Chapter 1 - The Exchange

Chapter rating: K


Echizen Ryoma stopped and looked at the sky. It was heavy with dark grey clouds. A sudden gust of wind blew sand into his eyes. He resisted the urge to rub his eyes and blinked profusely to let his tears wash away the painful grains. He caught whiffs of sulfur in the air, a sign that it was going to rain very soon. He found the gloom very depressing.

"Oi! Echizen! You'd better hurry before it starts to rain!" Momoshiro Takeshi called out to him, hurrying him to get on the bicycle. Ryoma uttered a reply and hopped on behind his senpai. Without another word, Momoshiro started paddling their way out of the school's bicycle park, "Hope we can get back home before the sky pours."

Ryoma looked skywards once more. The bad feeling was growing and he was not aware that his grip on Momoshiro's shoulders had tightened. "Echizen?" Ryoma broke from his thoughts and saw Momoshiro half turning his head backwards. "Are you alright?" The spiky haired teen tried to check on his kouhai from the corner of his eye.

Ryoma wanted to reply nothing when he was blinded by the glare of fast approaching headlights. He heard himself shouting, "Watch out!" before hearing deafening horns and a loud crash...

That was all he could remember after waking up to a stark white ceiling with a black television hanging from it. His head was hurting under thick bandages. He looked around the dim room, lit only by a miserable light seeping in from under the door, and saw that he was in a hospital ward. All was quiet except for the occasional light footfalls passing by his ward and soft snoring from the other, he guessed, three patients who were sharing the same room.

Ryoma found it unbelievable that his father had put him in a middle-class ward. Not that he minded but he had thought, at least his mother would have insisted on an individual room for him. His head hurt by just thinking and he figured that what he should do now was to close his eyes and go back to sleep. Everything could just wait until morning comes.

A soft voice urging him to wake up was the next thing he heard. Ryoma opened his eyes to a smiling nurse going about the ward, pinning the curtains open and greeting everyone. She then stopped at the foot of his bed and asked if he needed help to wash up before the doctor comes to do the morning routine check. His head had stopped hurting and he replied that he was able to do it himself. Slowly sitting up and getting out of the stiff bed, as he was told to do so by the nurse, he recalled that Momoshiro was with him when the car crashed into them.

"The other boy is alright." She had a warm smile that put Ryoma's uncertain mind at ease, "I can try to find out which ward he is staying in, if you want to visit him." He thanked her and slowly made his way to the bathroom. Feeling strange about what was happening around him; Ryoma could not grab hold of what exactly was wrong since he woke up. The way things all around him were?different, even when turning the knob of the bathroom door. Dismissing it as the aftermaths of an accident, he stood before the mirror hanging above the sink to check how bad his condition was.

He saw a badly bruised and cut face and a heavily bounded head in white bandages. Ryoma frozed suddenly in the midst of checking his face, he had realized that he did not have to tiptoe to look into the mirror. But that was not the ultimate horror he had discovered. Taking a step back, Ryoma shrieked on the top of his lungs when he saw his reflection in the mirror. A couple of nurses, included the one who had woken him up earlier, rushed into the bathroom to find a tall teen staring and screaming at his own reflection.

Ryoma could not remember how he had gotten back into his bed when the doctor took turns to flash a light in each of his eyes, listened to his heart and made other checks on him. Satisfied with his observations, he then straightened up, slid the slim torch into a pocked on his white robe while informing a lady with black hair that her son was alright. She looked relieved upon hearing that. The doctor then assured her that her son had received a bad knock on his head and this was usual for patients from traffic accidents, "He should be getting better in a few days." the bespectacled doctor said before leaving the ward.

The lady reached out a hand and ruffled his hair, "You've always been a healthy boy and never made me worry about you." She must be Momoshiro's mother, Ryoma thought. Lost at how he should be responding to her, or rather, how Momoshiro would have responded, he resolved to just blink at her and not saying anything in return. After observing her 'son' for a few moments, she suddenly turned away and picked up her handbag, "Well, you should get some rest now." She tucked the boy in bed and said that she'll be coming along with his (Momoshiro's) father and siblings during the next schedule of visiting hours.

Ryoma lied still in bed after Momoshiro's mother left. His eyes were fixed on the blank ceiling while he tried to find an explanation to what had happened. He was in Momoshiro's body was what he can be certain of unless he was dreaming. In that case, where had Momoshiro gone to? When it struck him that Momoshiro could be in the same situation as he was, he jumped out of the bed and ran towards the nurse station, hoping that the nurse who had promised to find out 'the other boy's ward' would still be on duty. He ran into someone when turning at a corner and the person's face banged hard onto his chest with a muffled grunt. He wanted to apologize to the person for not noticing his approach but his voice got stuck in his throat before he could say anything. His hand rubbing the pain from his chest stopped when he saw 'himself' before him rubbing on 'his' nose.

Ryoma almost blurted out, Momo-senpai! but his voice just could not break free from the mud pond in his throat. He opened and closed his mouth several times trying to decide whether to exclaim, "Momo-senpai!" or "Echizen!"


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