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ashglory-writes · 6 years ago

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another heart’s asylum - chapter 1/10

Who’s ready for a good old-fashioned bodyswapping adventure??? A huge shoutout to Rana for looking this over for me, thank you so much!!

[Read it on AO3] - | Next Chapter

~ 2.8k words, rated T, f/f Chargestep (Serena/Julia), contains spoilers for Retribution!

What would you do if you woke up in your girlfriend's body? Hopefully the same thing you would do if you woke up in your enemy's. Otherwise, you might have a problem on your hands.

As it so happens, Julia Ortega has a problem. So does Serena Basri.

There's a vise strangling Serena's spine when she wakes. The pain reaches down to the bone.

This is agony she hasn't felt since Heartbreak – or rather, its aftermath. Nothing has ever hurt as much as that year she spent in 'recovery' after the Farm doctors removed her pain-gate.

To this day she doesn't know if it was punishment for her first escape, or if it had just been so damaged by the fall that its removal was a necessity. All that matters is that they hadn't given it back; that even if it was not meant as punishment at first, that is what its absence had amounted to in the end.

Sleep's haze lifts from her mind, already racing. Wrongness prickles at her thoughts. There's something off about everything here: situation, location, her own self.

Observations swarm like flies around a carcass: the too-soft and too-warm mattress; her arms, longer than they should be; the glint of metal out of the corner of her eye; the shape of her body, soft where it shouldn't be and dramatic in its curves and angles; but worst, and most damning of all, is the silence.

It's not the smothering blanket of telepathic dampeners, nor is it the round-cornered smog that comes from anti-telepathy drugs. She's experienced both forms often enough to be certain. This is just pure, knife-like absence.

It's not unlike being in her puppet's body, especially that first time she slipped into Eden's unpolished, granite-grit shell. But Eden's body is broken in like a new pair of shoes now, worn soft and comfortable, flexible, almost as if it were her own.

It's disconcerting that she's ended up in someone's body without knowing how. But Serena can sort out the how and the why of it all later, in her own body. Away from this pain.

So she closes her eyes, and prepares to loose her soul from this shell...

And nothing happens.

She opens her eyes, staring down at a pair of hands that aren't hers but are intimately familiar nonetheless. Revelation seeps through her mind like groundwater through earth as she registers the blots of silver and chrome peeking through the synthskin of her palms.

These are modded hands.

These are Julia's hands.

Serena's first instinct is to deny the absurdity. She can't be in Julia's body. It's just shouldn't happen.

She knows she has dreams. Some that seem impossible to disentangle from memory, that feel so real she has immediately check herself for injuries the instant she wakes. This is no dream.

Still, these are undeniably Julia's hands. When she cranes her head to look around, she begins to recognize the angles of Julia's bedroom, the stupid bedside lamp, the sleek carpet, the heavy curtains pulled shut over arching windows. Serena is in Julia's body, in her apartment– her life? Involuntary sparks dance up and down her fingers as her distress grows.

There's no trace of Julia's mind lurking in the corners. When Serena possesses people she quashes their thoughts under her own consciousness, but they don't just vanish. They're still there, thin and clinging to the inner walls of the skull, waiting for her permission to inhabit themselves again. The only time that she has ever been inside a truly silent mind is when she makes the jump into Eden's body, and even then she can still feel the indentations left in the brain from a lifetime of someone else's thoughts.

Search as she might, nothing feels odd about Julia's head. The same, however, can't be said about Julia's body.

Give the mind enough time and it can grow used to anything, even pain. That doesn't mean that it's vanished. Only that Serena has had time to adjust, and knows to brace for the flood of fire that spills out from her spine when she forces herself off the bed.

She doesn't have time for pain to hold her back. She's had to push past adjacent hurts before, and with even less on the line than what is at stake now. Because a sudden, terrifying, thought has just come to mind: if she is here, her mind in Julia's body, then where is Julia?

The simplest assumption is also the worst case scenario. She is in Julia's body. So if Julia is in hers...

Serena had been too tired last night, to do much more than peel herself out of Nihil's armor and collapse. Everything is out in the open in her hideout: her tools for working on the prototype regenerator; the nanovores; her notes, her plans, her schemes-

And worst of all, Serena herself. Her body.

Every emotion she's capable of feeling vanishes all at once, replaced by only dread. If Julia really is in her body, she has no more secrets to keep, no layer of deniability to hide behind. That thought terrifies her more than any other.

Plans overwrite plans in Serena's head. Everything at this point is only conjecture, but if there is any chance at all that it's true then she cannot leave it be. There will be a fallout, and she needs to be prepared to do damage control. And oh, she’s had so much practice at damage control, no time to rest between one crisis and the next.

So, step one: get in contact with Julia. Find out how much of the truth she knows, though Serena can't imagine that Julia won't have pieced together the entirety of it. Julia is ignorant, perhaps willfully, but she isn't stupid. Even she will have to accept the truth when she's forced to stare the ugly truth in the face.

The question, then, is: how does she do that?

Julia's brick of a mobile phone is easy enough to find, left charging by the bedside table. Serena hefts the thing in her hands, considering. Julia seems so confident that her apartment is untapped, unbugged. Secure. But a phone like this, carefully insulated against any flareups, has to be built to specification. And she knows that Julia uses it for Ranger business.

There's a high possibility that this phone is monitored. And if she calls Julia, who must be equally – if not more – bewildered at their circumstances, there's too high a chance that one of them will let something slip. Say something they shouldn't. Holding her tongue has never been one of Julia's strengths.

Serena growls to herself. Calling or texting is out of the question, and it's by very deliberate design that she hasn't left Julia another way to contact her.

That leaves one option. And that means Serena needs to get dressed.

As she staggers her way to the doors of Julia's closet, it's second nature by now to avert her eyes from the full-body mirror mounted to the wall next to the closet door. Still, skin flashes in the corner of her vision: deep tan, interrupted by pale streaks of scars.

No orange.

No orange, and it takes actual effort to shake herself out of the realization that this really isn't her body. That this is a human body, rugged and real. For the briefest instant she almost fools herself into believing that this could be her.

Then reality catches up to her, in the form of light winking off of silver rivets along Julia's body. Serena has to turn away from the mirror, something that tastes half like guilt sticking to the back of her tongue. Enough gawking at Julia's body, wishing that it really was hers.

Serena throws on the first set of clothes she gets her hands on, not bothering to make sure they go well together. It's Julia's closet; any old blouse and pair of pants should look nice enough. Habit has her shrugging on a jacket as well, unnerved by her shirt's short sleeves. All of this still feels too light, too exposed, but she's Julia now. And Julia Ortega isn't afraid of anything.

Mercifully, there's no one else in the apartment that's up and about save the doorman. It's early enough in the morning that she greets who she thinks is Julia with a yawn and a simple wave, content to leave it at that. Serena returns the greeting with a smile, hating how easily her mind conjures up Julia's guileless grins, how at home they feel on her face.

Public transportation is an unfortunate necessity that Serena doesn't like dealing with, even on her best days. This is... definitely not one of those. No matter if she's in Julia's body or not. Luckily, Julia's car keys sit heavily in her pocket, and somewhere in the years she's been gone, Julia swapped out her ostentatious sports car for something a little more subdued.

It's still a nice car, Serena thinks, sleek and shiny, because Julia doesn't settle for "serviceable" when she can have "great" – but what does that say about her? The way Julia sees her?

Serena's hands tighten around the steering wheel, her own upset electricity biting into her palms. With a grimace, Serena pushes that thought away. It's just one more to add to the avalanche of things she can't acknowledge if she's to preserve this tentative happiness between her and Julia.

Though once the dust of the current disaster settles, says a spiteful part of her that she just can't ever seem to silence, there may not be much of anything left to preserve.

A car like Julia's stands out in the suburbs. There's nothing to be done about that. All that Serena can do is drive out as far as she dares, and hope that there's nobody willing to brave the city's precarious, landslide-prone fringes this morning. Luck seems to be on her side today: the few people around seem to all have business elsewhere, and no one strays anywhere off-road. Still, she misses her telepathy deeply, unable to satisfy her paranoia by scanning the area for any too-curious minds.

The long drive over has wrung her out. The grating ache in her spine had proved impossible to ignore. She knows she makes jokes about Julia's age, but she hadn't expected this exhaustion. She refuses to let the emotion curling like wispy smoke through her gut be guilt.

So, deciding firmly to not be guilty, Serena climbs down into the labyrinthine tunnels that sprawl out beneath the outskirts of Los Diablos. She has business here.

Everything looks as she remembers, though there's precious little to be disturbed. On the one hand, it's a good sign that nobody has traced her back to this entrance. But on the other, it means nothing; there are dozens of pathways all leading to her hideout, her sanctuary. Julia could have left through any one of them and she would be none the wiser.

Serena picks up the pace. Her footsteps echo through narrow corridors. While she likes to wander, normally, she cuts through the passageways as fast as she can now. The twists and corners are as familiar as breathing, but Serena doesn't make for the main entrance. The path she ends up on is slightly more circuitous than she would prefer, but she can't rely on the main doors being accessible. A side entrance, just one of many potential escape paths, is what she needs.

At last she reaches her destination: a broken down chamber attached to the water plant. It may have been a garage at some point, perhaps, but what matters is that the walls have decayed enough that there's space for her to slip into the main building, even accounting for Julia's excess of height.

The lights are off, though grimy sunlight streams in through the high open windows of the power plant. It's no worse than the tunnels, and just enough to barely see by, though everything within is cast in dim shadow. Serena hesitates when she fully squeezes through the gap.

With the benefit of, quite literally, a new perspective, her lair reminds her of Heartbreak. Musty, broken things scattered about everywhere, and a bitter foreboding that hangs in the heavy air, perceptible even without telepathy. Is this what she's been surrounding herself with?

No. Stop. Focus. So many thoughts she needs to pack away, to ignore for now – or, preferably, forever.

So Serena takes a breath, and calls out into the solemn quiet, "Julia?"

No answer. But her ears catch on a breath of a sound, the barest hint of soft cloth shuffling against cloth. Then breath after ragged breath. She immediately snaps her head in the direction of the noise, scanning the gloom for its source.

There, by her workstation: the silhouette of a lump of a person rather than an actual person, curled in a fetal position, arms wrapped around the head. Serena begins approaching gingerly.

"Julia, can you hear me?" she tries again. It must be disconcerting to hear your own voice speaking to you, and Julia has even less frame of reference for this sort of thing than Serena herself does. She doesn't know how much of Julia's instincts or her own remain, coiled tight and waiting like the tension in a spring, so she moves slowly, so as not to jostle the hornet's nest. Caution is her ally here.

It's not until she's right up next to her own- Julia's- her body that she recognizes what's happening. She has to forgive herself a little, for taking so long; she's never seen this from the outside before. The Farm had always taken care to separate the telepaths from each other when one of them was showing weakness. Breaking down.

For once, Serena's thankful for the blank silence in Julia's head. The same void that she had cursed many times over the years now wraps her in a blanket of immunity. Otherwise...

Serena's never really stopped to take stock of just how much her powers have grown, especially in the wake of Heartbreak. A telepath's instinct tells her that if she weren't in Julia's body right now, her mind would be pulped like an orange just from proximity. No wonder everyone had been avoiding her hideout; self-preservation works even when you don't know what it is you're running from.

But Serena knows what she's facing. And she knows she's not fleeing.

Seeing herself laid low like this leaves an unpleasant taste in her mouth. It's not any easier than when she had to have Eden stitch her up after a fight gone wrong. Somehow, it feels worse, actually.

Is it because it's Julia shivering on the ground, and not you?

Serena's gotten adept at ignoring her own thoughts. She can't afford to have Julia collapse in on herself, in Serena's body, under the sudden deluge of new powers beyond her ability to control. The ship has long since sailed on pretending that she only wants Julia to calm down to avoid any irreparable damage to her own body.

So she kneels down by Julia's hunched form, pushing past the way her spine protests the motion. Gingerly, tentatively, she rests a hand on Julia's shoulder. Only a thin nanomesh suit separates skin from skin. She holds steady through the full-body shudder that shakes through Julia's entire body.

"Listen to my voice," Serena begins, keeping her tone soft. She doesn't think that conscious thought is close enough to the surface for Julia to be able to understand her words. But from past experience, she knows that her overloaded brain will latch onto the comforting thought-void static, the warm murmur of soft nonsense.

"It will feel like an ocean, at first. Like you're drowning in it..."

Step by step, she talks Julia back from the brink. In the absence of telepathy, she can only rely on how Julia trembles beneath her palm. The shaking that was almost violent dies down as she speaks, slows. Julia's ragged breaths evens out.

And at last, she stops shaking. Serena lets her words trail off, though she keeps her hand where it is. Solid, tangible, real.

Julia cracks an eye open. Then the other. Something akin to vertigo sweeps through Serena when she stares into her own green eyes. There's a consciousness behind them that's not her own, and a part of her wants to recoil at the primal, visceral revulsion that the thought conjures.

She watches Julia lick her lips. Her voice comes out as half a whisper, hollowed out. "...Serena?"

Swallowing against the tension, Serena nods. "It's me, Julia."

Julia stares at her blankly in the face for a moment. Then she looks down to her arms, the way the sleeve of skinsuit is pulled up just enough to-

Serena grits her teeth, eyes flickering away when she catches a glimpse of orange streaks. Her eyes come to rest on her armor, lying dismantled by the workstation. Nihil's distinctive helmet lies on a bench, blueprints and maps and all other manner of clues scattered on the tables like fallen leaves.

Her stomach clenches. And then so does her heart, when she sees Julia follow her gaze, and how the puzzle pieces itself together in Julia's head.

Damage control, Serena reminds herself. She's good at that, if nothing else.

But nothing prepares her for the sheer depth of fury in Julia's eyes, nor the despair in her voice, when Julia asks, "Serena, what the hell is this?"

#fallen hero #fallen hero: rebirth #chargestep #my fanfic #another heart's asylum #serena basri

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