of Marco for that when the poster frowns back at him.
It’s not a poster, it’s a mirror.
Tentatively, Mats raises his hand and Marco in the reflection does the same.
Shit, Mats thinks and pats down his chest, his arms, touches his face and rubs his hand across his tattoo, no, Marco’s tattoo.
It feels real but it also doesn’t because Mats feels like he’s taller than his own body but even just trying to make sense of it makes his stomach turn.
Mats starts hyperventilating and he can feel a panic attack coming up because what the everloving fuck?
But he clenches his fists, squeezes hit eyes shut, swallows dryly, slowly counts to ten and figures that it could have been worse – he could have been turned into a dog or Kevin freaking Großkreutz so maybe Mats is even a little bit grateful that he’s stuck in Marco’s body.
“Stuck in Marco’s body”, ha. Mats is almost sad that no one is here to hear all the glorious jokes he could make about that.
Since nobody’s ever told him how to act in case he wakes up in the body of his best friend, Mats tries to think of possible measures to take and comes up with the following two:
He could get back into bed, finish jerking off and then sleep some more and hope this will all have been a bad dream – but he would neither be able to get it up (no matter how deep he digs into his Benni-is-hot-just-by-existing wank folder) nor sleep. Nor ever look Marco in the eyes again.
He could also try to figure out what unearthly curse made him turn into Marco Reus, of all people, which seems like the more sensible plan.
Unfortunately that’s also the option that requires clothes. Mats sighs, looks at himself in the mirror again and shrugs.
It’s scary to see Marco do the motions but to be 100% honest, now that Mats has accepted his temporary fate, it’s really intriguing to look at and touch Marco’s abs in a totally platonic way. He doesn’t get to do that often without someone looking at them weird.
Mats can’t wear the clothes Marco wore yesterday because they stink of smoke and beer so he pulls a random shirt and pants out of the wardrobe and gets dressed. Coordinating a new body isn’t impossible, mostly not even hard but sometimes Mats feels like he’s missing a couple of centimetres and he misjudges his proportions.
Somewhere in the room, a phone rings and Mats reaches into his pockets to get it out but it’s obviously not there, just like his own body.
He does, however, find Marco’s phone under the bed and unlocks it to find seven missed calls and five texts from his own number.
Slowly, it dawns on Mats that maybe he didn’t just wake up in Marco’s body but they might have in fact swapped and Marco might be in Mats’ body with Mats’ phone.
Damn, this is going to be complicated.
from mat$ humm€l$: what the fuck did you do?
from mat$ humm€l$: mats, what did you do??????????????????
from mat$ humm€l$: mats frank oliver elijah hummels, answer your phone
from mat$ humm€l$: i’m driving to your freaking house
from mat$ humm€l$: *to /MY/ freaking house fuck you
Mats sucks in his breath. When Marco uses made-up middle names, he is really serious, but it’s not like Mats knows how this happened.
Maybe it’s some sort of karma payback for the three... five... seventeen times at most he had been a dick in his past life.
Mats raises his hand to run his fingers through his hair but there’s only Marco’s wanna-be Mohawk to hold onto. Life’s a bitch.
Just before Mats can push the button to call back, the door bell rings. For a second, he panics and hopes he can convincingly act as Marco before he peeks out of the window and sees –
Himself.
It’s less surreal than Mats would have expected it to be, mostly it’s. Uh. Hot. Not to sound conceited.
Out on the front lawn, Marco spots Mats looking through the window and gestures at him with a ‘fuck you and hurry up’ expression on his face.
Mats never knew that his own face could look so pissed off.
He hurries to let Marco in – not without grabbing a toast to eat in the kitchen on his way – and when he opens the door, Marco squeezes past him into the house without a word.
They face each other or, well, themselves and Mats thinks that if this is the last thing he sees before he dies, he could probably die happy, if somewhat unsatisfied that he never got to make out with himself.
“Why are you wearing a hat?” Mats asks unhelpfully, pointing at the yellow beanie on Marco’s head and is surprised by his own voice. “Wow,” he says slowly, “I sound like you. I mean, I look like you. You look like me.”
Marco rolls his eyes to Chile and back. “Congratulations, babe. I never knew you could be so quick.” He takes a deep breath to collect himself and rubs his eyes. “Mats, what did you do?”
It sounds like Marco is a dad talking to his son who managed to make the toaster explode and blames it on the cat.
Mats throws up his hands and tries not to get distracted by the tattoos on his new skin. “Why is it always me? How about I ask you what you’ve done to make us freaking swap bodies?”
Marco raises an eyebrow and Mats relents. “Okay, okay, if anybody of us was responsible for this, it would have been me, I give you that. But I didn’t do anything. Cross my heart and hope to die! I swear on the World Cup.”
Marco eyes him with a taxing look and it looks like he’s about to disagree but then he just nods.
“I need something to drink.” he says, still incredulously staring at Mats, staring at his own body in front of himself.
“It’s your house.” Mats offers and five minutes later they’re both sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in front of them, despite the fact that they should still be hung-over from the celebrations last night.
This creepy body magic probably overrode the alcohol their system and maybe there is an upside to this whole thing, you know, except getting to stare at yourself.
“Stop staring at me. I mean, stop staring at yourself,” Marco says and groans, “this is so fucked up.”
Mats tries to kick Marco under the table but he aims wrong and his legs are too short now so he just ends up hurting his knee.
“Fuck, why are you so short?”
Marco sticks out his tongue. “I’m not short. I’m just shorter than you. And I already bumped into thousands of things because I can’t handle your height so don’t complain. We’re both in this together. And unless you want to spend the rest of your life as me,” – Mats cringes because no, thanks – “although that should be a treat for you, we need to figure out how to reverse this. Is there anything you remember about yesterday that makes you think... magic or whatever?”
Mats nods slowly. “Yeah, now that you mention it, there was this old lady with warts and I didn’t help her across the street and then she said, ‘Dishonour on you, your family and your cow!’ and then she clicked her red heels and, bam!, I was in your body!’
“What? Really?” Marco actually asks and Mats is close to facepalming.
“No! Of course fucking not! All I remember is us going for a drink yesterday, celebrating your goals and then I woke up and wanted to jerk off but I couldn’t get hard after seeing your dumb tattoos.”
“You had your hand on my dick?”
“Technically, I had your hand on your dick so that probably doesn’t even count as gay. Not that I’d mind.”
Marco looks at Mats like he doesn’t even know what to say anymore and takes another swig from his bottle.
“So what are we going to do? Should we – should we tell anybody?” Mats asks and the moment he says it, he knows that it’d be a dumb thing to do.
“They’d either think it’s a prank or that we’re mad! It might get us banned from playing and the internationals are coming up! We’ve got to figure out how to swap back ourselves. Figure out whether the others know what happened yesterday.”
Mats leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “And until then?”
“We’re going to act as each other? How hard can that be?”
Mats looks at himself across the table and while it’s his face, of course, there’s also something undeniably Marco in the eyes. Not that anybody else would notice but it makes Mats feel grateful that he’s stuck in this with his best bro.
“Okay, Mats.” Mats says slowly, rubbing across Marco’s name on his forearm.
“My name’s not-“ Marco starts correcting him, before catching on and softly saying, “Oh. Shit. This is going to be hard.”
Mats laughs and Marco scratches his head through the beanie, he’s still wearing.
“What’s with the hat?”
Marco pulls it off to show the black, messy hair underneath. “Honest answer? I couldn’t tame your curls.”
Mats nearly falls off his chair laughing and is only saved by his new, lower center of gravity. “Oh my god, Marco, I can’t let you walk around like this. I’ve got a reputation to uphold!”
Marco sticks out his tongue. “Don’t worry, I can walk around looking bisexually frustrated and like I want the next best hunk to jump me. You, however, will have trouble replicating my graceful football techniques in training tomorrow!”
“Haha, so funny, like you’re one to talk,” Mats laughs mockingly before it hits him like Sergio Ramos out to get a red card. “Shit. Football.”
Marco seems to understand what he means and his smile fades a little, as he runs his fingers through the mess of his hair. “Damn. I had trouble brushing my teeth in your tree log of a body. Playing will be a challenge.”
But Marco doesn’t get it, not really. Mats isn’t worried about training tomorrow or about the BVB matches, he could survive not taking part in them (don’t tell Kloppo) but there are nationals soon and Mats would literally kill a man to make sure he’ll be called up.
Not so much for the matches but.
For Benni.
“I can’t miss the matches with the national team!” Mats says emphatically, a little louder than necessary.
Marco coughs to hide his laughter. “Any, uh, particular reason?”
Mats tries to glare him into submission but he keeps staring like it’s a challenge and Mats can't bear to see such a serene look on his own face.
“Yeah. Well. It’s Benni, okay. Okay?” Mats admits, “we rarely ever see each other except with the national team.”
Marco sighs and picks at the label of the beer bottle in front of him. “You should really do something about Benni. It’s awkward how you keep tip-toeing around each other. If I was you-“
Marco interrupts himself and looks down at himself, then at his reflection in the shiny surface of the fridge. An alarmingly wide grin spreads across his face.
“If I was you.” he repeats and devilishly rubs his hands together. “You know what? We’re going to train, we’re going to go to the international matches, we’re going to meet Benni and then we’re going to find out how to swap back.”
Mats isn’t half as excited about it as Marco. “In that order?”
“In that order." Marco nods.
Mats wants to dig a hole somewhere in a far-off desert and never see light again, even if that meant he’d never meet Benni again and never got to ask Marco whether he’d be entirely against making out with himself. For science.