Home Without You

Disclaimer: don't own

Notes: Day 27 of the 30 Day Cheesy Tropes Challenge by ghiraher on tumblr: body swap

Shuuzou wakes up to a ringtone that's not his own but is coming from the phone on the floor; the ground is too close but he reaches for it anyway and the light is funny and his skin is too pale but the phone is so goddamn loud and it's too early for this shit but he stabs the right area on the screen and holds it up to his ear.

"Yeah?"

"Shuu?"

He pauses. Tatsuya's the only person who calls him that but this is not Tatsuya's voice; it's kind of familiar but also odd. "Tatsuya?"

"Listen, I think we switched bodies."

Shuuzou contemplates throwing the phone across the room but when he looks at the floor and realizes that this room does not possess the hideous baby blue wall-to-wall carpeting that's in all the bedrooms of his house he decides not to—of course, he almost drops it on the bed instead but at least that's soft.

"Well I'm definitely not in any place I know."

"Look in the mirror," says Tatsuya. "There's one above the dresser."

Shuuzou gets up. Now that he's thinking about it, there's hair over one of his eyes in a way that his bangs are way too short for and he's lighter on his feet than he should be. The wood floor is cold under his soles and as he comes into view of his reflection he nearly drops the phone again.

He hasn't seen Tatsuya in person in over a year (he's only had a few blurry photos and some dimly-lit Skype sessions to supplement his memories) and goddamn if he didn't get more beautiful—he's gained a bit of muscle and his eyes are brighter and his lips are fuller. He'd forgotten how gorgeous and long and lean Tatsuya's legs are; he flexes one experimentally. Damn.

"Shuu?"

Right, the phone. Tatsuya's face in the mirror colors slightly. Whoa. Tatsuya doesn't blush often, but when he does—

"You still there?"

"How the fuck do you not just stare at yourself in the mirror all day?"

Tatsuya snorts. "Vain much?"

"It's not my body I'm talking about."

"It is now," says Tatsuya. "Unless you know a convenient way to switch back before either of us has to get up?"

It's probably the middle of the night there—but Tatsuya's used to waking up at this hour, probably, even on the weekends.

"I think I read a light novel about this kind of thing once," says Shuuzou. "They had to kiss to switch back or something because they didn't realize they liked each other."

"Well," says Tatsuya.

Flying across the Pacific isn't really an option for either of them right now, is it?

Shuuzou sighs. It's fascinating watching the way Tatsuya's body moves under his control in the mirror; it's not the way he's used to seeing it but it still looks good and it's weird to think that he looks good in Tatsuya's body, that that kind of body suits his mannerisms almost as well as it suits Tatsuya's.

"You're staring again, aren't you?"

"Sorry."

"Well, let's just plan things out for today."

Yes, the day—spending Saturday as Tatsuya and having to leave the room and interact with other people and pretend he knows them. "Wait, it's still Golden Week, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I'm staying with my brother so you won't really have to worry about the act."

"It's your brother; I'm sure he'll know something's up. His name's Taiga, right?"

"Yeah," says Tatsuya. "He's getting tutored by his friends today so he'll be gone all afternoon and he sleeps in pretty late, so you'll just have to do breakfast and dinner with him. Mostly we talk sports so you'll be able to handle it."

"You seem pretty confident," says Shuuzou. "I've never seen you interact with him. Hell, I've never even met the guy and I have no idea what to expect. At least you know my family."

"Not that well," says Tatsuya.

"Well enough. They're pretty spacey. Anyway, Mom's giving you the car today and you have to drop off my sister at soccer practice but she'll go home by herself. I needed a couple of new pairs of shorts so I was going to go to buy some, too."

"I was going to buy some candy to take back to Atsushi; he's staying back in the dorms for the week."

"Where does your brother live again?"

"Tokyo."

It's easy pretending to be Shuu—Tatsuya's never considered himself much of an actor but he thinks about Shuu a lot, what it's like being him, how they're alike and how they're different; he'd tried his hardest to memorize the little gestures Shuu makes, the way he bites his lip when he's searching for the right English word and translating in his head even though he knows that's not the way he's supposed to do it, just in case things went sour or things stopped altogether, just in case he never got to see them again, even though he'd known that would only make the potential situation worse.

Shuu's gotten taller again, and Tatsuya isn't sure if he likes it or not. On one hand it's kind of nice feeling this big and powerful and seeing the ground that much farther away, but on the other he's going to have to crane his neck the next time they see each other and it's going to be weird and he is so sick of being the short one (and at six feet he really shouldn't be)—at least Shuu is still significantly shorter than Atsushi and Wei (but he'd better not match them the next time they meet properly).

He drops Shuu's sister off at the soccer field and heads over to the mall, still focused on working the car—it's been a long time since he's driven and while he hasn't forgotten much he's still on high alert, not paying too much attention to which buildings he's passing and which neighborhoods he's going through; the GPS tells him which streets to turn on to get to the mall and he finally reaches the parking lot. He's always been bad at stall parking but he manages to fit the sedan in properly with no damage to it or to his surroundings.

And then he steps out into the parking lot, locks the car, and breathes in. Families are walking across the lot; cars of all sizes meander around looking for the optimal parking spots; groups of giggling teenage girls look him up and down and whisper amongst themselves. It hits him like the way it did seven hours ago when he was sitting on Shuu's bed trying to process his reflection and his surroundings, that he's home, that he'd fallen asleep last night in Taiga's spare room thinking about how it would be good if they could be back home and of course he hadn't meant it this way at all but in some ways it's better than good, the warmth of the sun on his neck and leaning against the car. He takes a selfie and sets it as the background; if they ever switch back Shuu might find it amusing. But now he needs new shorts and he needs the mall atmosphere itself—never his favorite thing but still something unavailable in Akita or even in Tokyo.

Shuuzou takes the long route to his favorite candy store, the one by Teikou—he'd been there at the same time as Murasakibara a few times and he'll be able to find some good snacks for him. And he'll also need a few for himself; even the specialty stores in LA are limited in their scope of Japanese junk food. It's so good to be home, even if he's in the wrong body and even if he can't see his old friends, even if after two years some of his favorite places have changed so much—the basketball courts at the park have been redone and his favorite coffee shop is now a bank and the fruit stand where he did much of his grocery shopping the year he lived alone is boarded up and they've rerouted some of the roads but it's still the same, still very much the way he remembers it; he'd spent so many afternoons walking everywhere as a child and then after he'd retired from the basketball club and had no high school entrance exam to take, only papers to transfer to a distant country. It's kind of surreal, the fog that's settled over the city today; it's threatening rain but none has come quite yet.

Tatsuya's little brother is a good kid, thanking Shuuzou for the fried eggs he made and chatting away about basketball with him during breakfast. Shuuzou is aware that they've had their differences in the past (how much at fault Tatsuya is for them is unknown although he's willing to shoulder the bulk of the blame) but he seems to be really making an effort. Shuuzou had ruffled his hair in affection and hoped that it was something Tatsuya sometimes did; his sheepish reaction made it clear that whether or not it was it definitely had the desired effect.

Perhaps Shuuzou should buy him some candy, too. He's already about to go overboard, but then again Tatsuya's probably going to blow all of his on gas.

The first thing Tatsuya does after getting the shorts and leaving the mall is drive to his own neighborhood, pass slowly through the streets and revel in everything he's missed, the corner bodegas and variety stores and hair salons, the people—some he doesn't know and some he does, Katie who used to babysit for him and still lives at home with her parents sitting on a lawn chair smoking a cigarette on the porch, the old man with his three cocker spaniels, one of the grocery-store clerks. He turns onto his own street, slows down further as he passes his own house, sees his mother's car in the driveway. His next door neighbors still have the Christmas lights up; they never get rid of them until at least June. He wants to laugh or cry or something but he just keeps going, speeding up and off toward the freeway.

Taiga is more subdued after he comes back from the tutoring session; it's not like Tatsuya to ask directly what's wrong so Shuuzou just lets him be and lets him cook dinner—he offers to help but Taiga waves him away with the excuse of being a host. It's clear that cooking alone helps him think and Shuuzou is actually kind of relieved; Tatsuya is so messy when he cooks and he did a shitty imitation of it at breakfast. He sits in the living room and reads the paper and dinner starts to smell really good.

It's a delicious gumbo; Tatsuya wasn't lying when he bragged about his brother's cooking skills. Taiga looks considerably happier, especially with how much Shuuzou eats (it's definitely more than he should but even if he stays in Tatsuya's body forever he's going back to Akita tomorrow).

Shuuzou gives him a chocolate bar after dinner, and it's then he begins to open up about what's on his mind, and as Shuuzou clears the table and cleans up he starts to talk.

"It's just…really hard. Learning the concepts and stuff is difficult enough but then I have to know the kanji for everything and I just can't keep track of all of them and when they're pronounced which way because half the time they just throw away the pronunciation guide and…"

Shuuzou knows almost exactly what he means; it's the way it was for him at first—the way it still is sometimes, when he's at school in LA. It's hard to learn concepts when you're struggling with the basic sentence patterns and can't even discern which part is the verb let alone what it actually means. His own strategies probably wouldn't work the other way around, especially since Taiga's struggling more with written Japanese than with spoken, but it's still more than comparable. Shuuzou dries his hands and walks out into the living room. Taiga looks up at him, brow creased and chocolate on the corner of his mouth, and Shuuzou sits down next to him and brings him into a tight hug.

"Thank you," Taiga whispers.

The next morning Shuuzou wakes up in his own bed with several missed texts from Tatsuya in his phone. His background is now a picture of himself that he doesn't remember having taken. Tatsuya probably took it; he recognizes his mom's car in the background. Typical. Shuuzou smiles and texts him back.