Chapter 3: Rules of Engagement

Where should I start? How should I explain?
Wanna tell you everything that happened
while you were in a long, long dream
Wish I could breathe in the same dimension,
I don't want to let it go
Now that I am finally faced with the voice
I've known for so long

Meliodas woke up with a huge yawn and a stretch. He rubbed his palms into his eyes, trying to shake off another odd dream. He had been plagued with them lately, although he could never exactly remember what they were about when he woke up. It was more unsettling than he wanted to admit.

There was only a bit of sun peeking outside, the clouds heavy as they rolled in, threatening rain. He needed to get down to the village and get some things before that started, so he got out of bed, rolling his shoulders a bit. He padded barefoot over towards the washroom, but when he reached the door he froze. Slowly he turned back and walked to the little table to the side of the room.

It was covered in papers and his notebooks—things he knew he had not left out—things he would never leave out. In a flash Meliodas hurried over to the drawer where they should be, but when he yanked it open, sure enough it was empty. He frowned in deep confusion, finally turning back to the table.

Meliodas gathered up the things into a pile, thinking. Why would he leave all this out? Why would he take it all out in the first place? He huffed when he picked up the journals, feeling uneasy that someone might have come in and looked through it all. Or did he do it? How much did he have to drink last night? It usually took a lot more than the few he recalled to get him this intoxicated.

It was all a haze, and he plopped down in the chair to flip through the pages, looking to see if he had written or drawn anything and just didn't remember. Everything seemed the same, so he turned it over as the back cover popped open.

There, next to the symbol he had drawn that was from a former life, something that had been a part of him since birth, was a name in a script that was completely different than his own but still, somehow, familiar.

Elizabeth.

His heart jolted and his body jumped with a sharp rap on the door. "Captain! You up?" Ban's voice called through the wood.

"Y-yeah," he answered. A single finger slid over the name. Who wrote that? Who could know?

"We got stuff to doooo~" Ban called again, and Meliodas shook the mystery from his mind. Quickly he gathered up the books and papers and deposited them in the drawer. This was a question that could be answered later.

Downstairs, Merlin and Ban watched him closely as he walked through the main room and headed behind the bar. He pulled out a mug and filled it with fresh water, and after taking a long sip he looked between them both. "Why are you staring?" he asked suspiciously.

"Who are you today?" Merlin smirked, and Ban snorted.

Meliodas frowned. "What are you talking about?"

The two exchanged a look. "I don't know, Cap'n," Ban began. "You seem to be switching back and forth between you and—not you."

"You're talking nonsense," he dismissed with another sip of water.

"Not really," Merlin observed. "Although I think this might be the Captain."

Before he could demand an answer, Ban leaned over the counter. "Well, let's test it. What are your thoughts on pudding?"

"What?"

"Hmm… feigning innocence. All right, how many cups of coffee are you planning to drink today?"

Meliodas snorted. "I don't even really like coffee."

Ban's eyebrows raised, and Merlin joined in, "Tell us Captain, what does cooking an egg over hard mean?"

Both erupted into laughter, but Meliodas just huffed in annoyance. "You're both ridiculous."

He muttered as he washed out the mug, the others still laughing, but then he straightened and ask, "Did one of you guys go in my room last night and take out all my papers?"

"Your room?" Ban echoed. "Why would one of us do that?"

"I don't know… was I really drunk or something?"

They exchanged a glance, a habit that was beginning to grate on his nerves. "You didn't drink last night, Cap," Ban answered. "Probably should have though."

"I thought he was rather charming," Merlin smiled.

"Ha ha," muttered Meliodas as they laughed again. "Come on, let's get moving."

When Elizabeth woke up, the first thing she saw on her arm was writing in ink. Elizabeth? Who are you? What are you? it read.

"What?!" she exclaimed, just as the door to her room banged open. She jumped in surprise, nearly falling over the side as Veronica yelled into the room. "Let's go, you're going to be late!"

"Late?" Elizabeth exclaimed. "For what?"

Veronica huffed with her hands planted on her hips. "We have class in ten minutes, and you haven't had breakfast yet."

"Class? But isn't it… Sunday…?" Elizabeth glanced down at her arm, her finger tracing over the letters drawn there.

"I see you're not touching your boobs today," Veronica snickered. "Now hurry up!"

She was gone with a slam of the door, and for a moment her exit did not register. "It's not Sunday," Elizabeth whispered to herself, then her eyes shot up to where her sister had stood. "Boobs!"

Quickly she scrambled out of bed. No time to call for a lady-in-waiting, she threw on a gown and put in her earring before slipping into her shoes, not bothering to brush her hair or wash her face before running from the room. She made it just in time, but when she entered the library, the tutor glared at her sharply, not even acknowledging the small hello she gave. Elizabeth slipped into her seat as quietly as possible, and as the tutor was busy flipping through a book, she leaned over and whispered, "Why is he looking at me like that?"

Veronica just shrugged, but for the rest of the morning, Elizabeth knew something was wrong. Immediately she realized she had left her notebook in her room, which earned her a laugh from her sister and an exasperated sigh from the teacher. For the rest of the morning she was short with the princess, cutting off her answers and only glancing at her work. Yet the teacher's eyes never seemed to leave her, as if waiting for her to make a mistake, so it was a relief to finally escape for lunch.

The princess hurried down to their tree, Howzer and Jericho waiting as they always were. "You'll never believe this," she groaned as she plopped down next to her friends, but Jericho cut her off. "Are you feeling better today?"

"Better?" Elizabeth repeated, her stomach tight with dread.

"You really don't remember," Howzer replied, more a statement than a question.

Groaning, she dropped her head. "What did I do now?" she moaned.

She could practically sense the way they shifted uncomfortably next to her, and then Jericho answered, "Yesterday, we were down in the town, and you overheard some merchants speaking badly of your father. They called him—some things, and you got upset."

"You kind of made a scene," Howzer went on. "One said something about the Holy Knights putting the king out, and the other said that it wouldn't change anything since they are all corrupt, and you—kind of—pushed over one of their stands."

"I—I—I did what?" she gasped, going frozen in shock. With wide eyes she stared back and forth at the two apprentices. "I broke someone's stand?"

"Well, not the whole stand," reassured Jericho. "Just… part of it."

Elizabeth trembled for a moment, sucking in a deep breath. There is no way—no way—that she had done such a thing. She covered her mouth with a hand, the other playing with her earring absentmindedly, wondering if this was real.

"Elizabeth? What's that on your arm?"

Her arm. She looked down and remembered the writing and the notebook and how this kept happening, over and over. With a yelp she was up, grabbing her skirts as she ran back towards the castle, ignoring the shouts of her friends that followed behind her. She raced past the servants and visitors in the castle, hurrying through the corridors as her shoes made loud sounds on the steps as she took them as quickly as she could. When she reached her room finally, she grabbed her notebook and practically fell onto her bed, turning the pages frantically.

"What is this?" she hissed to herself. The notebook was covered in scribbles, the sloppy handwriting very different from her own elegant script. But she had seen it before, remembering the morning she found Who are you? inexplicably written along with her speech.

Her eyes darted between the pages and her arm. It's the same script for sure, but how? How could someone be doing this?

Think, Elizabeth, she chided herself. Someone was sneaking into her room, writing on her arm, filling her notebook pages with questions asking her name, where they are, what was happening. But that couldn't be! No one could get into the room of a princess. No one could be doing all this without someone knowing, someone seeing. Besides, if this mystery person was somehow leaving cryptic messages around, then what about the other oddities in her life? What about the missing time? Her unusual behavior? It was almost as if someone else is doing these things, while she was somewhere else.

She stopped turning pages when she spied a picture of the castle façade. It was drawn perfectly to scale, and included little details like the scalloped windowsills and the broken wing on one of the goddess statues. Elizabeth had never been adept at drawing. But this sketch was beautiful, and as she traced the outline with her finger, she suddenly remembered her dream.

Elizabeth had been a boy in it, who worked at a tavern, the kind of life she had always dreamed would be fun. That boy had handwriting very similar to the one on her arm and in the pages of her book. That boy had an entire book filled with drawings.

Again she looked at her arm, her eyes going wide, her mind refusing to acknowledge the connection in front of her. "Could this mean?" she said out loud. "In our dreams… that guy and I… Are we… switching places?"

"We're switching places," Meliodas groaned. He slumped forward onto the table, burying his head into his arms. Papers were strewn across it, notes about the previous day—another day he couldn't remember, another dream just out of reach—but he could not deny the truth any longer. There were too many strange coincidences, too many weird behaviors; there had to be some magic at work.

Merlin raised an eyebrow. "Switching places?"

"In our dreams, this girl and I…" he muttered, pulling the pages forward to look over. "Two or three times a week," Meliodas continued, "I randomly and without warning switch places with Elizabeth. She is someone important, a princess perhaps, although I can't tell where exactly in Britannia. The trigger is sleep. The cause, unknown."

"Switching places," Ban repeated, leaning forward a bit in his chair.

"Any memories I have of the switch get more and more hazy after I wake up." He held up a paper with her handwriting on it, listing theories about what was going on, and asking him questions about the tavern and his friends. "But there's no doubt we are switching places."

"Switching places!" Hawk squeaked, pulling himself up to sniff among the papers.

Meliodas looked back and forth between their blank expressions. "Don't you see? Haven't you noticed something… odd about me lately?"

Merlin cleared her throat. "Well, yes, as a matter of fact," she replied. "I just assumed you had been drinking."

Ban snorted as Meliodas shook his head. "This proves it. This isn't my writing. This isn't me. It's her, this girl who is in my body and I go into hers and—" Suddenly he cut off as he spied something on the page. "No, no, no, how much did she spend on cake in town?"

"So you don't know why this is happening?" Ban asked, bringing him back to the conversation.

"No," he sighed, "it just started… a couple of weeks ago? I guess? How long have I been doing this?"

Ban scratched his chin. "At least that."

Meliodas turned to Merlin, and with a pleading look asked, "Will you please look into this? There has to be a spell, an enchantment, a curse—something is making this happen."

"Of course, Captain," she chuckled, as Hawk banged a hoof on the table. "Whoever this girl is can only be an improvement!"

Gritting his teeth, he turned over another paper, and spied more of her writing on the back. Meliodas nearly choked as he read:

RULES!
No rudeness!
No missing assignments!
NO baths, NO looking, NO TOUCHING! (Veronica TOLD me what you do… are you some kind of pervert?)

"Pervert!" he exclaimed, feeling his face grow warmer. "Who does she think she is?"

"She certainly knows who you are if she says you're a pervert," Hawk joked.

He ignored Ban's laugh as he furiously picked up a pencil. Sure, he had taken a feel once or twice, but damn it he thought it was a dream! Besides, if he was touching her body, then it was only logical that she would have to touch him at least occasionally. Meliodas snickered to himself at the idea, grinning a bit at the thought of the princess with those lovely curves taking a peek of her own.

Drawing a line down to separate the page in half, he scribbled furiously on the other side:

RULES!
No sweets.
No sleeping in.
No buying anything!
No weird stuff!
Don't talk to my friends!

Satisfied for the moment, he went back to her note.

Everyone is staring at me now, you keep upsetting everyone!
Keep your opinions to YOURSELF!

With a twitch of his mouth, he wrote next to her looping script:

Maybe they just like ME more than YOU.

It was childish, he knew, but Meliodas felt justified as he continued to her next point:

Watch sitting in a skirt, this is basic for being a girl.
You should hire some more staff, it's too hard to run the bar myself!
The tavern is too much work!

"I cannot believe this girl!" he muttered, writing:

Maybe I COULD hire more people if you stopped spending my money!

"I wondered how you knew how to sew my skirt," Merlin mused aloud, and his eyes snapped up. "I should have known something was off."

"I did what?" he gaped, as she turned to show the hole that was stitched expertly.

Meliodas sighed and went back to reading. It was a bitter irony when he saw the next line:

Merlin is really pretty. You should treat her better, and get her a decent uniform. That thing is very indecent. You could have something special if you treated her like a LADY. I told her as much and she looked at me strangely. Haven't you ever complimented her before?

His hand shook as he wrote in bold letters: STOP MESSING WITH MY RELATIONSHIPS!

Next he read: Some young men in the academy have been sending me notes. It's not proper, and my father is going to be furious when he finds out! I don't want any suitors right now!

To that, he simply added:

Same here! So forget about Merlin or ANYONE ELSE, I have something I'm trying to do!

Satisfied, he gathered up the papers, meeting the gazes of his three friends, who had been simply watching him this whole time. "There," he said. "We have some basic rules now, so we both know what to do until this… phenomenon, whatever it is, stops."

"It would be helpful if we knew who this Elizabeth is," Merlin puzzled. "Do you recall meeting an Elizabeth at any time?"

A bit of heat went up the back of his neck. "A long time ago," he answered quickly, starting to gather up the papers into a neat stack. "But it can't be her, that was—too long ago. No one since."

"Still, a princess shouldn't be too hard to track down. There are plenty of kingdoms in Britannia, and we just need to find one with a princess named Elizabeth."

"If she is a princess," Ban chimed in as he drummed his fingers on the table. "If a princess was acting all—well, like the Captain—wouldn't that news be out by now?"

Meliodas glared at him, but Merlin simply shook her head. "Not necessarily. But it's worth asking around about anyway."

He nodded, feeling better now that his friends were in the loop, and that he had some sense of what was going on. The sooner they found Elizabeth, and figured out what was causing this switching, the sooner they could get back to finding the others before the Ten Commandments made their appearance.

The sounds of the castle coming to life prodded him awake, and groggily Meliodas opened his eyes. He sighed as he stared at the now-familiar ceiling for a few minutes, knowing he was back in Elizabeth's body. With a grunt and a stretch he sat up, wanting to be up and ready before Veronica burst into the door. He looked down and pulled the covers away, but paused when he took in the sight of the ample cleavage peeking out of the sleeping gown. Immediately he lifted his hands to take himself a helping.

It had been a few weeks since they had made their discovery and set down their rules, and they had switched back and forth at least a couple of dozen times. The notes and rules were helping things immensely, both now able to keep track of what the other was doing.

But Meliodas knew that what Elizabeth didn't know wouldn't hurt her. He considered her body just a perk of this whole ridiculous experience.

Still, he paused, and after a moment forced his hands back down in his lap. "I shouldn't, for her sake," he said aloud. Pleased with this decision, Meliodas looked around the room… before his eyes dropped back down to the gorgeous pair of breasts that were just sitting there, waiting to be touched. "To hell with it," he muttered, and gave them a good squeeze, keeping his hands outside the fabric this time as a compromise.

It was a strange sensation, being able to feel up such an enticing body, rolling the flesh in his hands in a very exploratory sort of way—plus with the added sensation of being on the receiving end. Experimentally he teased them a bit, closing his eyes with a sigh. Elizabeth's chest wasn't her only tantalizing feature, but it was certainly the most fun.

As he continued his caresses, Meliodas thought about everything he had learned so far about the girl. She was the youngest, and rarely saw her father, the king. Meliodas had only seen him once, briefly, when he was called before him to answer for upsetting some of the staff. He chuckled to himself at that, being spoken to as if a child; it had been a long time since that had happened, if ever. It struck him that his own father had been just as absent, and that he did not have a mother around, just like this princess. He also noted that he too was one of three children, although he had been the oldest.

Being a princess was so unlike his own experience growing up a prince in the demon realm that it was almost absurd. The amount of lessons every day, the rules he had to follow, were sometimes maddening. Everything from how to sit to how to walk to how to eat was carefully managed by someone, and rarely did he get any free time as Elizabeth to do… well, anything else. Even as the manager and owner of a tavern, he had fun sometimes.

There was no alcohol for a princess, which was also hard. When he did sneak away, he would usually head down to where the apprentices gathered. He actually liked Jericho and Howzer a lot, and really liked their faces when he did a bit of showing off with a sword on the training fields. After that he had had several of the others—both boys and girls—approach him with blushing cheeks and stuttering compliments. Meliodas huffed a laugh as he wondered what Elizabeth had thought when she read about that.

The door slammed open, and there was Veronica, her arms folded as she laughed. "You sure to like feeling your own boobs, don't you?"

Meliodas looked at her oddly, still half in his daydream and not paying enough attention to understand. "Get up!" she yelled. "Let's go!"

Twenty minutes later, Meliodas entered the small breakfast room where her sisters were waiting. "Why are you dressed like that?" Veronica demanded as soon as she entered.

He looked down at the blue gown and pearls he wore. Quickly his mind flipped through the rules about clothing—No bare legs, No bare shoulders, ALWAYS UNDERWEAR—unable to pinpoint what he had done wrong now. "What?" he asked with a frown.

"You were supposed to put on your formal clothes," Margaret admonished her gently. "Don't you remember? We are going to see the goddesses today."

"Sorry, I'll change after breakfast." Meliodas took his seat, eagerly reaching for the plate of ham set on the table, but then paused. "Wait, goddesses?" He looked at Margaret in surprise. "What goddesses?"

The princess smiled at him. "We are going to speak to them today, to thank them for the blessings. It's the follow-up to the ceremony."

Meliodas nodded, gulping down some water. For a moment, he had been worried. If there were any real goddesses around, he could be in trouble. They would be able to sense he wasn't really Elizabeth in a second. But this sounded like just some superstitious thing. So he should be safe. Should be.