Title: M is for Mindswap
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Sanctuary Crossover/Fusion
Characters: Nikola Tesla, Helen Magnus, Evan Lorne
Pairings: Tesla/Magnus, Lorne/Parrish
Rating: R
Orientation: Slash, het
Word Count: 2,645
Prompt: For Dark Bingo Fill: “Mindswap”
Also for Ancient City Bingo Fill: “Crossover/Fusion”
And for 10 Tropes Fill: “Crossover”
“I do not understand the purpose of this device, Nikola,” Helen said as she bent close to the sparking coils of electricity and blinked at the glow.
“It utilizes the electricity of the mind, Helen, it brings two minds into perfect synchronicity, it aligns everything in a blissful oneness, isn’t it wonderful?” Nikola looked at her eagerly as he held up a metallic headpiece and waggled it at her. “Shall we?”
She held up a hand and declined. “I am not feeling particularly adventurous today.”
The look he gave her was one of utter betrayal. “You don’t believe it will work. I’ve tested it extensively.”
“Really?”
He grinned. “Yes, I have very blissfully harmonious rats now. Come on, Helen, I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I’m not willing to do myself.” He tried pouting at her but as usual she simply ignored the downward curl of his lip.
“Why would I even want to do this?” she asked, cocking a hip and crossing her arms as she stared at him.
Leaning on the edge of the table, he smiled at her. “Perfect harmony. Think of the sex, Helen.”
Helen was silent for a moment, considering. “If you fry my brain I shall be very, very put out with you Nikola.” She extended her palm for the headset he was twirling on his finger.
Once she had fitted the device over her long dark hair, he led her to the sofa and sat down, patting the cushion beside him. He slipped an identical headset over his own head and held up a device. “Ready?”
“As I ever am for one of your experiments.”
“You love the sex, admit it.”
“Some of your inventions do have practical applications. Press the button Nikola, let’s get it over with.”
He smiled, leaned over to kiss her briskly and hit the switch.
~*~
Nikola couldn’t breath. He had a moment of panic before he realized that he was lying on his belly with his nose flattened. He lifted his head and wiped at his face. He was face down in the dirt, literally. He rolled over and sat up with a groan as he felt pain throb in his head. She felt dreadful, as if she had been slammed against a wall and beaten with sticks. “This is not blissful, nor is it harmonious, what happened?” he muttered as he looked around at what appeared to be a greenhouse or nursery. There were plants everywhere.
He climbed to his feet and brushed the dirt off his chest. He was wearing a lab coat, but it wasn’t his lab coat. He was also wearing khakis that were not his; ill-fitting baggy khakis and a plaid shirt. He never wore plaid. Ever. What the hell was going on here? He stared up at the ceiling and muttered, “Helen, where are you? I might have died and gone to hell for real this time!”
~*~
Finding his way out of plant hell had been a pain in the ass. He had always hated jungles, ever since the incident in South America that Nigel had gotten them into. Emerging from the greenhouse room, he walked out into a corridor that looked like something out of a sci-fi show. Where was he?
The people he passed seemed to recognize him, he got casual nods and waves from those he saw. He held a hand up in front of him and looked at it. It looked like his hand, except it didn’t at the same time. He realized that he felt weird. Weird in a bad way, like he had during the time when he had been ‘de-vamped’ - he felt fully human. Damn. Something had gone very horribly wrong with his experiment.
“Hey, where’s the nearest restroom?” he called out to a young lady in a lab coat walking past him. He found he suddenly had need of the facilities when he realized his change of state.
“Right around that corner, Doctor Parrish, you can’t miss it.”
Doctor Parrish? Well, at least he had a name and seemed to belong here, that was good, he wouldn’t be arrested for trespassing or seized as an intruder. He strode quickly around the corner and found a door with a weird little sign on it. There was no handle, but there was a thing sticking out of the wall beside the door, when he touched his fingers to it the door slid open. Bathroom.
He darted in and straight over to the required equipment, which was oddly designed. When he was done, he went towards a sink and figured out how to wash his hands using it. There was a shiny surface that served as a full length mirror on the wall by the door and he realized the person he saw in it was himself, after he held a hand up and waved and the reflection did the same. He slowly moved towards it. He thought it couldn’t get worse than plaid and baggy pants, but it could. He fingered the long strands of shaggy hair. He looked like a complete dork, but a dorky version of himself. This must have something to do with the device. He and this doppelganger of himself must have similar enough brain waves that the device had matched them up. He wasn’t certain yet how he had ended up in this body, though.
It gave him pause to think that this Doctor Parrish might be running around in his body, doing... things.
Disgusted with the entire experience, he strode out into the corridor, intent on finding some way of getting back where he belonged. Was this some kind of parallel world or alternate dimension? A past or future life? The more he thought about it, the more fascinated and less disgusted he became.
A man in a black uniform appeared in front of him, grabbed his sleeve and dragged him into what seemed to be a storage closet, judging by what he saw before the door slid shut. It happened too quickly for him to protest. His reflexes in this body were nothing like his own. Once the door was closed and they were in the dark, Nikola was pushed up against the wall beside the door. Hands groped at the waistband of his pants as the guy slammed his mouth onto Nikola’s. He was too startled to struggle.
“C’mon David, what’s wrong? You called me, remember?” Hot breath blew on his ear as the guy spoke and then bit his neck.
Crap. His dorky alter ego was gay on top of everything else? “Yeah, look, I’m not feeling so well.” He wasn’t really lying as he pushed the guy off him and awkwardly zipped his fly back up.
The overhead lights suddenly came on and the guy was staring at him, obviously annoyed. Nikola blinked at the unexpected brightness. “You called me, not fifteen minutes ago. On the main coms, no less. You used the priority code.”
Priority booty calls? Oh, his alter-ego was too much! “Blinding headache, it just hit me. Sorry.”
The guy, Lorne, according to his uniform, grunted and backed up a few steps. “I’ll walk you to see Doctor Keller.”
He gave a nod in agreement with this plan. A few Tylenol wouldn’t kill him. Lorne opened the door and looked out, holding a palm to Nikola’s chest when he moved to follow. Oh, right, the guy was military, this kind of thing was still a no-no. The mild sense of insult he felt on behalf of this Parrish fellow faded.
He followed Lorne to the end of the corridor and down a stairwell, then into another closet. This room was different, there was a control panel on the wall of this one, and Lorne pressed a finger to a red dot on it.
They were met in the infirmary by a girl with a blonde ponytail. Apparently the child was the doctor he was supposed to see about his headache. He accepted the pain medication she offered after Lorne explained why they were there and looked around, seeing some odd equipment he could not identify. What was this facility? The architecture was like nothing Nikola had ever seen before.
As they were crossing the room towards the door, a blonde woman came in. Nikola stopped short and stared. Well, he’d found Helen’s alter-ego, a uniformed doppelganger named Carter. The name tags on the uniforms? Brilliant. Everyone should walk around with such labels, it would make life easier. He had forgotten how good Helen looked as a blonde.
“Major Lorne, could you spare a few minutes? I need to access the city systems through the chair and Colonel Sheppard’s is still offworld with his team,” the Carter-not-Helen person said to Parrish-not-Tesla’s boyfriend.
“Sure Colonel, no problem. Doctor Parrish, if you’re all set, I’ll see you later, dinner with the team at eighteen thirty, okay?” How could these people not notice the heat in the looks this guy Lorne was giving him?
“I’ll see you then, thanks for walking me up here.” Nikola waved and slowly followed them out of the infirmary. He intended to find the little room with the panel and the dots, he had some exploring to do.
~*~
In his travels, he found a lot of empty rooms and a lot of military guards that stopped him and made him turn around and go back the other way. He found undersea windows that looked out to the underside of this facility. He found windows in a tower that overlooked what was apparently a city. Their patches said Atlantis? Could this be the lost city of legend? Or maybe the people in the facility just fancied that it was. It could just be a code name, military types were big on code names.
The radio bud in his ear crackled and Lorne said, “We’re waiting on you, Doc. Stacks and Cadman are already eating.”
He had found the button on the screen of the transporter that led to the mess hall while exploring. It would not take him long to get there. “I’ll be there soon, I got distracted.”
“Okay, I’ll wait for you.” Nikola should really find out Lorne’s first name. He wasn’t bad looking, but it had been a really, really long time since he had been attracted to guys and besides, he was sort of involved with Helen. If he did anything while he was stuck here, Helen would KNOW. She was like that, she would take one look at him and then the whole story would come spilling out. Lying to Helen when she suspected any kind of untruth in the air was nigh on impossible.
He walked into the mess hall and was saved the need to search when Lorne called, “Parrish, over here!” He waved and went to get a tray of food. Cafeteria food - military grade cafeteria food. He groaned inwardly. He really needed to get out of this place.
The conversation was interesting, he picked up a few things, for instance, Lorne’s first name was apparently Evan. That was what the woman Laura had called him when she punched his shoulder after he made a bad joke. He learned that Parrish was part of a team that went offworld. That fascinated him, but he couldn’t outright ask about the term without blowing his cover.
“Chess tonight, Doc?’ Lorne asked as he took both their trays to the recycle bin and dumped them.
Before he thought about it, he replied automatically, “Sure.”
“Headache gone then?” Lorne winked at him and Nikola groaned, had he just missed some kind of code? “That’s good, we can pick up where we left off before.” Yes, he’d missed tweedledum and tweedledee’s code word for sex. Great. Now what?
He walked beside Lorne on the way to the transporter, but he didn’t know enough about Parrish’s work to make up some credible excuse for ducking out of the assignation he’d inadvertently agreed to. Helen was going to kill him. Worse, she was going to withhold sex forever as punishment. She could; she’d gone decades without.
Major Grabby Hands had him in a tight clinch as soon as the door shut behind them. He had no idea whose room this was. The dearth of information at his disposal was making it difficult to resist Lorne’s attentions. He groaned as hands slid down his sides and around to stroke his ass. He had not done this in many years, but some things were quite like riding a bicycle. Tossing caution to the wind, he caved to the inevitable and started returning the kiss.
He was nudged, forced to step back until he toppled over onto an armless sofa. Lorne followed him down, rubbing against him as he dug his hands into Nikola’s hair. He found himself responding, it was impossible not to.
Evan slid down to kneel beside the sofa and reached for the buttons on Nikola’s trousers. Parrish’s trousers, he corrected, he would never own such garb. He refused to claim ownership of the borrowed clothes.
Lorne’s hand slid inside the fly and cupped him. Nikola groaned and thrust up, which seemed to amuse Evan who chuckled huskily.
There was a blinding light and pain from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. Tesla went from being ordinary and mortal to being his old vamp self in the space of a heartbeat. He could feel it in his blood and his extra senses tingled. “What happened?” he barked, his vision was still blurry, he was seeing shadows and light, but no form.
A warm hand cupped his cheek. “Are you back with us, Nikola?”
“Helen. Oh, thank God. You have no idea of the fate you just saved me from. There was nothing I could do to stop it!” He clasped her hand against his cheek and squeezed.
“Funny, it sure didn’t seem like Doctor Parrish was reluctant to go home. He was quite eager to volunteer your body for the experiment,” Will said from somewhere behind him.
From the echo, he could tell he was in the medical wing at the Sanctuary. “You met him?”
“He was quite confused and very sweet,” Helen was carefully tugging the headset off.
“Nothing like you,” added Will.
Nikola bared his fangs and hissed in Will’s direction. Helen patted his cheek and asked, “Feeling allright, no ill effects?”
“I feel an overwhelming desire for cheese,” he joked. “Are you allright, Helen?”
“It didn’t work on me, I never left my body. Odd, because according to Doctor Parrish there is a version of me in his reality. Did you meet her?”
His vision was clearing rapidly. He reached up and tugged a few strands of her hair. “Have you considered going back to blonde?”
She slapped his hand away. “Maybe someday. I’m happy with it for now. I shall take that answer as a yes.”
“She was a Colonel, gave some orders to some people, I didn’t get much else about her, I was stranded there as just an ordinary human, Helen, it was horrible.”
She patted his shoulder and kissed his forehead. “Just think of how awful it was for poor Doctor Parrish to suddenly find himself fanged.”
“Did you know right away it wasn’t me?”
“Yeah, he was nice,” Will said as he went to the door and left. Nikola ignored him.
Helen nodded, “The screaming sort of gave it away.”
Tesla smiled as he slid off the exam chair and walked to the door with Helen. Poor Doctor Parrish, though he wondered if his pity was misplaced, perhaps it was Major Lorne that was in need of sympathy. After all, he was going to have to explain why his hands were where they were when Parrish got back into his own body.
The EndOriginally posted at
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