Jason scrambled after his cousin, not knowing what to expect out of this situation but hoping to prevent it, whatever "it" was. He remembered Lucy's proclivity for stirring up trouble from more than a few childhood incidents, and he could just see, in his mind's eye, her rushing down to the kitchen, holding out her severed head, and giving his poor mother a heart attack.
Unfortunately, she had a significant head start on him, and whatever the explanation was for her rapid adjustment to her new bodily arrangement, she swept down the stairs with shockingly little trouble, one hand on the railing with her head tucked underneath her arm; from what he could see by the time he reached the top landing, she hardly even had to look where she was going. Maybe her body does have a mind of its own, he thought, as he scrambled down after her.
Jason made it to the bottom of the stairs just as Lucy reached the doorway into the kitchen. He scrambled after to find his mother facing them with her hands on her hips and an expression of wry exasperation on her face.
"Really, you two!" she said, looking straight at Lucy as if nothing were amiss. "I'dve thought it was a herd of elephants coming down those stairs. Is the house on fire or something?" She waited as a confused Lucy meekly used her hands to shake her head (while Jason simply stared in disbelief,) then chuckled. "Then take it a bit easier, please. You kids aren't little anymore."
"S-sorry, Aunt Harriet," Lucy said, still a little surprised. "I just...um, got a little excited; it's been so long since I've stayed over at your guys' house..."
Her aunt smiled. "It has been, hasn't it? Last time was...oh, back when Shannon had that kidney stone, wasn't it?"
Lucy tipped her head in a nod. "Y-yeah...I was so freaked out 'cause Mom was hurting and in the hospital, so you let me stay up with you and made cocoa and helped me work on my Halloween costume..."
Jason's mother laughed. "Oh, yes, that was the year you went as Anne Boleyn, wasn't it? What a time we had with that dress...!"
Lucy laughed and made her nodding gesture again. Her aunt smiled. "Well, I'm glad to have you back, dear. But I have to go grab some things for dinner, so I'll leave you to get settled in. Jason, give your cousin a hand if she needs help with anything, okay?"
"Uh, sure," Jason said, still boggling over the fact that his mother apparently found nothing unusual about the situation. He watched as she turned to go, but was surprised by Lucy suddenly grabbing for the katana hilt, which he'd entirely forgotten he was still carrying. He felt the button click and then time froze around them once again.
He swung around to face her. "Hey, what the...!?"
She took the blade from him and gestured toward her aunt while she hefted her head up under her arm. "Dude, did you see that!? She didn't even blink! She thinks I've always been like this!"
Jason nodded. "It was kind of hard to miss, yeah." He frowned. "I wonder why that is? It didn't mention anything about that in the instructions..."
Lucy shrugged, her head lifting slightly with her shoulder. "Dunno; maybe whoever made it's still getting all the kinks worked out themselves? I bet it's because we were both involved in the time-stop."
"I guess that'd sorta make sense," he said. "Since the two of us were exempt from the temporal effects, we remember the old reality. Which means that probably the entire rest of the world thinks this is normal for you, too..."
Her eyes widened. "Hey, yeah. That's going to be weird. And I actually went as a vampire that year..." She shifted her arm to cant her head to one side. "Come think, doesn't that mean that anybody who was altered while time was stopped for them would think their own changes were normal?" She got a thoughtful look on her face.
Jason knew that expression all too well. "I don't know what you're thinking, but...no, I know exactly what you're thinking. Just no, okay?"
Lucy gave him a cockeyed grin. "No? C'mon, you know you're as curious as I am - and we've already established that it's harmless."
He gave her a heavy-lidded stare. "You want me to behead my own mother."
She laughed. "Hey, it's reversible. And fun!" she said, lifting her head up on the palm of her hand and swishing it around like a serving tray. "Woah. Guess moving around like that still gets to me. I wonder, if I spin my body around while my head sits still, will I still get dizzy?"
"Where do I even begin with you?" he said. "I mean, it's one thing helping you do something crazy to yourself..."
Lucy sighed, lifting the blade up and swinging it experimentally. "Okay, fine, I'll do it myself..."
Jason stared at her, realizing for the first time that she'd swiped it from him. The prospect of her trying to use it herself played out in his mind in two variations: single-handed, trying to keep a steady hand and counterbalance against the weight of her head, and two-handed, trying to see what she was doing and direct her body's actions from a vantage point on the kitchen counter. Neither seemed at all like a good idea.
He moved toward her. "Look, please, just give that back..."
Lucy giggled. "Sure, just as soon as I'm done with it." She turned her head back to look at him. "Oh, don't give me that look. I let you experiment on me, didn't I?"
Jason considered his options, but he couldn't see a good way out of this. She had the hilt, and if he went for it she could simply unfreeze and re-freeze time without him; and if she did that, it seemed, he might never know the difference. Besides, it was reversible...the only permanent effect would be pushing his boundaries for extreme weirdness a little further...
He sighed. "Fine, okay, just...let me do it, please..."
She gave him a Cheshire grin. "Why, my dear cousin, are you implying that I can't handle this? That I'm just some poor helpless girl with a decoupled head who needs a normal person around to do everything for her? Tsk, tsk!" She noted his growing exasperation. "Well, Auntie did say for you to help me..."
Somehow Jason didn't think this was what she'd had in mind. But, he told himself, better that this be done well, if it had to be done at all... He reached for the hilt, but Lucy pulled it away. "Ah-ah! First you have to promise," she said, tilting her head up at him expectantly. He nodded, conceding defeat. "I promise."
She smiled happily, as if what they were doing was the most normal thing in the world, and handed it to him. Jason took it with a palpable sense of relief, and turned his attention to the still-frozen figure of his mother. He might've been able to wriggle his way out of it somehow, at this point, but he was already finding himself less and less disturbed by the idea. After all, it had worked out fine with Lucy, and after all, he knew what he was doing now, and after all, it was just a little experiment, and after all, it was reversible...
Jason carefully lifted his mother's hair out of the way and set the blade at the base of her skull. He flicked the selector switch over to halfway between the normal and "sentient" settings, just like it had been with Lucy; he was curious what the normal setting by itself would do, but he wasn't about to experiment and risk turning his mother into a mere disembodied head - or worse, a headless corpse.
He couldn't exactly use his other hand to guide the laser blade, but by grasping at the top of the hilt and cutting at the base of the blade he was able to get a good, steady grip - and, thanks to the ideal nature of the blade, he lost nothing from the lack of leverage. Using his other hand to steady himself against the back of her head, he pressed firmly but gently on the hilt and began to cut. As before, the sensation of passing the blade through the different components of the human neck was beyond bizarre, but with his fear about any potential deadliness assuaged, he also found it strangely absorbing.
When he'd finished the initial cut, he gently lifted his mother's head off and set it on the counter facing her, then switched the blade over to the "vanishing" setting. After another short bit of work, she was configured exactly like Lucy. He turned back to his cousin, who was watching with interest, moving her head around to observe the process from a variety of angles. "Well," he said, "here goes nothing." He clicked the button, and time began to move again.
Mrs. McCormick's body casually strolled forward toward the door, then stopped short as a look of surprise came over her face back on the counter. She turned back toward them and laughed as she picked herself up off the Formica. "'Forget my own head next!'" she quipped. "This is what getting old does to you, kids."
Lucy laughed. "Nah, I have moments like that all the time."
Her aunt chuckled and headed out the door, head in hand. A minute or so later, they heard the car start and pull out of the driveway, which raised an entirely new set of questions that Jason was too busy wrestling with the previous set to handle. This was so bizarre, so...so...it seemed like it should feel deeply wrong, but between the relief he still felt after confirming that nobody was going to get killed in his little experiment, Lucy's unexpected enthusiasm, and now his mother's blithe treatment of all this as perfectly normal and the expected state of things, it seemed impossible to feel that it was as twisted as his mind suggested it should be.
"That was amazing!" Lucy said gleefully. "It was like she'd been this way her entire life. I mean, she even knows how to drive like this." She looked over at Jason. "Hey, we should do you next."
Jason shot her down emphatically. "Nuh-uh. I like my head where it is, thanks."
"Spoilsport." She idly scratched at the back of her head as she pondered over what he assumed was the problem of convincing him to cut his own head off. "I mean," she said, "you know you're curious about this. You wouldn't have been so ready to test it out before we even really knew it worked if you weren't."
Jason started to retort, frowned, thought for a moment, then sighed. She wasn't necessarily wrong. He did find the whole concept intriguing; the fact that he'd done this at all was proof of that. But he'd been taken off-guard by his cousin's unexpected enthusiasm for the experiment; far from his initial fear of sharing the secret, she was clearly more into it than he was.
But, if he was honest with himself, he did find it kind of intriguing in the abstract...but that didn't necessarily mean that he wanted to do it to himself...
"I, er," he stammered, "I don't want to just do exactly the same thing as you..."
"Aw, you're no fun," Lucy said. "Think of it, we could have a whole family like this. Wouldn't that be crazy?"
He stared at her, feeling at a loss for words. "I, uh, well, yeah," he said, "but..."
"Anyway," she said, "even if you're going to be boring about it and not cut your own head off, you oughta at least do something. This whole thing was your idea, after all."
He thought about pointing out that most of what they'd actually done had been her idea, but he knew it was futile. Lucy was fixated on the idea of getting him to try this, and once she was good and invested in something, there were really only two ways out: run and hide until she got bored and moved onto something else, or...give in and go along...
