PHARAH TRACER BODY SWAP FREAKY FRIDAY STYLE
I’m going to move on from this since I know some people want SM stuff and I’m already to 2600 words on this but I am having a GREAT time and please let me know if you want me to continue this!
Lena Oxton was used to having an unusual life. She had been the world’s top fighter pilot, she had seen herself as a child, not knowing it meant, she was a medical miracle who by all theories and standards shouldn’t have been able to be sitting there next to Pharah when it happened. No, she was very used to life being just a little strange, just a little off-key, and mostly, she appreciated that she would never be bored, or boring.
None of which truly prepared her for waking up on a hardwood floor, twenty centimeters taller.
“Bloody…” she rolled over, her head pounding, and looked over to her right.
Her body was lying there, next to her. Her eyes widened, and her heart leapt into her throat, the tight panic of knowing that it had happened again, oh no, it had happened again, and she was out of time, and her whole body began to tremble as she thought of the pain of it–she couldn’t do it again, she’d die, it had nearly killed her the last time–but there was no cold at all. No pain. Just a strange tingling at her shoulder, which was offputting, but not painful. This wasn’t being lost in time at all.
She was so surprised for a moment, that she forgot to be afraid, and sat up.
“Am I dead?” Her voice echoed off the walls, but it was wrong, it was deep and rich and nice enough, but it wasn’t hers, was it?
Her body began to moan next to her, and pinched its fingers at the bridge of its nose.
Tracer looked at herself. “Uh..you alright…me?”
Her body mumbled something in Arabic.
Tracer looked down at her hands, one metal, a gold ring welded to it, and one so much darker than she’d fallen unconscious with. Her hands, or at least, the ones she was currently processing, flew to her hair, a small low ponytail fixed to the back of her head, a gold bead wrapped around a strand. She looked back to her body, and crawled over next to it.
“Fareeha?”
Her body’s eyes opened, and blinked a few times. “Nothing, I only must have…” Pharah’s bright brown eyes looked into Tracer’s dark ones, “Ahhh!”
Tracer yelled back, and jumped away from Pharah, who was also Tracer, trying to twist her arm behind her and finding that the body she was inhabiting wasn’t quite as flexible as her own, and she fell back to the ground for a moment.
Pharah rolled to the side, and made to grab the knife from her pants, only to discover that there was no cargo pocket at all. She took in the scene for a moment, and sat back on her heels. Her body folded easily in the position Pharah had stretched herself for so many times. It was painless. Easy. She looked down at her chest, at the blue light there. ANd then glowered back at Tracer.
“What did you do?”
“Right,” Tracer said, laughing, “I’s like, God but I’d love to steal Fareeha’s body, and me with all me science knowledge, be nothing but a bit of a lark to do, just going to take me–”
“I did not mean,” Pharah growled, in a voice that was much too high to bring across the frustration she felt, “That you meant to.”
Tracer slowly stood up, a little dizzy from the strangeness of her body. She reached out a hand to the desk, feeling at it with the hand Winston had created. It felt mechanical, in a way she struggled to describe even to herself, like the information was being delivered, and was simply that. She touched the hand back to her chest. She didn’t care for the sensation.
Pharah rose to her feet. “You have to be used to it.”
Tracer walked over to the tiny closet, so much more quickly than she was accustomed, and opened the door, looking at the small mirror inside it. She felt at her face, tracing the tattoo below her eye, the sharp carved edges of her chin and her nose, her commanding jawline.
“I’m you.” She said, the mystery and strangeness in it permeating the space.
“No,” Pharah pulled at the sweater on her body, “you are in my body.”
Tracer whirled around and looked down at Pharah, which Pharah disliked immediately.
“Bloody ‘ell Fareeha, you know exactly what it is I meant, no need to get so specific over it.”
They stood there in silence for a moment, both of them attempting to wrangle with the strangeness of the situation, both of them wondering how this could possibly have happened, and if it had been borne of ill intention, or a mistake, or just one of those things that seemed to befall only those who live storied lives. Neither of them came up with much. The day had begun like any other, right up until a blinding headache and a dash into the darkness.
Tracer sat cross-legged on her desk, pulling her legs into position. “Well,” she said, chin in her hands, “Now what?”
Pharah sat down in her chair, immediately noted the desk was too high for her to comfortably type, and and pressed her lips together in annoyance, eyes closed. There was no protocol for this, no answer she knew. As far as she was aware, there was no precedent for this sort of thing, no case study or treatment Mercy could even consider.
But it would have to be Mercy, because there was no better option.
“We will ask Angela.” Pharah nodded her head, determined.
“Mmmm,” Tracer was looking at her own body more closely now, pulling up her sleeve to look at the muscles there, “Fareeha, do you ever eat a carb? Drink a beer? I’m plenty strong meself and that’s the truth, but it takes a good deal more deprivation than I care for to get this sort of definition, and–”
“Tracer! Pay attention!”
Tracer looked at her, and scowled. “Well,” she slowly dismounted from the desk, “We’ll ask Ang later, as I’m off to actually use these looks. You never bloody ‘ave, and someone ought to–”
Pharah leapt to her feet. “Are you saying you will make me cheat on my wife?”
Tracer giggled. “I’m not you, just in your body, right?”
Fareeha Amari considered herself a patient person, most of the time, and over the years, she had found a particular level of patience with Tracer, who she even, sometimes, could admit to herself, although never anyone else, she quite loved, and found charming in her own way. But Tracer knew how to needle her, and sometimes simply did it as her own sort of stress response, and Pharah was in no mood.
Well, she thought, Tracer is an excellent fighter, and I have always been curious what fighting as her might be like.
With that thought, she exploded toward her own body. But old habits die hard, and she went to throw Tracer into the wall, forgetting that she was much smaller than Tracer now, until Tracer grabbed her by the collar and tossed her back across the room. But Tracer herself was locked in her ways, and as Pharah came back for another round, Tracer tripped over herself–her balance was not nearly as keen or even as it had been–and she was staggered to find that jumping up out of the way was a near impossibility with all the stone she’d gained in the last half hour.
Whatever they had imagined fighting as the other might look like, and well they might manage a body with strengths they could not possibly know, it ended up looking quite a bit more like two toddlers on the playground. Pharah could feel that her body was one firm muscle, but she did not know how to use it, still throwing punches that could not possibly land with the force she wanted, lacking any knowledge in how to use speed and momentum. Tracer was ready for the sheer power of Pharah’s body, but not the slow planning it required to use it, born a creature of impulse and quickness. She was a hummingbird in the body of an eagle, and just as awkward.
Then Pharah tried to blink.
She had seen Tracer do it a hundred times before, even in this casual CA where she wasn’t supposed to be able to at all. It was a small advantage–half a second perhaps, maybe one in an outside chance–but it was still there, and she had used it to best Pharah on a handful of occasions. Perhaps in a wiser moment, Pharah would have recognized that knowing it could be done and knowing how to do something were cousins, but not twins, and so she should ask and practice, and be sure of herself. She was so often careful, and wise in this way. But she was frustrated, and she was angry, and she knew it was a great tactical advantage, and so, she thought about where she wanted to be, and tried to move there.
She fell to the ground immediately, not by any force of Tracer’s, who was still figuring out how to aim with the cannon that was her new body, but with a fierce contraction that went through her whole being, something that reached into her brain and fired, and she gasped with the pain of it. She crumpled to the ground, her stomach turning, heart pounding, barely able to breathe.
She heard her own voice in Tracer’s patter, and hand rubbing her back as the haze cleared. “It’ll pass love, I promise, it’ll pass. Just a moment, is all. Shouldn’t ‘ave tried it, ‘arder than it looks, in this kit, but it’ll pass.”
Pharah looked at her. “Does that happen often?”
“Nah,” Tracer smiled and shook her head, “But I do remember it. Not any fun at all. Deep breath, love, come on then.”
She helped Pharah sit up and lean against the wall. Pharah had often wondered, what it was like living in Tracer’s body, if it caused her pain, and had always thought it would be too rude to ask. Tracer avoided speaking about anything that teetered on the medical, and had expressed multiple times that while they could do what they liked if she was killed, during her lifetime she had no interest in being a scientific subject.
Pharah had not known how to make it clear she was asking as a concerned friend, and so had never asked at all.
But now she had Tracer’s body in hand, and so she felt justified to ask a short question. “Is it like that when it works?”
“Oh no, oh no,” Tracer sat beside her, “bit of nausea, sometimes, but nothing like that, love. That’s only when I don’t manage it,” she laughed, “beside all that, we’ll go to Ang, and she’ll fix us up, and so it won’t be your worry at all.”
The phone on the other end of the room went off, and Tracer reached into Pharah’s pocket and pulled out three candy wrappers and a small, blue, three sectioned box with a cheerful cartoon frog on it. She popped open the middle compartment, and handed a small yellow pill to Pharah.
“Do take this though, and I’ll thank you later when I’m back in me own body.”
She handed Pharah a glass of water, and Pharah did what she was told, the dizziness and pain beginning to subside.
“Sorry, Fareeha.” She sat next to her. “Didn’t mean anything by it. Pushed you a bit far.”
“You were only playing,” she sighed, “I…am anxious, to solve this.”
“Well,” Tracer shoved herself against the wall and stood up, “Let’s go find Ang.”
_________
Mercy was pleased with the quality of her life, since they’d moved to London. There was a temple she liked, not too far from their brand new apartment, and a pastry shop down the road, and she enjoyed sitting out on their tiny little plot of cement and reading a book in the inconsistent sunshine. Maybe they could stay, she thought. Maybe she could stop living her life as a tumbleweed, and find a place to settle, with her Pharah, and be still and happy.
It seemed more and more possible every day. Pharah complained, but she mostly did it in that way where nothing in life was perfection, or as organized as it might be, and she had long since given up the idea of moving back to Cairo, ever since a beach vacation in Spain had resulted in Mercy nearly getting heatstroke. Pharah would never want to be in a place where Mercy was unhappy, because, she had said, in that sweet and tender way Pharah herself never recognized as tenderness, then Pharah would be unhappy. They had kicked around Zurich, but Mercy never missed Switzerland, it was simply a place she had been born, and where her childhood had died. She had liked Boston, she hadn’t cared for Alberta, but London seemed like it could be home, if Mercy was ever allowed such a thing.
She was thinking on all of this, gazing out the window at the clear, humid day, when she heard the door open, and the familiar clunk of Pharah’s boots on the floor. She wasn’t normally home this early, but Mercy’s heart leapt at the thought that maybe she had finished with work, and since Mercy had finished with hers, they could go have lunch together at one of the little restaurants nearby. There was such a cute patio at the little brasserie, and Mercy had been wanting to try it–Pharah usually indulged her with a smile–so the timing seemed nearly perfect.
“Angela,” Pharah’s voice rang out into the kitchen, “I was so much hoping you would be here, I was wondering.”
Mercy’s body tensed. It was all wrong. Everything was wrong. She knew Pharah, knew her like she knew few people on this earth, and this was not her Pharah. Her voice was wrong, her movements were wrong, this imposter knew Pharah so little that her boots were still on, on the floor Pharah had waxed only yesterday. She was trapped here, with something pretending to be Pharah, and her phone was at the other end of the room.
The creature grinned at her, too wide and too bright.
Mercy grabbed for a knife from the block, eyes wide, and faced back at the thing. She would fight. She may lose, but she would fight hard.
“You are not my Fareeha.” She growled, as frighteningly as she could.
“Ang! Ang!” The monster put its hands up. “It’s me! It’s Lena! Fuck’s sake, love, just thought it would be a bit of fun.”
It was Pharah’s voice, but it was Tracer’s, too, and Mercy set the knife down, confused. Tracer came through the door, looked at Mercy with with great concern, and then glared at the strange Tracer-voiced Pharah.
“It was a terrible idea, which I told you it would be.”
Pharah! Mercy sighed relief, just for one moment, before the horror of the moment set in, as she stared across her small kitchen. There was Pharah. Same warm, dark eyes that Mercy always lost herself in, same wide shoulders, same soft mouth. But she was altogether different, too, her eyes darting around, looking this way and that, as if trying to take all of life in by snippets. She hadn’t stopped moving since she came into the room, fiddling with her hair, rocking up on her toes. And Tracer, too, was right, and wrong. A smattering of freckles, chestnut hair, chirp of a voice. But still, and solid, hair combed down and neat.
But this was impossible.