Fic: The Switch (1/?)
Title: The Switch
Author: metaphlame
Alternate Links: AO3
Rating: Mature
Summary: Some handle the sudden global switching of gendered bodies better than others.
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (eventually)
Warnings: AU, Genderswap
Notes: I don't actually like the implication in the title that there is merely A and B with nothing in between or outside. I intend to contest that binary as the story moves along. But I started it there to bring it into question.
Like most great events, people tried to explain The Switch away after the fact. Tried to say they'd seen it coming, that it was inevitable, really--had people only paid attention to this weather pattern or that religious doomsayer, they too would have avoided being blindsided by that which, in truth, blindsided everyone.
The fact was, there was no explanation for The Switch. No comical forays into ancient temples and sudden, violent shakings of the earth. No parting of the seas, no explosions, no ultimatums handed down from on high--wherever "on high" meant for you. No deaths. At least, not initially.
There were those who could not handle The Switch, of course. Those who, after trying to make sense of the change in their anatomy for a few days or weeks or months, found it too foreign, too confounding, and who checked out, either mentally through drugs or alcohol, or literally through the usual array of means mankind manufactures to end itself.
But such strident reactions to The Switch were, to the surprise of no few who lived through those times, rare. Far more common was a distant uneasiness, an awkwardness instantly recognizable for what it was--the stumbling of a baby deer on legs too new for it. For these bodies were new. Old in years, maybe, or young; pitted and scarred or voluptuous and unmarred, but still new. Unknown. Longed-for, in some cases, welcomed in others, and ultimately accustomed to in many. But heartbreakingly new, always and forever.
Relationships sundered. Gender studies leapt for a time to a positions of utmost prominence on academic rosters. What made you who you were? You who once saw the world from inside a man's body, lusting after women, now walking about with breasts of your own, your wife now a hairy being beside you in your bed. Do you still love her? How much of your love attached itself to her body, and how long must your unmoor yourself from her physicality to love her back? Can both of you manage to hang onto what you felt, and touch parts of each other that didn't exist before, with hands that don't feel like your own?
Oftentimes, the answer was no. Wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends--many parted ways, some with more acrimony than others. Some sought the same shapes they'd always desired, fumbling into expressions of a sexuality they'd scorned once. Others, religious and not, persisted in their discomfort with any pairing other than male and female, and threw themselves without love into relations they viewed as right, if empty. Still others rejoiced. Those who had been born into the wrong bodies to begin with now woke up that day with the one they'd longed for, oftentimes for most of their lives. The Switch was not without its ardent fans. It was now the formerly cisgendered who had to pour money into surgeons' coffers to try and shape themselves into a semblance of what they should have been. Of what they were, once.
Like assassinations and peace treaties, where you were on the day of The Switch became an instant conversation-starter. At your parents' house. On a red-eye flight. Asleep at your desk on the night shift. Night, always night, the world over--and always during sleep. A kindness, this, some thought, not having to see your body change so swiftly, so much. As news reports started sweeping the world from the international dateline onward, some people tried to cheat what they saw as an oncoming tide. They chugged energy drinks, set alarms to blare at the droop of an eyelid; begged their friends to wake them. Eventually they all slept, though, and they all switched. The curious set up phones and computers to record themselves as they slept, to try and record the change the news warned them was coming. A few actually caught the changes on tape and they were unnerving--pants growing slack and shirts growing tight; stubble appearing where only down had been before. Eventually these videos would become legendary in certain circles, a kind of "change porn," equally revered and reviled for the inexplicable sea change they documented. People replayed them again and again, trying to place themselves in the shot, trying to imagine how their own changes would have looked from the outside.
John had watched them, as had everyone else, as a way to try to understand what had come to pass. And like most people who watched the videos, he found little solace in them. What did the retreat of a young women's breasts in New Zealand have to do with the sudden appearance of his own? What the thinning hair up top, and the eruption of hair in the armpits, of the woman who'd been the Cadbury poster child have to do with the sudden and cataclysmic disappearance of his penis?
It did not help to share a flat, throughout the chaos thrown up by The Switch, with one Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, who had once been a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing man, and who was now a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing woman. At least, that was what his voice and the box of tampons under the sink said. The man was still inside that willowy woman's body. Sherlock had undergone the Switch like everyone else. The vexing thing was that he didn't seem to mind much.
Even the very morning of the Switch, he'd seemed fascinated rather than distraught. John still remembered his own slow rise to consciousness, the insistent sense of something being _off_, the bedsheets in disarray around him and more tactile, somehow, in areas they oughtn't to have been. The muddle of morning fuzz thoughts--why do I feel like this? am I hungover? did I have a roll in the sheets with--oh god, the sheets! Me under them! And then the scrabbling, the touching, the middle-aged woman's breasts sitting on his ribcage like two perfect strangers. The howling absence between his legs.
And the shriek that rose in his throat when he realized he was being watched this entire horrifying time by a tall slender woman in a dressing gown, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands tucked up into the slightly too-long sleeves. "Oh John," she quipped dryly as he clutched the blankets round himself in a vain attempt at protection from--who? What? Himself? "Trust you to sleep in on the most important day in human history."
"What in the--" John began, but clamped his mouth shut on the voice that wasn't his own. They were his words, but not his voice.
"I've been watching you for hours," the woman said from the doorway, stepping forward into the beams of light that had shouldered their way through the blinds. One of the beams lit up those too-pale eyes and John knew, then. "I was hoping to see it happen but I missed it. Stepped into the bathroom for only a moment, for the mirror, and like a fool I didn't set up a camera beforehand. It seems that it only happens to people when they sleep, and only a few people have caught it on video so far. They've uploaded to YouTube but I rather wanted first-hand evidence myself." The woman paused in her padding across the floor, narrowing her eyes on a distant point. "This will be terribly interesting. Football, finance, even the weatherman--you should have seen her, though I suppose I mean him now, try to talk about the storms in the west, all while desperately trying to keep her empty bra from falling off her--what, what is it?"
John's voice was a croak, a plea, coming from a vocal register not his own and out of lips not his own and toward a flatmate not his own but so, so familiar.
"Sherlock?"
And then, to his horror, John Watson had started to cry. Right there in his own bed, but not his own body, not one he'd be willing to call his own then or ever. When his attempt to choke down on the strange-sounding sobs started turning them into gulping, gasping wheezes instead, he felt a cool hand pat his shoulder stiffly, awkwardly.
"Breathe, John," said the woman who was Sherlock, in a voice low with command intended to soothe. "Just breathe."
And John breathed. One, two, three.
Author: metaphlame
Alternate Links: AO3
Rating: Mature
Summary: Some handle the sudden global switching of gendered bodies better than others.
Characters/Pairings: John/Sherlock (eventually)
Warnings: AU, Genderswap
Notes: I don't actually like the implication in the title that there is merely A and B with nothing in between or outside. I intend to contest that binary as the story moves along. But I started it there to bring it into question.
Like most great events, people tried to explain The Switch away after the fact. Tried to say they'd seen it coming, that it was inevitable, really--had people only paid attention to this weather pattern or that religious doomsayer, they too would have avoided being blindsided by that which, in truth, blindsided everyone.
The fact was, there was no explanation for The Switch. No comical forays into ancient temples and sudden, violent shakings of the earth. No parting of the seas, no explosions, no ultimatums handed down from on high--wherever "on high" meant for you. No deaths. At least, not initially.
There were those who could not handle The Switch, of course. Those who, after trying to make sense of the change in their anatomy for a few days or weeks or months, found it too foreign, too confounding, and who checked out, either mentally through drugs or alcohol, or literally through the usual array of means mankind manufactures to end itself.
But such strident reactions to The Switch were, to the surprise of no few who lived through those times, rare. Far more common was a distant uneasiness, an awkwardness instantly recognizable for what it was--the stumbling of a baby deer on legs too new for it. For these bodies were new. Old in years, maybe, or young; pitted and scarred or voluptuous and unmarred, but still new. Unknown. Longed-for, in some cases, welcomed in others, and ultimately accustomed to in many. But heartbreakingly new, always and forever.
Relationships sundered. Gender studies leapt for a time to a positions of utmost prominence on academic rosters. What made you who you were? You who once saw the world from inside a man's body, lusting after women, now walking about with breasts of your own, your wife now a hairy being beside you in your bed. Do you still love her? How much of your love attached itself to her body, and how long must your unmoor yourself from her physicality to love her back? Can both of you manage to hang onto what you felt, and touch parts of each other that didn't exist before, with hands that don't feel like your own?
Oftentimes, the answer was no. Wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends--many parted ways, some with more acrimony than others. Some sought the same shapes they'd always desired, fumbling into expressions of a sexuality they'd scorned once. Others, religious and not, persisted in their discomfort with any pairing other than male and female, and threw themselves without love into relations they viewed as right, if empty. Still others rejoiced. Those who had been born into the wrong bodies to begin with now woke up that day with the one they'd longed for, oftentimes for most of their lives. The Switch was not without its ardent fans. It was now the formerly cisgendered who had to pour money into surgeons' coffers to try and shape themselves into a semblance of what they should have been. Of what they were, once.
Like assassinations and peace treaties, where you were on the day of The Switch became an instant conversation-starter. At your parents' house. On a red-eye flight. Asleep at your desk on the night shift. Night, always night, the world over--and always during sleep. A kindness, this, some thought, not having to see your body change so swiftly, so much. As news reports started sweeping the world from the international dateline onward, some people tried to cheat what they saw as an oncoming tide. They chugged energy drinks, set alarms to blare at the droop of an eyelid; begged their friends to wake them. Eventually they all slept, though, and they all switched. The curious set up phones and computers to record themselves as they slept, to try and record the change the news warned them was coming. A few actually caught the changes on tape and they were unnerving--pants growing slack and shirts growing tight; stubble appearing where only down had been before. Eventually these videos would become legendary in certain circles, a kind of "change porn," equally revered and reviled for the inexplicable sea change they documented. People replayed them again and again, trying to place themselves in the shot, trying to imagine how their own changes would have looked from the outside.
John had watched them, as had everyone else, as a way to try to understand what had come to pass. And like most people who watched the videos, he found little solace in them. What did the retreat of a young women's breasts in New Zealand have to do with the sudden appearance of his own? What the thinning hair up top, and the eruption of hair in the armpits, of the woman who'd been the Cadbury poster child have to do with the sudden and cataclysmic disappearance of his penis?
It did not help to share a flat, throughout the chaos thrown up by The Switch, with one Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, who had once been a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing man, and who was now a tall, ethereal, disapproving, oddly piercing woman. At least, that was what his voice and the box of tampons under the sink said. The man was still inside that willowy woman's body. Sherlock had undergone the Switch like everyone else. The vexing thing was that he didn't seem to mind much.
Even the very morning of the Switch, he'd seemed fascinated rather than distraught. John still remembered his own slow rise to consciousness, the insistent sense of something being _off_, the bedsheets in disarray around him and more tactile, somehow, in areas they oughtn't to have been. The muddle of morning fuzz thoughts--why do I feel like this? am I hungover? did I have a roll in the sheets with--oh god, the sheets! Me under them! And then the scrabbling, the touching, the middle-aged woman's breasts sitting on his ribcage like two perfect strangers. The howling absence between his legs.
And the shriek that rose in his throat when he realized he was being watched this entire horrifying time by a tall slender woman in a dressing gown, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands tucked up into the slightly too-long sleeves. "Oh John," she quipped dryly as he clutched the blankets round himself in a vain attempt at protection from--who? What? Himself? "Trust you to sleep in on the most important day in human history."
"What in the--" John began, but clamped his mouth shut on the voice that wasn't his own. They were his words, but not his voice.
"I've been watching you for hours," the woman said from the doorway, stepping forward into the beams of light that had shouldered their way through the blinds. One of the beams lit up those too-pale eyes and John knew, then. "I was hoping to see it happen but I missed it. Stepped into the bathroom for only a moment, for the mirror, and like a fool I didn't set up a camera beforehand. It seems that it only happens to people when they sleep, and only a few people have caught it on video so far. They've uploaded to YouTube but I rather wanted first-hand evidence myself." The woman paused in her padding across the floor, narrowing her eyes on a distant point. "This will be terribly interesting. Football, finance, even the weatherman--you should have seen her, though I suppose I mean him now, try to talk about the storms in the west, all while desperately trying to keep her empty bra from falling off her--what, what is it?"
John's voice was a croak, a plea, coming from a vocal register not his own and out of lips not his own and toward a flatmate not his own but so, so familiar.
"Sherlock?"
And then, to his horror, John Watson had started to cry. Right there in his own bed, but not his own body, not one he'd be willing to call his own then or ever. When his attempt to choke down on the strange-sounding sobs started turning them into gulping, gasping wheezes instead, he felt a cool hand pat his shoulder stiffly, awkwardly.
"Breathe, John," said the woman who was Sherlock, in a voice low with command intended to soothe. "Just breathe."
And John breathed. One, two, three.