Chapter Text
The sun isn’t shining in through the window.
At first, Naib thinks it must be night time, still - it’s not as if he’s a stranger to waking in the middle of the night, although those awakenings are usually much more violent, jerking upright in a cold sweat with the sound of bullets ringing in his ears. He squints over at his bedside table, looking for the tell-tale glowing numbers of the alarm clock that usually sits there, except… The alarm clock is gone.
And, he realizes, that’s not his bedside table . There’s no recently-acquired succulent resting there, no clock, no medication bottles. His eyes dart over to where the window should be - there’s no plant resting on the sill. In fact, there’s no window at all - it’s further down the wall, he realizes, covered by blackout curtains.
He sits up, rubbing his eyes, like the action will right the world around him. It doesn’t. This isn’t his bed - he realizes now that the sheets beneath him are flannel, and though he should be uncomfortably warm, running hot as he tends to, he’s perfectly at ease, besides the slowly mounting panic in his chest - and this isn’t his bedroom. This isn’t his house .
He scrambles out of bed, limbs suddenly unwieldy and uncooperative beneath him - it’s like the signals he’s sending are getting scrambled, or like he’s suddenly got too much leg to contend with - and slams on the light switch, the room coming to life around him. He doesn’t notice the surroundings, though - not yet.
He’s too busy staring at his hand, still pressed to the wall. He knows this hand, the scar tissue creeping along the arm, up to just above where a sleeve would hit. Knows it intimately well, because -
A phone rings from inside the tangle of blankets he’s left behind.
He approaches it slowly, like it’s a bomb that might go off at any minute, picks it up with that same scarred hand - gingerly, as though it might bite - and slides to accept the call.
“Hello?” he mutters, the words rumbling in his chest in a deeper way than he’s familiar with.
“ What the absolute fuck is going on ,” his own voice replies.
Okay. Okay . He takes a deep breath. Hearing himself on the phone, some bizarre echo, is the least weird part of this situation. He can do this.
“Norton?” he asks, trying to sound like he at least semi-has his shit together. Which it is. His shit is completely together - he’s fine. Truthfully, this isn’t even the most insane thing that’s happened to him this month. That honor goes to the day he’d woken up with his now-maybe-boyfriend in his bed, and quickly been informed that 1) Time-loops are a thing that can happen, and 2) said time-loops were happening in a very intense way to said maybe-boyfriend, and 3) the guy had apparently walked in front of a truck, willingly, to prove it, a move of such idiocy that even though Naib doesn’t remember it himself , he doesn’t give Norton a chance to live down, because, seriously, why?
So waking up in a body that isn’t his own is at least believable , now, something he’s able to accept without his mind snapping in two.
“No shit it’s Norton,” Norton says, and Naib twigs to the fact that he sounds like he’s on the verge of panicking immediately. “Kind of. I mean… fuck, if I’m in your body, am I still me, or am I you? Fuck, this is making my head hurt-”
“ Norton ,” Naib interrupts, aiming for a calming tone but finding this body much less adept at it than his own; he’d been the voice of reason to his unit, back when he’d been on active duty, talking down scared new recruits and keeping his head while waiting with injured soldiers for help to come. “Breathe. Inhale six seconds, exhale six seconds, okay?”
“Okay,” he hears, the eye roll all but apparent in Norton’s voice, and then the sound of unsteady breathing slowly smoothing itself out to something resembling calm. “This is insane ,” he says, finally. “How are you not freaking out?”
“I’m plenty freaked. I just-”
He just what? He’d like to chalk being cool and collected, relatively speaking, up to his own experience, but the longer he’s aware of the fact that he’s in another body, the more he’s aware of a certain… dullness, a certain muted reaction that he can’t quite explain. It’s almost as though he wants to panic, wants to care more about this to the point of, as Norton had put it, freaking out , but it’s just… Too hard to make himself do so.
That, or maybe it’s his mind’s way of protecting itself from, again, snapping in two.
“Look, can we meet up?” Norton asks, assuming his sentence will remain unfinished. “That diner you took me to - fifteen minutes? I need some strong fucking coffee, and to sit down and talk to you - okay?”
“Okay,” Naib confirms, and that’s when he hears the creak of a door past his own. It’s sudden, and he prepares himself to freeze, for his body to go on-edge, and yet, it doesn’t: the sound is almost expected. Weird. At the same time, he remembers-
“Oh fuck, your roommate. How am I supposed to explain this to him?”
“ Oh .” He can practically hear Norton’s eyes - his eyes? - widen through the phone line. “Just- pretend to be me? I guess? I guess that’s what we’ll have to do until we get this sorted out - I mean, who’s going to believe us? Hey, I’m actually in… some guy’s body, in the not-fun sense, please don’t have me committed? ”
“I mean… I can try.” He lowers his voice, not that it really needs it any more, and puffs his chest out. “ Hi, I’m Norton Campbell, lemme tell you about rocks- ”
“Go fuck yourself,” Norton says, laughing on the verge of hysterical. “Wait - I guess like this you technically could, couldn’t you? Oh, God, I think I’m losing my mind. I need that coffee.”
“See you in twenty, then,” and within moments of each other they’ve both hung up the phone.
Letting it fall to the bed, Naib stares at himself - at Norton - in the mirror above the dresser. Serious case of bedhead, black sleep shorts, threadbare green t-shirt that reads I’m Rock Hard for Geology! across the chest. He runs his fingertips over the burn scar around one eye - it feels different, now, tracing it with Norton’s fingers rather than his own, familiar but sending a small shudder of a revulsion he’s never felt towards the man through his gut.
Out of respect - despite their back and forth banter and flirtation, the vast majority of their clothes have stayed mostly in place thus far - he turns away from the mirror to dress, throwing on jeans and a red flannel he knows Norton is partial to, and as he slides into a pair of canvas slip-ons and reaches for the doorknob, he hopes to high heaven that Norton’s roommate isn’t home. It’s not that he has anything against the guy - according to Norton, he’s a little bit strange but otherwise an excellent housemate, quiet and very focused on his studies and older boyfriend - but he’s never been a great actor, or liar, and “pretend to be a guy you’ve known less than a month” is a tall order under those circumstances, sort-of-together or not.
Unfortunately, there is someone sitting in the living room of the apartment when he emerges - rail-thin, silver-haired, and curled up in an armchair with a seriously heavy textbook on his lap. Squinting, Naib thinks he can see a diagram of a skeleton on the pages. He looks up at Naib-as-Norton, nods in acknowledgement, and doesn’t say anything at all.
With a nod of his own, Naib grabs Norton’s familiar ring of keys - it sports a metal Oletus Museum of Natural History keychain - from their place by the door and, stepping out, leans back against it and heaves a sigh of relief he didn’t know he was holding in. Pretending to be someone else is exhausting, and he hasn’t even had to do it properly yet.