I shouldn't be here...
Jason bit her lip and tried not to pay attention to her surroundings. This was because her next class had turned out to be P.E., and her surroundings were the girls' locker room and about a dozen of her classmates in various states of undress. It had been awkward enough just trying to avoid looking at a mere copy of her cousin's body in the shower, but this? There was hardly anywhere she could look...!
She honestly hadn't even considered this possibility when she'd decided to come to school today; now she was seriously wishing that she'd ignored Lucy's cajoling and stayed home instead. Of course, her mother wouldn't have stood for it...she wasn't actually sick, after all. The brief thought flashed across her mind that maybe girls could fake a period or something, and her stomach turned at the notion that this was now applicable to her. But putting that (forcefully) aside, she had no idea how to do that in the first place, and it was too late now, anyway. She wasn't home in bed still waking up and formulating a plan for the day, she was already here, at school, in the locker room, surrounded by...
She shook her head - or rather, her body did. Focus, focus...the sooner she got changed, the sooner she could get out of here and stop thinking about it. She thought briefly about how to approach this; after a moment, somewhat reluctantly, she set her head down on the bench facing the lockers. This wasn't like the shower at home; she didn't know it so well that she could do this "blindfolded," and while her body seemed to have a better grasp on things than she'd expected, she still wasn't comfortable trying to change into her gym clothes without being able to see what the other part of her was doing.
She thought about that surprising familiarity as she changed; it was a helpful distraction from staring up at her (cousin's?) underwear-clad tuckus. Being in this form was still bizarre and confusing, and yet she felt somehow less discombobulated than she had when she was a relatively ordinary human being who merely had a teenage boy's head on a teenage girl's body. Had that come with whatever shift in reality had changed her and her aunt to match her cousin and her mother, manifested these...ethereal flame-whatsits atop their shoulders, and placed a brassiere in her underwear drawer? Maybe this improved coordination between brain and body was just something that came with being a real...um, whatever she was? She tried to think: had Lucy also seemed less awkward in this form since then?
Jason had stripped to her underwear and was about to put on her gym clothes when she noticed that there was another bra in with them. That's right, sports bras are a thing, aren't they? She wasn't exactly sure what kind of activities they were expecting her to do like this, but she definitely didn't need any additional distractions while she was trying to cope with it...
She sighed, shrugging as she fiddled with the clasp on her bra. At least being able to watch what her hands were doing from behind her own back helped; she had no doubt she'd be fumbling with this a lot more if she had to do it blind...wouldn't she? Unless it was just muscle-memory that came with Lucy's body? Wait, was that even how it worked, or...? Well, all bets were off when you were dealing with a power that could completely alter reality...
She had just gotten it unclasped and freed her modest breasts from their confinement when there was a laugh from behind her. "See? I told you, she's even got the same birthmark as Lucy. Same place and everything. Are you sure you're not twins, Jasmine?"
Jason spun around to face the unseen interloper, only to find that she was still sitting on the bench, but now staring into her own crotch. There were giggles from behind her as her body picked her up and turned her around to see...a pair of girls she didn't know. In differing states of undress. It was almost enough to distract her from the realization that she was holding her head up to her chest, just underneath her own naked breasts.
"Self-boob hat, nice!" chuckled one of them, a tall, willowy girl of vaguely Mediterranean descent, with slightly dusky skin and an abundance of curly black tresses, as topless as Jason herself (who was now flushing as much from the sight as from embarassment at her own position.) "Guess there's perks to 'losing your head,' eh?"
"C'mon, that's not how dullahans work!" interrupted the other, a petite brunette with pale skin generously peppered with freckles. She, at least, was wearing the full complement of underwear, but this only helped so much. "They're born that way, y'know!"
"Ease up, it was a joke, Phoebe," the brunette retorted, putting her hands on her hips in a distractingly flouncy manner. "'Sides, it's not like anything about demi-humans is exactly common knowledge; they're pretty un-common." She turned her attention back to Jason, while her friend muttered that it was common knowledge for people who actually paid attention in class. "For real, though, I swear you and your cousin are, like, identical below the...um, the head...? It's kinda eerie."
Phoebe frowned and began lecturing the other girl, who was apparently named Catherine, on whether that was an appropriate thing to say to a demi-human, but Jason was too busy boggling over the implications of "demi-human" to figure out whether she was supposed to be offended; anyway, she certainly found her situation eerie. But the fact that they had...not just a term for the thing that she now was, but a term for what was apparently an entire class of creatures into which she and Lucy (and their mothers) fell...
It was one thing to have people directly affected by the reality-warping power of the blade think this was all normal - or even for others to just not realize that anything was wrong (had that boy at the convenience store even taken any notice of Lucy?) But for people to recognize the thing that she'd become, to put a name to it, and to react in a way that implied that society itself recognized and accommodated such creatures...
It was like stepping into another world - not merely the familiar old reality with a couple incongruous alterations, but a whole other world. The cognitive dissonance was profound; as alien as this all felt for Jason, this new world recognized and had a place for...for Jasmine the... "Dullahan," she thought. The thing I am now is called a "dullahan." ...Okay, but what is a dullahan? Had this been a thing in her old reality? A myth? A movie monster? Or had the term simply come into being in the new reality as a consequence of their existence? She wanted to look it up, but she knew she'd only find the "truth" of this other world, which was a sobering-
"Yo! Earth to Jasmine...!"
She started and tilted her head up to look at Catherine, who was chuckling at her. "Uh, huh? Oh, um..."
The other girl laughed. "Geez, you space out at the drop of a hat, girl!" she said, teasingly. "Head in the clouds much?"
Phoebe winced. "Catherine!"
Catherine only laughed harder. "Oh, come on. It's a joke, princess. 'Sides, it's not like Jasmine's bothered by it."
In point of fact, Jason wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about it, other than feeling that it was easily the least upsetting thing she was currently dealing with. Her body shrugged and cocked her head to one side; Catherine chuckled.
"You know, though, you've got such great hair," Phoebe said, when she'd finished giving her friend a Look. "You really should do more with it."
"I dunno," Catherine observed. "Seems like it'd make it harder to hold her head with longer hair. Not that it wouldn't look good, mind."
"Well, yeah, if she just had it out straight," Phoebe said. "But, you know, like an updo with a crown braid or something. Or keep it shorter, but do it up nicer with some product - really give it some volume. It's such nice hair; it deserves better than such...plain styling. It demands better."
Jason was simultaneously baffled and a bit miffed at this. She hardly thought about her hair at all, normally; the implication that her hair was some sort of separate being that she was mistreating by not making it pretty enough was goofy, but when she considered that she actually was sort of a symbiotic combo organism thing now, it made her feel deeply strange.
"Don't mind her," interjected Catherine, noticing her disconcerted expression. "She gets...passionate...about stuff."
Jason didn't answer, because she was too absorbed in (and weirded out by) the mental picture of her hair as yet another semi-autonomous component of "Jasmine" the dullahan. Would it be any weirder? Maybe not, but it felt weird to think about, on an instinctual level; it clashed with her own mental map of her body, deep in her brain. It was, come to think of it, the exact same neck-prickling sense of strangeness Jason had felt watching his cousin get up and move around without her head at first.
...Which just led her to realize that it wasn't something she still felt when thinking about the divide between her own head and body now, because whatever her conscious mind and memories said, the way her body was now matched perfectly with what her animal brain said it should be...and now she was looking at the two ordinary human beings in front of her, and she couldn't stop staring at the things between their heads and shoulders, those freakish columns of flesh and bone sprouting from the torso like a stalk, the head bobbing at the end of it like some bizarre fruit...
Her body vigorously shook her head; the sudden sense of gestaltzerfall cleared. Her classmates looked normal again, no longer the bizarre un-dullahan grotesqueries she had briefly perceived them as. They were, of course, back to staring at her again. Was that what it was like, to see the world through inhuman eyes?
"Man, again, Jasmine?" Catherine laughed. "You spaced out so hard you were smoking!"
Confused and curious, Jason turned her head around to take a look at herself. At first she got nothing but an eyeful of her own bare breasts; she'd almost forgotten she was still topless. But when she moved her head back and tilted it up, she saw it: a few last wisps of greasy black smoke rising from between her shoulders. Like the sparks that normally emitted from her flame, it seemed not to be strictly, tangibly real; it faded from sight well before reaching the ceiling, and left no residual haze in the air. Had...had that been coming from her? Was this because she'd been confused? Disturbed? Or what did it signify?
"For real, though, you probably oughta get dressed," the tall girl said. "I think they're already starting out there."
"That goes for you as well!" Phoebe protested, as Catherine unhurriedly donned the other half of her gym clothes and Jason began fumbling with her sports bra. "We're already late...!"
"Relax, they're still gonna be picking out teams," Catherine replied, straightening out her shirt and testing the fit of her own sports bra with a languid roll of her shoulders. "It's just softball, not the actual end of the world."
Jason managed to fumble everything into place as Phoebe was preparing to launch into another harangue, and quickly slipped her top on. The feeling as it passed through the area where her flame burned was exceedingly strange; it reminded her of the weird feelings she got when handling cotton balls or tin foil, in that it felt like the part of her brain that handled tactile sensations was getting overloaded with nonsense input and didn't know how to cope. Her body gave a little shudder.
Once she'd gotten everything straightened out, Jason picked up her head and made her way out to the field in the company of the other two girls. The other girls... The thought that, to them, she was now one of the group - relative strangers united by a shared experience they assumed she was part of - was very strange, and she found herself starting to get broody over it again.
A few minutes later, however, she was too busy with more immediate concerns. To wit: how the hell was she supposed to participate in softball like this? She needed both hands to swing a bat, but if she had to set her head down, how was she supposed to watch the incoming ball?
Jason joined up with her classmates as they were debating over team picks; Catherine had been right after all. She wasn't exactly eager to get involved in the first place, so she hung back, keeping her head down and waiting to see how things unfolded. It was all fairly standard, although she was a bit surprised to find that Catherine, who struck her as fairly low-key and definitely not the active type, was apparently in demand as a runner. Well, she has the legs for it, she thought to herself.
"Jasmine" herself, it turned out, was the object of some discussion. "I mean, she's such a tomboy, she's gotta be sporty, right?" said one of the girls who'd latched onto one of the team captains as an unsolicited advisor.
"Nah, she's a computer geek," said a girl on the opposing team. "Though I guess she's gotta have a good arm, if she carries her head around with her all day."
"Yeah-huh," the other girl shot back. "Like we can't tell you guys're just trying to get her for yourselves...!"
Jason, for her part, legitimately wondered which of them was closer to right. As Jason, he hadn't exactly been out of shape, but it was true that most of his interests were more sedentary. But "Jasmine" had her own head on (well, off) a copy of Lucy's body, and Lucy was, while not an athlete, definitely more energetic and active than Jason. How did that work? How were Jason's personality and habits reconciled with "Jasmine's" somewhat more fit shape? Who was this person whose life and body were now hers? That just set her brooding again...
...Or it would have, if the conversation around her weren't still going on. In the end, she did get picked for right fielder, and thus it was that "Jasmine" the dullahan headed to the outfield with a glove on one hand and her head tucked underneath her arm.
Which was, for the record, an odd position to be in. Thus far in her brief existence as this freakish split entity, she'd mostly carried her head around in both hands, setting herself down when she needed to carry or manipulate things - but that meant she couldn't move out of her own line of sight, unless she was somewhere familiar enough that her body could "fly blind," like in the bathroom that morning. It worked, but it was a bit of a hassle.
This, though...it was strange to feel cradled and surrounded like this, and tricky trying to get the hang of it. She was able to keep her head secured against her ribcage to the point where she wasn't worried about dropping herself, but she had to crook her arm just so to avoid covering her ears, and turning and tilting her head with just one hand was significantly more challenging. (On top of which, her right forehead was constantly getting smooshed against the underside of her left breast.)
But for all that, it felt oddly normal...right, even. It was strangely comforting how secure she felt in even this casual embrace by her own body. Not that she wasn't still discombobulated by the insanity of her predicament, let alone the question of how she was supposed to play like this, but still...it helped, somehow.
She got into position and spent the next few moments trying to work out how to angle her head for a reasonable view of the infield. Yes, that should work...probably. Maybe. Well, as Catherine had said, it was just P.E. softball, not anything life-altering...
The first couple hits by the opposing team went into center field (plus a wild swing by Phoebe which managed to connect and went hard foul into left field,) which gave her a chance to get used to following the trajectory of the ball while holding her head like this. It was strange, she thought, that she didn't feel at all disoriented when she had to tilt her head way back when it went high. Jason could still feel that inner-ear sense that told her she was off from level, but it didn't feel off or alarming the way tipping backwards to the point of falling normally did. Also, it seemed like her body had its own separate balance-sense, which she could feel separately from the orientation of her head. She supposed that made as much sense as anything about the situation, but it still added to the already high level of strangeness that came with existing in two separate pieces and being in two places at once...
Then someone hit the ball her way, and she had to actually get in the game. As best as she was able, she followed its course, sprinting towards where she thought it was heading - but she ran into trouble when it was near the ground. The ball was somewhere above her, but she couldn't actually see where since it was difficult to look straight up with her head held like this. Maybe if she...no, it was no good; she heard the ball hit the ground behind her.
Whirling around, she snatched it up, then turned her head to the side to get a view, as best as she could with one hand, while her body wound up. The runner had already cleared first; her body swung around and lobbed the ball to second. It didn't get there in time, but Catherine, who was left fielder, intercepted it and caught the runner in a mad sprint a few yards before she reached third. Popular consensus was right - she could move.
It was strangely exhilarating - Jason wasn't especially into sports, but the particular weird challenges that came with doing anything in this body made even a qualified success at a complex task like this feel like a significant accomplishment. Still, if she could just figure out what to do about being able to look straight up...
The next couple hits went center-right, and one girl struck out, so she had a little while to think on it. The next hit to left field went high indeed; Jason followed it as best as she could from the position she'd been carrying herself in, but there was no way around it - she needed to look straight up. She crooked her arm a little farther outward, loosening her grip on her head, letting the back drop slightly while lifting her chin up with her fingers. Yes, there - she could see the ball, she jogged backwards, reached out her other arm to catch it...
And then she felt it. Stretching just a bit too far, shifting her arm just slightly the wrong way, losing her grip on herself...and then the horrible, helpless feeling of falling.
In reality, it only took a split-second, but the time seemed to stretch out into a minor eternity. As she felt her body abandon the game and fumble frantically for her, the thought ran through her mind on seemingly endless repeat: This is what I am now - just a head. Utterly helpless and incapable without some other part of me.
Her shoulder hit the ground hard as her body lunged downward. By some miracle or other, her sense of proprioception was good enough that she could tell where she was in relation to herself even as she dove out of her own field of vision; she remembered the incident at the corner store yesterday, and how instinctively Lucy had reacted to protect her own head. At the last moment, she caught herself with her gloved hand and clasped her head with the other, yanking herself in close as her body came to rest on the grass.
She lay there for a minute, one side of her face pressed into the pleather and stitching and the other buried in her chest, breathing heavily and trying not to cry. That had been so terrifying, to feel that helpless...
The P.E. teacher came running over. "Oh my God, Jasmine, are you alright?" She helped Jason to her feet, as she was still clutching her head tightly to her breast. "You feel okay? No dizziness or tunnel vision?"
"I'm - hahhh - I'm okay," Jason wheezed, feeling her chest heaving. "I'm fine." It was only half-true, at best - she'd caught herself gently enough that there were no indications of a concussion, but the shoulder and hip she'd landed on ached and she was winded from the sudden, panicked exertion, to say nothing of the emotional trauma. She stood there, shakily, as the teacher looked her over.
When it was clear that she didn't require immediate medical attention and just needed a minute to collect herself, the teacher left her and there was some discussion about the play, which had come to an abrupt halt when she'd had her accident. It ended up being called as a walk, which didn't make her feel any better, and it was on that note that the first half-inning ended, to boot.
Jason sat on the bench, waiting for her turn at bat, holding her head in her lap and brooding. She already felt like a freak like this, but now she felt like she'd made a fool of herself on top of it. Granted, the other girls had seemed more concerned than derisive, but somehow the fact that other people weren't making fun of her didn't make as much difference to her sense of embarassment as it seemed like it should.
Maybe it was just because she was so stuck on the memory of falling helplessly through space until she was saved by the heroic intervention of her own body...
They'd ended up deciding that she would go last in the batting order, to give her a chance to recuperate. Frankly, she'd completely lost track of how the game was even going; she was too lost in her own thoughts. By the time she was up, there were runners on first and second and the team she'd been put on was one point behind.
None of which had any bearing on the immediate problem: how was she even supposed to bat!? She waited for a moment, glancing at the teacher in the vain hope that she might pick up on her confusion and jump in with a hint, but no such luck. This was absurd...!
After a long minute of trying to puzzle it out and wondering what kind of stares and whispers she was getting from the other girls, Jason set her head down on the grass a little ways behind the catcher (the last thing she needed right now was to get accidentally kicked or stepped on,) took the bat that the teacher offered her, and took her place at home plate. She stretched a little, still feeling the soreness in her shoulder, and got her body into position, trying to keep a tight rein on it, trying to make sure that she was consciously controlling everything it did. After it'd nearly dropped her, and especially after the shenanigans in bed that morning...
She waited, wondering briefly if anybody was going to tell her this setup was somehow illegal, but nobody said anything and the girl on the mound wound up like normal. Jason watched as she threw the ball, watched it sail through the air toward her, tried to work out where it would be in relation to her body, readied herself, aaannnd...
Swing-anna-miss. The ball zipped past her body and her view was briefly obstructed as the catcher lunged in front of her head to catch it. The P.E. teacher called it for the obvious strike that it was; Jason cringed and fumed over the insanity of it. How was she even supposed to do this!? She could only sort of track its path from here, and judging where both her body and the ball were in relation to her head lying a few feet away on the ground was just too much to think about in real time!
Screw it. She set down the bat momentarily, picked up her head, and set herself down off to one side. Maybe if the ball wasn't coming at her head-on, it would be easier to follow...? She wondered if this was allowed, but nobody said anything. Her body picked up the bat and returned to the plate; she felt flustered and tense, and tried to calm herself - not very successfully.
The next pitch came hurtling towards her body; the girl they had up there had a surprisingly good arm. Moving her head had...probably...? been the right call; it was certainly true that she could follow the trajectory of the ball better from here. Unfortunately, it was still hard to judge exactly where it was coming in relative to her body. She swung and actually managed to connect, but only just; the ball glanced high off the bat, bounced off the backstop, and, adding injury to insult, clunked her none too gently in the back of the head.
This, at least, wasn't called as a foul tip, partly because the catcher hadn't actually caught it, but mostly because the teacher was too busy checking with Jason to make sure she was alright. She insisted that she was, and it was certainly true that the ball hadn't done worse than bruise her - not even a lump or anything - but she was starting to get hot under the notional collar, and she could feel tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. This wasn't fair; it wasn't right of them to expect her to do this! But it was somehow even worse to be the object of pity, which she was sure must be what the teacher was feeling - the poor little freak who can't do anything for herself, who needs her body to do everything for her...
Well, to hell with it. Let her stupid body figure it out, then. If whatever impulsive, perverted monkey-mind drove that thing when she wasn't consciously controlling it was so great, it could just go win the whole game itself or whatever. She shut her eyes and relaxed her control over it, trying to ignore the things that she couldn't actually hear, but that her subconscious mind was certain the other girls must be whispering about her.
There was a feeling of confusion from her body; she ignored it and kept her eyes shut, wishing she could just disconnect from it altogether. The confusion escalated into mild distress, but she kept ignoring it. Let it figure things out. She could not, however, plug her ears, and from over in the direction of the pitcher's mound she heard the tapping of the ball against the glove, the scuff of dirt under the shoe as the other girl wound up, and the softest rush of air as the ball was thrown. Her body, already prepped to swing, waited for one fraction of a second...two fractions of a second...and swung.
She could feel the rush of air as the ball passed right over her shoulder, missing her by a narrow margin, its wake making the flame between her shoulders dance, and heard a leathery thump as the catcher snatched it out of the air. There was no ambiguity about this; with some confusion and concern in her voice, the teacher reluctantly called strike two.
She felt humiliated, victimized. It wasn't fair of them to make her do this, not when she couldn't control her body and her body couldn't even do it on its own...or so she started to think to herself, but part of her knew it was a weak excuse. This one was her own stupid fault, for getting resentful and shutting her eyes, denying her body any chance of success. She'd felt its confusion, and she'd still persisted in acting like a child, and now she really had made a fool out of herself, despite her body's best efforts. It...
...it needed her as much as she needed it. It couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't smell, couldn't taste, couldn't speak. At best, it could find its way around familiar spaces by feel and recollection, but none of this was familiar. She'd been so focused on how helpless she felt, so wrapped up in self-pity, that she'd failed to realize that. She bit her lip, tears welling up in her eyes again. This...this whole situation was so messed-up, and she didn't want to be in this position, but that wasn't its fault; even if she was still freaked out about the incident this morning, acting this way was just...self-sabotage. She wanted to get back to normal, for so many reasons, but while she was stuck like this, being at war with herself was just stupid...
She opened her eyes to see that the pitcher was getting ready for a strikeout. Her body, despite the confusion and emotional jumble they were both experiencing, readied itself, and she decided, for the first time since that morning, to put her trust in it, letting her control over it stay relaxed and focusing on what she could do for them, which was to keep her eye on the pitcher and the ball. There was the wind-up, the pitch, coming in hot...
If this had been a movie, she probably would've knocked it out of the park, scored a grand slam with a third runner who wasn't even on base, and blown up the Death Star to boot, but real life is rarely as dramatically perfect as all that, even in sports. As it happened, her body did score a good hit, driving hard into center field, and taking off running as soon as the ball was clear. It was bizarre to watch herself go, getting more and more distant until it was like watching her avatar in a video game, somehow feeling all of the exertion and motion while her perspective remained static and motionless. The runner on third made it safely home, but the runner on second was tagged out trying to make it to third; meanwhile, her body made second base without issue, but being the end of the inning, she had to return to right field anyway, after coming back to pick up her head.
Still...it felt good. For the first time since she'd ended up like this, it felt like things actually worked, like she was able to function - not just to be carried through everything by her cousin, her mother, and her own body, but actually contributing to the events around her. It didn't mean she didn't want to get back to normal as soon as humanly possible, but just being able to contribute made her feel a whole lot less helpless, less pathetic. She even found herself smiling a little.
Of course, it also wasn't the end of the game. She had to play right field again, then come back and bat again, and so on...it ended up being called for time after four innings with the score ending in a tie. By the end of it, she even felt vaguely halfway comfortable with the challenges of playing this stupid game with a disembodied head and a headless body. If she could just get through the rest of the day without any more awkward incidents...
...was what she was thinking as her body carried her back into the locker room, stripped, and proceeded to hit the showers, with her in tow and the whole rest of the class doing the same. She grimaced and shut her eyes as soon as she'd been safely set down on the shelf next to the soap dish, trying not to think about the number of her classmates she'd just seen completely naked. I definitely shouldn't be here...
