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Rosco wakes up with a fever.
He hasn’t had a fever in—never, not in his pitiful excuse of a body. He’s not even sure if he can call it his, because all that is his is his mind and a questionable description of a soul, but it feels like a furnace and he actually feels whole for once.
It freaks him out enough to open his eyes and jolt half of his body upwards.
He wakes up to a dimly lit room. Nothing new there.
He wakes up to gold walls and red curtains and carpets and the faint scent of incense and peaches. That’s new.
Rosco clutches the blanket that he must’ve kicked off his body while he was asleep; he grips it tight in his balled fist and pulls it close to his chest. It’s hot to the point where he feels he’s a walking furnace, but he doesn’t have a headache, and his limbs aren’t aching and sluggish. He shakes his head right and left, up and down, just to make sure there’s not an elusive headache waiting to surprise him later in the day. Nothing. No phantom pains. No ghost of where his body is unevenly patched together like a tapestry, hanging by staples that freakishly regenerate along with his distasteful existence of self.
It makes Rosco feel worse. His guard should have been up the moment he couldn’t hear any voice in his head.
His eyes warily scan his surroundings. His bed is softer. His room is cleaner. Less clutter expected in a place where experiments and abominations coexist. It doesn’t smell like a room where breakthroughs and failures have happened. Incense. Peaches. The faintest trace of gold, specifically gold from coins and antiques that have been passed from hand to hand.
Rosco swallows, and only then does he notice that, aside from heat, magic is coursing through his veins.
He slowly looks down as he takes his hands out, examining his arms and forearms, and it makes him faint how foreign yet familiar these limbs are. In the dim lighting, he makes out tanned arms. Stronger, more defined than his own attached arms. Longer fingernails, albeit painted in the same shade of black.
His brain racks for answers—it still bothers him that he has no headache, and that he can’t hear nor feel anybody’s presence—as he scrambles off the bed, looking for a mirror in cabinets and drawers. There’s a theory forming at the back of his head, a theory that makes no sense, but is the only plausible explanation for his current state. He feels like he should sweat, but his physical body is fine and Rosco has always been only almost fine ever since he gained consciousness. He shouldn’t be fine. He defies the laws of birth and rebirth and his heart is but a literal crystal, but—
Rosco finally finds this room’s vanity. If his theory is right, and if he knows the owner of his body as much as he thinks he does (he should, he should)—
There, in his reflection, is a familiar face blinking back at him. It’s not his face. It’s not the face he’s used to seeing. His eyes aren’t uneven, instead sharp and bright and in the same beautiful shade of gold. There are no jagged stitches that hold his face together, no sign of grey skin. No eyebags that remind him of how close yet also how far he is from death, despite being undead.
There, in his reflection, is striking red hair that Rosco knows all too well. There, in his reflection, is a frightened expression that he decides does not look good on Malim Cendari’s sunkissed face.
Rosco swallows again, nails digging into the wooden table as he tries not to fall off the chair.
He cannot fathom how he got himself into this state. He doesn’t recall whatever he did that could have brought him in Malim’s lamp; last thing he remembers is staying up late catching up with research after taking some time off, and—
He does remember spending more time with Malim as of late. Malim, with his playful demeanor and clumsy behavior, who somehow convinced Rosco to take some time off just to roam around and eat with little to no care of the world. Admittedly, despite how much Rosco grumbled for taking care of him, Malim was right when he said he needed the break. No King, no Soldier, no Scholar. Morimer didn’t even make a snide remark nor a scathing sound of disapproval.
No matter how hard Rosco tries to think, he doesn’t feel a headache forming. He doesn’t remember the last time his head was this peaceful. Deserted.
(Lonely, his brain tries to supply, but Rosco only swallows again. He has always been lonely. He’s the only abomination tied to a certain condition that has no escape. Lonely is synonymous with Rosco Graves.
Lonely is what Rosco has felt less these past few days when he was with Malim.)
Rosco picks himself up from the chair and sluggishly walks back to his—Malim’s—bed. He slowly sinks back in, eyes roaming the empty ceiling as he slides down the headboard. His fingertips tingle with magic, so warm and unfamiliar and strong. Strong for Rosco, who has nothing but staples on and the undead in his body. Whatever body he was summoned in. A cheap imitation of birth.
Rosco briefly wonders of Malim’s life before he gets turned into a genie against his will. Rosco briefly wonders, right after, of Candle’s life. The life that preceded him. The life that should have been, instead of what has become.
Rosco bites on his (not his) lower lip, and then immediately tugs his (not his) teeth off. He licks his teeth (not his) and almost misses the sharpness of his own (not his) fangs.
Rosco is convinced he’s only put on this world to experience what it’s like to not have his own body. The faint taste of peach in his (not his, Malim’s) mouth almost makes Rosco smile. Very typical. Malim’s hints of consistency oddly comforts him, but he’s always been odd, anyway.
“You,” A voice rings in his head, and he knows from the get go that it isn’t Morimer—there’s tragedy in how familiar he is with the very crystal that sustains him and despises him, but Rosco isn’t in his borrowed body right now, so he doesn’t further dwell on it—but it’s deep and menacing, and Malim’s body is as familiar of it as Rosco is with Morimer. “You’re not Malim.”
Rosco takes a while to crack an eye open, smirking just how Malim usually does when he’s teasing. His eyes search for the lamp, until he realizes that he is inside of it. He forces to sharpen his smirk. “C’mon. You see my face.” He makes sure to add a certain cadence to his words, a lilt and an extra hint of taunt.
“I do. It’s the same grating smirk and voice,” Willy scoffs. Rosco keeps the smirk on as he adjusts his body, his arms crossed behind his head, with relaxedness that is too practiced. “But I’ve spent centuries with that brat. I’ve spent countless years with the magic coursing in his body and the life force that we share. What is your purpose in inhabiting his body?”
Rosco doesn’t answer him immediately again. His eyes examine Malim’s room even more, and if he weren’t in such a grave—ha, ha—situation, he would’ve laughed at Willy’s difference between his unserious doodled face on the lamp and his deep and ominous voice.
“... You’re not going to ask me who I am?”
Willy laughs, humorless despite the bellowing voice. “I do not care for such questions. I mostly only care for his body—” Rosco can imagine him tutting his chin to gesture at where he currently lays. “And the magic that binds us to this very day. If he doesn’t jeopardize me in any way, then why should I ask?”
Rosco closes his eyes again. He wants to get used to the fact that the only voice he hears is different and is outside his head, but if he’s in Malim’s body, then surely Malim is in his’, and he’s not sure he wants to put his… companion through that. Malim has had his fair share of trials and tribulations, but at least Rosco is actually used to it all, from the physical mismatch of his body to the mental stress that his skull is already numb to.
“Besides,” Willy snorts. “You do not reek of danger. You reek of… death, but not quite.” If Willy had a nose, he might be scrunching it now. Full of distaste and displeasure. The image makes Rosco snort back. “You… I cannot put a finger on you. You must be his stitched up friend, then. The one who shouldn’t be alive.”
Rosco doesn’t know where he snaps; was it the jab about his uneven and unnatural stitches that made him open his eyes? Was it the remark of his stagnant, undead state that Morimer never fails to remind him about? Or was it the more sharp yet vulnerable use of the word friend? The one he doesn’t dare use to describe any of the people he met, thanks to the crystals?
He angrily burns holes through the ceiling and hopes Willy feels it. Like most of Rosco’s wishes, it doesn’t happen. He only clicks his tongue and hastily pulls the blanket up to cover his head and the rest of his body. He’s close to a corpse like this, fully covered with his body lying straight and stiff. A cheap imitation of death.
“... I’ll figure out how to switch our—” Rosco doesn’t even know what exactly is exchanged between their bodies. Their minds? Consciousness? Souls? “Switch us back. Later. Don’t be annoying.” He grumbles, eyes shut tight in the hopes of mentally shoving Willy away.
“Ha. You two can be so similar,” And Rosco doesn’t know what to make of that, because Malim is light and lively where Rosco is dark and stagnant. Malim actually has his own body, fit and intact, compared to Rosco’s amalgamation of a body. Malim grants wishes, while Rosco only has unanswered questions.
The sweltering heat in his borrowed body oddly yet surely lulls him to sleep. He’s alone in the room now, but it’s the farthest to loneliness he’s felt in forever.