#masayui

“Masashi, get up already if you want breakfast,” a female voice calls. Kaoru thinks he recognizes Masashi’s mom’s voice.

Okay. So. He appears to have body-swapped with Masashi. He’s not screaming, which Kaoru thinks is a very admirable first step. This is fine. He can handle this.

“Masashi, you’ll be late for practice!”

Right. Practice. He can do this.

Kaoru thinks he does an admirable job of faking through breakfast. At least, no one calls him out, and that’s probably the best he can hope for until this gets fixed. Masashi’s mom gives him some weird looks, but she’s the only one home and she doesn’t say anything.

It starts going downhill when Kaoru realizes he has no clue how to get to Seidou from here.

It can’t be that far. Masashi walks every day, so it can’t be more than a kilometer or so.

Right?

Kaoru’s probably convinced a few neighbors that Masashi is unbearably slow, but with a few helpful directions, he does manage to make it into practice on time. He should’ve realized that this was not a reprieve, but a whole new level of hell.

“Ah, Masashi-kun, I was hoping to get a few swings in with you before we start,” Kanemaru stops him. Was Masashi working on his swings with Kanemaru? Kaoru can’t remember.

Then Kaoru spots…well, himself, which means – hopefully – Masashi.

“Sorry, senpai, I’ve got to talk to…” Kaoru trails off, beelining for what better be Masashi.

Something about the expression on his own face does remind Kaoru of Masashi, which at least means that they’re spared some kind of mass body-switching event and Kaoru doesn’t have to track down, like, Okumura or something.

“We need to talk,” he says.

Masashi follows him away from the others, and when Kaoru tries to duck into the dugout, he smacks his head hard on the ceiling.

“Ow, fucking…how do you walk around like this?” he demands.

“At least I can reach things,” Masashi says, his usual neutral tone sounding so strange in Kaoru’s voice. “I couldn’t get your clothes down from the hanger. Why do you hang it up so high if you’re so short?”

He sounds petulant and petty, and maybe it’s a product of the morning he’s had so far, but Kaoru finds it hysterically funny. The sound of uproarious laughter sounds insanely weird in Masashi’s voice, and it only makes Kaoru laugh harder.

When he finally calms down, the same blank expression Masashi usually wears is on his own face, but Kaoru thinks he looks a little annoyed as well.

“Are you done?” he asks.

“Sure, fine, yes,” Kaoru says. “Okay. Now what?”

“Now, we’re about to be late to practice,” Masashi says. “I hope you can keep up with my position.”

“It shouldn’t be…” Kaoru trails off as the thought suddenly strikes him. “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“I am going to hit so many homeruns,” he says. “Masashi. Listen. We are never switching back.”

“You’ll have to give up your tiny strike zone,” Masashi says, looking alarmed.

“Don’t care,” Kaoru says. He’s been fighting against his height his entire life. He was rejected so many times for his height. He’s going to love this. “Between my batting skills and your strength, I’m going to be unstoppable.”

“I have batting skills,” Masashi protests.

“Sure, you can hit homeruns, but only when you get the bat on the ball,” Kaoru dismisses. “I can get the bat on the ball. Together, we’ve made the best batter known to man.”

“And what am I supposed to do?” Masashi complains. “I can’t hit like you.”

“I dunno,” Kaoru shrugs. “You don’t have to swing at much, most pitchers can’t get it in my strike zone anyway.”

“Then why do you swing at things?”

“Because I’m a damn good batter and I want other teams to fear my name.”

He claps Masashi on the shoulder, and Masashi almost collapses to one knee. Kaoru winces. Masashi really is a lot stronger than him, and Kaoru isn’t used to the new body yet.

“Come on, let’s go.”

For about an hour, it’s the worst practice of Kaoru’s life. He doesn’t know how to move Masashi’s long limbs, doesn’t know how to get this body to obey him, and Masashi doesn’t have any of the same muscle memory that his does. Fielding is a wash, and Masashi has gotten better at that in his second year, enough that people notice Kaoru fucking it up.

Batting takes him a second to get down, too, but by afternoon practice, he’s managed to settle into these new limbs enough that he can bat like himself. Not perfectly like himself, but he’s meeting or exceeding Masashi’s batting average, and it feels so good to watch the balls go flying.

Kaoru’s feeling very pleased with himself when they wind practice down, and he cheerfully stays with Kanemaru for extra practice, basking in the compliments to his improved form.

He hasn’t been paying much attention to Masashi, which he feels a little bad about, but it’s been a bit of a weird day, so Kaoru feels like he can be forgiven.

“Yui? Where are you going?”

Kaoru whips his head up instinctively at the sound of his own name, and sees Masashi heading for the front of the school.

“Home,” he says, and immediately seems to realize his mistake. He blushes, because Kaoru’s body blushes easily.

“Are you sure you’re not feeling sick?” Furuya – Furuya? – asks. “You’ve been off all day.”

“That must be it,” Masashi says, and he coughs unconvincingly into his fist. Luckily, Furuya’s a little dumb.

“Get some rest,” Furuya says. “I won’t ask you to catch for me today.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to steal the Wolf Boy from me, Furuya!” Sawamura shouts from the other side of the room.

“We’ve talked about you using my name,” Okumura complains. “I know we have. It happened an hour ago.”

“You might want to just let it happen,” Haruichi advises. “He’s not going to stop.”

Come to think of it, Kaoru and Furuya do have a routine. It’s not all that unusual that Furuya can recognize that something’s up. Not that he’ll guess what’s really up.

Kaoru thanks Kanemaru for the extra practice and heads back to Masashi’s house, only stopping once at a convenience store to ask for directions.

This time, Masashi’s father is home, too, and Masashi’s brother is home from his university classes, and Kaoru doesn’t do nearly as well faking as he did this morning. He tries, but despite his friendship with Masashi, it doesn’t mean he’s actually any good at mimicking him, and besides, he rarely sees Masashi interact with his family. It’s probably different to how he acts with his friends and teammates.

Kaoru gets sent to bed to sleep off whatever’s got him so sick, Masashi’s parents whispering with worry behind him, and figures it’s for the best. This was probably some strange fluke of a day, and whatever’s wrong with the universe will reset itself after a good night’s sleep.

When he wakes up to the same alarm clock, he admits that was a pretty stupid thing to assume.

He rushes through breakfast and out the door, ignoring Masashi’s mother’s offers to stay home and rest if he still feels sick, and corners Masashi the second he sees him.

“Okay, this sucks,” he says. “How do we fix this?”

“How should I know?” Masashi asks.

“Well, I didn’t do anything to cause this,” Kaoru says. Minus an idle wish on what he thought might be a falling star but actually turned out to be an airplane, so it doesn’t count. “Isn’t this usually caused by, like, a bad fortune cookie in the movies?”

“What movie is that?” Masashi asks. “And what makes you think I did anything?”

“Well, did you?”

Masashi looks away.

“Wait, you did?” Kaoru asks. “What did you do?”

“It was just a wish at the shrine by my house!” Masashi protests. “And I didn’t wish for this!”

“Then what did you wish for?” Kaoru asks. Masashi mumbles something under his breath. “What?”

“I said, I wanted to get to know you better,” Masashi repeats, blushing with all of Kaoru’s body.

It’s…a strange kind of mirror to Kaoru’s wish, in a way. Kaoru’s wish – on an airplane, so it still doesn’t count – was for Masashi’s attention. He doesn’t seem to notice anything other than baseball, which is cool, but Kaoru has this new sexuality thing he’s kind of dealing with, and Masashi is kind of his best friend, and they have this bond forged from being the only first years on the first string, and Kaoru would maybe like it if Masashi looked back at him every now and then.

But wishing on a plane because he has a crush definitely shouldn’t have made them switch bodies, so he’s fine with blaming this on Masashi’s thing.

“You could’ve just asked, you know,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

It’s like pulling teeth all day at school, getting Masashi to ask questions, but eventually he seems to get the point of the exercise, and Kaoru, not wanting to prolong whatever this is by refusing to answer, lets Masashi in on a lot of personal stuff, like how insecure he feels sometimes, like how sometimes he just wants to scream because everyone only seems to see his height and not how hard he works, and even some other personal stuff, like the fact that he might like boys as well as girls and he’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to do with that.

By the end of the day, Kaoru is emotionally exhausted, and that better have been enough to break this, because he doesn’t think he can do it again.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kaoru says. “And hopefully you’ll be you again.”

“See you,” Masashi tells him.

Kaoru skips dinner and passes out as soon as he gets to Masashi’s house, and is blissfully excited to wake up in his own body again.

And he doesn’t.

Kaoru almost screams in frustration. They don’t have school today, but he books it over to Seidou anyway. Masashi is waiting for him at the gate.

“Plan b,” Kaoru says. “What shrine did you say you went to again?”

On the way over, Masashi tells him about the crazy old shrine maiden who takes care of it, and her younger coworker who tries to keep her in line, and how the old woman had offered him a fortune and a wink when he’d gone to make his wish.

“There’s the younger one,” Masashi says when they get there. “Sanae-san, I-”

“Did she get you too?” Sanae asks, exhausted, before Masashi can even finish.

“What?”

“My senpai, she was giving out these charms that had an unusual effect,” Sanae says. “Did she give you one?”

“Yes?” Masashi says.

“Alright, I’ll get you two switched right back,” she says, looking extremely underpaid. She pulls two charms from her waistband. “Hold these, and everything should go back to normal.”

As soon as Kaoru touches his, he gets this weird split vision for a second before his eyes go fuzzy and stabilize. He’s looking at Sanae from a different angle.

It worked.

“So it wasn’t about a wish I made?” Masashi asks.

“No, of course not,” Sanae says. “Don’t go spreading this around, okay? She didn’t mean any harm, she’s just mischievous in her old age.”

“Sure,” Kaoru says.

They make it a few blocks away from the shrine when Masashi turns to Kaoru.

“Did you mean everything you said yesterday?” he asks.

“Of course,” Kaoru replied. “I didn’t want to fuck it up by lying.”

“Even the part when you said you like boys too?”

“If this is the part where you stop being friends with me because you think it’s weird you can wait until tomorrow.”

“No, I don’t…any particular boy?”

Kaoru crosses his arms over his chest. He can feel the blush taking over his face.

“Maybe.”

“Who?”

Kaoru is about to yell at him when he looks up and sees how earnest Masashi looks.

“Why did you want to get to know me better?” he asks. Masashi looks away. “Hey. You should take me out on a date. Since this is your fault.”

Masashi’s eyes widen.

“Really?”

“Yeah, but not today.” Everything is still a little weird, and Kaoru needs to settle back into his body. “You should go talk to your parents, though. I think they’re worried about you.”

“Do you want some breakfast?” Masashi asks. “I’ll introduce you to them properly.”