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It was weird. Even by Library standards, it was weird.
“This is weird,” Stone mumbled in Ezekiel’s voice.
“Tell me about it,” Ezekiel agreed. The three of them were gathered in front of the annex mirror, and it was almost like everything was normal until Ezekiel remembered the eyes he was busy staring into were Cassandra’s rather than his own. He stuck his tongue at the reflection. Cassandra’s reflection stuck hers out back. He waved a hand. Cassandra’s reflection was the one that moved. The reflection Ezekiel should have was busily tugging at the hair Ezekiel should also have, until his hands dropped suddenly to his pockets.
“Jones, is this my wallet?!”
Oh yeah, Ezekiel had forgotten about that. He hadn’t factored in the whole ‘what if a Library artifact shoved us into a crack 80s romcom’ situation. “I was gonna return it!”
“You didn’t order pizza on my card again, did you?”
“Boys, boys!” Cassandra interrupted, clapping her hands together to get their attention before Ezekiel could confirm or deny the double pepperonis heading their way. Ezekiel bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from grinning at the familiar action in an unfamiliar body (and really, it wasn’t fair that he ended up Cassandra in this mess. Why couldn’t he have been Stone? He could’ve really rocked that flannel). “Ezekiel, give Jake back his wallet.”
Ezekiel reluctantly plucked the wallet from Stone’s hands before holding it out to him again. “Here ya go, Stone.” His accent seemed to trip up on Cassandra’s tongue - he didn’t know what it sounded like to the others, but it didn’t sound right to him at all. He would have to record himself if they were stuck like this, drop a few “g’days” and “mates” in there.
Stone glared at him. Ezekiel kinda liked it; Stone’s glowering made Ezekiel look genuinely intimidating. Interesting. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“Will that be before or after I get my own devilishly handsome features back?”
“We’ll get this sorted before long!” Cassandra said brightly. She leaned in closer to the mirror, her shoulder bumping against Ezekiel’s as she rubbed a hand across her chin and pulled a face. “You’ve got really nice eyes, I never noticed before.”
“Um. Thanks?”
Cassandra flashed a wide smile that Ezekiel only usually saw on Stone’s face when he uncovered an Ancient Greek scroll in the Library vaults that promised to rewrite Minoan palace archaeology. Or something. “This is kind of fun, really! I mean, once we know for sure we can switch back without any side effects or anything -” the smile faltered into a thoughtful expression more akin to Stone trying to translate said scrolls on Minoan palace archaeology - “not that there will be any side effects, I’m sure, look at Jenkins! He rode his whole swip-swap thing fine!” She gestured with her hands as she spoke, twirling her index fingers around each other, and even though she was using Stone’s hands and Stone’s voice and Stone’s, well, everything, it was surprisingly easy to look her and think “Oh, hey Cassandra”.
“That was with a spell, though,” Stone said, returning to the mirror and tugging at Ezekiel’s hair again like if he kept doing it long enough, he’d find a leprechaun hidden in there. Ezekiel would’ve swatted his hands away but he was also very tempted to mess around with the long red hair that was temporarily his, so he was going to let this one slide. “This was an artifact. Could be a whole different rodeo.”
And if Ezekiel thought his accent was weird, it was even weirder to hear Stone drawl out “rodeo” in an accent that hinted at something of a dingo raised and bred in Oklahoma.
“We deal with artifacts all the time,” Cassandra reminded them with a wave of her hand. “I bet all we’ll need to do is activate it again, and boom! Back to normal!”
“Librarians!”
The three of them turned as one as Jenkins walked into the annex, carrying the artifact in question in gloved hands. “I have good news and bad news,” Jenkins continued, placing the artifact carefully onto the central table. Stone and Cassandra instantly made a beeline towards him; Ezekiel gave one last look at the mirror (yep, definitely still in Cassandra’s body) and smoothed out his skirt (gotta be honest, he kind of liked how airy it was) before following them.
The artifact was a griffin statue, nicely carved from bronze with topaz gems set for eyes - Ezekiel could have sold it for a nice sum if he wasn’t forced to follow the golden rule of “don’t steal and sell the Library artifacts”. It had been shipped to them in the post from a warehouse somewhere in South Dakota, and Ezekiel hadn’t been able to resist taking it from the box and ripping off the bubblewrap before Jenkins could return with the gloves he preferred to use when handling new artifacts. Cassandra had instantly appeared at Ezekiel’s shoulder, eyes bright with interest, and despite telling him off for opening it, Stone had wandered over too, and-
And there had been a flash of yellow light the same colour as the statue’s topaz eyes, and when the light disappeared there they all were in the wrong bodies.
But it was fine, because Jenkins had been through his own bodyswap scenario a few weeks ago and had gotten out of that one relatively simply. So the three of them had nothing to worry about, right?
“The good news is that we know what the artifact is,” Jenkins announced, turning the griffin slightly as if he couldn’t bare to let go of it. “It was catalogued for us by the warehouse. One of Robert Louis Stevenson’s bookends, a fine creation indeed.”
“The Robert Louis Stevenson?” Ezekiel, Cassandra and Stone all said at the same time.
“I loved Jekyll and Hyde,” Cassandra added. “Magic and science mixing together….”
“You’ve read Stevenson?” Stone directed this at Ezekiel instead, eyebrow raised.
“Hey, I don’t like my own body judging me! Treasure Planet is an underrated film, okay? Who wouldn’t love a story about treasure just lying around for the taking?”
“As I was saying,” Jenkins continued loudly, “it is a bookend. And this is where the bad news begins.”
Ezekiel really didn’t like the sound of that.
“You need the other one to switch back.”
“Okay,” Ezekiel said aloud, when Stone and Cassandra didn’t do anything else but look suddenly more concerned. “Okay. So where’s the other one? We get another delivery?” He glanced over at the box the artifact had come out of, the few letters piled on top that made up today’s post. Sure didn’t look like there was another box.
Jenkins hesitated. “And - well, there’s something else.”
“Good or bad?” Stone prompted.
“Bad,” Jenkins said, and they all groaned in unison. “Unless you get that other bookend and switch back, well. It’s a possibility it won’t end well for any of you.”
“Meaning?” Cassandra said, Stone’s voice sounding almost impossibly small.
Jenkins busied himself with turning the bookend around again and didn’t meet any of their eyes when he replied “Meaning, this could cause you three to die if you remain each other for too long. The cataloguing was quite clear on that part.”
------
There had been a moment of panic, when they all first looked around the room to find themselves in each other’s bodies, but that had quickly given way to the three of them huddling over by the mirror in curiosity - they were Librarians, after all, and Jenkins had successfully swapped into a stranger’s body and back in one day with no lingering effects.
This? This was a bombshell and curiosity was right out the window.
“Should we call Baird?” Cassandra had asked the moment Jenkins left the room, promising to go recreate his anti-bodyswap potion just in case. “She - she probably deserves to know if we might all die, right?”
And wasn’t that a terrifying thought, panic bubbling away deep in her chest. She splayed her hand over her heart, trying to steady herself with the rhythm of her heartbeat, and wasn’t especially calmed that there was no bra to act as a barrier between the shirt and her now-flat chest. Cassandra may have lived with a death threat hanging over her head for the majority of her life, but the idea didn’t get any less frightening with time - and especially not now, now she had her whole life ahead of her in a way she only could have imagined in her wildest dreams.
Being Jacob Stone was a fun novelty, but not so fun now she might die as him.
“We’ll just panic her! Maybe? I don’t know!” Ezekiel said from Cassandra’s body, and that might also have been a fun novelty ten minutes ago, seeing Ezekiel get all flustered. “Stone, give me my phone.”
“Your what?”
“Urgh!” Ezekiel darted towards Stone and dove a hand into the pocket of his soft grey hoodie, ignoring Stone’s protests as he emerged with the phone and slid onto a chair a second later, prodding away at it. “I’m gonna take some readings off this thing, do a bit of searching to see if we have any idea where these bookends last were.”
Stone rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right, like that will-”
“Found it.” Ezekiel tapped away a bit more. “Tell you what, if I’d ended up with Stone’s fingers this might’ve taken longer. Cass, you’d be an excellent thief.” He wiggled a hand at her and all Cassandra could think was the new coral nailpolish she’d bought on a whim looked better than she’d thought.
“Thanks? I think?” Cassandra glanced down at the fingers she was currently using as her own, and okay, Ezekiel might have a point there. Stone had large hands. She curled them into fists experimentally. She could probably do some damage with these. Would Stone’s punching skills count as muscle memory? Could Cassandra effectively knock someone out if she tried to? Or would a punch count purely as a learned skill, and she wouldn’t be able to figure out the required force now she had an entirely new body mass to work with? Almost without thinking, she moved her hands in front of her face and begin shifting through the figures.
“Cassie? Hey, Cass, you alright there?”
Cassandra stopped in the middle of a sum involving Stone’s weight to thigh flexibility ratio to find the real Stone’s hand on her wrist, grasping it with a tenderness she would have recognised as Stone over Ezekiel any day. It was extra weird to come back from the numbers and find herself face-to-face with - well, herself.
“You alright there?” Stone repeated, Ezekiel’s voice mangled into some new hybrid accent.
Cassandra hesitated, the numbers still visible, and then she dropped her hands, letting go of the sums. If she really needed to punch anyone in Stone’s body, they would still be there when she needed them. “Sorry, sorry! I got - caught up in things.”
Stone stared at her as if trying to read her mind, and oh, wasn’t that ironic considering she literally was his mind now?
Wait. No. That didn’t make sense.
“Scotland, Cassandra,” Ezekiel said, flashing her his phone screen. Cassandra had the hunch that he had tried showing her before, while she was in the midst of calculating. “The artifact’s in a museum in good Auld Reekie.”
“Edinburgh,” Stone clarified. “C’mon, let’s get Jenkins to set a door up. Hopefully we can find this thing and be back in our rightful bodies before Baird even thinks about dropping in to check on us during her day off.”
--------
They stumbled out into a shadowed alleyway, which would have been almost worrying if there hadn’t been sunlight and crowds of people at either end.
“Edinburgh’s famous for these,” Stone said with a wave at the alley they were in. From his tone, he was about to spring into a lecture, and true to form: “Creates all kind of interesting literary narratives. Jekyll and Hyde, right, that was set in London but it took a lot of inspiration from this city - bright open streets right alongside shadowy doorways, the rich living a stone’s throw away from the poor. There was this one guy, a real-life Jekyll - all upstanding citizen in public, and then he’d use his position to steal from his rich ‘friends’ when they had their backs turned.” Stone did the ‘friends’ in air quotes as they emerged from the alley, blinking at the hazy Scottish sun.
“Now him, I like the sound of,” Ezekiel said with a grin, checking his phone again. “The museum’s this way, c’mon.”
“He was hanged for his crimes, y’know,” Stone added, a little too cheerfully. “Just putting it out there.”
The three of them made their way uphill. It should be somewhere in the evening - Cassandra quickly ran through the timezones and settled on it being around quarter to five. The people around them kept darting in and out of shops decked out in tartan and there must have been at least five different bagpipe soundtracks playing at once. Stone looked as excited as a kid in a candystore - or what Cassandra assumed kids in candy stores looked like, she was usually too excited when she visited them herself to notice the expressions of her fellow customers. He was especially interested in the statue of some philosopher.
“Hume was one of the greats!” Stone was exclaiming, having to walk a little faster to keep up with them since he kept stopping. “I’ll need to get Jenkins to send me back here once I’m back to my old self.”
Ezekiel kept rolling his eyes, but Cassandra found herself caught up in Stone’s enthusiasm. It was nice to feel a bit of excitement at visiting a new place; it soothed the panic bubble in her chest. They were going to retrieve the artifact, they were going to switch back, they were not going to come anywhere close to dying, and maybe she could persuade Ezekiel to teach her some more basic lock-picking skills now he’d confirmed her fingers were suitably dexterous.
She hadn’t really thought about it, Ezekiel in her body. She wondered if he felt the same itch she’d had since slipping into Stone’s skin, a desire to put this new body to the test and see how different the results could be between her old self and this current one. Really, when she thought about it, it was fascinating that she could even walk steady and straight, not having to think about placing one leg in front of the other or how to swing her arms, and-
Cassandra tripped over a cobblestone.
“I’m okay!” She exclaimed quickly as Stone and Ezekiel both darted towards her. “I’m fine! I think,” she added, more to herself, but nevertheless the two stuck out their arms and helped her stagger to her feet. Probably for the best; the ground was further away than she remembered.
“I swear, if you bruise me,” Stone said gruffly, but it was an empty threat. Cassandra wiped her palms on his jeans and decided not to tell him that her left knee was stinging slightly, just in case.
“I was just thinking about how weird it is that we’re all walking fine.” She hovered a moment, checking her balance - so different from her own, but normal for Stone. “We should all write down this experience when it’s over! I keep telling Jenkins he needed to after Jeff, but I don’t think he’s gotten around to it yet.”
“Maybe you write it down, and I’ll…. be moral support for you writing it down,” Ezekiel said.
-----------
Trust Cassie to go and make everything awkward all over again.
Jake had almost forgotten that it was Ezekiel’s arms he was using to gesture towards the remarkable buildings, Ezekiel’s voice he was using to tell the others about them. He had been too excited to notice the little things, but now Cassandra had mentioned the little things, and, well.
He was back to square one on trying to wrangle Ezekiel’s tongue in his mouth.
(God, when he said it like that…)
Jake kinda wished he had some of Cassie’s biology skills there to figure the voice thing out. Ezekiel’s tongue seemed to rest differently than Jake’s tongue usually did. When he was busy focused on that rather than the words he actually wanted to say, it was too easy to get caught up in the wrongness of this whole situation.
There were other things too, things he couldn’t help noticing again now he was thinking about it again. He rolled his shoulders back, jerked his arms a little harder than normal, trying to get a feel for this body. At least he hadn’t switched sexes around like the other two; he’d gotten the long end of the stick there and he was grateful for it. If he needed a bathroom break - well, it would be weird as hell and it wasn’t something Jake wanted to think about - but he’d be able to place himself on autopilot and get the job done. Ezekiel’s body wasn’t too dissimilar to his own, all things considered.
So it was pretty disorientating when Ezekiel led them off the main street into another alley and the yellow light suddenly flashed again.
“Are you kidding me?!” Jake heard a voice exclaim as the light vanished. It sounded a heck of a lot like Jake’s original voice, but it didn’t sound a whole lot like Cassandra behind it. Really, it sounded more similar to-
Jake suddenly felt very off-balance and took a step backwards to steady himself, and in doing so glanced down and - oh.
Oh.
“We switched again?” At least Jake seemed to have more control over Cassandra’s tongue than he’d had with Ezekiel’s. “We switched again. Great.”
Ironic, really, he’d been thinking about how he’d grabbed the lengthier straw only moments ago. Now he had - well, it sure was a different view of Cassandra than the one he normally had. Leave it at that.
“Jenkins didn’t say anything about this,” Cassandra was saying, somehow having mastered Ezekiel’s full Australian accent in a full five seconds. It shouldn’t have been disorienting looking at her, considering Jake had only been Ezekiel for half an hour or so. But it was, a little. “Should we call him?”
“We’ll grab the bookend, then call him and get out of here,” Ezekiel said firmly, running his hands over Jake’s chest tentatively. “Maybe after I get out my phone and record Stone gushing over how great a thief Ezekiel Jones is.”
A gust of wind swept through the alley, sending strands of hair straight into Jake’s mouth. He spluttered, spitting it out and trying not to think hard about how he’d just inhaled on Cassandra’s hair, or how her damn skirt was threatening to billow up too high.
“I’ve got a hairband on my wrist, if you want it.” Cassandra - how weird was it that Jake didn’t even need to ask which was Ezekiel and which was Cassandra standing before him? - quickly stepped towards him, giving his skirt a quick tug in adjustment. Jake instantly tensed up and was very pointedly not looking down at the chest he was currently inhabiting, although his - Cassie’s - this was damn confusing - heartbeat seemed to beat louder.
“Let’s just get the damn thing, okay?”
“Already ahead of ya,” Ezekiel said with a grin and a wink. “Museum’s right here.”
Ezekiel’s body hadn’t been too different from his own. Cassandra’s, technically, wasn’t too different either, except for the inescapable rise and fall of her chest while breathing (he was still trying not to think about that) or when Jake banged her hip against the doorframe.
“I swear, if you bruise me,” Cassandra said lightly as Jake bit back a curse.
“Didn’t wanna mention it, mate, but Cass did hurt you before,” Ezekiel said, just as innocently. “Reckon your knee’s a bit swollen.”
Jake rubbed at his hip through the skirt, trying to be nonchalant about it. “Yeah, well, consider this payback.”
The museum housing the artifact was an old stone building consisting of three small floors and a long, spindly staircase. The basement floor was dedicated to Stevenson, so that seemed the rational choice to check out first. Jake tried to focus on looking for the artifact and not on the other exhibits and photos decorating the area - he’d definitely be coming back here, that’s for sure, and maybe he had to reread Treasure Island sometime soon.
“Found it!”
Reluctantly, Stone tore his gaze away from a letter handwritten by Stevenson and to the glass case Ezekiel and Cassandra stood before. Inside the case was the bronze statue of an eagle with a lion’s head that was very definitely the bookend they were looking for.
“We’re in luck,” Ezekiel announced, cocking his head to the side and peering at the exhibit. “No security system over than the CCTV in the corner. Once I disable the system, all we need to do is lift the glass and smuggle this thing out under our coat.”
“What coat?” Jake said before he could stop himself.
“Jacket work?” Cassandra offered, waving a hand down at the hoodie she was currently wearing.
Ezekiel glanced at each of them, then at himself, and groaned. “Okay, might be a little tougher than anticipated. But not by much.” He moved to the corner opposite the bookend, underneath the small camera set into the ceiling. “Stone, your fingers suck but here’s hoping they’ll do the job.”