FIC: ST RPS -- Turnabout Intruder in My Pants (3/7)
Title: Turnabout Intruder in My Pants (3/7)
Author: the_deep_magic
Pairing: Pinto
Rating: R (NC-17 overall)
Word Count: 2,554
Warnings: crack, overused fandom trope, a bit o’ angst
Disclaimer: so very, very untrue
Summary: bodyswap!fic
A/N: When I posted the last part, I forgot to thank ewinfic, who spent a significant chunk of time in New York encouraging me and assuring me that this could not possibly be the worst thing ever written in the history of time. Thanks, m’dear!
Monday / Tuesday
Wednesday
By Wednesday, Chris is about to go out of his mind. He’d been too freaked out after that last foray into the outside world to repeat it, but cabin fever is starting to set in, and he knows he can’t handle another day on Zach’s couch, doing nothing but watching episode after episode of Mork and Mindy. God alone knows when Zach had decided to buy the complete series on DVD.
Chris has to talk to someone. Someone who is not Zach talking in Chris’ voice. Someone who is not Zach, period. Chris has an old college buddy in New York, but he hasn’t talked to the guy in a couple of years and there’s no way he’s just going to show up on his doorstep like this. No, it would probably have to be a friend of Zach’s who Chris has at least met before.
Picking up Zach’s phone, Chris scrolls through the contact list. Name after name goes by that he doesn’t recognize, and in the end he’s left with Corey, Neal, and Victor. Chris has never done more than shake hands with Victor, so he’s probably out. More than once, Chris has hung out with Corey and Neal at Zach’s place, though he wouldn’t actually call them his friends, per se. Neal seems like the more level-headed, less fanciful of the two - so Chris calls Corey.
Forty-five minutes later, he’s seated in a diner two blocks from the apartment, slouched down in a booth with his hood pulled up over his head while Corey goes to work on a mountain of chili cheese fries. “Can’t believe you’re playing hooky,” Corey says, shaking his head but with a dark little gleam in his eye. “So irresponsible, Zachary.”
“Wouldn’t do it without a good reason,” Chris mutters, trying to glance around without looking like he’s glancing around. Has anyone recognized him? He doesn’t think so.
“So what’s the deal? Why did I have to hike all the way across town if you’re the one with the day off?”
Chris shakes his head - he’s not sure he can get the words out. “You’re not gonna believe this.”
“Believe what, that you’ve finally set aside your hipster ways and started dressing as a… nearsighted hobo? Is that what that is? ‘Cause I actually like it, and if I like it, you know it’s bad.”
“Corey, listen…” Chris says, and Corey’s eyes narrow. Right - Zach always calls him Moose. Well, maybe that’ll make what he’s about to say more convincing. “Something really weird happened, I don’t know what, but as of Monday morning, I’m, um. I’m not Zach.”
Corey merely lifts an eyebrow and keeps chewing, so Chris goes on. “I know how insane this sounds, but I’m actually Chris. Chris Pine. In Zach’s body. I have no idea how the fuck it happened, but like I said, Monday morning I woke up in this body. And Zach is in mine, in LA. We, uh, swapped. He’s flying out here as soon as he can, but he has to pretend to be me in an important meeting today, and I’m going right the fuck out of my mind because did I mention I’m in Zach’s body.”
Regarding him thoughtfully, Corey says, “That’s highly improbable.”
Chris blinks. “Improbable? That’s all you have to say? You don’t think I’m going nuts, or trying to play a prank on you or something?”
“Well, I mean, it’s not logically impossible, like a four-sided triangle or something. Not as long as you subscribe to the dualist philosophical tradition of Descartes and, despite the best intentions of my physicalist college professors, I do. Also I read this really convincing book on astral projection one time.”
“You…” Chris is lost, well and truly lost. “What?”
“Obviously I’ll require some sort of corroborating evidence,” Corey says, dabbing delicately at his mouth with a napkin.
And fuck it, Chris wasn’t hungry a few minutes ago, but those chili cheese fries look damn good. He’d all but promised Zach he wouldn’t, but he figures one bite isn’t going to hurt, so he reaches over and scoops up a four-fry pile of beans and beef and cheese, cramming them in his mouth all in one go. Technically still one bite.
“Interesting,” Corey says carefully after a long, searching look. “Well, Chris, what’s your plan of action?”
Chris swallows the half-chewed lump of food a little too soon. “You believe me?”
“I believe Zach would know that any amount of chili makes him gassy. You’re in for a surprise there soon, my displaced friend.”
Chris almost groans, but then remembers he’s actually got an ally here. “So what do I do?”
Corey leans forward, munching thoughtfully on a fry. “And you have no idea what caused this?”
“No. Zach and I talked it over, and neither of us was doing anything out of the ordinary Sunday night.”
“Okay, well, I’m assuming that a solution is more important than a cause in the short-term.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, how are we going to fix it if we don’t know what caused it in the first place?”
“Well, let’s look at this in a narrative light. Teleologically, if you will,” Corey says, sounding surprisingly matter-of-fact for someone with a smear of nacho cheese on his cheekbone. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life, it happens in stories. So why does it happen in stories?”
“Magic machine, magic fortune cookie… just magic, usually.”
“No, I’m not talking the efficient cause, I’m talking the final cause. The function in the narrative.”
“Well, I guess…” Chris thinks about it, all those stories he read. “To learn to see things from the other person’s perspective, right?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Okay, let’s say you’re right. What is it I have to see from Zach’s perspective? I feel like I already understand him pretty well. I mean, usually there’s some type of central conflict between the two characters who switch bodies, right? Zach and I get along fine.”
“You might not even realize there’s a conflict. That could be the conflict. Are you being entirely honest with yourself?”
“Am I… what?” Corey’s gaze is disturbingly penetrating, and Chris is starting to wonder whether he should have called Neal.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s some kind of realization you’re meant to come to, some kind of epiphany you’re meant to have. That’s how it usually works. And after you have that epiphany, BAM - you’ll switch right back, no harm no foul.”
“But… that’s not how the world works. This isn’t a story, it’s real life.”
“Do people switch bodies in real life?”
“Well… no.”
Corey shrugs, going back to the cheese fries. “If it looks like a plot trope and sounds like a plot trope. That’s really the only advice I’ve got to offer. It’s either candid self-reflection, or… I dunno, I guess you could call NASA or something. See if they’ve worked out that body-switching ray yet. I heard it wouldn’t be ready for human tests until 2015, though.”
&&&
Chris is careful to lock the two deadbolts and chain on Zach’s door on his way in, just in case. Of what, he’s not quite sure, but having an unlocked door certainly isn’t going to help anything.
When he gets to the bedroom, he flops over backwards onto Zach’s bed, enjoying the little bounce from the springy mattress. He pulls his absurdly long legs up to rest his heels on the edge of the bed and… wonders. He’s thought about it idly ever since yesterday, when he reached down to pick something up and realized he could bend far enough to set his palms flat on the floor.
He glances around the bedroom, even though there’s obviously no one else in there with him and Zach probably doesn’t have any recording equipment set up in here. And if it does, it’s not on right now. Probably.
So he toes his Chucks off and kicks them away, scooting on his back up the bed. The jeans he’s wearing barely let him bend his legs, so he wriggles out of them as well. And there’s no use in keeping the shirt on once the pants are gone.
He tries not to think about how he’s pretty much naked on Zach’s bed, instead focusing on how exactly to do this so he doesn’t injure himself. There’s got to be some kind of technique for it, right? He’s sitting up by now, so he tries a few toe touches, just to test the waters. The waters, apparently, are quite bendy. So far, so good.
After realizing he’s probably overthinking it, Chris lies back down and decides to just go for it. In one motion, he kicks his (Zach’s) right leg up, grabs his ankle, and fits it neatly behind his head. “Holy crap!” he says aloud through a laugh, because that was nowhere near as hard as he thought. He feels the stretch in his thigh and lower back, but it doesn’t hurt. It almost feels good in a weird sort of way.
Once he’s done the right leg, he figures he might as well try the left. This one’s a little bit harder, because he kind of has to tuck his left ankle behind his right ankle and it makes his neck crane out at an awkward angle, but it works. He’s managed to fit both his legs behind his head, and it feels really, really… not sexy. Not at all. He’s pretty sure he looks about as erotically appealing as a pale, hairy pretzel. How is this supposed to be hot again?
He sighs, a little disappointed, and figures he’d better stop before he pulls something. Except… shit. His legs don’t seem to want to move. His neck, especially, is really starting to hurt, but his ankles are sort of locked in place.
“Fuck,” he mutters aloud. He tries to straighten out-no, that’s not going to work. Maybe if he… No, that makes it a little worse, and now something distressingly near his groin area is starting to cramp. Out of frustration, he ends up rocking back and forth, trying to gather momentum and hoping everything will right itself and he’ll snap back into shape like a rubber band. It’s almost working, he’s almost got his left ankle to slide up...
Until he rolls right off the edge of the bed.
&&&
The bag of frozen peas over the lump on Chris’ head is starting to drip water down into his eyes when Zach finally returns his call. It’s not actually from rolling off the bed; that’s his right shoulder. No, the bump on his head came when Chris did - in the shower, jerking off to try to forget about the pain in his shoulder.
And because, well… He’d had to listen to some torturously extensive voice mails from someone named Cody. Yes, voice mail. Zach - the man who talked Chris’ ear off months before the iPhone came out - still has an answering machine on his landline that puts the caller’s voice on speaker while recording the message, like a fucking 90’s sitcom. Which is how Chris knows every single agonizing detail of how well Zach fucked this “Cody” person two weekends ago, liberally interspersed with the whine of “Why don’t you call me, baby?”
What he’d initially mistaken for irritation turned out to be the beginnings of good old-fashioned horniness, because by the time he’d gotten in the shower, he could no longer ignore his aching hard-on. Or the fact that it had something to do with listening to Cody rhapsodize over the dexterity of Zach’s tongue.
Despite everything, it had been a really fucking good wank, too, up until the end. Apparently, Zach’s knees go all wobbly when he comes standing up. Some indignant part of Chris feels sure Zach should have warned him about that, or at least put those little grippy stickers on the bottom of the bathtub, and thus it can’t possibly be Chris’ fault that his head is throbbing.
Long story short, Chris is not in a chipper mood when Zach finally calls.
“How did it go?” Chris asks the moment he picks up the phone, failing utterly at keeping the grumpiness out of his voice.
“Y’know,” Zach says, “this really isn’t getting any less weird, talking to myself on the phone.”
“Don’t stall, asshole.”
Zach sighs, and Chris’ gut clenches before he hears, “It went fine. They barely needed me - well, you - there, anyway. Kept talking about me like I wasn’t even in the room. I took notes, though, and I’ll bring them with me.”
“You got a flight?”
“Yeah, tomorrow night. I get in around nine your time I think.”
“Fuck, they didn’t have anything sooner?”
“Not that wasn’t first class and cost an arm and a leg,” Zach says with a bit of an edge in his voice.
Chris groans. Why is Zach starting to sound annoyed with him? “Okay, the bohemian pauper bullshit is fine when it’s just you, but this is an emergency. Our bank accounts can take the hit. You’re, like, the worst movie star ever.”
“It’s how I was raised,” Zach snaps back at him. “I’m truly sorry I didn’t have celebrity parents.”
Oh, fuck, not this again. Even though Chris grew up with money and Zach didn’t, it’s not really a sensitive spot for Zach - the “movie star” thing, however, is. Like Chris is somehow impugning Zach’s honor by accidentally reminding him he’s a commercially successful film actor. Still, though, he really needs to leave Chris’ family out of this. “And I’m sorry my childhood wasn’t as authentic as yours was.”
“Jesus fuck, Chris, you don’t get to call me pretentious. Mr. English Major and you’ve never even cracked the spines of half the books on your shelves. I’m looking at them now.”
“I’m just really careful with my books!”
Zach just laughs, all the crueler because it’s Chris’ own laugh turned on him. “Sure you are.”
“Well, I realize you prefer the company of less intellectually challenging men.” Chris isn’t even pretending he’s not lashing out, just trying to get a rise out of Zach. “Cody in particular sounds like a real mental colossus.”
“Who?”
Of course Zach doesn’t know. Maybe he never bothered to get the guy’s name. “Maybe this will sound familiar: ‘oooh, baby, lick my ass, stick that gorgeous fucking tongue in me.’”
“What the fuck, Chris, you have no right-”
“To what? Listen to the airheads that leave messages on your machine? Trust me, I’d really rather not have heard that.”
“You really want to start this? Judging who we sleep with? Because, let me tell you, you have no ground to stand on there.”
Ugh, Chris had almost forgotten how obnoxious arguing with Zach can be. It usually gives him a stabbing pain just behind his left eye - he hopes Zach’s feeling it now. “I can’t do this right now. Just fucking get here as soon as you can.”
“Yeah,” Zach grumbles.
In the movies, there’s always a click and a dial tone to indicate that the other person has hung up. In real life, there’s just Chris saying “Zach? Zach?” into the phone before he figures out what’s happened and chucks the stupid fucking thing across the room.