"Alright, stop."
Those two words sent a chill deep through their shared core. That voice belonged to their mother.
“What did I say about arguing with yourself before school?” She had a half-finished mug of coffee in one hand, and the other on her hip. The look on her face was somehow both tired, and devastatingly acidic.
Jon and Zoe were immediately doing their best impersonation of a wounded puppy, but said nothing.
"Zoey. C'mon, we don't have time for this. What's the rule?"
"...I don't know? What..." said half their voice in earnest confusion, before the other half hastily lied "We forgot, honest! Please, um, remind us what it was? Won't happen again! Jon, what are SHUSH!" And then their lips clamped shut.
Mom's free hand went to the bridge of her nose. "Keep it inside your headspace." There was a painful edge in her voice. "I'd really rather you two not fight at all, but people are still trying to sleep in the morning! Try not to fight out loud so much? You woke little Mikey up!"
"... What the fuck does that mean?" Zoe tried to say, but Jon was still pursing their lips.
"I think she means we should just think at each other instead of saying all that stuff out loud," thought Jon's internal monologue. "You can hear this, right?"
"Hang on, we can do that!?" Zoe tried thinking verbally. "...Marco!"
"Polo," Jon thought. "We could do this since 2 episodes ago, sister. I may not claim to know a lot about magic, but at least I'm paying attention here."
"Oh, shut the fuck up, Jon," they said, out loud. Then their mouth got clapped for the fifth time that morning, and by Jon for the first time.
"What did I just tell you, young lady!?" Their mother growled, now right and properly cross with them. "And you shouldn't be swearing, either!"
"I can swear as I damn well please, Mom! They're just words, and everyone uses them now, 'old lady!'" Zoe tried to say almost instinctively, but unfortunately, she could not swear as she pleased, because Jon was forcing them to practically gnaw on their own palm rather than say such things.
"Zoe, SHUT! UP! You're going to get us in even more trouble!" Jon thought forcefully.
"So what!? She always gets me in trouble over stupid shit like this, and it means fuck-all outside of her house! Now let me talk!" Zoe made an attempt to bite down on their own hand to get Jon to relax his grip.
The bite was successful, but it wasn't getting Jon to let up. "It's not just you anymore, sister! I sure as hell am not gonna get dragged into that!"
"YOU JUST SWORE TOO, YOU HYPOCRITE!"
"There's no rule against thinking with swear words!"
"What's the matter with you this morning!?" Their mother was growing more animated and alert as the moments passed, watching her wild-eyed firstborn slobbering all over the hand they were biting into. "Do I have to get The Coin? What on Earth could you two be fighting over this fiercely this early in the morning!?"
"MAGIC STUFF!" flew out of their mouth the moment their hand finally flew away from their teeth. "Zoe says she has a way to cure us with Magic Stuff! Jon, I NEVER said-" and then they clapped a hand over their mouth again. "WOULD YOU STOP THAT!?" Zoe thought. Jon refused.
A deep sigh. Now all the weariness came crushing back down on their mom, but this time without a trace of the sleepiness. "Honey," she began cautiously, "Dissociative Identity Disorder has no cure. Believe me, I've looked. You two are going to have to learn to live together, you understand? And as far as I'm concerned, both halves of you are my children, whom I love very much, so could you please stop fighting with yourself so much? Nobody wins those fights, and you know that!"
Silence. Sudden stillness.
Jon and Zoe were both looking at their mom curiously, their shared eyes betraying a sudden amazement that she could say such a strange thing. "...Mom, what are you saying?" Zoe tried to ask, but Jon still had their hand clamped down over their mouth, and only he heard it unmuffled.
Their mother impatiently checked the time. "Mikey, could you make yourself some Eggos this morning?" she called out to their younger brother. "I need to have a chat with your big sister before school."
"Yay!" Said Mikey, who appeared just briefly enough to justify his existence in this narrative, and then just as suddenly disappeared with every intention of heinously violating the family's Nutella Jar.
"We don't have too long before school," reminded their mother, "so let's be expedient about this, please. Jon, get your hand off your sister's mouth. Zoe, please don't say anything that might prompt your brother to cover it up again. Both of you, take a seat on the couch. Get comfortable, and shut your eyes."
"...Okay?" They said experimentally, as their hand grudgingly pulled itself away and went relaxed. Being made to sit before one of their mom's lectures wasn't anything new, but the last two instructions definitely were. Blackness filled their shared vision, and... well, they got as comfortable as they could get in their foreign bodily hardware. "Man, it really is easier to sit legs-together as a girl!" Their body sighed. "You sicken me, Jon."
"Go limp," their mother commanded. "Don't move except to breath. Forget where you are. Imagine where you might be. You're in a room, around a table. It's a safe, familiar place, with comfortable chairs and tasteful decoration, and in the middle of the table, there is an intercom. Either of you may speak to me through it. Both of you are seated around that table, in separate chairs. Now, you may look around, but keep your eyes shut. One of you, and then the other, tell me where you are."
Their mother had never spoken to either of them like that, and frankly it was giving Jon and Zoe the creeps. That particular tone of voice, somehow, was sending chills up their shared spine with every word, and by the time she finished they were covered in erect little hairs, and shuddered. Still, it was impossible to think their mother could possibly be trying to hurt them, so...
Jon tried doing... whatever that was, first. "Look around, but keep you eyes shut," he thought aloud. Obviously their body had to still be on the couch, so, where on earth was he now...? He reached over and pressed a button on the intercom when he figured it out. "We're in the Headspace!" He announced proudly.
"Unreal!" Thought Zoe. In that place, she was a separate person from Jon again, and her first instinct was to climb out of her chair and inspect the area. It... honestly, it looked like an idealized version of their own dining room, except it was cleaner, and there wasn't any trace of the excessively sugary "Balanced breakfasts" Mikey was in the habit of making. The biggest difference was in the dining table, which had the old-fashioned intercom alright, chairs more plush than their actual dining table had, and... "JON!" Zoe thought in surprise when she saw him at the table. "You're a guy again!"
Jon felt himself in the headspace, and sure enough, there was his thing, just where it should be, and not a trace of excess breast tissue on him. "Hey, so I am!" He jumped out of his chair in excitement. "And you look like Snow White at a Funeral again!"
Zoe scowled. "It's fashionable," she spat back defensively. "Goth girls are in vogue, dickbreath."
"Right, right, sure. You gonna answer Mom any time any time soon?" Jon diverted while grinning.
Zoe rolled her eyes. Hand on the intercom, "The Magic of Imagination is running at Full Throttle," she quipped with her usual sarcasm.
"Good, good." They heard their mother exhale, and her tone no longer had that tingly quality; but lying there as if asleep on the couch, of course they couldn't read any more into her expression. "Now, I want you two to, calmly and concisely, tell me what you were fighting about so fiercely that you couldn't keep it in The Headspace this morning. I'm disappointed; you two haven't had a morning fight like that in a very long time."
In their shared imagination, Jon and Zoe were giving each other a very meaningful Look. How the hell were they supposed to answer that in a way she could understand? Jon reached for the intercom first. "Mom... how long have we been like this?" He asked, tone full of careful tact.
Their mother sighed heavily. "There were signs even before Mikey was born," she answered wearily, "but I wasn't sure until a few months after your father left. So, I'd sayyyy..." she did some figuring, "7 or 8 years now, honey. Why do you ask?"
"She doesn't remember!" Zoe exclaimed in thought. "Holy Fuck Holy Fuck Holy Fuck She thinks we've always been like this! I, the middle child, probably don't exist to her anymore!"
Jon just shushed her. "So, you've been looking a long time, right? And you haven't found ANYTHING that could, y'know, fix us? Zoe says that if we sacrifice a goat-"
"You do not need 'fixing', honey," their mother interrupted firmly. "You're different, not defective. I'll say it again, as far as I'm concerned you're my beloved son, and Zoe my precious daughter, and nothing is ever going to change that."
Jon had no idea what to say to that. Zoe, scowling, did not have that problem. "Gimme that!" She claimed the intercom, "Like hell we don't need fixing! There's two of us! We should have two bodies! You wouldn't be saying any garbage like that if you knew we'd been born as two properly separate people, would you, huh?" Jon's eyes went wide. Now he was really trying to shush her.
Quiet for a while in the real world, even as their headspace started to erupt. "What makes you say that?" Her mother finally asked, now wary.
Jon was frantically trying to get Zoe to stop talking, but to no avail. "I know the 'magic stuff' here better than Jon ever did!" she declared despite Jon trying to physically force her away from the microphone. "We're two separate souls! Someone's put a curse on us and we need to break it somehow! And Jon doesn't know what he's talking about, for a Curse this powerful you'd need WAY more than just a goat here!" Jon finally got some traction, and used it to wrestle out a message of his own to Mom. "Don't listen to her! She has a friend she thinks is an actual witch but she's totally crazy! SHE IS NOT TOTALLY CRAZY! Zoe, you can't undo wishes! That's fact! How would you know, smartass!? I just do, okay!? Besides, you're never going to convince Mom anyways; your Wish just rewrote all of reality, can't you see that!? What makes you so sure? She could just be under a glamour, or maybe it was a hex on our household, or... Or what, Zoe!?"
Back inside the Headspace, the intercom had practically broken down thanks to all the fighting in there, but now Zoe was stepping back and, wonderstruck, faced Jon directly. "Jon," she spat, "did you have something to do with this?" Zoe accused.
Immediately, Jon was defensive. "I don't know what you're talking about. Why would I have done this!?"
"I don't know, but you know things about this spell! Things you can't have just guessed correctly over and over! The reality-changing thing, that it has something to do with expressed desires and 'wishes', the power we don't have to break the curse... That's why you were accusing me earlier, isn't it, dickbreath? You just wanted to shift the guilt away from you!" Zoe looked like she was about to spontaneously combust.
There was a telling silence. Finally, Jon found something in "Zoe. You know I would NEVER want to share a body with you like this, right?"
"WELL, THE FEELING'S FUCKING MUTUAL, ASSHAT!" Their eyes, their eyes out in the real world, snapped open, and suddenly said eyes were much more wet than they had been. They sprang to their shared feet as if to run away, but suddenly neither of them knew where to go. "HOW COULD YOU HAVE DONE THIS! HOW COULD YOU HAVE EVER EVEN THOUGHT OF DOING ANYTHING LIKE THIS, JON!? DON'T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THIS MEANS!? Zoe, I never meant it! I never meant for anything like this to happen, you have to know that, don't you? WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DO? HOW COULD YOU CONCEIVABLY HAVE FUCKED UP THIS BADLY TO GET US LIKE THIS!? Zoe, it was just supposed to be a stupid magic rock, okay? I never imagined this! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?"
"Okay, I've heard more than enough. I've got The Coin."
Somehow despite their discombobulated state, Jon and Zoe's gaze managed to return to their mom. It took a moment to realize she had left earlier, while their eyes were still shut, apparently expressly to fetch this new MacGuffin. The Coin... kinda looked plain, really. It looked like just a typical US quarter, except mostly without the metallic hue; at some point both sides had been painted over.
Actually each of them instantly recognized the designs painted on the faces as one or the other's own handiwork, despite never having seen it before, and looking at the coin was giving them the same tingly feelings their mother's voice had. To be honest, just looking at it they were starting to realize just how much more Power it had over them than any old coin.
"I'm sorry to do this, but I don't have time for all this fighting and I won't until after work. Heads, Zoe gets the frontseat until the end of the School Day. Tails, Jon does."
"...frontseat of what? The car?"
"Frontseat of your body." She flipped The Coin, and when it landed one of them was trapped in the Headspace.
