#BUT WHEN HE DOES (COUGH COUGH THE KING OF VERE)

[doumekichikara]

bodyswap! 👯‍♂️👫👬👭

[put a fanfic trope in my inbox and i’ll describe the fic i’d write!]

i am in fact heavily into a bodyswap au for damen and laurent that i unfortunately am never going to write but i’ll describe it in detail for you now! for 2,500 words, in fact!

note that it’s inspired in part by kimi no na wa (your name) so if you don’t want spoilers for that movie then don’t read this,

laurent and damen realize they’re swapping bodies a couple of days into it, after initially thinking they must be having incredibly, inexplicably realistic dreams. what is happening is impossible and cannot be real. but then damen sees, in a handwriting that is not his own, too neat, almost as if the writer is not used to writing in akielon and had to compose the message quite slowly and carefully, a note left in his bed: is this real?

laurent, waking in damen’s body the following day, finds a message in veretian, written below his own and tucked away in the same place: it must be.

through notes, and then longer letters, they piece it together. they’re alternating days. the switch happens as they sleep. laurent tries staying awake to prevent it, but all it does is delay it by a day. (he files this away in case there’s a day he knows he wants to be in his own body for.) when damen wakes up in his own body for two consecutive days and finds out how, he tries it too and is also able to delay it, and it doesn’t happen when he takes a nap that afternoon either; they both have to be asleep. laurent counts back the days and realizes it must have started at the six-year anniversary of the battle at marlas, but that is not something he wants to discuss with damen without a sword in his hand and damen in front of him, and so he never mentions it.

the problem is: in damen’s body, living damen’s life, it is very hard to imagine fighting him to the death. the first weeks, it sickens him to feel all these worshipful eyes on damianos, to see people prostrate themselves for him, to be served by slaves and to have to refuse the services that are so commonplace as to be assumed if he doesn’t give some reason he wants his bed to himself that night. and it is confusing, at times distressingly so, to move through customs and behaviors he’s only ever read about, and to do so in a body that he can feel so much power in, one he handles with lumbering awkwardness, forgetting his height and the mass of his limbs. he comes back to his body and he feels very light, too quick, not nearly solid enough.

but damianos is—thoughtful. damianos glosses akielon words in veretian where he can and leaves little phrases he thinks might come in handy, far more conversational than anything laurent included in his own guide to passing as himself. he writes suggestions for areas laurent might like to work on the next time he spars with jord, accurate to laurent’s weaknesses without having ever seen him fight, only from being in his skin. he catches onto laurent’s unwillingness to make the same use of slaves as he does and does something, during one of their days in their correct bodies, that leads to laurent never again finding himself having to work a way out of a slave coming to his (damianos’s) bed.

he slowly transforms the messages from warnings and rules to anecdotes about what he did that day, things laurent doesn’t need to know, but that he seems to want to tell him anyway. and laurent starts to do the same, almost like a diary, or a friend.

meanwhile damen has become…very taken with laurent, or what he has gathered about what laurent must be like. his messages are utilitarian at first, and from the way he spends his days (or the way damen does while he’s him) he doesn’t seem to interact with anyone any more than he has to. he has minimal interaction with the court, which baffles damen because it is so far removed from everything he has learned from his father about being a future king, and laurent is supposed to rule in just two more years. it occurs to him that laurent may be keeping him away from the court in order to keep him from learning anything sensitive, since he’s an enemy and could use that information against him—that’s the way veretians think, isn’t it? (it would never work, since memories of laurent’s life are fuzzy each time he returns to his own; it’s the written record at each end that refreshes it each time, and that never makes it to the other side.) all he can say for sure about laurent, initially, is that he’s incredibly beautiful and probably incredibly intelligent, if the reading material in his bedroom and the way he writes are anything to go by.

and then he spars with jord, and he learns that laurent works much, much harder than he wants anyone to know, and that he has the absolute loyalty of his men, good men, and that it is deserved. laurent does not have the physical strength that damen does but he has honed his body well, and for a long time, and from how jord responds both during and afterwards damen can tell that laurent knows how to move in his body much better than damen can, and that damen can only begin to imagine what laurent could do with himself.

(he has a similar realization the first time he-as-laurent goes riding.)

and then laurent starts to write back for real, no longer the spare, efficient messages but actual responses to damen, and damen learns that he is funny in a way that can cut but also has a warmth to it. that he’s far more observant than damen, so much so that damen starts to realize just how much slips by him simply because it hadn’t occurred to him it could be important. that he is fair, and kind, and perhaps also very lonely. that he couldn’t have asked for a better person to be stuck in this surreal situation with.

some days he imagines going to vere to meet him, to share the same time and space instead of always being alone and always delayed a day. he wonders whether that’s what they’re supposed to do, if maybe that’s why this is all happening—they’re meant to find common ground, come up with a way to move past this uneasy truce between their countries and form a real alliance. he considers writing laurent a letter and sending it off to arles, and then feels silly because they already do that every day, and what is he expecting to happen? (and on some days, when he can’t stop himself, he wonders if there might be an end to the switching, if the way to stop is to meet, to kiss—)

laurent, meanwhile, has accepted border duty, even knowing his uncle means to engineer a way to kill him, because he too has started to wonder, and he thinks there may be a way to make a friend of akielos. the day he leaves for the border, he sends a letter to damen, a real one; leaving arles means leaving behind the place he’s been hiding their messages, and he’s not sure when he’ll next have a safe place to leave new ones.

the next day, laurent wakes up in his own body.

he thinks that damen must have had to stay up late, for some reason, or woke so early that there was no overlap, seeing as laurent went to sleep quite late. but there’s no switch the next day, either. or the next. he moves towards the border without a single day in ios. and without a reply to his letter.

when he reaches the border after two weeks, he writes to jokaste. they got along well when he was in damen’s body; damen always scolded him for it afterwards, but she was the only one he’d ever let himself act at all like himself with, when he was damen. he thinks that if he is going to chance a letter to anyone else in the akielon court, it has to be her.

and this is how he learns that damen has been dead for a year.

and this is where the reader would remember that laurent had thought it was six years since marlas, had turned twenty, while damen had thought it would be two years until a nineteen-year-old laurent could rule. that jokaste had tried to warn laurent-as-damen but had referenced things only damen himself would understand, and laurent hadn’t written any of it down, so he didn’t remember and damen never knew. that for a month damen had been coughing, had been tiring more easily, but had pushed it aside so well it didn’t seem important.

for this au, both theomedes and damen were poisoned as part of the regent’s plan with kastor, and damen accidentally died too soon, too soon for it to be believable, before theomedes and before enough word had gotten out about him being sick for it to seem like it had been of natural causes. the alternate plan became to keep it quiet that he’d already died and wait for long enough that it seemed plausible it was natural. the story was that he was ill, and even the story didn’t make it to laurent because it barely left ios; the health and vitality of their royals is a point of pride and to have the king and crown prince both ill wasn’t a vulnerability the kyroi wanted to share openly with neighboring countries. by the time it became more public knowledge laurent was swapping with damen and believed his firsthand knowledge over quiet rumors, and was also very distracted with the whole swapping situation in general.

so: laurent learns the truth from jokaste, who tells him the truth because by this point (pg in the canon timeline) the regent is starting to move forward with his plans and jokaste is sure something like what happened to damen is going to happen again, and she couldn’t save him but maybe she can help laurent. laurent, meanwhile, is very fixated on the fact that this all started on the anniversary of marlas, and while part of him thinks maybe this has all been some kind of delusion borne of his obsession with damianos and his approaching 21st birthday i.e. expiration date, he thinks it must have been real. that was not the damen he would have conjured from his own mind.

so he rides alone to marlas from the border, and he goes to the artesian ruins. and in his letters with damen they talked about artes, and how it was once a single kingdom, and all of the ways those connections are still present, underlying their foundations. and during the months they were alternating bodies, there was a time that laurent-as-damen went to marlas and left something of damen’s there—a sword? a shield?—on the site where auguste died. laurent returns there, now as himself, and he considers how backwards this all is: he came to remember auguste, wearing auguste’s killer’s body, and now here he is in his own body, desperately seeking his brother’s killer.

while he’s there, he falls on the uneven ground and hits his head. when he wakes, he’s in damen’s living, breathing body once again.

what follows is an Exciting Ride, in which laurent desperately tries to ensure damen lives, talking to jokaste about the poison plot, riding to delpha alone to see nikandros (who has def been present already in the story, warning damen-as-damen just like jokaste warned laurent-as-damen, and also the time laurent went to marlas was during a trip damen made to delpha) to set things in motion as far as having an anti-kastor faction amongst the kyroi. after he’s talked to nikandros he has a very strong instinct that he needs to go to the ruins, that he’ll be able to see damen there—

and he does, somehow. he goes to where his body had been when he left it (over a year from now?) and he calls for damen and hears damen call him back—damen in laurent’s own voice, saying his name, as he calls damen’s with damen's—and then somehow, incredibly, damen is there, or he is there, over a year from now but somehow in a shared time and place, and then he is himself, and looking up at damen, damen who is so very large and right there in front of him for the first time.

“you died,” laurent says, “how could you let that happen, you absolute moron—”

damen doesn’t hear any of this because laurent is so much more beautiful in front of him, in front of him and not in a mirror, laurent found a way to him, even though damen remembers when he collapsed—"can i?“ damen asks, reaching out.

he embraces him. laurent has not been touched, not like this, not in so long, but he embraces damen, there where damen killed auguste, and he feels a relief he hasn’t felt since that happened, and it doesn’t make any sense but he doesn’t want to let it go.

they are holding onto each other as laurent tells him everything he needs to know, tells him to remember all of it, his life literally depends on it, there will be more attempts, don’t you dare die, and damen tells him he won’t, he won’t, and laurent had better not either—

the moment ends. laurent stands alone, on the ruins.

he can’t remember why he came. he was looking for someone. for something? he looks around and feels an echo of relief and doesn’t know why.

(over a year ago, damen remembers what laurent told him, remembers what he needs to do. he doesn’t die, he won’t, he promised someone…

who?)

laurent can’t remember why he went to marlas, and he goes back to where he was stationed on the border in a sort of haze, feeling both emptied, as though something very important is missing, and more full and real than he has in a long time.

laurent can’t remember why he sent the letters to damianos or jokaste, but he did, and that’s what matters. that’s how the correspondence that changes everything begins. how he is able to bring together his uncle’s plots and the thwarted poison plot on the akielon royal family, the mastermind of which still hasn’t yet been identified. how he arranges to meet formally with the akielon crown prince and sees him in the flesh for the first time.

but—it doesn’t feel like the first time at all, and as laurent studies damianos’s face he thinks he sees something familiar in it, something he feels but can’t name. a sort of nostalgia, missing something he shouldn’t be able to miss. as they look at each other, the eye contact feels intimate, and strangely laurent doesn’t want to pull away from that.

“is this…?” damianos—damen asks.

“it must be,” laurent says.