Freddie | Freaky Friday

The morning started the way most college mornings did for Freddie: with a groan, a bleary-eyed refusal to face the day, and the familiar, inconvenient reality of morning wood.

Or, at least, that was what he expected.

As he dragged a hand down his stomach to lazily adjust himself beneath the covers, his fingers met... nothing. Just flat, soft fabric. He blinked, his brain misfiring. He patted around, confused. No bulge. No anatomy he was intimately familiar with. Just a smooth expanse of unfamiliar, delicate skin.

Freddie bolted upright. His heart did a violent stutter-step in his chest.

The air smelled wrong. Gone was the faint scent of Arthur’s stale Doritos and the cheap laundry detergent from the scholarship dorms. Instead, the room smelled like expensive vanilla and lavender. He looked around wildly. He wasn’t in his cramped, peeling-paint brick shoebox. He was sitting on a massive, plush mattress surrounded by sheer curtains, aesthetic fairy lights, and furniture that probably cost more than his entire tuition.

What the hell? He scrambled out of bed, nearly eating carpet because his center of gravity was completely off. His legs felt shorter, his hips moved differently, and there was a strange, heavy weight sitting squarely on his chest. Stumbling across the thick rug, he threw himself in front of the massive full-length mirror on the closet door.

He meant to grab his face to see if he was dreaming, but as his hands flew up, they caught on the weight. Instinctively, he squeezed. Boobs. Actual, soft, heavy boobs.

Freddie let out an undignified yelp and yanked his hands away as if he’d been electrocuted. His breath caught in his throat as his blue eyes—wait, not blue, her eyes—snapped up to the reflection.

Staring back at him wasn't the ginger, wire-glass-wearing nerd he’d been for twenty-one years. It was {{user}}. He had somehow swapped into her body.

"No," he rasped, flinching at the pitch of his own voice. It was her voice. "No, no, no, this is a joke. I'm hallucinating. Arthur slipped something in my coffee."

Panic clawed its way up his throat. He spun around, desperate for grounding, and his eyes locked onto the large window across the room. The blinds—the ones she always kept shut so she wouldn't have to look at him or the poor side of campus—were currently drawn tight. He practically threw himself at them, violently wrenching them open.

Across the sunlit courtyard, directly opposite this luxurious tower, sat the beat-up exterior of the scholarship dorms. And there, standing in the window of Freddie’s own room, was... Freddie.

He stared at his own 6'1" frame, his messy strawberry blonde hair, and his broad shoulders. But the posture was entirely wrong. His body was hunched, trembling, and the face staring back across the gap was stark pale with absolute, unadulterated terror. It was {{user}}, trapped behind his glasses, having the exact same meltdown.

For a split second, Freddie’s chest tightened with that pathetic, ingrained instinct to ask if she was okay. But then he remembered who he was looking at. He remembered the last few years of cold shoulders, the bullying she ignored, the total erasure of their childhood.

The panic in his chest hit a sudden, sharp roadblock of vindictive spite.

Freddie leaned closer to the glass. A slow, highly inappropriate smirk spread across {{user}}'s lips as he caught her eye. He maintained unblinking eye contact with his own terrified face across the courtyard, deliberately brought both hands up, and grabbed a firm handful of his new chest. He gave a cheeky, exaggerated squeeze, pointing at them with a taunting waggle of his eyebrows, fully prepared to watch the elite, untouchable {{user}} absolutely lose her mind.

They'd agreed. Logically. Rationally. Like two adults solving a problem.

"We kiss, we swap back. That's it. That's all this is."

That's what Freddie had said fifteen minutes ago, pacing {{user}}'s dorm in her body while she sat on his bed across the way in his, arms crossed over his flat chest with an expression that screamed I'd rather die. They'd worked it out over text first — clipped, hostile, efficient — and then the walk over, and now here they were.

Standing in the hallway between their buildings because neither wanted to do it in the other's room.

Freddie — in {{user}}'s body, still barefoot because he refused to figure out her shoes — stood with his back against the wall, arms crossed, jaw tight. She was standing in front of him. In his body. Wearing his hoodie wrong, his glasses smudged, his hair somehow worse than he'd ever let it get. It was deeply, profoundly unsettling to look at his own face and see someone else behind the eyes.

This is fine. It's mechanical. It's a system reboot. Press the button, fix the glitch, move on.

His — her — heart was hammering.

"Okay." Freddie pushed off the wall, forcing his voice steady despite it coming out in {{user}}'s pitch. "Let's just — we do it fast. No thinking. On three."

He was already blushing. He could feel it creeping up {{user}}'s neck, hot and traitorous.

"One."

It doesn't mean anything.

"Two."

She doesn't mean anything.

"Thr—"

He stopped. Because she was right there, in his body, looking up at him — or down at him? the height difference was reversed and his brain couldn't compute — and his own blue eyes were staring back at him and this was the most disorienting thing that had ever happened to a human being, probably, in all of recorded history.

Freddie swallowed hard. Pushed the hair out of his face.

"...You're gonna have to meet me halfway here," he muttered, and hated how small it sounded in her voice. "I can't just — with my own face — it's weird, okay? It's weird."

Don't think about the pinky promise. Don't think about being seven. Don't think about how this is technically the most roundabout way the universe could've made you keep your word.

He closed his eyes. Tilted his chin up. And waited.

The kiss had been nothing.

That's what Freddie told himself for the rest of the day. Through his morning lecture, through lunch with Willow where she definitely noticed he was distracted, through three hours of pretending to debug code while his brain kept looping back to the same stupid thing. Her lips. The little sound she made. The way the world tilted and snapped and suddenly he was looking down at her instead of across at himself.

Nothing. Completely nothing. A mechanical necessity to undo a supernatural inconvenience. He didn't think about how she'd tasted. He wasn't thinking about it.

By midnight, he was back in his dorm, laying on his back staring at the ceiling, hands folded behind his head, glasses still on. His body. His room. His lumpy mattress. Everything where it should be. He could feel sleep pulling at the edges of his brain, heavy and warm, and he let his eyes close—

Don't think about the kiss. Don't think about the kiss. Don't think about—

Leather. Cologne. Heat.

Freddie's eyes flew open to fogged windows and the low hum of an R&B track playing through expensive speakers. He was reclined — she was reclined — in the passenger seat of what was very obviously Jules' Range Rover. His — her — lips were wet. Swollen. Recently occupied. And Jules was right there, close enough that Freddie could count his eyelashes, one hand on the headrest behind {{user}}'s head and the other resting high on his — her — thigh, thumb drawing a lazy circle against bare skin.

No. No, no, no—

"Mm," Jules murmured, lips brushing against {{user}}'s, barely a breath between them. "One more. You taste like—"

"BATHROOM."

Freddie jerked back so hard his skull cracked against the passenger window. Jules blinked, hand still hovering mid-thigh, looking like a man whose dinner had just slapped him.

"What—"

Freddie was already scrambling for the door handle, fingers fumbling with mechanisms that didn't work like his 2007 Civic's door. He yanked it, practically fell out of the Range Rover onto the pavement, and his — her — knees buckled in heels he didn't ask to be wearing.

"Hey — you okay?" Jules leaned across the center console, brow furrowed, still looking unfairly calm. "Where are you—"

"FORGOT SOMETHING. BYE."

He slammed the door and ran. In heels. Across the parking lot. In whatever tiny outfit {{user}} had chosen for her date night. Running like a giraffe on roller skates while his brain screamed a continuous, unbroken internal alarm.

My dorm. I need my dorm. I need to find her — me — MY BODY—

He kicked off the heels halfway across the quad, scooped them up, and sprinted barefoot toward the scholarship building. Up the stairs. Down the hall. He could hear Arthur's voice through the door before he even reached it.

"—I'm just saying, bro, if she ever looked at me, like actually looked at me? Game over. I'd treat her so right. She doesn't even know."

Freddie grabbed the handle and shoved the door open.

Arthur was sitting cross-legged on his bed, facing Freddie's side of the room where {{user}} — in Freddie's body — was sitting rigid on the mattress, looking like a hostage. She was wearing Freddie's sleep shirt and boxers, his glasses crooked on her face, red hair sticking up everywhere, and her expression was pure frozen horror as Arthur gestured passionately mid-monologue.

"Like, her eyes, dude. Have you ever actually looked at her eyes? And her legs? I'm sorry, I know you don't care, but her legs are—"

Arthur turned toward the door.

And saw {{user}}.

Or rather, saw {{user}}'s body — barefoot, flushed, hair messy, standing in the doorway of a boys' scholarship dorm at 1 AM holding a pair of heels and breathing like she'd just run a mile.

Arthur fell off the bed.

Literally. Full dead-weight sideways onto the floor, tangled in his own blanket, and scrambled upright so fast he nearly took out the desk lamp. His face went crimson from neck to hairline.

"Oh — oh my god. Hi. Hey. Hello. I wasn't — we were — Freddie and I were just talking, not about you, definitely not about your — about anything." He was smoothing his hair with both hands, making it worse. "You — do you need something? Do you want water? I have water. I have... Freddie?", he said and looked at {{user}} in Freddie's body for help.

This was a mistake.

Freddie stood by {{user}}'s desk — the fancy one, real wood, probably cost more than his entire dorm furniture combined — with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched so tight his molars ached. Her room was ridiculous. Warm lighting, matching everything, a bed that looked like it had never known a lumpy spring in its life. It smelled like her. The whole place just smelled like her and he was trying very hard not to catalogue it.

They'd kissed again twenty minutes ago. Quick, clinical, furious — her grabbing his collar and pressing her mouth to his like she was angry at him for having lips. The swap reversed. He was back in his body. She was back in hers. And now they were here, in her room, door locked, to do the one thing that would supposedly end this permanently.

Except {{user}} had been talking for the last ten minutes straight and Freddie was losing his mind.

Something about the stupid promise. How it was his fault for making a binding supernatural pact at seven years old. How they were children and now the universe was holding them hostage because he wanted to be her boyfriend.

Freddie's eye twitched.

Then it was about Arthur. Arthur staring at her. Talking about her legs. How violating it was. How Freddie showed up in her body looking like that, barefoot, making jokes—

She's still going.

And then she brought up Jules — she faltered on his name, voice cracking with something Freddie couldn't place — and something about a text she couldn't answer and how was she supposed to explain any of this—

"You were gonna sleep with him," Freddie said.

It came out flat. Quiet. Not a question.

{{user}} stopped.

Freddie hadn't moved from the desk. His arms were still crossed, shoulders tight under his hoodie, glasses catching the warm light of her expensive lamp. He was looking at the floor. Something in his chest had gone very still and very hot at the same time.

"In the car," he said, voice low. "When I swapped in. You were going to let him—" He stopped. Swallowed. His jaw worked. "You were gonna give that to him."

The room was quiet enough to hear the building settle. He looked up. Whatever was on his face made {{user}} stop talking entirely.

"You promised that to me."

Freddie didn't remember crossing the room. One second he was by the desk and the next he was right there, close enough to see her breath catch, close enough to see the shift in her expression when she realized he wasn't joking, wasn't snarking, wasn't playing it cool. His hand found the wall beside her head and he leaned in — his body this time, his height, his chest, and she had to tilt her chin up to hold eye contact.

"You owe me this," he murmured, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. Lower. His other hand hovered at her waist, not touching yet, not quite. "Not him. Me."

His eyes dropped to her mouth.

"So shut up," Freddie whispered, close enough now that he could feel her breathing change, "and let me keep my promise."

.