I So Want to Be You
By Deep Roller
A/N: Well, a couple weird things happened to me yesterday. One, I found a bird! A little cockatiel was huddled under the wheel well of my car yesterday afternoon, perched on my tire. It was raining and I was coming out of class when I saw this little flash of gray and white. I got the bird home by wrapping it in the towel I used for my First Aid class, and now it's my birdie! No one at the campus was missing one. I named it Plankton, after well...Plankton! Hee hee! And I think it's a he-bird, he's making my other one jealous. And also yesterday I chewed six pieces of gum at once. It was a record.
Disclaimer: No! NOOOOO! They aren't my characters, I'm not making a profit, please don't sue me. Please? I'll give you a puppy if you don't....
The other Erik began to sob, the sound rather unsettling in Erik's ears. ~I sound like that?~ He thought, blinking as he studied the other person. "But...but....wait a minute." He held out a hand, shaking his head, which made his tangled mop of hair slap him in the face. "Urgh, I'm sick of this." He muttered before trying to get his thoughts straight. This was so confusing, and who was he talking to, anyway? "Who're you? You're certainly not me, and how do you know that I'm me??" He asked, sitting back and folding his hands to wait for an answer.
"Well...that's kind of hard to explain because...because you're not going to believe it when you hear it." The other said hesitantly, looking as though they had done something wrong.
"After the morning I've had, I'm ready to believe just about anything." Erik replied grimly, looking down at his soaking dress and grimacing. "So tell me, who exactly are you? Who is it that's in my body? I'd like to know because even though it's not the best looking, it's the only one I've got left to me. Until now, that is." He added with a wry smile.
"Well...think whiskers, is all I have to say." Shrugging, the other Erik looked impatiently at Erik to see if he could figure it out.
"Whiskers? What? You don't mean...." He trailed off, looking at himself in disbelief. Hardly daring to speak his conjecture out loud, when it did come it came as a sort of squeak. "Ayesha?" But the nod from the other Erik, Ayesha, he supposed, confirmed it. This was just too strange, almost too much for Erik. He shook his head again, earning another slap from his hair and then looked up. "But how did you know I would be HERE? And you wished to be me? You wished for all this?"
"No, no, no." Ayesha shook her head sadly. "I didn't wish for this at ALL. I wished for...never mind, that's not important. I knew who you were when you fell in the lake," this came with a sort of misty smile, "no one curses like you, Erik."
"But I think what you wished for does matter. If it wasn't for this, it had something to do with...with all this." Erik protested, treating the whole scenario as though it was perfectly normal. "Because I wished for something too. But what was yours?" Ayesha looked down at her hands, head drooping on her shoulders as she mumbled something. "What was that?" Erik cocked his head curiously, trying to hear. "I didn't catch that."
"I wanted mhyhkghhknnnd." She mumbled again, a little louder.
"Ayesha, I still can't hear you, please, tell me." He urged, his voice carrying a whine to it that was never present in his old form. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to be himself, only himself. This was ridiculous.
"I wanted to be Christine!! You happy?! That's what I wished for! I wished to be her!" She roared, the anger amplifying her voice to carry over everything. Then she began to sob quietly, the noise striking that odd chord in Erik. He just sat still and let her go on sobbing for a few moments. Then he asked the question.
"But why, Ayesha? Why would you want to be her?"
"To you I'm just an animal, something to be petted and talked to to stave off loneliness. Oh, you'll treat me okay, give me a collar or feed me. And for awhile that was enough, that was what I wanted. No one was there to take you away from me. But then SHE showed up." Ayesha hissed, the eyes behind the recently reapplied mask turning to slits. "And you pushed me away. Whenever you started thinking about her, I was just getting pushed away. Like last night, all I wanted was to make you happy, to make you stop thinking about her. But it didn't work. All you talk about when you're around me is Christine anymore, and it was making me sick. I wanted to be her, so she'd have to be the cat and I could make you happy." Resigned, Ayesha sighed. "I may be an animal, Erik, but I can see what she's doing to you. She's tearing you up inside, and...I don't like it. But it went all wrong. All wrong!" Erik was stunned, this was new to him, his cat talking to him through his own voice and body while he was stuck in the body of the woman he had come to obsess over.
"Ayesha, don't cry, don't cry. Yes, this is a bit of a mix up but..." His thoughts suddenly moved toward the third party involved in this. "Where did she go? Is she the cat?"
"SEE?!! All you think about is what happened to HER!!" Ayesha shouted and jumped up, ready to go at Erik's throat again. From where he sat, and from the fact that his new body was smaller and weaker than the one that he used to have, Ayesha formed his body into an incredibly imposing and scary figure. ~I miss being me, I miss being scary sometimes.~ He thought to himself before he leaped off the couch and moved a few paces away.
"Calm down, Ayesha, I just wanted to see who else was involved and..." Seeing the suddenly nervous look in Ayesha's eyes, he moved a step closer to her. "Is she in your body?" He asked with slow, almost poisonous malice.
"Her? No, she's not in my body, no way. She's been shouting all morning though, I locked her in the closet because I was sick of hearing her. It's lovely being so big and strong, I can't understand why anyone would want to trade this body. You have FINGERS and thumbs. Thumbs are my favorite." She said, looking at the pair of long slender hands in childlike wonder, wiggling them and laughing merrily.
"I'm glad you like it, Ayesha, but who exactly did you lock in the closet? Christine, I know, but..." Sighing, Ayesha led him to the closet and opened the door.
"She's been thrashing all morning." Ayesha said almost boredly, rapping on the closet framework with one hand. "I LOVE these things..." she murmured to herself while Erik could only gape.
Nadir was bound and gagged, kicking and growling in muffled noises. "NADIR?! Christine's turned into the daroga?" He asked, trying to untie her. "You hold still!" He said fiercely when she kept twisting her head back and forth. Her eyes went wide and when he had gotten the gag off, he got bitten. "YOUCH! What was THAT for?!" He asked, staring at her.
"That's for letting that...that cat do all this to me!" She said indignantly. Even though she was using Nadir's voice, he sure could tell it was Christine in there. "I've been in here all morning, since I woke up and...I thought at first I had walked here in my sleep, and then she locked me in the closet."
"How did you know it wasn't me? And how do you know who I am?" Erik asked, completely puzzled.
"Well, I woke up in this little room off the cabin, and I heard the cat thundering around, shouting about thumbs. At first I thought you had gone totally crazy and abducted me, or I had come to visit you and forgotten, but then I knew it was the cat because she kept saying 'I'm not that puny cat anymore.' And then she asked aloud for you, and I went in there, and looked in the mirror, and I must have screamed because the next thing I know I've got a gag and I'm in the closet..." She trailed off, and then looked at him suspiciously. "What have you been doing as me?"
"Nothing to get concerned about. You really ought to wear shorter, looser dresses. I don't know which is worse, having my breath shut off or tripping over every bump in the road." Erik looked sullen at her remark on abduction. "Why would I abduct you, anyway? That's got to be the stupidest thing you've ever said." When he saw the hurt look on her face, he shook his head. "It's just been a very long day, Christine, a very long, CONFUSING day. I don't know how to get out of it but....the cat!" He exclaimed suddenly, his eyes lighting with a sudden thought.
"Erik? Has it been worse than you thought? Are you losing it?"
"No, no, nothing of the sort child." He said quickly, looking around for the cat. "Where is the cat?" He asked, getting up and moving around in slow circles.
"She's right there, Erik, what are you rambling about?"
"Not THAT cat, Ayesha, where did your body go?" Erik asked, in a frenzy now. Ayesha shrugged, and Erik began to roam around the flat, looking and looking. He found the cat asleep on a small chair, and he whispered. "Nadir? Is it you?" The cat's eyes snapped open and it swung it's head around to look at Erik full in the face. The only answer he got was a sullen "mrowwwr." Scooping up the cat and keeping well out of range of claws, he brought it to where the other two were. Christine was still tied up and Ayesha was now examining her new toes, much to Christine's estrangement. Erik blinked, and suddenly everything was just completely hilarious. Before it had been hectic, nerve wracking, surreal, and horrifying, but now it was absolutely the funniest thing in the entire world. He was in a woman's body, the only woman he ever really loved, and she was in the body of perhaps his very best friend. His cat had taken his body and was now sitting on the floor and wiggling his toes, and he was cradling a cat who was certainly someone other than a cat.
"What is so funny?!" Christine demanded irately when the bouts of laughter burst from him in waves, he began laughing so hard he started to shake, and the constraining dress shortened his breathing. The noise came out as a sort of half hysterical, half wheezing sound. The cat looked at him sullenly, flexing its claws. When he could calm down, he shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Ayesha, oblivious to everything, frowned heavily at the cat, her eyes lighting with distaste. ~Could she hate herself as much as I did? Did, Erik? Are you saying you don't? Maybe...Good grief, you have lost it!~ His inner conversation just made him give up one last chuckle before he set the cat down.
"I'm going to ask you again, are you Nadir? Nod once for yes." The cat nodded. "Why you little beast, you scratched me!" Erik suddenly burst out before anything else. Nadir merely raised his back, the hairs lifting slowly.
"My face! Look what he's done to my face!" Christine shrieked. Nadir leapt onto her lap and growled low. "Don't get me started, you. If my hands weren't tied behind my back I'd throw you across the room." She said fiercely.
"Not to my body you little usurper!" Ayesha thundered, rising in her bare feet to advance on Christine. Nadir scowled and slashed Ayesha's foot, causing her to hop on one foot. Erik sighed and watched the spectacle sadly. This was going nowhere, and there might not be a way to stop any of it. That was what worried him the most. Looking at the three fighting, he wondered morosely if they were all stuck like this for the rest of their lives.
"This couldn't get any worse, could it?" Erik muttered, rising to his feet and then slipping on the dress length in the puddle of water he had made himself. Great, just great.
A/N: Next chapter coming soon. Well, I did do some foreshadowing, but it was really really hard to see, but now it will be easy to see! I would have extended the switch to more, but I don't think I could keep track of more than this....Thanks to all those reviewers! You make my pineapples fruitier! ~_^
By Deep Roller
A/N: Well, a couple weird things happened to me yesterday. One, I found a bird! A little cockatiel was huddled under the wheel well of my car yesterday afternoon, perched on my tire. It was raining and I was coming out of class when I saw this little flash of gray and white. I got the bird home by wrapping it in the towel I used for my First Aid class, and now it's my birdie! No one at the campus was missing one. I named it Plankton, after well...Plankton! Hee hee! And I think it's a he-bird, he's making my other one jealous. And also yesterday I chewed six pieces of gum at once. It was a record.
Disclaimer: No! NOOOOO! They aren't my characters, I'm not making a profit, please don't sue me. Please? I'll give you a puppy if you don't....
The other Erik began to sob, the sound rather unsettling in Erik's ears. ~I sound like that?~ He thought, blinking as he studied the other person. "But...but....wait a minute." He held out a hand, shaking his head, which made his tangled mop of hair slap him in the face. "Urgh, I'm sick of this." He muttered before trying to get his thoughts straight. This was so confusing, and who was he talking to, anyway? "Who're you? You're certainly not me, and how do you know that I'm me??" He asked, sitting back and folding his hands to wait for an answer.
"Well...that's kind of hard to explain because...because you're not going to believe it when you hear it." The other said hesitantly, looking as though they had done something wrong.
"After the morning I've had, I'm ready to believe just about anything." Erik replied grimly, looking down at his soaking dress and grimacing. "So tell me, who exactly are you? Who is it that's in my body? I'd like to know because even though it's not the best looking, it's the only one I've got left to me. Until now, that is." He added with a wry smile.
"Well...think whiskers, is all I have to say." Shrugging, the other Erik looked impatiently at Erik to see if he could figure it out.
"Whiskers? What? You don't mean...." He trailed off, looking at himself in disbelief. Hardly daring to speak his conjecture out loud, when it did come it came as a sort of squeak. "Ayesha?" But the nod from the other Erik, Ayesha, he supposed, confirmed it. This was just too strange, almost too much for Erik. He shook his head again, earning another slap from his hair and then looked up. "But how did you know I would be HERE? And you wished to be me? You wished for all this?"
"No, no, no." Ayesha shook her head sadly. "I didn't wish for this at ALL. I wished for...never mind, that's not important. I knew who you were when you fell in the lake," this came with a sort of misty smile, "no one curses like you, Erik."
"But I think what you wished for does matter. If it wasn't for this, it had something to do with...with all this." Erik protested, treating the whole scenario as though it was perfectly normal. "Because I wished for something too. But what was yours?" Ayesha looked down at her hands, head drooping on her shoulders as she mumbled something. "What was that?" Erik cocked his head curiously, trying to hear. "I didn't catch that."
"I wanted mhyhkghhknnnd." She mumbled again, a little louder.
"Ayesha, I still can't hear you, please, tell me." He urged, his voice carrying a whine to it that was never present in his old form. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to be himself, only himself. This was ridiculous.
"I wanted to be Christine!! You happy?! That's what I wished for! I wished to be her!" She roared, the anger amplifying her voice to carry over everything. Then she began to sob quietly, the noise striking that odd chord in Erik. He just sat still and let her go on sobbing for a few moments. Then he asked the question.
"But why, Ayesha? Why would you want to be her?"
"To you I'm just an animal, something to be petted and talked to to stave off loneliness. Oh, you'll treat me okay, give me a collar or feed me. And for awhile that was enough, that was what I wanted. No one was there to take you away from me. But then SHE showed up." Ayesha hissed, the eyes behind the recently reapplied mask turning to slits. "And you pushed me away. Whenever you started thinking about her, I was just getting pushed away. Like last night, all I wanted was to make you happy, to make you stop thinking about her. But it didn't work. All you talk about when you're around me is Christine anymore, and it was making me sick. I wanted to be her, so she'd have to be the cat and I could make you happy." Resigned, Ayesha sighed. "I may be an animal, Erik, but I can see what she's doing to you. She's tearing you up inside, and...I don't like it. But it went all wrong. All wrong!" Erik was stunned, this was new to him, his cat talking to him through his own voice and body while he was stuck in the body of the woman he had come to obsess over.
"Ayesha, don't cry, don't cry. Yes, this is a bit of a mix up but..." His thoughts suddenly moved toward the third party involved in this. "Where did she go? Is she the cat?"
"SEE?!! All you think about is what happened to HER!!" Ayesha shouted and jumped up, ready to go at Erik's throat again. From where he sat, and from the fact that his new body was smaller and weaker than the one that he used to have, Ayesha formed his body into an incredibly imposing and scary figure. ~I miss being me, I miss being scary sometimes.~ He thought to himself before he leaped off the couch and moved a few paces away.
"Calm down, Ayesha, I just wanted to see who else was involved and..." Seeing the suddenly nervous look in Ayesha's eyes, he moved a step closer to her. "Is she in your body?" He asked with slow, almost poisonous malice.
"Her? No, she's not in my body, no way. She's been shouting all morning though, I locked her in the closet because I was sick of hearing her. It's lovely being so big and strong, I can't understand why anyone would want to trade this body. You have FINGERS and thumbs. Thumbs are my favorite." She said, looking at the pair of long slender hands in childlike wonder, wiggling them and laughing merrily.
"I'm glad you like it, Ayesha, but who exactly did you lock in the closet? Christine, I know, but..." Sighing, Ayesha led him to the closet and opened the door.
"She's been thrashing all morning." Ayesha said almost boredly, rapping on the closet framework with one hand. "I LOVE these things..." she murmured to herself while Erik could only gape.
Nadir was bound and gagged, kicking and growling in muffled noises. "NADIR?! Christine's turned into the daroga?" He asked, trying to untie her. "You hold still!" He said fiercely when she kept twisting her head back and forth. Her eyes went wide and when he had gotten the gag off, he got bitten. "YOUCH! What was THAT for?!" He asked, staring at her.
"That's for letting that...that cat do all this to me!" She said indignantly. Even though she was using Nadir's voice, he sure could tell it was Christine in there. "I've been in here all morning, since I woke up and...I thought at first I had walked here in my sleep, and then she locked me in the closet."
"How did you know it wasn't me? And how do you know who I am?" Erik asked, completely puzzled.
"Well, I woke up in this little room off the cabin, and I heard the cat thundering around, shouting about thumbs. At first I thought you had gone totally crazy and abducted me, or I had come to visit you and forgotten, but then I knew it was the cat because she kept saying 'I'm not that puny cat anymore.' And then she asked aloud for you, and I went in there, and looked in the mirror, and I must have screamed because the next thing I know I've got a gag and I'm in the closet..." She trailed off, and then looked at him suspiciously. "What have you been doing as me?"
"Nothing to get concerned about. You really ought to wear shorter, looser dresses. I don't know which is worse, having my breath shut off or tripping over every bump in the road." Erik looked sullen at her remark on abduction. "Why would I abduct you, anyway? That's got to be the stupidest thing you've ever said." When he saw the hurt look on her face, he shook his head. "It's just been a very long day, Christine, a very long, CONFUSING day. I don't know how to get out of it but....the cat!" He exclaimed suddenly, his eyes lighting with a sudden thought.
"Erik? Has it been worse than you thought? Are you losing it?"
"No, no, nothing of the sort child." He said quickly, looking around for the cat. "Where is the cat?" He asked, getting up and moving around in slow circles.
"She's right there, Erik, what are you rambling about?"
"Not THAT cat, Ayesha, where did your body go?" Erik asked, in a frenzy now. Ayesha shrugged, and Erik began to roam around the flat, looking and looking. He found the cat asleep on a small chair, and he whispered. "Nadir? Is it you?" The cat's eyes snapped open and it swung it's head around to look at Erik full in the face. The only answer he got was a sullen "mrowwwr." Scooping up the cat and keeping well out of range of claws, he brought it to where the other two were. Christine was still tied up and Ayesha was now examining her new toes, much to Christine's estrangement. Erik blinked, and suddenly everything was just completely hilarious. Before it had been hectic, nerve wracking, surreal, and horrifying, but now it was absolutely the funniest thing in the entire world. He was in a woman's body, the only woman he ever really loved, and she was in the body of perhaps his very best friend. His cat had taken his body and was now sitting on the floor and wiggling his toes, and he was cradling a cat who was certainly someone other than a cat.
"What is so funny?!" Christine demanded irately when the bouts of laughter burst from him in waves, he began laughing so hard he started to shake, and the constraining dress shortened his breathing. The noise came out as a sort of half hysterical, half wheezing sound. The cat looked at him sullenly, flexing its claws. When he could calm down, he shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Ayesha, oblivious to everything, frowned heavily at the cat, her eyes lighting with distaste. ~Could she hate herself as much as I did? Did, Erik? Are you saying you don't? Maybe...Good grief, you have lost it!~ His inner conversation just made him give up one last chuckle before he set the cat down.
"I'm going to ask you again, are you Nadir? Nod once for yes." The cat nodded. "Why you little beast, you scratched me!" Erik suddenly burst out before anything else. Nadir merely raised his back, the hairs lifting slowly.
"My face! Look what he's done to my face!" Christine shrieked. Nadir leapt onto her lap and growled low. "Don't get me started, you. If my hands weren't tied behind my back I'd throw you across the room." She said fiercely.
"Not to my body you little usurper!" Ayesha thundered, rising in her bare feet to advance on Christine. Nadir scowled and slashed Ayesha's foot, causing her to hop on one foot. Erik sighed and watched the spectacle sadly. This was going nowhere, and there might not be a way to stop any of it. That was what worried him the most. Looking at the three fighting, he wondered morosely if they were all stuck like this for the rest of their lives.
"This couldn't get any worse, could it?" Erik muttered, rising to his feet and then slipping on the dress length in the puddle of water he had made himself. Great, just great.
A/N: Next chapter coming soon. Well, I did do some foreshadowing, but it was really really hard to see, but now it will be easy to see! I would have extended the switch to more, but I don't think I could keep track of more than this....Thanks to all those reviewers! You make my pineapples fruitier! ~_^
