Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Vicki came back to consciousness with a start, drawing breath painfully into her lungs. The air caught in her throat and she started coughing. She couldn't remember when she'd fallen asleep, or been knocked out, or what the hell had happened, and it scared her.

Finally managing to breathe normally, Vicki pushed her hair out of her eyes.

And froze.

She was in Henry's bedroom.

In Henry's bed.

She was in Henry's bed and from the feel of the sheet over her legs, she was naked.

Forget fear. She was barreling right towards anger.

She sat up, pulling the sheet to cover her chest. "Henry, where--"

Her question, where are you and what the hell is going on?, died as she heard the voice that came out of her mouth.

"Oh no."

Vicki looked down at the hands holding the sheet against her chest. Long fingers, short trimmed nails, square palms. Masculine hands. In perfectly clear focus.

Her vision was clear and focus-perfect. She could see, just like she once had, before the growing blindness had changed her life. And what she could see did not look at all familiar.

"Oh, hell no!"

She dropped the sheet to her lap.

The chest she was looking down at most certainly did not belong to Vicki Nelson. The washboard abs, the sculpted pecs, all very male.

She wasn't ready to move the sheet away from her lap to see what was below her waist.

Vicki pulled the cloth around her as she stood. The vantage point seemed familiar, so she was probably the same height as before. So... what? Had she somehow transformed to a man?

That would fulfill dear old Dad's longing for a son, Vicki thought in disgust. Although, on reflection, that would not explain why she'd woken up in Henry's bed.

Which would be worse? Doing the whole Victor/Victoria thing, or waking up in the body of the vampiric bastard son of Henry the Eighth?

There was only one way to find out. Moving carefully to avoid dislodging the sheet, she made her way to the bathroom and its wall-to-wall mirror.

Henry Fitzroy's reflection stared back at her, and he looked pissed.

"Fuck!"

A quick search of the otherwise empty apartment failed to turn up any clues. It had, however, revealed that Henry had a clothes fetish and a DVD collection populated with movies produced by Disney.

"I don't care if he draws cartoons for a living, that's just wrong," Vicki muttered, wincing at the low register of Henry's voice. She closed the DVD cabinet and turned back to scan the apartment. Something was wrong, but she couldn't figure out what.

Besides the fact that she was in Henry's body.

She had to get out of here, to figure out what was going on, and she couldn't do that naked. Steeling herself, Vicki walked to the closet and scanned Henry's clothing collection. He liked to hoard clothes, even if Vicki usually saw him in a simple shirt and jeans.

"This will answer the question of boxers or briefs," she said to herself as she began opening drawers at random. The first drawer yielded a collection of studded leather straps. Vicki slammed that one and went on to the next before she could figure out what she had just seen.

Luckily, vampires really did wear underwear, and it seemed as if the vampire in question preferred boxers. Vicki gingerly pulled a pair of plain blue boxers from the drawer. To put them on, she was going to have to drop the sheet. And if she dropped the sheet...

Of all the fantasies she'd had about seeing Henry naked, actually being Henry had never factored in.

Stop being squeamish! Vicki told herself. Get dressed and get moving!

She dropped the sheet.

She tried not to look, really she did, but being male apparently required a bit of 'adjustment' when donning boxers and she had no choice.

Right. So they really didn't circumcise Christian males five hundred years ago. Focusing on that, and not letting herself think of anything else, Vicki got everything tucked away and went back to sorting through Henry's monochromatic pants collection.

Hysteria was bubbling up in Vicki's chest, but she refused to lose control. She had more important things to do. First, she had to find herself and figure out if she and Henry had swapped bodies, or if something more sinister had taken up residence in Vicki Nelson.

Then she had to figure out how to put things back to the way they were.

Sunrise was in fourteen hours, a quick glance at the clock told her. She could do all of that in fourteen hours.

Right?

Finding a grey long-sleeve shirt in the closet was easy, although Henry's collection of Grateful Dead t-shirts raised more questions than Vicki had time to deal with. Luckily, Henry kept his wallet and his keys on the table by the door, so she didn't have to search for those.

She paused as she picked up Henry's cell phone. Four new voicemail messages that she wouldn't be able check. As much as she didn't want to think of Henry inhabiting her body, doing God-knew-what with her human form (and wasn't that a place her mind didn't want to go), the idea was preferable to the thought that someone or something else had evicted her soul to take up residence.

She slid the phone, unused, into her pocket. Just in case the answer lay behind door number two, she wouldn't give it any warning.

Hand on the door, Vicki steeled herself to face the world as Henry Fitzroy.

"Here we go."

She opened the door and was promptly blinded by the lights in the hallway.

"Jesus Christ!" Vicki exclaimed as she blinked hard, eyes watering. Thankfully the hallway was empty, so no one was witness to her less-than-glamorous stagger to the elevator.

That was what had been wrong in the apartment, Vicki realized. She hadn't turned on a single light, and still she had been able to see perfectly. This must have been what Henry meant when he had talked about seeing the night in Technicolor. What other vampiric tricks-of-the-trade would she have to deal with?

"I am going to kill whatever did this," Vicki muttered as she hit the elevator call button. "I'm going to kill it really hard."

Any apprehension she may have had about driving Henry's car, the first time she'd intentionally been behind the wheel since her failing eyesight forced her off the road a year before, vanished as she slid into the BMW's driver seat. She smiled as she started the car, sharp hearing picking up the soft purr of the engine.

"Trust the king's son to settle for only the best," she said as she adjusted the rearview mirror. Henry's reflection grinned back at her. "Let's go find ourselves, shall we?"

Vicki had been driving stick since she was twelve years old and had snuck her mother's car out onto the then-deserted roads around Kingston. The car's gears shifted smoothly under her hand as she drove carefully out of the parking garage. Driving had always been a joy to her, be it a boxy squad car or her old beater or Mike's Volvo. Now, being able to drive after a year in taxis and subways was a gift.

Her enjoyment of driving dimmed slightly as she thought of Mike. How was she going to explain this one to Mike Celluci? Of all the people whose bodies she could have been stuck in, she'd ended up in Mike's least favorite person.

Vicki took a deep breath. She'd solve this and get her body back and she and Mike would get back to...

To what?

Vicki eased the car to a stop at a red light. Around her, Toronto teemed with life; pedestrians and cars and buses. The glass and metal shell of the car blocked some of the sound, but Vicki had never been so aware of her surroundings. She could have fallen into it so easily.

With an iron will, Vicki pulled her attention back to the street light. The red glow shifted to streamers of green and blue, and Vicki stepped gently on the gas.

She had a job to do. Find herself and fix this mess.

And not dent Henry's car in the process.

Finding a parking job outside of her office wasn't exactly easy, but she managed. As she locked the car door, movement and a familiar scent caught her attention.

Coreen was walking down the street, holding a cup of coffee and a book bag. Vicki stared at the girl. Not only could she see Coreen clearly, she could see so much more. Coreen was glowing. Her skin was flush with heat and life, and Vicki could see the blood pulsing under her skin.

"Hey Henry," Coreen was saying. "How's it going?"

With effort, Vicki tore her attention away from the girl's throat. "Fine," she said. "Things are fine." A lie, but an unimportant one. "Aren't you getting to work a little late?"

"No, just taking a break," Coreen said, hefting the cup. "Vicki's up there with Mike."

No. Mike was with whatever was in her body. Fear for him tasted sour, and her hands itched with the remembered feel of Mike's blood. "Oh?" Vicki managed to say as she fell in step with Coreen. "How am... I mean, how's Vicki?"

"She's fine." Coreen busied herself with digging for her keys.

"She's not acting weird?" Vicki pressed.

"No weirder than normal," Coreen said. Before Vicki could figure out if she was relieved or offended, Coreen yanked open the building's front door. "Although she may have a tapeworm or something, she's been eating all day."

Even with Coreen so close, Vicki could hear other noise in the building. As they mounted the stairs, the sounds solidified into two heartbeats, two voices. One was Mike's voice, so familiar that Vicki clenched her hands.

The other was her voice, and it sounded amused.

Vicki was anything but amused.

Still, she followed Coreen into the office. She needed to have a game plan, she couldn't just go barging in and beat the crap out of whatever was inhabiting her body, no matter how very tempting the idea was. She would...

All plans rushed out of her head as she stepped through the door. The body of Vicki Nelson was curled up in the chair behind her desk, plastic fork in one hand lifting a mouthful of Chinese food to her lips.

The body may have been that of Vicki Nelson, but the expression in those eyes was pure Henry Fitzroy.

Vicki put a hand on the wall to steady herself as the tension left her limbs. She and Henry had simply swapped bodies, no witches or demons inhabiting her body. This wasn't the end of the world. This, she could fix.

Then Vicki took in the rest of the scene. The desk was littered with takeout containers and drink cups, almost obscuring the papers beneath. And what was with the guilty expression on her, or Henry's, face?

Just how much had Henry ordered?

"Eating for two?" she ground out, noting how well Henry's voice was suited for sarcasm.

Henry dropped the fork back into the container as Mike, who had been lounging in the corner, shot to his feet with an expression of mingled anger and horror.

Oh crap.

Somehow, Henry salvaged the situation. "You try running around all day dealing with Toronto's finest," he said easily as he stood up. "You'd be hungry too."

Mike's irritation dialed back a few notches, but the man still glared angrily at Vicki.

"Mike, don't," Henry continued. "And Henry, stop baiting him."

Vicki looked at Henry. Was he actually enjoying this?

"I didn't realize it was so late," Henry added. He smiled gently in what might have been apology, but Vicki was having none of it. "I sort of got caught up."

Vicki glared, absently noting how Henry's heart started beating faster.

Outwardly calm, Henry turned to Mike. "I have some work to do," he said apologetically.

Mike was already grabbing his coat. "Don't let me stop you from your dealings with the various creatures of the night," he snapped. "I'll call you later."

The police detective glowered down at Vicki as he swept out into the hallway. The door closed pointedly behind him.

Coreen cleared her throat. "I'll be at my desk," she said, and closed the office door. The barrier of thin wood and glass did almost nothing to mask the soft sound of her heartbeat and the shuffling of papers.

Henry broke the silence. "I meant to be at my place before dark, it's just..."

"Mario's was having a half-off pizza deal?" Vicki snapped. All the confusion of the day rummaged around in her head. "What the fuck happened, Henry?"

The last part came out a little more shrill than Vicki would have liked, but Henry's voice modulated the words until they were more sulky than shrill. Not a big improvement.

Henry ducked his head for a moment, and when he looked up again, Vicki was surprised to see that his cheeks were red. "I lost track of time."

"You what?" Vicki stepped forward. "I wake up as you, having no idea what's going on or how I got to your place, I come over here thinking that some kind of evil spirit has taken over my body, and I find you doing Chinese with Mike because you lost track of time?"

Coreen's shuffling of papers stopped.

Anger gone as quickly as it had come, Vicki dropped onto the hard wooden client chair and buried her face in her hands. Even that felt strange; cheekbones too wide, the faintest hint of stubble rough against her fingers. Someone else's face.

She couldn't fucking deal with this.

Henry crossed the office and opened the door. "Hey, why don't you take an early night?" he said to Coreen. "I have to head out in a few minutes and I don't think I'll get back tonight."

"Is everything all right?" Coreen asked in what she probably thought was a quiet voice.

"Just some stuff," Henry said in a self-deprecating tone. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

"Oh. Okay, then." A pause. "Tell Henry if there's anything I can do--"

"I will."

Vicki had never heard that level of compassion in her own voice before, and it irritated her that it was probably just a carefully crafted lie by Henry.

Vicki lifted her head when Henry came back into the office. "You know, I actually pay Coreen for a reason," she said. "You can't go giving her the day off like that."

Henry slumped on the couch, curling up into a ball. Seeing her body like this made Vicki uncomfortable. She'd never thought of herself as fragile, but...

But in this light, with the soft glow and thrum of life under the skin, her body looked as if it was made of living glass.

Was this how everyone saw her?

She was moving over to the couch before she could really figure out why. Warmth was emanating off her body and it was distracting. She shook her head. Concentrate. "Are you okay?" she asked. "You don't normally go all fetal. Come to think of it, neither do I."

Henry twisted up a corner of his mouth. "It has been over four hundred and sixty years since I was alive, Vicki. Walking in the sun, feeling a heart beating in my chest..." He gestured at the take-out boxes on the desk.

"Able to eat," Vicki finished for him. "Let me guess. Stomachache?"

"I think so." He squirmed. "Unless you have some other... complaint?"

Vicki raised her eyebrows. It took her a few seconds to work out what Henry was asking. "No, it's not that." Honestly. Wake up in a woman's body, and almost the first question was about the time of the month.

Men.

But Henry really did look uncomfortable, so Vicki got to her feet and went back to the desk. "Let's work on fixing this whole mess before you have to go through that, shall we?"

"Agreed," Henry said with feeling. He narrowed his eyes. "That drawer won't open. What are you doing?"

Vicki hooked her fingers through the handle. "It's not locked, it just sticks. You need to give it a bit of a jerk." Suiting actions to words, she yanked on the drawer much as she did every day. The drawer flew open, momentum carrying it through the air and impacting with the far wall with a crunch. Bottles and pens skittered over the floor.

Vicki looked at the broken drawer in her hand. "Don't say it."

Across the room, Henry gave her wide eyes. "I didn't say anything."

"Yeah, but you were thinking it." Vicki disentangled her fingers from the mangled handle and dropped the remains of the drawer on the chair. "Loudly."

"Contrary to popular myth, vampires can't read minds."

"Yes, but I know you and you always have something to say." She dropped to her knees to wrestle the Tums bottle from behind the filing cabinet. "Something about me not being used to the strength in this body and having to be careful to avoid being noticed?"

The scowl on Henry's face grew more pronounced. "If you know me so very well, then you'll have no problems masquerading as me until we find a way to fix this!"

"Hey, don't get mad at me! I didn't do this!" Vicki exclaimed.

"Don't you have any idea how dangerous this is?" Henry demanded. He uncurled enough to cross his arms over his chest, then just as quickly uncross them. Score one for the B-cup, Vicki thought maliciously. "It's one thing for Vicki Nelson, half-blind private investigator to start acting strange, but if a vampire starts acting up, it is much more dangerous!"

Vicki carefully set the bottle down on the desk. "I am not half-blind," she said slowly. "Nor am I stupid! I'm not going to draw attention to the fact that you're a vampire--"

"You have no idea what it means to be a vampire!"

The shrill edge to Henry's voice grated on Vicki's sensitive ears. "Try shouting a little louder, I don't think they heard you in Mississauga," Vicki suggested. She tossed the bottle onto the couch next to Henry. "Chew on two of those, they'll make your stomach feel better. And next time, don't treat indigestion with King Pao Chicken."

Henry didn't move.

Vicki counted to five, then ten, then walked over to the couch to sit next to Henry. "We're going to fix this," she promised grudgingly. "Then you can take back your perfectly sculpted body with its perfect eyesight and get back to the whole Prince of Darkness routine, okay?"

Henry pulled off Vicki's glasses and buried his face in his hands. He still didn't speak.

Starting to get worried, Vicki took the glasses from Henry's fingers and put them on the table. "Is it just a stomachache?" she asked, brushing her fingers over Henry's forehead. "Jesus, you're burning up!"

Henry lifted his head. "No, I'm not." He took Vicki's hand in his, curling hot fingers around her palm. "This body, your body, is always this warm. It is my body that is cooler than normal."

"Are you sure?" Vicki put her free hand against Henry's forehead. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. "I've been looking in the mirror for thirty-two years and I recognize the patented Vicki Nelson 'I feel like crap' expression."

"Charmer," Henry muttered. He pulled away from Vicki. "Perhaps, when one is forced to live a certain way for almost five hundred years, one becomes... accustomed to the way things are." He rubbed at his eyes again. "Then to have life handed back to you in an instant... I had forgotten how uncomfortable it is to live."

At least you didn't lose any of the Fitzroy melodrama, Vicki thought, not unkindly. "Do you have a headache too?"

"If you can call it a 'headache' when something is hammering on my temples," Henry snapped. "Do you have these headaches often?"

"Sometimes." Vicki leaned over to pick up the handbag on the table. "It sounds like the combination of too much caffeine and sugar with bad light and not wearing the glasses." She unearthed the small prescription bottle and handed it to Henry. "Which is worse, the headache or the stomachache? Because it's this or the Tums. They don't play well together."

Henry took the bottle from Vicki's hand. "You never told me you have headaches."

She shrugged. "It wouldn't do any good to whine about it. I just deal."

Henry looked at her. "Everything is blurry, I have no peripheral vision, and the moment the sun set it has been harder for me to see anything. Add this to the headache, and how can you possibly call that whining?"

"Because talking about it won't fix a damned thing." Vicki took back the pill bottle, tipped two small white pills onto Henry's palm, and shoved the bottle back into the handbag. "Knock those back."

Eyeing the pills warily, Henry picked up the water bottle on the desk. Vicki stood and went to the window, staring out at the night. She had forgotten how still everything looked after the sun set, how darkness cast a ceiling on a vast world.

"A vast world of darkness," she murmured, feeling foolish.

"What did you say?" Henry asked from the couch.

"Nothing." Vicki turned around. Henry had straightened up, sitting almost normally. "Just trying to get into the whole vampire vibe."

Henry rolled his eyes. "Spare me the Dracula routine," he said. "We have a lot to figure out. For starters, what did this?"

"Don't look at me. I woke from the dead at sunset, and from the sounds of things, you've had a very busy day."

Henry's cheeks went red again as he lifted his chin defiantly. "I don't know how this happened."

Vicki felt her stomach rumble. "You know, I am absolutely adorable when I blush."

The blush deepened. "Come sit down so I can talk to you. I can't focus on you over there."

"Now you see why I like to stand near people who are talking to me?" Vicki asked as she made her way back across the room.

"And here I was, thinking you just liked my company." There was something just under the surface in Henry's words, but Vicki was finding it hard to concentrate on the soft tones of his voice. The steady thump-thump of his heart grew louder as she sat on the couch.

Not his heart, Vicki thought distantly. It's my heart and my blood. He's just borrowing, it's mine--

"Vicki!"

Vicki blinked. Henry was flat on his back across the couch, Vicki stretched out on top of him, one of her hands on his shoulder holding him flat, with her lips only inches from Henry's throat.

Teeth achingly close to the blood flowing through living veins.

"Fuck!" Vicki sprang off Henry and put as much distance between them as she could. "This is not happening!"

Henry stood slowly, pulling his disarrayed shirt back in place. "This is what I meant when I said you have no idea what it means to be a vampire," he said. His hands were out, as if he were approaching a wild animal. "The hunger for blood can't be stopped by any force of will."

"This is not going to happen!" Vicki said. Not pleading. Not yet. "We'll fix this and then you can go right back to blood-sucking, not me!"

"Vicki--"

"No!"

"Vicki." Henry stopped inches away from her, so warm and so alive and Vicki was just so hungry and this was so messed up that she didn't even know how to start to deal. "A new vampire is completely at the whims of the hunger. The fact that you managed to stop probably means that you have the benefits of my control, but even I can't go for more than two nights without feeding."

It took a few seconds to process the meaning in his words. "You didn't feed yesterday?" Vicki asked in a shaking voice. "Are you stupid?"

Henry smiled wryly. "I intended to go to a club when I awoke this evening." He reached up to cup Vicki's cheek with his hand. His touch was so warm, skin smelling so familiar, with a pulse pounding just below the dark demon mark marring the skin of her arm. "Change of plans. You need to feed before we can start to figure out how to fix our situation."

"Henry, please." The words came out as a whisper, drowned out by the rhythmic pounding of blood. My blood.

"I'll help you through this," Vicki heard Henry say, and he moved his wrist closer to her mouth.

The touch of warm skin to her lips was her undoing. Vicki opened her mouth to taste that skin, warm and faintly salty and alive, with the pulsing of the blood just under that surface. My blood.

She wanted it.

She needed it.

She was so hungry.

Her mouth felt strange for a moment, then she was scraping too-sharp teeth over soft skin. A sharp gasp reached her ears. She opened her eyes to see her own face, apprehensive and nervous, staring back at her, and she reacted without thinking.

She took the fear away.

Apprehension turned to desire, eyes suddenly wide with arousal as Vicki bit through the skin of her own wrist.

The soft moan that filled her ears was almost as sweet as the blood rushing into her mouth. She -- no, Henry collapsed against her, hips moving as Vicki caught him and lowered them both to the floor.

Swallow.

Henry closed his eyes as Vicki gathered him close, mouth still locked to his wrist.

My wrist. My blood.

Mine.

Vicki drew down another mouthful of blood, wondering how anything could possibly taste so sweet, so warm, so right. Henry gasped, pressing against Vicki. "God, don't stop," he whispered.

Don't stop.

Vicki fought to push past the overwhelming desire for more. There was something she was supposed to remember. Something important. Something...

Stop!

Vicki pulled her head back with a gasp. She had to stop.

Henry wriggling in her lap wasn't helping her concentration. Reason somehow fought itself to the front of the fray and Vicki licked at the small puncture wounds on Henry's wrist until the blood stopped flowing.

Stop.

Henry rested his head against Vicki's shoulder, breathing hard. "I'd forgotten what that could be like," he whispered sleepily.

Vicki sighed. "I thought you were supposed to keep me from killing you," she whispered back, pushing the hair off Henry's face. Her fingers lingered on the soft skin, taking in the delicate wrinkles around his eyes. Age lines that Henry should never have had.

"How was I supposed to know you'd put the whammy on me?" Henry burrowed deeper in Vicki's arms. "I knew I was good, but not that good."

Vicki frowned. "I put the what on you?"

"New vampires can't usually evoke that sort of response. They usually generate an instinctive fear response, not a sexual one. Only the older ones can incapacitate their prey with arousal." Henry sounded as if he were drifting off to sleep, which was the only reason Vicki wasn't shaking him for not mentioning this before. "It takes a while to wear off."

"You've bitten me before and I never reacted quite so strongly."

Henry exhaled softly. "I keep it toned down because it can have unintended side effects. Besides." He yawned. "Your will is too strong for me to overwhelm you with it. I think you took that with you when we swapped bodies."

"What side effects?" Vicki asked, stroking Henry's cheek to keep him awake. "Come on, stay with me." She knew she hadn't taken too much blood. The soft (post-coital, her mind named it) rosy tint covering Henry's skin told her that.

This is so incredibly fucked up.

"It can become an addiction if the vampire isn't careful."

A what? "So I may just have made myself sexually addicted to your mojo?"

Henry nodded against her shoulder, before surrendering to sleep.

"Oh, my god," Vicki grumbled. She put her arm around Henry's back to hold him more securely as he dozed. I know men usually fall asleep after, but this is ridiculous.

It was sort of nice, though, to be holding someone so close, even if that someone was really herself.

And all it took was a body swap, breaking half the furniture in my office, and potentially sexually addicting me to Henry's vampire wiles, Vicki thought. When I find what started this whole body swap, I'm going to set it on fire.

Chapter Text

After Vicki had realized that Henry wasn't waking up any time soon, she managed to lift him up and lay him out on the couch. And then, because she knew how chilly the office could get these days, she covered him with a blanket and stood back to watch him sleep.

Or rather, watch herself sleep.

This is really weird, Vicki thought as she sat on the edge of the table. It's me, but it's not me. Looking at herself in a mirror certainly wasn't the same as seeing herself through someone else's eyes. Especially the eyes of a vampire.

Even in sleep, her body looked tired.

Vicki shook her head. "Back to work," she said to herself. This case wasn't going to solve itself, and with Henry down for the count, she needed to get working.

All the same, she took a moment to smooth the hair back from Henry's face, and if her fingers lingered a little too long on his cheek, there was no one there to see it.

Henry's little nap lasted three hours.

As she closed the last of the case files at the desk, Vicki's ears picked up the slight change in Henry's breathing. She picked up her note pad and headed over to the couch.

When she sat on the edge of the cushions, Henry opened his eyes, then blinked a few times before closing them again.

"Hey," Vicki said softly. "Time to wake up and face the night."

Henry curled around Vicki's body, still not opening his eyes. "I feel strange."

Vicki squashed her growing amusement. I never would have taken Henry Fitzroy for a cuddler. "Your body is doped up on painkillers and the first sex it's had in over a year. You're probably flying a little high."

Henry opened his eyes, still weighed down with sleep. "Painkillers are nice," he murmured sleepily.

Vicki touched her fingers against Henry's forehead. He still felt fever-hot. "Are you feeling any better?"

Henry nodded. "The headache is gone and I no longer feel ill." Vicki could almost see him fighting his way to full consciousness. After a moment, he gave her a sheepish smile. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For everything." Henry untangled himself from the blanket and sat up. If he noticed that he had been cuddled around Vicki, he took no notice, and Vicki held back comment.

"You're welcome." Vicki held out her note pad. "Time to get back to work. We have a case to solve."

Henry stood. "I will need a minute."

"To what?"

"To, um..."

Taking in Henry's disconcerted expression, Vicki figured it out. "Run to the little private detective's room?" Henry glared at her. "It's down the hall."

Vicki waited until Henry had cleared the door before allowing herself to smile. Poor Henry. His princely ego wasn't holding up very well under the indignities of every-day life. She wasn't sure which was worse to him, being alive or being a woman.

With great effort, she managed to calm herself before Henry returned.

The vampire-turned-human came into the room and made a beeline for the couch. He sat beside Vicki, eying her warily.

"What?"

"How do you feel?"

Vicki raised her eyebrows at him. "Fine."

"Not hungry? Agitated?"

"I told you, I'm fine. I just ate, remember? What's up with you?"

Henry held up his wrist. Two tiny red puncture marks lay upon the middle of Astaroth's mark. "You fed through this!"

"Your point?"

Henry's gaze grew dark. "My point is that you fed through the demon's mark!"

"For crying out loud, Henry, what do you expect to have happened? I've been walking around with those things for months and nothing bad has happened. And if you will recall," Vicki shot back at him, "You fed off me in that elevator without anything bad happening to you!"

"I didn't take your blood through this!" Henry thrust his arm at Vicki.

Clenching her jaw, Vicki deliberately sat back on the couch. "If I start having uncontrollable urges to take over the world, I'll let you know. Can we get back to the case?"

"No, we cannot!" Henry continued. "What if there are repercussions from what you've done? What if we can't get back to our true selves or--"

Vicki had heard enough. "You want to talk repercussions?" she demanded. "You might have mentioned that vampires can addict their entrees before you went waving my arm in your face!"

"I didn't think that you--"

"That is exactly my point! You didn't think!" All the lingering confusion and apprehension over the day, of waking up as Henry and being all alone, pushed its way out as anger towards Henry. "You weren't thinking when you didn't come over to your apartment after sunset, you weren't thinking when you ate too much and you didn't think when you offered up my blood on a silver platter to a 'new' vampire!"

Henry sat frozen, face pale and heart pounding loudly in his chest. Vicki had no idea what to make of his expression.

As quickly as her emotions came, they faded into nothingness. Vicki tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and made herself exhale. "Look, tempers are obviously a little frayed right now. Let's just focus on solving this mess so we can go back to getting angry at each other in our own special ways as ourselves." She picked up her notepad. "I have some ideas of where to start with this. I've gone over the cases we've worked together over the last few weeks."

Henry was still staring at her.

"What?"

He shifted slightly, gaze never wavering. "How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Have something of this magnitude happen to you, and not panic?"

Vicki shrugged. "A lot of strange shit has been happening to me ever since I met you. You just deal."

Henry was shaking his head. "No, I do not. I have lived through much, but nothing could have prepared me for this." He finally looked away. "I do not understand you."

"Well, if we don't fix this, you'll have the rest of my life to figure it out," Vicki stressed, trying to pull the conversation back on point. "First, you need to tell me what happened to you today. The last thing I remember from before this," she waved her hand to indicate the both of them, "was cutting across the park outside my place to get to the bus. Then blackness, then I was waking up in your place. No flashing lights, no pain, no demons, nothing."

Henry opened his mouth, breathed out without speaking, and tried again. "The first thing I remember was the light." Out of the corner of her eye, Vicki noticed movement, and looked down. She startled at what she saw.

His hands were shaking.

"The light was everywhere, and I did not burn." Henry clenched his hands into fists. "I stood in the light of the sun and I did not die." His eyes were almost glowing through what might have been unshed tears, but then he blinked and the moment was gone. "I... I didn't know what to do."

As much as Vicki didn't want to interrupt Henry's rediscovery of the day, she didn't have time for this. "What happened next? You didn't start having a religious experience in the middle of the park, did you?"

Henry smiled faintly. "If you can call a paradigm shift a 'religious experience', then yes." The smile grew. "But if you are asking if I caused a scene, then the answer is no. I told the nice man who stopped to help me that I had something in my eye."

"What, did you fall or something?"

Henry's smile changed, rueful. "Five hundred years ago, and this was the day I returned to grace."

Vicki rolled her eyes. "Can you stop with the religious metaphors? It'll be the first tip-off to anyone who knows me that I'm different."

"You are not religious?"

"Not hardly." Vicki suddenly couldn't take Henry's curious gaze any longer. "My mom was one of those holiday Christians. You know, show up at church for Christmas and Easter and that's it. I stopped going after my father left."

"How old were you when that happened?"

Vicki folded over an edge of the paper on her lap. "Ten. But it was fine, me and mom, we managed."

A warm hand settled on her knee. "You are a remarkable woman, Victoria." Henry shifted closer to her on the couch. "That is another thing we have in common."

"What are you talking about?"

"Serious father issues."

Vicki couldn't help smiling. "You ever think about how things would have been different, if you hadn't become a vampire?"

"Sometimes." Henry looked down at the marks on his wrists. "A bill was before Parliament to acknowledge me as my father's heir, and I might have become King of England. I would have stayed married to a young woman who was faithful and religious and quiet and the opposite of Christina in every way, and I would have been unhappy for the rest of my life."

None of this was news to Vicki -- since meeting Henry, she'd read every book she could find on Henry VIII's reign and his son's "death". But to hear Henry bring those dusty word to life with the faintest hint of bitterness and regret...

"Then you could have been the one to deal with the Church and Spain," Vicki said to break the tension in the room.

Henry scoffed. "More likely I would have been beheaded after Edward was born. And what fun that would have been. Better for sister Elizabeth to have that on her plate. She was much more like our father than I was."

"Speaking of plates, you want to explain the all-you-can-eat day you've been having?" Vicki nudged Henry's arm. "I mean, don't get me wrong. Food's great, but you of all people should know the dangers of giving into that gluttony impulse."

"I thought you wanted to go over the day," Henry retorted archly.

"Knock yourself out." It was interesting to watch Henry be evasive. Vicki was used to it, but it was fascinating to see the words coming out of her own mouth.

"After I recovered from the... shock, shall we say, of being you, I sat on a park bench for a while and contemplated what to do next. As luck would have it, your phone rang and took the decision away from me."

"That's right, blame the inanimate object." Vicki leaned back to get a better look at Henry. "Who was it?"

"Detective Celluci."

Vicki blinked. "What did you do?"

"I answered the phone."

"And?"

"And he wanted your assistance on the case and asked if he could take me to lunch."

A sharp pain was developing behind Vicki's left eye. "And you said no and started to work right away on why you were in my body."

"That would have been the smart thing to do."

The pain started pounding along with a non-existent heart-beat. "You went to lunch with Mike? You hate Mike!"

"I was trying to be you! It is absolutely vital that no one find out what has happened to us!"

"Were you mean to Mike?" Vicki demanded. Henry looked away. "Oh god. What did you do?"

Henry squirmed. "I met Mike for lunch and he was... he was nice to me. So I was nice back."

"He wasn't nice to you, he was nice to me," Vicki argued. She felt as if she should go look out the window to see if pigs were taking flight in the Toronto skies.

"And I was trying to be you, so there you go."

Henry was staring at his hands so intently that Vicki started to worry. "What happened? He ask you a personal question you couldn't answer? He get suspicious? Ask if you were possessed or something?"

Henry lifted his hand to stare more intently at his left thumbnail. "We had lunch and he gave me a ride to your office and..."

"And?" Vicki was starting to have a bad feeling about whatever Henry wasn't saying.

"And... we said goodbye."

That wasn't so bad.

"And he kissed me."

Vicki's heart dropped. "What?"

"What was I supposed to do? I was pretending to be you!"

The guilty expression on Henry's face told Vicki the rest of the story. "You kissed him back?"

"I was pretending--"

Vicki shot to her feet. "You son of a bitch! You let Mike Celluci kiss you and you kissed him back and you are blaming this on me?"

"How am I supposed to know how close you two are these days?" Henry asked defensively. "For all I know, you might have been with him recently."

Vicki stared at Henry, aghast. "Please tell me that you didn't do anything more than kiss him."

Seeing the horror on Henry's face was almost worth the last half hour. Almost. "What do you take me for?" Henry demanded.

"Oh, I don't know, you just told me you were making out with my cop ex-boyfriend after he took you out for lunch! What am I supposed to think?"

"So you are together with Mike!"

"I am not!" Everything was spiraling out of control. Mike had kissed Henry. Henry had kissed Mike. Vicki was a male vampire who had just fed on her own blood. If only flying pigs were the worst of my worries. Vicki put her hands on her hips and tried to calm down. "I haven't been with Mike, and I certainly haven't been with Mike, since I quit the force. And the way things were going, I thought things between us were over. We're just friends."

Henry shot Vicki an unbelieving glance. "You might want to tell that to Mike. That wasn't a 'just friends' kiss he gave me."

"Which makes me wonder exactly how nice you were to him," Vicki snapped.

"Do not blame this on me!"

Calm. Think calm. Do not think about Mike and Henry making out. Perversely, the idea wasn't as abhorrent as Vicki would have hoped. The visual Vicki conjured up was actually rather hot.

This is so incredibly fucked up.

"After Mike kissed you--"

"Please stop saying that!"

Vicki clenched her jaw. "After you and my ex-boyfriend had a hot makeout session in his squad car? Is that better?"

Henry buried his head in his hands.

"After 'the incident', you came up to the office and did what?"

Henry's voice was muffled. "Coreen was here and she told me about the work on a wrapped-up case and I tried to look through your files, but it was hard to read anything. I called you a few times but the sun hadn't set yet."

That would explain the four new messages on Henry's phone. "I haven't got your pass code," Vicki said, pulling Henry's phone out of her pocket. "Here."

Henry uncurled and took the phone from Vicki, not looking at her. "Thanks."

"And then Mike came over with Chinese, bolstered by the growing rapport between you two, and you ate and had a grand time until I came in. That sum up the rest of the evening?"

"Yes," Henry said grudgingly. "He wasn't as annoying as he usually is."

"Well, he actually likes me." Vicki sat down again on the couch. She was beginning to feel like a jack-in-the-box, with all the moving around she was doing. She didn't remember Henry being this twitchy, but decided against mentioning it to avoid another 'you're a vampire now' lecture. "You, he doesn't like."

"Lucky me."

Vicki picked up the note pad. "Okay, faux homoerotic makeout sessions aside, sounds like your day was a bust." She was starting to enjoy how Henry winced whenever she brought up the kiss. "Let's try and figure out what might have done this to us and go kill it, how does that sound?"

"Just fine."

Vicki pointed at the top of the pad. "Yesterday we were working that carpet warehouse case. Did you sense anything out of the ordinary about that one?"

"I changed my mind."

Henry pulled Vicki towards the bed in Henry's bedroom. "It doesn't matter. The sun will come up and you will die for the day and nothing can stop that. Wouldn't it be better to spend the day on a nice bed rather than crumpled on the hard floor?"

Growing apprehension and an awareness was distracting Vicki.

Something was coming.

It was like knowing something was standing just behind her with a knife and she wouldn't be able to turn around fast enough.

"Come on," Henry coaxed. He pushed Vicki onto the bed. "You'll be safe here until the sun sets."

"Are you sure?" Vicki twisted around, looking around the room. There's something coming. "Maybe you're wrong, what if something did this to get to you during the day?"

"They wouldn't have needed to swap our bodies if they wished to attack me during the day," Henry reminded her. "It is only the approaching sun."

"Only?" Vicki echoed. Her head was vibrating and fear was like a knife on her tongue. "It's like this all the time?"

Henry gently guided Vicki to lie down, fully clothed. "Every day," he said quietly as he lay down next to her. He rested his head on her shoulder, his warmth and steady pulse something for her to concentrate on, to keep the panic at bay. "The sun cannot hurt you in here."

Breathe. "You'll keep working on a way to fix this?" Vicki asked.

"I will."

Vicki was about to ask Henry to promise to avoid Mike that day, but then the sun rose and took her life away.

The violent return of life to Vicki's body even worse the second day. The disorientation lasted a full minute before Vicki could manage to get her bearings.

A quick glance at her hands showed that nothing had changed overnight. Still Henry. Fucking great.

The apartment was silent. Vicki looked around. The bed looked more rumpled than it had the previous night.

At least Henry got some sleep.

A note lay on the bedside table with her name on the outside. Rubbing her eyes, Vicki picked the paper up and turned it over.

Vicki,

I have gone to your office. Meet me there.

You should not need to eat. If you are hungry, come to your office and we will deal with the issue.

Henry

PS: Did I hear you correctly last night when you said you hadn't been with a man in over a year?

"Bastard," Vicki muttered as she dropped the note.

It was all well and good that Henry was demanding her presence (and answers), but she'd gone a full day without a shower and she felt gross. There was still the issue of being naked while being Henry, but she'd deal with it. I'll just leave the lights off and not look. Yeah, that'll work.

The bathroom was warm and damp and smelled of floral soap. A surge of panic swept through Vicki, that someone had been in the apartment, but reason soon returned. Henry had slept over, he probably had just had a shower before he left for the day.

Vicki didn't want to know exactly what Henry had done with her body in the shower, all naked and wet and soapy--

"Oh my god, stop it!" Vicki told her reflection. Henry's face stared back, dark eyes crystal-clear in the mirror. Vicki closed her eyes. She wasn't going to be addicted to Henry's vampire powers. She wasn't going to think about what Henry had done with her body while he was naked in the shower. She wasn't going to think about Mike and Henry making out. She wasn't going to think about all the naughty things she could get up to with Henry's body.

Just to be on the safe side, the shower she took was a cold one.

Very cold.

Chapter Text

The street was empty, surprising for a winter's Saturday night in Toronto. Vicki shoved her hands deep in the pockets of Henry's coat as she trudged towards her office. Henry had told her that vampires didn't feel cold the way humans did, but she was willing to bet that standing in a cold shower for twenty minutes would put a chill into even the undead.

I can't believe this is happening, Vicki thought for the thousandth time. How was she going to look Henry in the eye after this? Sure, there was the possibility that he had been a perfect gentleman and hadn't taken any liberties in the shower with his borrowed body, but...

But this was Henry Fitzroy. He was the vampire for whom the phrase "taking liberties" was invented.

I'll just pretend that I never thought of it, Vicki told herself as she slipped in the door of her office building. That Henry didn't spend the night in bed with me and didn't spend time in a warm shower with my body--

She stopped her line of thought abruptly. This wasn't helping. Under her breath, she went over her list of appetite-suppressants as she mounted the stairs. "Homer Simpson, Joan Rivers, Richard Simmons, pretty much everyone who ever appeared on the Jerry Springer show..." It worked, after a fashion, but she felt as if she needed another shower.

The door to Vicki Nelson Investigations was closed, but Vicki could hear voices through the glass. Two murmuring voices, two heartbeats, both beating a little faster than normal. Vicki stopped with her hand on the doorknob. Please God, let them be fighting. An arguing Henry and Mike, she could deal with. But if their heart rates were raised for any other reason...

She opened the door.

Henry was seated at her desk, papers spread out on the wooden surface. Mike sat on one of the client chairs, tilted back onto two legs. He let the chair fall with a thump when Vicki walked in.

Henry glanced up. "Hello, Henry," he said with subdued sarcasm. "How are you this evening?"

"Oh, I feel fine," Vicki said, unable to keep a smirk from flashing over her face. To her satisfaction, a flush rose to Henry's cheeks. Serves you right for showering with my body. She glanced at Mike. "Detective."

"Fitzroy," Mike said in a tone of voice usually reserved for men named 'Newman'.

Vicki rocked back on her heels as an awkward silence filled the room. "So here we are," she finally said.

Henry rolled his eyes. "Here are the files we were talking about last night," he said. He pushed a stack of files in Vicki's direction. "I've narrowed it down to the top two and sent Coreen--"

"You sent Coreen out on her own?" Vicki demanded, hand stopping halfway to the files. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

Henry sat up straight, his Prince of Man expression haughty and strangely fitting on Vicki Nelson's face. "It's an antique show opening," he said scathingly. "She is with friends. I told her it was a follow-up to the Milano case."

"You should have gone with her," Vicki responded tartly. Her hands balled up in her pockets. "If she gets into trouble--"

"She won't!"

"Because you're the expert on trouble-free private investigation?"

"Excuse me," Mike interrupted. "Anyone want to tell me what the hell you two are going on about?"

"No," Henry and Vicki said in unison. Vicki shot Henry a glare, which he ignored.

"There's something about my past cases that has been bugging me," Henry lied, glancing at Mike. "I wanted to go over it with Henry, and as the antique show opened tonight and I couldn't be in two places at once..."

Mike looked at Henry with an indecipherable expression. "You hate letting anyone else do your footwork."

Henry's expression never changed. "Coreen's not a stupid girl, if there's anything there to find, she will."

Mike shifted his gaze to Vicki. "I guess a lot of things have changed since you left the force."

Growing irritation shifted darker, swirling about in Vicki's belly. "Vicki would never let Coreen walk into a dangerous situation, Mi-- Detective," she said. To cover the shaking in her limbs, she picked up a folder from the pile on her desk. "You were her partner for years, you think she's changed that much?"

Mike's eyes went back to Henry. "A lot of things have changed since she met you, Fitzroy, and I can't help but wonder how much of that was her and how much was you."

Henry leaned forward, a slightly feral smile on his lips. In the light, his teeth looked a little sharp. "I'm sitting right here, and if you think that talking about me as if I am absent or incompetent, or beguiled by Henry's native charms, is going to endear you to me, you are sadly mistaken. Am I clear?"

Mike sat forward, elbows on his knees. "Loud and clear," he said, expression still indecipherable. "So what is Coreen looking for?"

"Looking for?" Henry echoed. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, what is she looking for?" Mike said again. "I've been hanging around in the past few weeks, maybe I can help with whatever case is bugging you. Like that time with the Percy Horton case, you remember."

What the fuck is Mike talking about? Vicki searched her memory for any case she had worked, alone or with Mike, for a person named Percy Horton, but came up blank.

However, Henry nodded. "Yeah, that time. This is different, it's just a feeling I have. Nothing concrete."

The corner of Mike's eye twitched. "Still."

Vicki's stomach sank. That son of a bitch! she thought, not really sure which man she was thinking about. "Don't you have to go, Detective? All that very important police work to do?"

"I'm good," Mike replied. "After all, if you need to send Coreen out to pound the pavement, you probably need all the help you can get." He inclined his head in Vicki's direction. "Actual help, I mean."

The jibe was aimed at 'Henry', but the swirling uncertainty roiled in Vicki's stomach. It made her angry. It made her want to hit something.

It made her hungry.

"I need some air," Vicki announced, dropping the folder to the desk. "Back in a few."

She had barely cleared the door when Henry started in on Mike, the thick wood muffling his words. It was probably for the best. All Vicki could think about was anger and hunger and wanting to smack that stupid expression right off Mike's face.

Her feet moved of their own accord towards the door at the end of the hall marked Roof Access Only. The door was supposed to be locked, but the landlord usually kept it open so he could go up and smoke during the day. Sure enough, the door was unlocked now, and Vicki soundlessly eased through the door and up the stairs to the roof.

The lights of Toronto sparkled against the black velvet of the night. Vicki stopped by the edge of the roof, staring out at the glow of the lights, and above them, the sharp remote glow of the stars filling the night sky. Now that she was alone, the anger in her chest tampered down, letting Vicki feel another emotion that probably been there all along, but had been hidden but the confusion of the body swap, and the anger at Mike.

Loneliness.

Cold fingers picked at the metal railing on the roof's edge, aged paint no match for a vampire's fingernails.

Since the day Vicki had met Mike Celluci, he'd had her back. They had been partners on the force, lovers, and friends. The RP had taken the first two away from them, but they had always remained friends.

The bare metal of the railing scrapped at Vicki's fingernails, sending a shudder up her spine. She needed to stop lying to herself. The RP hadn't taken Mike away from Vicki. She had done that, pushing him out of her bed after she realized that she couldn't be a cop any longer. She hadn't wanted him to see her as less than she had been.

And now, to have him look at her with unmasked dislike... Intellectually, she knew that it was because she was Henry, but every time Mike looked at her, he saw someone he hated.

And there is a very real chance I will never be me again.

The sharp lights of the night blurred as the loneliness dug its claws into her heart. It wasn't just Mike she'd be losing. It was everyone. Her mother, everyone she ever knew...

Everyone she'd driven away.

There was still Henry, Vicki tried to tell herself. Somehow, the idea of exchanging her entire life, for one person bound to her thought a metaphysical accident, seemed to her a hollow trade.

"It's going to be okay."

Vicki nearly jumped out of her skin. "Fuck, Henry!" She swung around, wiping freezing tears from her cheeks. "You of all people should know about sneaking up on vampires!"

Henry smiled faintly. "Are you okay?" he asked, hands held out in front of him as he came closer.

"I'm fine," Vicki mumbled. Every instinct in her wanted to assist Henry, who had to have been almost blind on the rooftop. But she wouldn't have welcomed the help, and neither would Henry. "How did you know I was up here?"

"Instinct," Henry said. His seeking hands found the railing beside Vicki, and he gave an almost inaudible sigh of relief. "I find I do-- I did the same thing. Find the high ground at night so I can think."

The lights from the street below highlighted the curve of Henry's cheek, the delicate line of his throat and the faint flutter of the pulse below the skin. The stirrings of hunger pushed at Vicki's head, but she swallowed the urge to satiate that need.

"So," Vicki said carefully. "Did Mike leave?"

Henry wrinkled his nose. "I do not care. The man is just--"

"Trying to help?"

"I was going to say irritating." Henry turned his head. "Coreen will be fine."

It took Vicki a moment to make the mental transition to think about her assistant. "Probably," she admitted. "But we really don't know what's up with what happened between us, and putting Coreen in the potential line of fire--"

"She is with friends, and I gave her strict instructions to be careful and only look," Henry retorted. He stared blindly at the street. "She will be safe."

"Since when does Coreen follow instructions?" Vicki asked, edging closer to Henry. He was so warm, and while Vicki wasn't actually cold anymore, the warmth was captivating.

"I used to be able to make her," Henry said softly. He closed his eyes when Vicki's hip bumped his. "Now she just nods her head and gives me that smile and I have no idea what she's up to."

"Welcome to the wonderful world of being me." Vicki ran her hand over Henry's long hair, feeling the silky strands soft against her fingers. "Some days, dealing with Coreen is like herding cats."

Henry smiled. "Headache-inducing?" He turned to face her and suddenly he was too close. Vicki wanted... something she couldn't name. Something she wasn't willing to name. Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

Henry put his hands on Vicki's shoulders, holding her still. "It occurred to me this morning, that if we are to be like this for long, then we need to discuss several matters of importance."

"Whatever happened to finding whatever did this and killing it?" Vicki asked softly, distracted by Henry's closeness and his warmth. All she'd need to do would be to lean in and kiss him, move her lips lower and sink teeth through the soft skin over a vein--

"That's very high on the list," Henry said, either not aware of Vicki's distraction or ignoring it. "But we should have a contingency plan. Just in case."

The still-functioning part of Vicki's brain wondered how a full-body embrace could constitute as a contingency plan, but baser needs won out. She put her hands carefully around Henry's waist, distantly startled at how very slender the body in her arms was, and lowered her head.

Henry's lips were soft and warm under hers, responding to Vicki's kiss with enthusiasm. He clutched at her shoulders, trying to pull her even closer as he deepened the kiss.

Perhaps it was the confusion of the past day, or maybe the months of unresolved sexual tension, but Vicki didn't even bother trying to stop. Henry felt so alive in her arms, that she wanted more.

More.

What more might have been was abruptly brought to a halt as an angry male voice crackled through the air, "What the hell is going on up here?"

Vicki jerked back, Henry's gasp sharp in her ears as familiar blood coated her tongue. Henry stumbled back, eyes wide and hand rising to his lips, but not before Vicki saw the blood running down his chin.

Mike appeared out of nowhere. He grabbed Vicki's jacket with both hands and hauled her away from Henry. "What the fuck are you doing to her?" Mike shouted, his fist already on the downswing. He caught Vicki hard against the jaw. She fell to the ground. The world coalesced to the mild pain in her jaw, the blood on her tongue, and the man standing over her, closing in for another attack.

A growl burst from Vicki's throat as she leapt at Mike.

Henry dove between them at the last second and spun Vicki away, deflecting the angle of her attack. "Vicki, stop this!" Henry shouted, pushing her away from Mike. Vicki's feet tangled in Henry's and they toppled to the ground. Henry straddled Vicki's waist to stop her from going at Mike again.

The blood on Vicki's tongue suddenly tasted foul.

"Stop this!" Henry commanded as he pushed at Vicki's shoulders. "You can't let the anger take you; you'll never find your way back!"

Vicki sat up as if Henry weighed nothing, stood with Henry in her arms. One she was on her feet, she dumped Henry unceremoniously to the ground, not really caring if he landed on his feet or not.

Across the roof, Mike stood frozen. The faint light from the street below was enough to gleam off the gun bare in Mike's hand; the gun pointed at Vicki's chest.

Vicki took a step back, then another, then fell to her knees and spat blood on the freezing ground.

Footsteps sounded on the gravel. Henry knelt beside Vicki, his heart still racing. "Are you okay?" he asked as he laid his hand on her shoulder.

Still nauseous, Vicki managed to nod. "Your mouth..."

"You bit my lip, that's all," Henry told her. "I'm fine."

Fine. Nobody's fine, nobody's ever going to be fine ever again, Vicki thought bitterly. In her mind's eye, all she could see was Mike's gun pointed at her.

"Shh," Henry urged as he patted her shoulder. "It's over."

Heavier footsteps stopped beside Henry and Vicki. "The hell it's over," Mike said. Vicki could hardly hear his words over the pounding of his heart and his rapid breathing. "What the fuck is going on?"

"None of this concerns you, Detective Celluci," Henry said. His hand stilled on Vicki's shoulder. "You have done enough damage for one night, so why don't you leave?"

Vicki lifted her head. Mike's gun was still in his hand, but he had the thing pointed at the ground and Vicki could see that the safety was on. Her eyes went higher. Mike stared as if he had never seen either of them before in his life.

"Go away, Celluci!" Henry exclaimed.

Mike put his gun up. "What's going on?" Mike asked. He seemed to be ignoring Henry all together, staring directly at Vicki.

Mouth dry, Vicki had to swallow twice to be able to speak. "I let my temper get the better of me," she said, hoping to hell she sounded like Henry.

"Bullshit," Mike retorted. "Why did Vicki call you 'Vicki' just now?"

Henry let out a little groan. "That, he heard," he muttered.

Vicki eased out from under Henry's hand and rose to his feet. "Do you really want to know, Mike?" she asked.

"No, he does not!" Henry snapped, popping up. "I said... I said, 'it's Vicki, stop this', not anything else!"

Mike shook his head. "The hell you did. And you two have been acting pretty fucking weird for the last few days--"

"This only happened yesterday!" Vicki said indignantly.

"What only happened yesterday?" Mike demanded.

Ignoring Henry's attempt to shut her up, Vicki crossed her arms over her chest. "Henry and I swapped bodies. We're trying to figure out what did it so we can put things back the way they were."

Mike blinked at her. "You... what?"

"Swapped bodies," Vicki repeated as Henry threw up his hands and stalked away across the rooftop. "Like on Freaky Friday. I'm Vicki and that," she pointed, "is Henry."

Mike shook his head again, harder this time. "No fucking way. This is like a big joke, right? Coreen's going to jump out from behind the boiler stack and say I've been punked, right?"

At least he wasn't laughing. "What do you want me to say, Mike?" Vicki asked. "It's the truth."

"No--"

"Oh god, Mike? You want me to prove it?" Vicki's temper, already frayed from the most recent round with Mike, got the better of her. "The office Christmas party, the month after I made detective, you and me were dancing to something intolerable except for the fifty-percent blood alcohol we were dealing with, and you ended up nailing me in the ladies can and I had to stagger back in there the next morning, all hung over, and scratch out the 'Mike Celluci is a sex god' I'd written the night before. Satisfied?"

She probably could have picked a better example of something she wouldn't have told Henry, but it was too late. Mike stared at her, his face blank.

"Anyway," Vicki continued uncomfortably. "What was with the Percy Horton crap, anyway? Did you think something was up with me?"

"Vicki was all spacey at lunch yesterday-- I mean, I thought it was Vicki, and I thought that Fitzroy was messing with her memory or something..." Mike's face went as white as a sheet. "If you're Vicki and that's Fitzroy, then yesterday in the car..."

"I'm about as thrilled with the recollection as you are, Detective," Henry snapped, wandering back across the rooftop. "Let's just both pretend it never happened and get on with the urgent matter of changing us back!" He gave Vicki a dark look. "Without telling anyone else what has befallen us."

Vicki took a deep breath. "Just a tip, Henry, I never use words like 'befallen', so cut the Scrabble vocabulary and maybe you won't be the one to give us away, okay?"

Henry turned away. "If it's all the same to you, I am going back to work. Do whatever you want." He stalked off in the direction of the door.

"Stop!" Vicki called. Henry obeyed a little too quickly. Vicki let out a breath and tried to speak normally. "There's a low pipe in front of you."

Growling low in his throat, Henry sidestepped the pipe and continued on his way back to the door.

Mike watched Henry go. "Before she... I mean you, met Fitzroy, life used to be so simple."

Vicki looked over her shoulder at nighttime Toronto, sparkling and clear. "No, it really wasn't."

Mike snorted. "Pretend it was, okay?" He paused. "I'm sorry about the jaw thing."

"I'll live," Vicki said, which seemed like a better thing to say than It didn't actually hurt that much.

"But you get why I did it, right?" He glanced at Vicki out of the corner of his eye. "I see Fitzroy chomping down on... you, in the dark. That's not right."

Vicki whirled on him. "You know what? Even if it had been me, I can take care of myself. If this ever happens again, you don't get to hit anyone, human or vampire or fucking rabid squirrel, that kisses me!"

Mike shook his head. "You never change, you know that, Vicki?"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Henry was buried in a book when Vicki and Mike made it back downstairs. He looked deceptively calm, except for the trickle of blood dried on his chin.

"What did you do?" Vicki demanded, stopping halfway across the room.

"I did nothing."

"Henry..."

Henry snapped the book shut. "Fine. Your mother called while you were upstairs."

"Mom? Is she all right?" Vicki asked, glancing at the clock. Her mother normally called on Sunday nights, not Saturdays. "Did something happen?"

"She wanted to invite you to go shopping next weekend," Henry said. His lips were pressed together tightly. "For household goods."

"Hey, we may not get along, but she's my mother so get the disdain out of your voice, got it, Your Highness?" Vicki snapped.

She wouldn't have thought that Henry would have such a reaction to an accusation of bad manners. He sat bolt upright, eyes blazing.

"I do apologize, Victoria, for my words." His teeth were fairly grinding in his head. "Now, shall we work on dealing with the issue at hand so you can keep your shopping date with the renowned Mrs. Nelson?"

Vicki didn't move. "Did you say anything else that I'm going to have to deal with when I see her?"

"No." Henry went back to the files on the desk. "But she will probably ask when you can get the reception in your office phone improved."

"I never thought about that one," Mike said as he dropped onto the couch. "Pretending I don't know my mom's calling because of the reception."

"Why is he still here?" Henry asked.

"He's going to help us solve this." Vicki pulled a bottle of water out of the mini fridge and set it on the desk next to the tissue box. "You should clean that blood off your face."

Luckily, Vicki caught herself before she offered to lick it off. Fate had been tempted quite enough as it was.

As Henry mopped away at his face, ignoring Mike's incredulous stare, the phone rang. Vicki picked it up without thinking. "Vicki Nelson Investigations."

"Hi Henry, it's Coreen," the girl said excitedly. "When did you get there?"

"You know me, Coreen, it's like I never get to leave," Vicki replied. "You want to talk to the boss?"

"No, I can tell you. The show was pretty dull, about what you'd expect from a bunch of old things. No offence."

Vicki couldn't help smiling. Coreen could be so tactless, it was almost cute. "None taken."

"So I looked for everything that you were hired to ensure made it through in transport from Montreal. The whole list. Everything was on display tonight, and while a lot of it was boring furniture crap, there were some interesting things." She paused. "Are you writing this down?"

"Yes. Along with a note to take all that boring furniture crap off your Christmas list."

Coreen let out an exasperated sigh. "Fine, be like that. I'm just trying to help--"

"Coreen, I'm writing it down. Pen in hand, paper in front of me. Now go."

"Okay. So, like, there were two pieces at the show that were almost interesting. One was a really cool glass urn thing from Persia. The owner guy was apoplectic because apparently someone in this place dropped the jar when they were moving it from out back and there's like a tiny chip in it."

"And what was the other piece?" Vicki asked as she wrote CHIPPED GLASS JAR across a takeout menu.

"Now this is where it gets cool. It was a Roman statue of Janus."

"Okay..." Vicki said slowly. "That's supposed to be important?"

"Of course it is!" Coreen said. "Janus is the two faced god, originally represented the sun and the moon. He's used to symbolize the transition from one state of being to another."

"Thanks, Coreen. I'll tell Vicki and we'll get on this." She twirled the pen between her fingers. "Are you heading home now?"

"Sort of," Coreen said, as laughter broke out in the background. "Me and Kelly met up with some friends at this coffee shop--"

"Say no more. Have a good night." Far away from danger, Vicki added silently.

"Bye!"

"That girl is fifty percent caffeine," Vicki muttered as she hung up the phone. "Henry, do you remember that Milano case?"

Henry brandished a folder at her. "You mean this case? The one I've been staring at for hours? No, doesn't ring a bell."

"Wow, vampires really do suck at sarcasm," Mike said with an insincere smile.

Henry's head snapped around. "If you really want to talk about sucking, detective--"

"Ladies?" Vicki interrupted. "Thank you. Coreen said that there were two interesting pieces at the show. One was a Persian glass jar that was cracked a few days ago. The other was a statue of Janus."

"Janus, the two-faced god?" Henry asked. He closed the folder. "Maybe that's it."

"You know about Roman mythology?" Mike asked.

For some reason, Henry looked away. "Not exactly."

"So how do you know about Janus? You two old drinking buddies?" Vicki asked.

Henry took a deep breath. "It was on a Buffy episode once," he said with the utmost reluctance.

Mike choked. "You watch Buffy?"

Henry glared. "Yes, I watch Buffy. The plot serialization is magnificent and Joss Whedon's storytelling is just this side of genius. It helps with my work, if that is all right with you!"

Mike held up his hands in surrender, although from the expression on his face, he'd be bringing this up again at some point soon.

"Now..." Henry's voice trailed off. "What are you staring at?"

"You watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?" Vicki asked. "Seriously? Isn't that against vampire union rules?"

Henry closed his eyes.

Chapter Text

"So, here we are."

Vicki pretended to ignore Henry's annoyed muttering as they moved deeper into the darkened display room at the antique store. Perhaps it was her own flight of fancy, but it was almost as if something was lurking in the shadows.

Waiting.

Vicki tried to calm herself down. It was probably just the faint heartbeat of the owner in his upstairs office. Even this close to midnight, Vicki's former client was at work and hadn't minded letting Vicki and her 'associate' in to look at the display in case she had missed something in transit.

Well, he had minded at first. Until Henry had flashed him a charming smile and given the man big doe eyes.

That was something that Vicki and Henry were going to have a little chat about.

"Why are we here?" Henry pressed. He moved his flashlight around the room, very nearly blinding Vicki in the process. "Do you really think that poking around at old statutes will give us any information on what we are facing?"

"It's possible," Vicki said, trying to blink away the spots of light dancing in her eyes. "Enough to give it a try, anyway."

"But I wasn't anywhere near these pieces on transit," Henry said. His light stopped on a dirty brass mirror. His lip curled. "Did you touch anything in the shipment?"

"A few things," Vicki admitted. "I went through the checklist before they loaded the truck up, then watched them load it, sealed it, rode in the front seat with Andre the driver, watched them unload, made sure everything was there, got my cheque and went home."

Henry sighed. "Our situation might not have anything to do with one of your cases. We might have to start looking at an outside influence."

"Like your little buddy Sinead?"

Henry clenched his jaw. "Or someone like her," he said. "You have to admit, you have made quite an impression on the world of the supernatural since--"

"Hey, I'm not the only one involved in this," Vicki interrupted. "You've been making as much as impression as I have."

"Before I met you, I never became involved with this side of the supernatural!"

Vicki turned around. "Oh really? For someone who's a dark magic virgin, you've dated an awful lot of witches and have a lot of books on creepy evil things! And that's just stuff I've found out about!"

Henry refused to look at Vicki. "That's different."

Hypocritical annoying blood-sucking ass! Vicki thought furiously. She forced herself to relax her shoulders. "Let's find the statue and then get out of here, okay?"

"What's the rush?" Henry asked sarcastically.

Vicki stepped closer to him, so close that her lips brushed his ear. "Because I'm getting hungry," she whispered. Pleased when Henry shivered, she kept walking. "Come on. And stop shining that damned light in my eyes."

Henry quietly followed Vicki around the cavernous show room for a minute, then he flipped off his flashlight. "What did you say to Detective Celluci to get him to leave your office?"

Vicki shrugged. "Nothing. He had to go to work."

"You said something to him," Henry pressed. "While I was getting your--my coat."

"It wasn't anything important." Vicki stepped around a rickety chair. The impression of something watching from the shadows was growing, like an itch between her shoulder blades. "I just told him that we would find a way to fix this."

"Thus reassuring him that you would not look like me for the rest of eternity."

"What can I say, Henry? He really doesn't like you."

"Do you still love him?"

Vicki almost tripped over her feet. "What?"

Shadows cast Henry's face into darkness. "You heard what I asked."

"You're being ridiculous. And distracting."

"Why did I end the world for you?"

Ice trickled down Vicki's spine. "What are you talking about?"

Still coated in shadows, Henry crept closer. "You told me, in the elevator so many weeks ago, that I ended the world for you, because I knew you could bring it back." His small hand closed around Vicki's wrist, drew her hand up and placed her fingers over the demon marks. "Why did I end the world for you in the first place?"

Vicki pulled away from Henry. It took her two tries to speak. "The Janus statue is over there."

"What did it have to do with Mike Celluci?" Henry's voice followed Vicki across the room.

Vicki touched one of the statue's faces with trembling fingers. "Is a possessed statue supposed to feel any different than a normal piece of rock?"

"What happened to Mike Celluci, that you asked me to end the world?"

Vicki curled her hand into a ball. "We're not going to talk about that. One life-altering crisis at a time, okay?"

She couldn't think about that now. Not about seeing Mike dead on the dirty floor of that hotel hallway, not about the gritty, slippery wetness of Mike's blood on her hands.

Not about how she had destroyed the world to save Mike.

Henry was beside her, staring up at her in the dark. How much could he even see in this light? Vicki skirted around the statue until the rock was between then. "Maybe it's not this. Do you remember where Coreen said the urn was?"

A long silence. The rhythmic flutter of Henry's heart called Vicki's attention in the stillness. She clenched her hands into fists, willing herself to concentrate. They needed to solve this mystery and get back into their own bodies, before...

... before I forget why drinking blood is supposed to be so repellant.

"I didn't speak with Coreen," Henry said. Did he know his voice was in synch with his heart rate? Vicki wondered. She sincerely hoped not. Not even Henry was that much of a tease. "You did."

"Right." Vicki cast her gaze around the room. Now that Henry's flashlight was off, she could see clearly in the twilight. In the far corner, hidden behind a jumble of chairs and brick-a-brack, a white sheet covered a bulky object.

The moment Vicki spotted the sheet, the underlying feeling of being watched by the shadows intensified.

"Crap," she muttered. "I think the car is behind door number two, Monty."

Henry let out a sigh. "Is this 'a witty quip for everything' a natural gift, or do you practice at night in front of the mirror?"

"Quiet," Vicki hissed. "It's listening." The words were out of her mouth before she realized what she was saying.

Henry looked around. "What's listening?"

"Whatever it is." Knowing that getting nearer to the thing under the sheet was a potentially hazardous idea, she nevertheless edged across the room. "I guess your old buddy Janus wasn't at fault after all."

"You might not want to do that," Henry warned, but it was too late. Vicki had grasped the sheet and, before she lost her nerve, pulled back the sheet. The cloth slid to the floor with a whisper, and it was the only sound Vicki could hear. No outside traffic, no humming electricity in the wires.

No heartbeat. No breathing.

No Henry.

Vicki dropped the sheet and whirled around. Henry stood frozen in place, one hand outstretched in a futile attempt to stop Vicki.

Beside Henry stood a stranger. He was tall and dark and muscular, with shoulder-length hair caught back in a clasp, and whatever he was, wasn't quite human.

Vicki growled, feeling her teeth extend and her vision sharpen. "What did you do to him?" she demanded.

The strange man's face creased in a grin. "He will remain unharmed," the man said in a faintly accented voice. "Until I have had a chance to thank you."

"I-- What?" Vicki darted around the man until she was between him and Henry. "What the hell are you talking about?"

The man waved his hand around the room. "For freeing me from my prison."

"You're going to need to give me a bit more back-story on this one," Vicki said. She felt Henry's wrist for a pulse. It was like touching a marble statue, still and so very cold.

The man bowed. "It is the least I can do, for my savior."

"Stop calling me that! I didn't free anyone from anything!"

"Not true," the man admonished with a click of his tongue. "It was your touch that melted the protection seals on my glass prison, that allowed the series of circumstances to be set in motion for the glass enclosure to be shattered and my physical form to be set free."

Vicki looked past the man to the object that had been under the sheet, a shimmering glass urn, that looked almost like a...

"You're a genie?" Vicki blurted out. "You were trapped in an actual lamp?"

The man crossed his arms over his chest, every movement screaming annoyance. "I am not a genie," he stressed. "I am Djinn."

"I say potato, you say 'pahtahato'," Vicki snapped. "And I may have touched the lamp a grand total of once in transit, but that was it! No rubbing and certainly no wishing!"

"But what good would I be as a bestower of wishes if I only listened to the words that crossed the lips of mankind?" The djinn smiled, and now it wasn't at all benevolent or kind. Vicki swallowed the growing fear in her chest. She couldn't let it see her afraid.

"So you somehow imagined that I wanted to spend the rest of my days in someone else's body?"

The djinn shook his head. "That is not what I gave you." In the blink of an eye, he was on the other side of the urn. "In the deepest hours of the night, the hidden desire of your heart is to be able to see as you once did." He ran a finger of the delicate gold lettering on the urn. "To not be less than you once were; but to be more. To be faster, stronger..." Then he was back beside Vicki and Henry. "To be better."

"And your grand solution was to shove me into someone else's body?"

The djinn shrugged. "He was only a vampire. He has lived long enough."

"That is not the point!" Vicki maneuvered back between the djinn and Henry. "I would never have asked for this! Put us back the way we were!"

Vicki really, really didn't like the way the djinn was looking at her. "Even knowing what the future holds?" he asked.

She knew exactly what he was talking about. Hasn't she spent month staring into the mirror, wondering about what the RP had done to her life? Still, she had to take a deep breath before responding. "No one knows what's going to happen in the future."

The djinn smiled. "True, but we can guess." He took a step back. "You will continue to lose your eyesight, then your hearing, and even risk mental retardation as the disease in your blood attacks you. You will not be able to work or care for yourself, and you have driven everyone away to the point where you will die, alone and forgotten, locked away in a hospital."

Vicki tried to speak, but she felt as though she were rooted to the spot in the same way as Henry.

"Or the other path you have chosen," the djinn continued. "Dancing so close to the edge of danger, trying to prove to yourself and those around you that you are not yet blind, not yet useless. One day you will step into danger and there will be no vampire savior to pull your life from the hands of the gods, no policeman with his gun to stop the dangers you seek out."

The djinn's voice was soft but penetrating as it ripped apart all the carefully constructed truths Vicki had built around herself.

"And you wonder, late at night, if you choose to walk into danger in the faint hopes that death will steal away your life before the blindness does."

Hands clenched so tight she wondered if she might break a bone, Vicki said, "Doesn't matter. Put me and Henry back!"

The djinn moved languidly over to where Henry stood frozen. "He would never know. You could keep his body, his powers--"

Vick had heard more than enough. "I'd know. Change us back!"

For the first time, the djinn seemed surprised. "You won't even consider my offer?"

"What part of 'put us back' don't you understand?" Vicki demanded. "Undo this!"

"And do what in its place?"

Now Vicki was surprised. "Do? You aren't going to do anything else!"

"Nothing else in your world you wish you could change?"

Vicki forced herself to open her hands. She could smell the blood her nails had drawn. "There's a tonne of shit that I wish was different, but wishing isn't supposed to make things different!"

"I could make it so."

"Like you made me 'better' by swapping me into a vampire's body?"

The djinn persisted. "It is our code, all debts must be repaid. You freed me from my prison, and I must provide compensation."

Could it be that the djinn actually thought he had done Vicki a favour? "Hell, consider it a gift," Vicki said. "You can accept gifts, right? No strings attached, nothing outstanding, we're clear and even."

The djinn considered. "We are not supposed to accept gifts."

"Who's going to know?"

"I will know," the djinn said, huffing slightly. "You truly do not wish to stay in the vampire's body?"

Vicki snarled involuntarily.

"All right. I will return you to your proper body and my debt will have been repaid as you will have received your wish to learn humility."

"Hey, I have never wanted to learn humility, you son of a--" Then the djinn dissolved in a cloud of black smoke and Vicki couldn't breathe as the world was encompassed by the darkness.

Everything was blurry.

Vicki rubbed at her eyes, but the blurriness did not receded. It was familiar, so familiar, but since the last few days...

Something was pressed into her hand, something wire and cool and Vicki was unfolding her glasses and setting them on her face before her mind could catch up with her hands.

Her hands, she saw as she blinked through her glasses. Her hands and her demon marks and her own hair swinging in front of her face as she sat up on the couch. Oh, thank god!

"Easy, Vicki," Henry's voice drifted over the air. Someone at her side helped her to sit up all the way. "You had a bad fall."

"What?" She turned her head. Henry Fitzroy sat beside her, looking and sounding just the way he was supposed to.

It had worked.

Movement across the room stilled the torrent of words on Vicki's tongue. The gallery owner, a smallish man, carried a glass of water towards the couch. "Are you better, Miss Nelson?" the man asked worriedly. "I had come down to tell you I planned on leaving, when I saw you fall. Your associate said you took faint?"

"Oh, did he?" Vicki asked, giving Henry a look. He smiled at her, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. "I'm fine, just a touch of the flu."

"Indeed." The man didn't look convinced. "Perhaps you should see a doctor."

"Good idea," Henry said. He laid his hand on the small of Vicki's back. "There's a 24-hour clinic near your office we could try."

There was no such thing anywhere near her office, but Vicki let Henry take her arm and help her to her feet. Truth be told, she was feeling a little light-headed. "That would be good."

"Thank you for your help," Henry said to the owner as he guided Vicki to the door.

"Wait," the man said, stopping them in their tracks. "Miss Nelson, the urn..."

Vicki waved a hand about vaguely. She wasn't sure if the man knew he'd had, then lost himself a djinn, but she didn't really care. "Someone could hurt themselves on that thing, you might want to get rid of it. Doesn't seem to have much value, anyway."

"I see," the man said quietly. "Yes, I see. Well, thank you for all your help and I am sorry about your fall."

Vicki let Henry pull her out of the office and out of the building, but when Henry attempted to slow down once they had cleared the door, Vicki kept on moving. "What is it?" Henry asked.

"I want to get out of here," Vicki said as she tried to remember where she had parked the car. "Far, far away from genies in lamps."

"I beg your pardon?" Henry asked. He tucked Vicki's arm closer to him.

"The thing that did this," Vicki indicated the two of them, "Was a djinn. He did it to thank me for rubbing off the protective seals on his glass lamp so he could get out."

"How did you convince him to reverse the situation?"

"I asked him to."

Henry stopped so quickly that Vicki almost fell. "You asked him?"

Vicki pried her arm out of Henry's grasp. "What the hell did you think I'd done?"

"I'm not sure, but I was betting that a copious amount of violence factored in."

Hands on her hips, Vicki glared up at Henry. He was fuzzy and the only thing that her damaged vision could pick up in the dim light, but that was the way it was supposed to be. "Why don't you have any faith in my skills of diplomacy? Look, I told him that I didn't actually want to be you, and he put us back to teach me humility or some such bullshit."

Henry's eyebrows arched. "Humility? You?"

Vicki stepped closer to Henry and jabbed a finger against his chest. "Shut up. I got us back to the way it's all supposed to be and didn't hurt a single hair on your head! The least you can say is thank you!"

Henry caught her hand and pulled her towards him so she ended up in his embrace. "Thank you, Vicki," he said, all traces of humour gone from his voice. His expression was almost too intense. "You are right, I owe you my gratitude."

Her half-hearted attempts to wiggle free weren't working, so Vicki gave up and leaned against Henry's chest. It felt so good to be herself again, just the right height and every part of her feeling right again. Especially pressed up against Henry. "You're welcome," she said a little breathlessly.

"In fact, I owe you more than words can convey," Henry continued. He dipped his head until his lips were next to Vicki's, words caressing her skin. "Please allow me to show you my regard."

"Henry--" Vicki's protest was silenced as Henry's lips met hers. His mouth was cool and tasted like sin and it was only with a great deal of willpower that Vicki managed to pull herself back before she fell completely into the moment. "Henry, hold on."

The vampire drew a deep breath, eyes still closed. "Why?"

Vicki planted her hands against Henry's chest and pushed, finally getting free of his embrace. "Don't you want to talk about what happened?"

Henry blinked. For some reason, Vicki had expected to see his eyes as pure black, but he stared at her with normal eyes. "You fixed this, and from the lack of urgency in your voice, you don't think that this djinn will come after us again. If you did, you wouldn't have allowed yourself to be... distracted."

Vicki clenched her jaw. If he had kissed her just now to gauge how distracted she could be, she was going to hit him. Or at least glare menacingly in his direction. "Fine, then," she said. "Are djinns evil?"

Henry shook his head. "They can be mischievous creatures, but they live by a very honorable code and seldom attack without provocation. They are very..." He smiled widely. "Very human in that regard."

"So we're done? This thing, it's all fixed?"

"You tell me. You seem to be the one with all the answers tonight."

Was that a hint of petulance in his voice? "Only because the djinn thought that I freed him from his prison and so he owed me one."

Without missing a beat, Henry said, "And you wished to be me?"

"Of course not!" Vicki stepped back, putting a little more distance between them. "He thought I wanted..." All the djinn's words came back to her, taunting her about the future, how she was losing herself. She cleared her throat. "That I wanted my eyesight back, and this was his solution."

Henry stared at her for just a little too long before he spoke. "And you did not succumb to the temptation." It was a statement, not a question.

"Of course not!" Vicki was ready to work herself into a fine rant, but Henry suddenly moved right in front of her. He took her hand and bent over it in an old-fashioned bow.

"I know what it is like to see through your eyes, Victoria." He kissed the back of her hand, lips cool against her skin. "The growing blindness, the headaches, the loss of independence--"

"Don't go making this into more than it is," Vicki interrupted, uncomfortable. "There's nothing I can do to change all that shit. Just got to keep on being me, you know?"

As usual, her lack of eloquence in the face of Henry's verbal prose made her feel like a country cousin, but she really didn't like the way he was looking at her. As if she was more than she was, for resisting the djinn's temptation. She would never have been able to accept, Henry knew her well enough to know that.

"So we should get going," Vicki continued. "I've probably got enough time to catch Mike at the station."

Henry straightened up, formality settling over him like a shroud. "Indeed. And I should feed before the sun comes."

"Henry--"

"Shall I fetch you a taxi?"

Vicki counted to five in her head. "Yes, Henry, that would be simply marvelous, thank you."

If he heard the sarcasm, which was truthfully rather hard to miss, he made no sign.

The squad room would never change, Vicki decided. It would always smell the same, always sound the same, no matter how badly her eyesight deteriorated. She made her way to the back of the room out of force of habit. The blonde blur sitting at the back desk solidified into Mike Celluci as Vicki got closer. She slid into the chair beside his desk without asking permission and waited.

After a few more determined scratches on his notepad, Mike looked up. His jaw clenched. "To what do I owe this visit?" he snapped.

"Chill, Mike. It's me." Vicki slumped lower in the chair. "One hundred percent back to normal."

The relief that crossed Mike's face was almost comical. "You're sure?"

"Yup." Vicki flashed him a smile. "Go ahead, test me. Anything."

Mike smiled back. "What did you get my mother for Christmas five years ago?"

Vicki rolled her eyes. "How the hell am I going to remember that? Ask me something work-related."

Mike just chuckled. "It's you all right." He reached across the desk for a file. "Everything's really back to normal? Do you know what caused..."

"The invasion of the body-snatchers?" Vicki supplied. "Yes, and it's not--" She was going to say, it's not a big deal, but that really wasn't the case and they both knew it. "It's over."

"Did Henry's fanboy knowledge come in handy?"

"No, different bad guy all together." Vicki forced herself to stand. "I just wanted to let you know that things were, you know. Back to normal."

"Good." Mike got to his feet. "That's good."

"I think so." Vicki hesitated. "Look, Mike, about that lunch thing." The humour faded from Mike's expression, and belatedly it occurred to Vicki that mentioning his kiss with Henry, however obliquely, might be a bad idea. "No, not that, I mean asking 'me' out for lunch in the first place."

"What about it?"

Vicki thought back to all the confusion and chaos of being 'Henry', and of all the things she thought she had lost. She took a deep breath. "If, you know, you'd like to go for lunch later this week?"

Mike didn't say anything.

Cheeks flaming, Vicki wondered if she had totally misread the situation. "I mean, in case you wanted to, to talk business or old cases or something--"

"Sure," Mike said quietly. "How about I call you?"

"Calling is good," Vicki stammered. "So, um..." She gestured over her shoulder. "I should go and let you get back to your important police work." In the glass behind Mike, she spotted Crowley approaching. "Like right now."

Mike had also spotted Crowley. "Good idea," he said with alacrity.

"Bye." Vicki turned and swerved around the head of Violent Crimes before the woman could do more than glare at her. Vicki made it as far as the entrance way and her waiting taxi before the whole importance of the conversation had sunk in.

Mike wants to go for lunch, Vicki thought, settling back into the cab as it sped across Toronto towards Chinatown and her apartment. Lunch, with me. She wasn't sure what exactly that meant, or how that was going to affect her relationship with Henry, but she found that she didn't really care.

She wasn't willing to let Mike Celluci go quite yet, regardless of Henry Fitzroy.

Vicki knocked on the door again, resisting the urge to start shouting. "Come on, Fitzroy," she muttered under her breath. "I know you're in there, it's only ten minutes after sunset."

The door finally opened to reveal Henry in a t-shirt and jeans. "Vicki?"

"Can you please explain to me how I managed to gain three pounds in two days?" Vicki asked, pushing past Henry into the apartment. "Were you eating ice cream the entire time?" She dropped her shopping bags on the couch. "What's with the duds?"

Henry sighed and closed the door. "Please, come in. Make yourself comfortable," he said sarcastically.

Vicki dropped onto the couch and put her feet on the coffee table, smiling at Henry's scowl. "Don't mind if I do." She waited.

After a minute, Henry made his way back over to his light table. "I have a deadline for my editor and after having lost two nights to the most recent crisis, I find myself behind."

"And you draw better when you dress like a slob?"

"These clothes are comfortable and I was not expecting company!"

"Come on, Henry." Vicki pushed herself to her feet. "You had to know I was coming over."

"I thought you would have other plans." Henry bent his head over his drawings.

Vicki bit back a few choice comments. "All my plans tonight involve you. Come on, put the pencil down and come over to the couch."

"I. Am. Busy."

"So I'll help." Before Henry could protest, Vicki pulled over a blank piece of paper and set to work. In a few moments, she held up her masterpiece. "Even Mr. Stickman," she pointed at the paper, where a highly stylized version of Henry was sprawled out on a couch beside another stick figure with glasses, "Wants you to take a break."

Henry sighed again. "You are a vexing woman."

"You say that like it's news to you." She grabbed Henry's hand and hauled him across the living room. "Sit and relax."

While Henry collapsed onto the couch, Vicki picked up the shopping bags and dropped them next to Henry. "What's this?" he asked.

"Just a token of my appreciation for being so level-headed while you were me and I was you." Vicki grinned. "Open it."

The look Henry gave her was loaded with suspicion, but he did reach into the bag and pull out the small boxes. He frowned. "What is this?"

"Joss Whedon's greatest hits," Vicki said. "You didn't have any of the DVDs in your collection so I went out and got them all for you. The complete Buffy and Angel and Firefly, which the clerk told me didn't have any vampires but there are apparently space cannibals, which sounds either really cool or very, very bad."

Henry looked at her. "You got these for me."

Vicki shrugged. "You liked them and I figured that if I'm going to be spending time with you, it'd be a good idea to see what the fuss is all about."

"This must have cost a small fortune."

"The Milano cheque cleared the bank. Now stop looking a gift horse in the mouth." Vicki picked the first season of Buffy from the collection. "Do we start with this one?"

Henry blinked at her. "Are we just to go back to the way things were before?"

Something clenched in Vicki's stomach. "If you want." She slipped the plastic wrap off the box. "Nothing's really changed. We're both still--" She mentally sorted through a series of words to describe their unorthodox relationship. "We're still friends, that hasn't changed. I may now know what it's like to suck someone's blood and die as the sun comes up, but isn't it a part of any relationship to gain a greater understanding of one's friends?"

"Perhaps."

Vicki headed to the DVD player. "So I understand you and you understand me, and we can both get back to being us." She slipped the disc into the tray and was on her way back to the couch when Henry was suddenly on his feet and in front of her.

"Before we can go back to being friends, Vicki, I need to test a theory." Henry's hands settled on her waist, pulling her close. "If you permit?"

"What am I going to be permitting?" Vicki asked, not moving. She was so used to Henry in fancy clothes that seeing him in ragged clothes, which just coincidentally fit every well-defined part of his body, sent her head whirling.

Henry's mouth curved up into a smile. "A kiss."

"Oh." Vicki tried to think of a reason to say no, but nothing came to her. "I guess that would be okay."

So Henry kissed her. At first, Vicki tried to remain detached, to keep in mind that a kiss was just a kiss, but then Henry's hand came up to cup the back of her head and his other hand ran over her hip and she forgot what she was trying to guard against. For the first time, she let herself fall into the kiss, into just being with Henry.

The trumpets blare from the TV's speakers brought her back to herself. Breathing heavily, Vicki blinked up at Henry, feeling just a little shy. "Hey."

"Hey," Henry whispered. He ran his thumb down her cheek, almost as if he couldn't bear to let her go.

Vicki tried to breathe evenly. "So what exactly was that theory of yours, anyway?"

Henry swallowed. "That first night when you fed from me..."

Vicki raised her eyebrows, remembering. "You wanted to see if I was addicted to your sexy vamp powers?"

"Something like that."

While Vicki certainly wouldn't have minded if Henry sank fangs into her right then, she didn't feel any overwhelming urge to have him ravish her. "I think I'm okay," she said with a smile.

Henry was still looking at her. "Good," he said in a faint voice. "That's good."

Still smiling, Vicki drew Henry over to the couch. "Now we have some vampire TV to watch." She handed him the remote. "How does this whole thing start, anyway?"

Henry sat next to Vicki, so close their bodies touched. "Like any good story," he said. "A blonde beauty and a boy who really should know better."

"Good way to start any story." Vicki waved at the screen. "Let's get to it."

Obediently, Henry pressed the play button, and the show started. Things went well until after the first commercial break, when Henry whispered in Vicki's ear, "Do I need to pretend to stretch so I can put my arm around your shoulder?"

Vicki shushed him. "You're ruining the dialogue."

Henry shrugged, stretched, and when his hand settled around her shoulders, Vicki let it happen.

She'd be a fool if she expected things to go to back to the way they used to be. She'd be a fool to want things they way they had been.

Maybe having a djinn swap her into Henry's body hadn't been the worst thing to happen to her, after all.