Work Text:
"See, Annie, if I press this button—"
I heard Kat’s voice but I felt dizzy, and my vision swirled, so I closed my eyes and rubbed them. When the vertigo passed I opened them again. I was standing in a different place than I had been a minute ago. "Kat?"
"Oops," someone said.
Wait, I—
"Oh, no!"
No, that can’t be. For a moment I thought—
"Oh jeez. Annie!"
The somebody who was talking was bent over a lab table staring into its shiny surface. As I watched, she straightened up and pushed a shaky hand through her hair.
She had red hair, cut exactly like mine.
She was dressed like me, exactly like me.
Her face was the same one that looked back at me in the mirror each morning.
"Jeez, Annie," she said, her eyes open really wide, her chest heaving rapidly. "Wow, this is weird." She frowned and cleared her throat. "Really weird." Her breathing calmed; she seemed more curious than panicked now. She looked at me and again I experienced the odd sensation of seeing my reflection. Her eyes opened even wider. "Uh oh."
I looked around, but we were alone. "Where’s—" My voice sounded funny so I cleared my throat, too. "Where’s Kat?"
"Right here!" My "twin" pointed to herself. "I’m Kat!"
"No you’re not," I corrected. "I don’t know who you are. You may look like me, though I don’t know why, and frankly I’m not sure you’re even a very good copy, because we’re not the same height. I repeat – where’s Kat? Have you done something with her?"
"Annie – seriously." She crossed the lab and grabbed me by the hand. "It’s me, Kat!"
"Kat?" I peered into her — my – face, and I felt that wave of dizziness again. Though the features were mine, the expression on her face was unmistakably my friend’s. "Kat?"
"Uh-huh!"
"But…" My head continued to spin and I took a deep breath. "How did you change yourself to look like me?"
"Er," Kat said, "I’m afraid that’s not all." She grimaced in a way that was familiar, but looked eerily out of place on my face. She dragged me over to the lab table and pointed at the shiny surface. "Take a deep breath, Annie, and try not to panic."
Frowning, I peered at my reflection.
"Huh," I said.
"I don’t know what I did!" Kat moaned. She poked at the collection of wires, buttons and bubbling flasks before her.
"Okay, let’s try to stay calm." I pushed black hair out of my eyes. "There’s no use becoming upset."
"Upset? Upset? I just switched bodies with you, Annie! How can we not be upset? How can you not want to kill me right now?"
"Come on, Kat," I said, taking her hands and leaning to look her in the eye. "It was an accident. You’re brilliant. You’ll figure things out." I shrugged. "Besides, it’s not the end of the world."
"Yeah," she said, visibly relaxing. "At least it's you. It’s not like I switched with Zimmy." She shivered. "That would be really, really awful. Can you imagine what she'd do with my body? Brrrrr!"
"Don’t be mean," I said, though secretly I was thinking the same thing. "Imagine if you’d switched with Reynardine." That made us both laugh.
"Oh, fine!" said a voice from inside my satchel. "Go ahead, insult me. As if your puny minds could comprehend the wonder that is Reynardine the Great."
"Nobody asked your opinion," I reminded him as he climbed out of my bag. He stood on the lab table with arms folded. "You didn't even have to come. You could have stayed in my room."
"What? And live in a box while you have all the fun?"
"This isn’t fun," Kat said crossly.
Reynardine snorted. "It is for me."
"Ignore him." I examined the equipment. "Start at the beginning. You were working on a body-switching machine?"
"Not exactly. Not at all, really," Kat said, idly poking at the jumble of mechanical bits. "It was, uh, supposed to be a mind-reading device."
"Mind-reading? What made you want to work on that?"
"Maybe she wanted extra credit."
"Quiet."
A mind-reading device. That deserved further examination, but I let it go for the moment. "Well, let’s try to be methodical about this. Can’t you remember the sequence of events?" I caught another glimpse of myself in the window. Very, very peculiar, having my thoughts, my words, coming from Kat’s mouth. "Think back – what were you doing just before you, er, changed us?"
Kat closed her – my – eyes for a moment, deep in thought. Her finger tapped the counter as she concentrated. "Let me see…I poured in the cerebrum invasor liquid, shot DC current through the circulator and bombarded it with radio waves, to the frequency of—"
"Okay, let's skip ahead; it's obvious something went wrong. But what I don't understand is how I got involved. How did we end up being switched, if I was standing all the way over there and you were the only one operating the equipment?"
She twisted a lock of hair around a finger, looking decidedly sheepish. "Well, I, ah, may have pointed the activator in your direction. By accident. Like this—" She lifted a metal rod from the collection of odd bits and parts that littered the work station. It had a coiled wire attached to one end that ran to a metal box with a huge red button on it. She waved it and shrugged. Her eyes shifted away. "I guess it could have picked up anybody in the vicinity."
Hmm.
"Kat," I said slowly, taking a step towards her, "did you point that thing at me on purpose? To read my mind?"
"On purpose? Gosh, no, Annie! I was just tinkering with it!" She sounded shocked but there was an underlying note of nervous energy in her – my – voice, and she jiggled from foot to foot. "I wouldn’t read your mind – not without asking first!"
"Okay then." I leaned against the table. "What happened next?"
"Let me think, let me think. After I turned up the radio frequency I…oh, right! The activator may have been pointing in your general direction—" She made a very deliberate move to point it away from me, behind her, and lifted her fist over the red button. "And then I hit the button, just like—"
"—This," said a voice behind her. "And then I…oh…what?"
There was a whirr of mechanical parts and a clank or two and I turned. Robot stood up shakily in the far corner of the room. "Annie?" it said in its odd metallic voice. "What. WHAT?"
Uh-oh.
Quivering with mechanical anxiety, Robot limped across the floor to where I stood frozen in shock. "Annie." it whirred. "Help me. Help me."
"How interesting," said my voice suddenly, and my body – the body where Kat had just been – started moving its arms in jerky motions. "Well, well, well. This is different!"
I looked into Robot's face. "Um…Kat?"
Despite the flat expression I could feel her terror, because the metal robot body buzzed and jittered alarmingly. "Yes. Annie. You have to get me out of here!"
"Mm," said Robot in my body, shaking itself in random and totally undignified ways. "What do you know? People are all wobbly! Rubbery. I didn’t realize that." It started to move and managed to trip over its feet. "Whoopsy! Funny body!"
"Don’t get used to it," I muttered. "Tell me, Kat—what do I do?"
Kat rattled closer. "Pick up the activator."
I took the activator tube in my hand, careful not to point it towards anyone. "And?"
"Point it at…wait. Don't do anything. Let me figure this out." Kat reached up to scratch her metallic head. The gesture was wholly Kat and completely unnerving. The robot body rolled its eyes up in the same way Kat did when she was hard at thought. "Let me get this straight. If you change you to you, I mean to me, I mean to my body, and then we change Robot to you, um, I mean to your body, then you’ll be here, I mean there, and—"
"Heads up!" shouted Reynardine, suddenly at my shoulder. He pointed a stubby arm at Robot, who had a decidedly un-me-like expression on its face, and who with a very un-me-like grunt leapt at me to make a grab for the activator.
"Mine, mine, mine!" Robot crowed, flailing the wand wildly around the room.
"Whoa, whoa!" Reynardine yelled. "Don’t point that thing at me!"
"Heehee!" Robot danced around, waving the rod over his head. "This body is fun! Not giving it back!"
"Stop that!" I leapt for the activator and we struggled for it. Kat's body was pretty strong, and I managed to get the upper hand. But Robot awkwardly lost his footing and fell onto the red button, his elbow smashing into the activator I had just wrestled from him.
There was that wave of vertigo again, as my consciousness swooped across the room. Suddenly all smell and taste and touch were gone, and —Love you, love you— the world pixilated into bits of information that streamed across my field of vision, where a red-haired girl struggled with a black haired one over a metal rod while someone bellowed war cries, and then—
—another swoop that left me breathless, into a dizzying swirl of ancient thoughts and time upside down and backwards and red blood, burning fire, scouring wind, damp earth, cold rain, the old ones, howling and if they knew my real power, they’d—there, the black-haired girl was gasping oh no, not again! and—
Something overloaded. There was an explosion, and clouds of smoke and then I found myself on the floor. Kat was running for the fire extinguisher and Reynardine was shouting “I hate all of you!" and somewhere to my left Robot was clanking in circles and moaning.
A door slammed open. "What are you two doing?!"
I pulled myself upright. Mr. Eglamore and Kat’s parents were in the doorway, looking in horror at the state of the lab. "What’s been going on here?"
"Er, nothing," Kat said, wiping one soot-blackened cheek on the sleeve of her shirt. "Research."
"It’s a project," I added.
"For extra credit," Reynardine muttered from the depths of my satchel.
"Whrrrrrr," said Robot, sinking into a pile on the floor.
"You’ve damaged a lot of equipment," Mr. Eglamore growled. "See you clean it up."
"Really, Katerina," said Mrs. Donlan. "Must you be so messy?"
"Sorry, mom."
"See you at dinner," said Kat's dad. They closed the door.
I looked down. My clothes (my clothes, hooray!) were covered in ashes. I rubbed at a bruise. "I’ll have to do laundry this evening."
"Me too." Kat and I slumped against the bench in exhaustion. "Whew. That was something, wasn’t it?"
"Something, all right. Not sure what though." I glanced over at my satchel. "I think I would rather have read Zimmy’s mind than Reynardine’s, though."
Kat shivered. "Weird, right?"
"Yes. Very weird." I looked at Kat. She smiled. I smiled back. We giggled. The giggles became laughter that shook us until we collapsed on the floor.
When we couldn't laugh any more we just sat there, tired, sooty and silent.
I looked at over at Kat, at her familiar face. What a relief to have her back again. “Um, back there, I think I was in your head for a second, Kat.”
She looked sideways at me, and her cheeks colored. "Oh."
"And, um—"
"Me too," she said, stammering a little. "I could read your mind. Just for a little bit."
"Oh." My own face flushed.
It got even quieter.
Kat’s hand snaked down and interlocked with mine.
I looked at our hands, and then at her.
"Weird?" Kat asked shyly.
"No," I replied. "Not weird at all."