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She fell in love with a Hong Kong sunset, just the other day
She fell in love with a brand new concept, made me a king for a day
King for a day
King for a day
Now I gotta pay
— “Best of a Bad Situation”, Wolfmother
Del wakes up.
A dull pain spreads from her arm. The world comes into focus slowly. She’s surrounded by concrete.
She’s not in a car anymore, and Wayne’s not with her.
Oh fuck, she thinks. She’s in a fucking jail cell. The cops must’ve caught up with them. Her arm is in a sling, and her nose feels weird. She’s pretty sure she’s on some sort of painkiller.
The fog in her head refuses to clear, and maybe that’s why it’s taken her so long to realize that something is wrong. She feels a little bit taller than usual. Her hair isn’t hanging by the sides of her face. She wobbles as she tries to stand.
There’s a mirror in the cell. She makes the mistake of glancing at it.
She’s now fully awake. Her next immediate thought is Holy shit, what the fuck did Wayne do, because she sure as hell wasn’t responsible for this.
The face staring back ain’t hers, not even close, though the mounting panic in her (his) eyes was an accurate reflection.
Pacing around in a cell that is way too small for any comfort, Del wants to scream. She can’t remember. She can’t remember anything before—
(hands still on the wheel, turning to look at Wayne, Wayne, who just said that he loves her, the dummy, and she’s about to say it back but
his eyes suddenly wide with fear that cuts into her soul, and—
"Del!"
imp a c t
white
black
nothing.)
Del closes her eyes. Tries to focus on the bright side of her life’s current state of shittiness: Wayne’s okay. Not completely, but hey, at least not dead. His arm’s no longer a slasher film prop—bloody bones sticking out and all—he’s no longer bleeding to death, and he’s actually had some fucking medical treatment.
The bad news is only that they’ve been arrested, and she’s stuck in a jail cell, and—oh yeah, she’s somehow in Wayne’s fucking body. Right.
In a brief fit of insanity, she almost laughs. Somewhere, somewhen, Trish and Jenny must be cackling at the innuendo.
Maybe this is just a drug-induced nightmare, and she’s actually in a coma.
Oh God. Where’s her body? She has to assume Wayne’s there, unless—
She looks back into the mirror, into a face that should be comfortably familiar but isn’t, not really, not with her wearing it. Takes a step closer.
“Wayne?” The deep vibrations of his voice coming out of her throat is weird as fuck. “Are you—shit, are you in there somewhere?”
No response.
“The fuck am I doing?” she mutters.
Del finds her necklace under his pillow.
Something burns behind her eyes, and her hands shake. She thought she would never see her mom’s gift again.
(“That’s my daughter.”)
The necklace bites into her palm. Del ignores it and only clutches her necklace more tightly, holding her fist to her mouth.
She’s going to find Wayne, wherever he is.
She passes by Wayne’s stepbrother once.
What was his name? Raggy? she thinks. Oh wait. I don’t give a fuck.
When they make eye contact, he gives her a shit-eating grin.
She shoots him the double bird.
He lunges at her, and though she flinches hard her fists come flying up. Like one of those boxers Del had seen on her daddy’s TV. She nearly lets them fly before another part of her brain registered that the guard standing nearby has a rather painful-looking baton. Her fists fall as quickly as they rose, and her body ducks before she even consciously realizes that oh hey, someone’s takin’ a swing at me.
Del grins. Mentally, she thanked Wayne’s muscle memory.
The grin quickly falls as more guards file in, but Raggy is, to her delight, manhandled onto the ground.
“Wayne?” says one of the guards, and—wait a second. That’s the weird sergeant that was following them around.
It takes less than 10 minutes for the sergeant to figure something was up.
“Who the fuck is Conan?” leaves her mouth right before it hits her that wait, fuck, Wayne mentioned the guy that morning they were staying at that shitty motel.
“You’re not Wayne,” Geller says, dropping both the comic and his smile, and Del immediately stiffens. “I’m not certain if you’ve suddenly got a split personality or something else, but you’re not Wayne.”
“The fuck you on about?”
His eyes are narrowed, eyebrows scrunched.
“The way you speak. The way you hold yourself. Everything’s different. It’s almost like, like that girl—” He frowns. “Delilah?”
“It’s Del,” she snaps, a knee-jerk response, and it‘s more than enough of a confession.
Part of her is happy to come clean. There’s little point in keeping quiet, other than the risk of being labeled insane, but the other inmates had been giving her these looks… and it’s hard to avoid being cornered for long when you’re stuck behind bars.
To his credit, he doesn’t call her or Wayne insane. He doesn’t judge or panic. He doesn’t do anything she’d expect a cop to do. He just sighs the sigh of a man who’d seen enough weird shit to last a lifetime.
“Let’s get you some actual food to eat.”
So apparently pretzels do have fucking vitamins.
Coffee also suddenly tastes like liquid dog shit mixed with vomit. She spits it all over Geller, who only blinks in shock. While he’s off getting napkins, Del gains a whole new appreciation for Wayne’s endurance.
Contrary to how she thought it would end up going down, there is no flashy breakout. Sergeant Geller bails her out.
With a bullshit excuse on enlisting Wayne as a consultant to find the missing Delilah Luccetti, they’re back on the road.
When she finally sees Wayne, he’s covered in blood on the side of the road to the prison, face harder than stone. There is, of course, a small, bloody hammer in his hand. He makes her look badass. It pulls at the corners of her lips.
“Hey, dummy,” she says.
He does a double-take at seeing her but recovers quickly.
“Hey,” he replies, breath heavy. “You okay?” Now there’s a smile on his face, and—
(she’s got pains from sleeping in a fucking bathtub, but Wayne is smiling. The dopey, stupid grin is most beautiful thing Del’s ever seen, and something in her twists as she realizes that it’s the first time she’s seen him do so.)
“Am now,” she says.
“So, how’d you find out?”
“Woke up in the backseat of a car. Wasn’t in prison. Arm was fine.” He hesitates. “I nearly strangled your dad until I saw your—uh, my reflection in the mirror.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Fat lot of good that restraint was, if you crashed the car later anyway.”
She nearly hits him when she realizes he, with her body, has no bra on.
He looks sheepish.
“I had no idea how to clip it.”
“Did you look?” she asks, point blank.
He pauses. Swallows heavily before opening his mouth cautiously.
“Yes. A little… a lot. Sorry.”
And his fearful, wide-eyed honesty in the face of imminent death makes her pity him just enough. She guesses she could settle for being flattered for now.
“At least you don’t have to worry about looking weird while buying tampons, now.” It’s an attempt at levity, but the look in Wayne’s eyes has Del immediately backtracking.
It’s a good thing her cycle had just passed.
He’s been much twitchier on the sidewalks lately, sticking to her side like personal space was last year’s trend.
“Okay,” she stops him. “The fuck’s up with you?”
Wayne hesitates but eventually relents.
“I’ve pissed off a lot of people, and you’ve got my face.” Del opened her mouth to retort but Wayne continued. “And I know you can protect yourself just fine, I know, but you shouldn’t have to be dealing with my prob—”
She silences him with a kiss.
When his eyes open, they’re filled with wonder as well as something else.
“What? Was it bad?”
He shakes his head.
“Nah, just kinda weird kissin’ myself.”
Del frowns and gives him—or her body—a onceover. It’s been a long time since she’s cared about beauty or shit like that, but she’s also accepted that she wasn’t all that pretty. Now, with that familiar slouch and stiff expression, she finds herself thinking she… actually looks kinda sexy.
Huh.
“Tell me ‘bout it.”
Though they try their best to adapt, there’s always the thought…
“What if we’re stuck like this forever?” Wayne says aloud one night. He doesn’t look particularly worried about the possibility, but she hears concern. Was it for himself? Her? Both of them?
She reaches out and gives his hand a squeeze.
“We’ll figure this shit out—we’ve been through worse! It’ll be fine.”
It is not fine.
Bobby Luccetti’s car—all patched up with the elegance of a rampaging bear—roars its way into the parking lot of their motel that same week. With Bobby is Raggy—or, Reggie Clay, freshly bailed from prison.
It takes less than ten minutes for things to go to hell in a handbasket.
Their door is broken down first. Then, Carl and Teddy descend on who they think is their sister. Bobby himself goes straight for who he thinks is Wayne, pocket knife in hand.
With Bobby about to carve her face like a Halloween pumpkin, the words just pour out.
“Daddy, stop!”
And everyone in the room just freezes, because no one wanted to hear those words spoken in Wayne McCullough’s voice to Bobby Luccetti. Bobby reels back, face scrunching in horrified recognition.
“D-Delila—?” is about as far as he gets before—
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sharp reports are deafening but not as fear-inducing as the image of Reggie standing in the doorway with a gun, eyes wide and excited. Why he fired multiple times at the walls first she’ll never know, but now he’s swinging it at Wayne and her brothers and Del finally understands why Wayne does what he does.
She moves and gets involved.
“Suck on this titty!” Reggie screams.
In that pinprick of a moment the world stills and time slows to a trickle. Wayne’s struggles renew with a desperate ferocity, his hand reaching toward her as if it could stop a bullet.
(He’s under the cabinet, reaching out as her throat was held closed.)
Del collides with Reggie.
Bang.
They both hit the ground. Her vision fills with electricity as pain shoots through her right arm, and Del releases a strangled shout.
In the distance, she hears sirens that are too far away. Reggie is being pulled up and wrestled away by her daddy. Wayne is shouting something that sounds like her name. Maybe everyone is shouting, but all she hears is Wayne.
The world, because it can’t be bothered to deal with the shit that they have to every day, goes dark.
When Del awakens, it’s nothing like the movies. Her head is throbbing and her entire body feels like one giant bruise. It takes an eternity for her vision to clear.
Her stomach drops when her eyes fall on her arm, IV drop attached and all, because she knows that arm.
She’s back in her own body.
Panic spreads through her like a wildfire because no no no the last thing she remembered was getting shot, getting shot in Wayne’s body, so where’s Wayne—
“Hey,” says a voice, so comfortably familiar in a way that makes her instantly relax. Wearing a new cast, Wayne stands at the doorway in that ratty grey hoodie of his, flowers in hand. She can see roots coated with dirt on them.
“Hey, dummy,” Del says, smiling.