#cis-swap

[starry-bubbles]

cw: cis-swap, lesbian jm/jk, pregnancy, weight gain, judgemental dancers

---

professional ballet dancer jm shocking everyone by putting in notice for maternity leave. jm is at such a critical moment in her career, having just been promoted to principal from soloist in the upcoming season. word spreads fast of course, because everyone knows amongst dancers, need for gossip and drama is like water and air.

luckily, jm just embraces it, excited to be a mom.

"oh my goodness! congrats!" "how far along?" "how was the morning sickness? I hear it can be really bad..."

jm takes their congratulations gracefully, they just hit 14 weeks, she tells them. the morning sickness was pretty tough, but letting up a little now.

"when I heard, it all just clicked what it was about you." "are you showing yet at all?" "the pregnancy glow is real! that's for sure, just look at you!"

jm gets a slightly funny look on her face, but then laughs, and thanks them again. it's a little early to be showing, she points out, but baby is growing faster, now that they enter the 2nd trimester.

rehearsals continue. jm endures more teasing, both in good fun and needling in only the way ballet dancers are with each other. the competition of the industry makes it so, even friendships are subject to the cut-throat nature of their craft.

jm's impending maternity leave, despite her scheduled return, will leave an opening to be filled. the other soloists jm was once a part of, are eager for their turn in the spotlight.

except, weeks go by, and jm seems largely the same as she always is.

"how are you feeling?" "tired? I know your body must be under a lot of strain." "should you sit this run through out? I know the variation and can step in if you need a break!"

jm politely declines. she dances with the same vigor and abandon as usual. partnering lifts with fellow principal sj's hands around her still toned waist.

it's not until sj accidentally flubs a lift, dropping jm who tumbles ungracefully to the ground that the negative attention turns on him now.

jm is perfectly fine, just a little bruised. nothing that hasn't happened before, but the girls are switched from predator to protective in an instant.

"you need to be more careful!" "don't spin her so many times! what if she gets dizzy?" "ugh, you men are so clueless!" "you do remember you are responsible for the two of them out there now, don't you?"

sj just stands there, shocked and confused until jm rescues him. assuring everyone that she is fine, she also missed a cue, taking some of the responsibility for herself.

weeks go on, jm is scrutinized by the company of course, but that's nothing new. but with growing intensity, a new concern is causing everyone to be wary.

jm still isn't showing.

Some of it can be blamed on the exercise, jms toned abs keeping everything tight. she is wearing more warmups these days, so perhaps they are concealing something, but it's a relief to almost everyone when they are about to start rehearsal run for the day and jm can't clasp her practice tutu in the back. sj tries as well but it's so tight and the eyelets just won't catch.

"it's no good," sj tells her.

jm groans hiding his face in embarassment. "the baby is just craving snack cakes all day long now. that's all we have in the house!"

sj just cackles at her, giving her thickened tummy a rub through the leotard. "jk is going to get a kick out of this!" he says delightedly. while some of the other girls rush to coo at her.

"oh jm-ie! don't worry! it's normal!" "nobody's judging you, it's just baby weight!" "...if there's anything else that doesn't fit, I could give that purple yumiko a good home..."

Everyone expects jm to balloon from that point, but she is strangely much the same, besides coming into morning class maybe a little more frazzled or distracted. jm's weight seems to plateau too, and she doesn't have any problems getting into her stage costumes at fittings.

it's all a grand mystery, some even start to wonder if the pregnancy is all a ruse, despite her avid overheard conversations with best friends and fellow dancers hs and th about nursery concept and crib assembly projects on days off.

it's only when at a big charity gala for the ballet, at the afterparty from the performance, jm gets the opportunity to introduce her stunning, glowing, and very heavily pregnant wife jk that everything clicks. jk is in a black evening gown that clings to her every curve. her black, curly bob sits just at her softly doubled chin and her cheeks squish deliciously has she beams proudly after her wife still riding the adrenaline high of performing. jk is everything jm is not, she's tall, plump and soft all over and jm takes every opportunity to show her off, a hand around her curvy waist and on her big baby bump the whole night.

"I hope your enjoyed the pay off of your little joke," sj says to jm after more than a couple glasses of champagne.

jk looks up at him confused when she is resting her sore feet by sitting on one of the ornate benches in the grand foyer of the theater. "what joke?"

th jumps in, "jm-ies been implying she's been the one pregnant for the last 6 months!"

"I have not!" jm blushes, but crosses her arms in conviction. "people just have heteronormative expectations... now I get to see them all look like absolute fools for it. I was teaching a valuable lesson."

"that's why everyone looked so surprised when my massive ass waltzed in here," jk mused, caressing her belly and turning big doe eyes to her wife. "I'm so tired. baby, take me home?"

she reached out chubby hands to have jm's slender ones help her up. jm offered a bolstering kiss for her wife's strenuous effort.

"with pleasure, my love."

[rheaitis]

See your Female Arjuna and crave for reverse, what if Karna born girl

“I do not have a son,” Pritha says once her husband has finished his enumeration of the ways in which they could obtain heirs despite the curse keeping him forcibly celibate, just as though she is an ignorant girl in some backwater village. Behind his back, Madri rolls her eyes in what would be brazen mockery from one less graceful, and is still amusing enough to make Pritha purse her lips to avoid a smile.

“Ah,” Pandu says. “Very well, O Blessed One, we will contrive a solution.”

They know, each as well as the other, what solution it is likely to be: one from the getting of a child and the other from being begotten. They look away to the soil, to the sky, both mortified, while fearless Madri glances from one to another, curious.

“I do not have a son,” Pritha says again, “but, O King, I have been blessed by the sage Durvasa and can summon the gods into my embrace.”

Pandu’s head swings up, eyes shining eager, pale face flushing a blotchy red. So eager, her valiant husband, like a boy on his first hunt, a pup on the scent.

It is Madri who says, “May not such gifts be perilous in mortal hands? You may win a son and lose a wife, O Husband.”

It would be heartwarming if Pritha could be certain it wasn’t manipulative instead. Regardless, she reaches out to tangle her fingers with Madri’s, and smiles at Pandu before saying, “I cannot be certain it will be a son, but you will lose no wives to this quest. In my thoughtless youth I summoned Aditya to my bed and he left me a daughter golden as dawn-bright Usha.”

Vasu is conscious of the stares she’s getting, on top of the stares all of them are getting. It is foolish how unprepared she feels for any of it when they had discussed the likely situation every night after the younger children had fallen asleep, she and Yudh shoulder to shoulder facing their mother like disciples, supplicants. Queen Pritha was lovely in the forest, but with every day on the road she has grown more splendid: at the head of the procession now she looks like an idol into which some god has breathed life. Her children and stepsons, Vasu diagnoses with an expert eye, are far less presentable. Vasu is the only one of them to have ever inhabited a city, a palace, and she was only four when outriders from Pandu took her from the arms of the nanny she’d thought was her mother.

“They’re looking at us,” Arjun complains from behind her shoulder, his pony nudging at her geldling. “I don’t like it.”

Arjun is her absolute favourite, a thing which she does not even attempt to disguise. But he is, like all little brothers—and Vasu is an expert in the matter, having five—an annoying brat with a gift for overstating the obvious.

“It’ll be worse when we get to the palace,” Bhim says ghoulishly. “All those cousins!”

“I’m sure they’ll be nice,” Vasu tells him. “Now look after the twins, I need to go talk to Yudh. Don’t hare off on a ride, this isn’t like home.”

It would be home, it would have to be, but for all she’s nineteen and a woman grown, Vasu feels for a moment as shockingly young as Madri’s sons: nine and still bawling for their parents every night.

The cousins are awful. The aunt is fine if remote, the uncles are… Vasu isn’t sure what she thinks of the uncles, for all they make it very clear what they variously think of her: Shakuni a tool, Vidura a protege, Dhritarashtra the possibility for an alliance. Grand-Uncle Bhishma, if he notices her beyond the archery, does not approve. It’s fine, Vasu’s not looking for approval and she is, she knows she is, an aberration, out of place in the neat story of Pandu’s sons, like an extra thumb on a hand.

But the cousins, oh the cousins. The eldest of them is the girl, Dushala, a month or so younger than Yudh and nearly as quiet. Then the unending stream of boys, led by Suyodhan who would be comely if he weren’t scowling and Sushasan whose name is a despairing parent’s fond wish. Vasu felt guilty for not being able to keep all their names in mind, but only a little because Yudh couldn’t either. Probably their mother could, as she’d always known not only the names but histories of all the servants, sages and itinerant mendicants they encountered.To Vasu they’re a river of troubles that Bhim keeps enthusiastically diving into to take on the crocodiles and eels in the depths.

And then the river tries to drown him. Vasu listens dry-eyed to their mother’s reasoning and agrees to keep it quiet. Then she and Yudh go out to their favourite hiding-place—and what a horror it is that they need such a spot, here in the home of her brothers’ father—and drink their way steadily through the last of their year’s stash of honeymead. In the morning she bawls them all out, makes them swear to never venture away from each other, never listen to their cousins, never trust anyone in service to the princes of the Elephant Throne.

It should, Vasu knows, be rather a surprise that it has taken so long for anyone to plot her marriage than to find it in her mother's plans, but it has been so long, and she is twenty-one and old for it, that it comes as a shock to have Queens Pritha and Gandhari turn to her one morning while she's doing her best to be unobtrusive, and say

"It is a good match."

"We do need eyes in Kampilya."

Another thing unsurprising, that it is her mother who cares for the politics of it openly and her aunt tries to disguise it with words of care.

It is, and they do. Vasu does not bother protesting that she has little interest in men and less in marriage, or that she would far prefer to watch her brothers grow into the glorious heroes they’re sure to become. She is Pandu’s daughter by adoption and Pritha’s by birth, a woman of the Yadavas far more than of the Kauravas: a political animal from curled hair to painted toenails. Better alliances will keep Yudh’s throne more stable, and their cousins have sent away their only girl.

The boys are gratifyingly miserable, Bhim cooking up a storm and Arjun coaxing her into archery lessons he no longer needs and the twins mutely clinging. With all that it is hardest to bid farewell to Yudh, who takes it all with dry eyes and a clenched jaw. He is seventeen, too old to need or heed her assurances, this brother whose birth restored her to her mother's arms and found her the only father she has ever had.

“You will see me again,” she tells him at last, and prods at him when he mulishly rounds his shoulders. “It is not so far in a light chariot, from here to Kampilya.”

“We met the twins’ uncle last year,” Yudh counters, “and our own never to this day.”

“My sons will see theirs,” she tells him as she gets up to dress, as her maids have been begging her for half the morning. “I’ll come to your coronation, little brother.”

Three years, five months and nine days after she sees them for the last time, a messenger comes to Vasupriya with news of her brothers’ death.

Her husband finds her in the outer courtyard of their quarters, methodically shredding a dropped tailfeather from one of the peacocks thronging the walls.

“We set out at dawn,” Shikhandi says, dropping to sit beside her and taking her wringing hands between his. "It is not so far in a light chariot."

[artemis-orientalis]

My brain: hey, what if you write out TOH episodes but genderswapped

Me: okay, sounds fun

~

My brain: what if you post them on ao3

Me: but there’s not really any divergence from canon, what would be the point?

My brain: idk, someone might read it

Me: I guess

~

My brain: NONBINARY HUNTER

Me: alright, just let me get to season 2 first

~

My brain: what if after Hunter finds out they’re a grimwalker they struggle with coming to terms with being a copy of Belos’ sister and Luz tells them that they’re not just a copy bc Belos’ sister was a woman and they’re obviously not and its all emotional and shit

Me: ffs I’m on the third episode stop thinking about Hunter and focus on season 1!!!!

[questionedturkey]

I'm onto something here,,,

[ashyelbowedtransgender]

Petiton to start calling genderbends cis-swaps

[sunshine-tattoo]

The Lady T’Pock of Vulcan. I made cis-swap Spock on a character creator. Ain’t she pretty? Captain Jane T. Kirk is all <3 <3 <3 <3

[pyroreo]

it doesnt have to be this way