Chapter Text
Shimazaki woke reluctantly. He groaned, turning over on his side. His head was throbbing and the dryness of his mouth brought back memories from the night before. He knew he needed to get himself some water, but he wasn’t ready to drag himself awake yet.
He clutched at his head, curling in on himself and willing sleep to come back to him. It wasn’t easy, he’d fallen asleep on the couch in the living room of Minegishi’s apartment – something he hadn’t done in a long time.
He had been dating them for a couple of months now, kind of. It was hard to pinpoint the exact start of their relationship, only the small shifts that had turned him from “ex-coworker” to “freeloading roommate” to… whatever they were now. Shimazaki liked to think of himself as a stay-at-home boyfriend. Minegishi would still probably have used the term freeloader, but they let him share their bed.
Shimazaki groaned to himself, his headache was getting harder to ignore and he cursed the amount he had to drink last night. His memories of the last hours of the night were vague, but worrying. He’d had a great evening with his partner for most of it, Minegishi spared some of their meager paycheck to take him for dinner at a fairly nice restaurant. Afterwards, the two of them had hit a bar or two and Shimazaki figured it was doing them good. Minegishi seemed more relaxed than they had been in weeks.
He didn’t understand why they’d suddenly turned sour at him. Shimazaki searched his memory for the moment they had said something… Or had he said something to them? He remembered them telling him in a low voice to take them home, with that cute little cocked head gesture they made when their patience was running thin. Shimazaki had found that endearing. Maybe he’d told them that at the time. He hadn’t been able to see the distained look Minegishi had given him in response.
Either way, Minegishi hadn’t said another word to him until he did take them home. Shimazaki didn’t like teleporting while drunk, worried that he’d miss the mark by a few feet and end up in midair outside their 4th floor apartment. But the edge in Minegishi’s tone told him they weren’t willing to wait for a cab. And once he’d brought the two of them inside, they had gone to bed immediately, closing the door on Shimazaki and leaving him to sleep in the living room like old times.
He’d been tempted to go out again and lose himself at another club, continuing to enjoy his night without them, but in the end he gave up and let himself collapse on the couch. Clearly the booze and the couch hadn’t been good for his sleep, his whole body felt stiff and alien, not moving in the way he expected it too. It felt better not to move at all, for now.
Damn them and their short temper. If Shimazaki had done something to make them so upset, they should have had the decency to tell it to him straight before shutting down like that. Or maybe it was Shimazaki in the wrong, and he felt a little guilty about putting them in such a mood on a date night that they had mostly paid for.
Shimazaki thought he’d learned to know their mood and mannerisms, but now he had no idea what they were thinking. Perhaps they’d already told him, and Shimazaki simply couldn’t remember. If he dared to ask them again this morning, maybe he'd hear it all again. Or maybe they’d shut right down again leaving him to step on eggshells.
Shimazaki desperately wanted to put off that conversation. He could make Minegishi a nice breakfast as an apology for something he didn’t quite remember doing. But he didn’t feel in a state to get up at the moment, and instead he curled back into the cushions, willing sleep to come back to him.
As he did so, he felt the weight of something soft on his body. He pulled the blanket around himself. Shimazaki was sure he hadn’t fallen asleep with one. Had Minegishi given this to him while he was asleep?
Oh? Perhaps they hadn’t been as mad as he had thought. The blanket smelled of them. The light, lavender scent soothed the rawness of his throat, and the thought that all might be forgiven put his mind at ease.
Despite this, he couldn’t quite rest. Something felt a little off. Rather than the firmness of the couch beneath him, he felt a comfortable mattress. Why was he in the bedroom after all?
He threw his arm out beside him. Minegishi wasn’t there, but they were an early riser, and it wasn’t unusual that he’d wake up to an empty bed. But a bed he didn’t remember falling asleep in? For a terrible moment Shimazaki thought he really might have gone out again and— No, there was no way that could have happened. Besides, this was the familiar mattress and familiar scent he’d slept with every night for the past few weeks. He could be sure he was in Minegishi’s bedroom, although he couldn’t be sure why.
And there were more things that confused him. For one, his clothes. The texture and fit wasn't familiar. Did he even own the t-shirt and shorts he was wearing? Shimazaki didn’t know if he had changed into them last night, he was becoming more distrustful of his memories by the minute.
It was clear he wasn’t going to get anywhere by lying around and wondering about it. And getting back to sleep would be impossible. Shimazaki gave up, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, leaning on the bedframe to drag himself upright. He felt like he was still drunk, everything felt so out of proportion, and his movements were clumsy, as if he didn’t know the length of his own limbs.
The shapes of the furniture in the room were outlined in his memory and he confirmed with touch as he stumbled past on his way to the door. Nothing seemed to be out of place, so why did he feel like his frame of reference was skewed? He rubbed the sweat from his forehead, then opened his eyes in confusion.
He cried out in shock, and the voice he heard wasn’t his own.
**************
Shimazaki sat heavily back on the bed, breathing hard.
It wasn’t difficult to understand what had happened. He’d seen it with his own – with Minegishi’s own – eyes, that much was clear from the situation. How this happened, he couldn’t guess. But for now, his new sense of sight was a far more interesting mystery to explore.
He’d found he couldn’t keep his eyes open for more than a couple seconds at a time. At first the light was dazzling, and even when his senses seemed to adjust to this “brightness,” the experience was still so disorientating that he needed to shut it down again.
He focused on what he saw as his conventional senses. “Mind’s Eye” seemed to be unaffected, and he was still able to sense his surroundings through touch. His muscle memory and sense of proportion was thrown off due to the slight difference in stature.
Minegishi wasn’t terribly shorter than himself, but even that small difference in height and length of their limbs made everything feel bigger in proportion, even the bed he was sitting on.
He ran his fingers idly through Minegishi’s hair, familiar with the feeling of the cool thin strands against his skin. It was time to try sight again, maybe.
He opened his eyes, cautiously, and blinked a few times. After a second, the painful brightness died away, though what remained wasn’t any less overwhelming. The onslaught of different shapes and colours were all competing for his focus all at once, and even as his gaze darted from one to another, it seemed impossible to connect the flurry of visual information to any physical meaning.
He needed to close his eyes again. It was too much to take in all at once, he needed to narrow his focus.
Shimazaki brought his attention to his hands, flexing each finger, feeling the way Minegishi’s skin became slightly dry and calloused in the winter months. He bowed his head, intending to open his eyes only to focus on their hands.
The result was somewhat enlightening, it felt a lot easier to focus on something right in front of his eyes, naturally following the movement as he laced and unlaced his fingers. Slowly, he was learning to correlate what he was seeing with his own movements, and slowly learn how “sight” could fit into his existing experience of the world – one made of memory and movement.
It was strange that his eyes seemed only to focus on one thing at a time. As he focused on the floor of the room, the perception of his hands grew fuzzy, and vice versa. Flicking rapidly between the two seemed like a good compromise, but Shimazaki quickly learned it made his head hurt.
This seemed far more limiting. With his eyes closed, he could gain a general sense of the objects in the room and their location, with the sharpest awareness of things close to him, like the bed, and the table. His memory of the room and its contents helped him sort through the visual information. He traced the corners of the beside table and studied how variation in color marked the boundaries between objects.
The walls and the bed looked mostly the same, apart from when Shimazaki pulled on the covers, the texture creating interesting ripples in the fabric. Touching the wall had no such effect, obviously. He put his hand on the solid surface, observing as he moved his hand around, watching a duplicate version dance along the surface, meeting his fingertips. He surmised this must be his “shadow”.
His clothes behaved similarly to the sheets on the bed, as did the curtains. Shimazaki pulled at them a little, and dazzled himself with the light this let into the room. He pulled them shut again, this was enough to explore the room by.
He stood and paced around, examining different objects. The closet was solid, and had flowing patterns running through the wood, even though the texture was totally smooth under his fingers. The floor looked similar, as did the other wooden furniture.
He found Minegishi’s clothes thrown over the back of the chair, and a couple of their books on the seat. He picked one up and flicked through, finding patterns inside that weren’t dissimilar to those on the wood, and held just as much meaning to him. But evidently Minegishi found these flowing, repeating symbols engrossing. He laughed to himself.
Hearing Minegishi’s voice, he remembered his situation. He had been so fascinated by this new experience that he’d almost forgotten the reason for it in the first place. After all the new experiences of the morning, the idea that he’d woken in their body wasn’t difficult for him to accept.
While he was quite tempted to continue exploring the senses of the body he was now inhabiting, he realised that the change was going to present certain problems. And he had a good idea of what was waiting for him in the living room.
He put down the book and went to the bedroom door with a sense of guilt and trepidation. With any luck, this new situation would have Minegishi preoccupied enough not to mention last night, and Shimazaki would be saved from an awkward apology.
It took more paces to get from the table to the bedroom door than he expected and he stumbled awkwardly as muscle memory wasn’t quite correlating with his surroundings, and the way his field of vision moved as he did was so disorientating he had to support himself with one hand against the wall as he walked towards the living area.
Shimazaki sensed their presence before he entered the room. His precognition told him the way they’d click their teeth at the approach of his footsteps.
He hovered in the doorway. They were sat on the couch, hunched over, chin resting on their hand in apparent thought or frustration. Their aura was unmistakably Minegishi-like. All espers were sensitive to the presence of others like them, and Shimazaki was more attuned to this than most. His partner’s mellow aura that usually curled and swayed like leaves in the wind, was coiled tight.
He looked at his own body, sat at a distance from him. They were slouching their back and tapping their foot uneasily.
“Minegishi? That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Depends how you look at it.”
They sounded bitter. Shimazaki laughed awkwardly. The sound of someone else using his voice was so curious it made him want to hear it again.
It didn’t look like Minegishi had moved from where Shimazaki had fallen asleep the night before.
Given that he was now inhabiting Minegishi’s body, and had retained his psychic powers along with their sense of sight, he had little doubt about what they were experiencing right now.
“How long have you been awake?”
Minegishi shrugged and clicked their teeth again. “With any luck, I’m still dreaming.” Then they groaned, “God Shimazaki, what did you drink last night? My head is killing me.”
Gingerly, he sat next to them on the couch. He suddenly had the chance to see his own body up close. He stared wide eyed as Minegishi leaned on the back of the couch and rubbed their forehead. They wrinkled their eyebrows into a frown, Shimazaki’s eyes caught on the way it made the skin bunch up above their – his – nose. The two of them would have to solve this predicament quickly, or Minegishi was going to leave those frown lines etched on his face.
“I'm guessing,” he started, diverting the conversation from the subject of the night before, “I’m guessing you can’t see right now.”
“No.”
The leaves of the houseplants in the room bristled in response to their frustration. So Minegishi had also retained their chlorokinesis like before.
“If you’re asking me that,” they said, sounding like it took some effort to keep their voice level, “then now you must be…”
Minegishi uncomfortably avoided saying the obvious. It was something that other people often did in reference to Shimazaki’s blindness, acting like it was a conversation too awkward to broach. He found that it was almost always out of pity, or a bizarre expression of guilt, that they possessed an ability that Shimazaki did not. He didn't understand the guilt, generally Shimazaki didn't pass an opportunity to laud his own abilities over others, and he despised the pity.
Minegishi had never once shown him that, it was partly what had drawn him to them in the first place. They never asked the usual prying questions about his eyes, his senses, how much his powers “made up” for what he couldn’t see. Maybe that was just genuine disinterest from Minegishi, but Shimazaki liked them hard to get.
Now, hearing that familiar trailing of the sentence, the awkward smile in their voice, in his own voice nonetheless. It sounded like an insult. Shimazaki's chest tightened.
But the moment passed. He had to cut them a break, Minegishi had just lost a sense that was important to them. He tried to dispel the tension in his chest with a laugh.
“Yes, I can see. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If we’ve been swapped, it would be weird if mine suddenly had a working pair of eyes and yours didn’t.”
“But our powers have been carried over as well. I wouldn’t make any assumptions about this based on sense.”
“Ok, true,” Shimazaki sighed. What do you think made it happen in the first place?”
“I don’t know…” they trailed.
He continued to stare at his own face in profile as Minegishi hung their head, closely studying the features he could now investigate by sight. Shimazaki was aware of the impression he had on people, and for the first time he could see the same way others did. The first human face Shimazaki had ever seen was his own, but he didn’t know at all what to think of it, with no point of reference to compare it to.
He found himself reaching a hand out towards them on instinct, his primary way of confirming anything was through touch, and he wanted something concrete to feel along with the sight. Before he even touched them, Minegishi flinched away.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just uh– testing you.”
“Stop that.”
“But you could sense me doing that. You’ll adjust to your other senses pretty quickly.”
“I don’t want to adjust to it,” they said sharply.
“Okay, okay. You got any ideas about how to switch back?”
“I don’t know…” they said eventually, letting out a drained sigh. “But right now I could really use a drink.”
“Hair of the dog?” Shimazaki rose from the couch and walked to the kitchenette.
“Ugh, I don’t even want to look at a bottle of–.”
“Lucky for you, you don’t have to.”
“Shut up. Coffee would be great.”
He understood why the situation wasn’t ideal for them – for both of them. While Shimazaki would have been more comfortable in his own body, the novelty of sight hadn’t quite worn off for him. Minegishi’s impatience seemed uncharacteristically childish.
Seeing they probably wouldn't say anything helpful about the situation right now, Shimazaki didn’t press them further. His morning coffee was well overdue.
He found the coffee pot by the stove, clean, thankfully. And filled it with water. This was new. As it flowed out of the faucet, he could clearly see the shape of the stream, where the substance started and ended, but the colour of the sink behind it, and the inside of the coffee pot it filled, was still completely visible. So this was what they called “transparency”?
Shimazaki couldn’t help but stare as the coffee pot overfilled and the water started to spill over his hand. This was certainly the most interesting phenomenon he’d seen so far, and he swirled the pot gently just to see how it splashed around. Minegishi had almost certainly watched the same thing countless times before, but for Shimazaki it was a first, it felt like exploring their world. He only wished his lover might do the same for him.
Pouring out the excess water, he put the coffee pot on the stove and brought out two mugs, which looked as featureless as they felt. Undoubtedly the cheapest Minegishi could find, along with the rest of the things in their house. The moka pot had been Shimazaki’s purchase. There was no substitute for good coffee, he thought as he poured it out and brought it back over to where Minegishi was sat
“Here…” he said as he took their hand, guiding it to hold their mug as he handed it to them. They took it gratefully, cupping it in both hands as if scared they’d drop it, and tentatively took a sip.
Once Shimazaki was sat with his own coffee, he could feel that Minegishi was noticeably less tense, their breath rising and falling more evenly as they held their mug to their chest.
“Thank you, Shimazaki,” they said quietly as he sat down. Their unusually soft tone, almost apologetic.
“It's alright.”
To his surprise, Minegishi leaned towards him, closing the distance between them as they sat, though only a little.
Shimazaki did the same, nestling closer and fully leaning against them. Minegishi’s way of intimacy was always understated, so even the small gesture of leaning their head on him made a grin creep across his face.
There was long silence as the two drank their coffee. Eventually Minegishi asked, “How is it?”
“Seeing?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm… More interesting than I thought, actually. Still could take some getting used to, I think.”
Their breath caught.
“Minegishi, I am sorry but–”
“It’s fine. Actually, I heard you stumbling about in the bedroom earlier, was that you ‘getting used’ to it?”
“Yeah, it was… Sorry I didn't come to you right away. Have you been sat there all this time?”
“Didn't want to move. I wasn't sure where I was. Or I didn't want to believe it. Until you came in.”
Sure, Minegishi had probably been a little shorter on evidence than he was. But hearing Shimazaki speaking in their own voice from across the room seemed to clinch it the moment he walked in.
Shimazaki laughed awkwardly. Hearing himself talk, his own body sitting inches away from him was definitely uncanny, and he was still adjusting to moving around in a new skin. Minegishi did have it harder in that respect. They seemed reluctant to move from their place on the couch. Shimazaki understood that they didn't have the kind of extra-sensory perception that helped himself, but did that stop them navigating the apartment they'd lived in for months?
He found his hand straying to their knee. They were clearly distressed by their new sightlessness, and Shimazaki found himself wanting to apologise. He bit it back, it wasn’t his fault. But he would comfort them.
Minegishi put their hand on his too. Or his on theirs. Their fingers entwined in the same familiar way that they’d done a hundred times before, but this time Shimazaki was feeling the lines and ridges of his own hand from the outside. Their aura had relaxed a little, falling over their body in a thin sheen of power that drew his attention less, and he could just feel the warmth against his palm.
He wanted to sit in the feeling a little longer, exploring the reciprocal sensation of his own body through his lover’s. Minegishi rubbed the back of his hand with their thumb, then pulled away.
“Feels weird.”
“It does,” Shimazaki laughed.
“There has to be some way to get back.”
“True love's kiss?”
“No.”
“Well I think it's worth a shot…” Shimazaki said, mock sulkily, leaning in further to draw his face close to theirs.
They put their hand out to stop him, keeping him at a distance. Shimazaki thought that was cold, even for Minegishi.
“Not like this.”
“Well I'm shit outta luck if I can't even kiss you in this state.”
They just sighed.
He tried not to take particular offense to Minegishi’s refusal, just went back to resting on their shoulder. They weren’t affectionate at the best of times, and this morning they had clearly been rattled, but to think they couldn’t even share a moment together as lovers was a shame to him.
Beside him, Minegishi sipped the last of their coffee.
“What do you think did this to us, another esper?”
He hummed. “I haven’t sensed one around recently. And if their power on us was strong enough to cause this, then I would have felt it.”
“Whatever the case, it’s clearly supernatural. Rather than relying on our guesswork we should take this to someone who knows more about this stuff.”
Shimazaki was floored by this suggestion. Minegishi seemed wildly uncomfortable in this condition, and he wouldn’t have expected their first suggestion to be seeking help from someone else. “Sure, but… who is going to know about this? Besides, I thought that– uh, getting around might be a bit of a problem for you.”
“You can still teleport, can’t you?”
“I mean, I haven’t tried since this morning.”
“Can you fetch my wallet? I think it’s in my jacket – on the chair in the bedroom.”
He blinked. “What, you wanna go now?”
“God, no,” Minegishi rubbed their temples a little theatrically. “I'm going to need at least another coffee. And these clothes smell like whatever that girl spilled on you yesterday. No, I just need to check something.”
“Okay…” he said uncertainly and got to his feet. Usually he wouldn’t bother teleporting around the house, but he wanted to test if being in Minegishi’s body required any sort of correction in terms of proportions or distance. Better check that now, safe in his home, rather than run into issues later.
In an instant, he was in the bedroom, right behind the chair. Good. No significant correction needed. He reckoned he could probably teleport anywhere within a mile of where he was and get it right to within a few yards – a larger error margin than usual, but he was grateful it wasn’t any worse.
He swept the jacket off the back of the chair and dropped it onto Minegishi’s lap in the same motion as he teleported back to the living room.
“Thanks.”
He watched them fumble in the pockets, they brought out something small and flat and rifled through it, taking out something even smaller and flatter. They handed it clumsily to Shimazaki, and feeling it in his hands he realised it was a card of some sort, one that had probably been knocking about in their wallet for a while. It was slightly bent and the corners were rounded.
“Serizawa’s business card. I’d honestly forgotten he ever gave it to me, but he told me his office deals with this kind of thing a lot. Spirits, at least.”
“Does he, now?”
“Maybe he could help.”
Shimazaki fingered the card. He couldn’t read what was on it, of course. He knew the shape of numbers, by touch. With a little effort he might have been able to associate that with the printed ink on the card with his memory to get the phone number, but any other characters were impossible for him.
Instead he used his phone, which had been in Minegishi’s back pocket, to scan and read aloud to him the text written on the card.
– Serizawa Katsuya. Spirits and Such Consultation Office –
Shimazaki wasn’t familiar with the address, but he knew vaguely the district it was in. He smiled. “A spiritual consultant, huh? Serizawa has come a long way. You wanna go now?”
“As soon as possible.”
“That eager to get out of my body? I'm sorry it isn't good enough for you. Anyways –” he gestured to the pajamas he was still wearing, though then realised they couldn’t sense this “– I have to get dressed before we go anywhere.”
“You know that's not what I meant. And yeah, I also want to freshen up a bit…” They sniffed the sleeve of the jacket Shimazaki had been wearing since the night before, and wrinkled their face again.
“You need any help with that?”
“I think I'll be ok,” they said firmly. “But if you could find me some clean clothes to wear after…”
“You got it, boss.”
“I don’t like how you said that in my voice,” they said as they stood up from the couch, and promptly keeled over again when they hit their knee on the coffee table.
**************