Stay Through Pregnancy
“I have to stay! I can’t leave this race!”
Invigorated with our choice, you throw yourself into the battle. Your arms seem to move with a force unknown to you. Slowly, the alien body of the tigress grows to feel like your own as the muscles ache and throb with the results of your own mind’s choices.
You slay through the enemies. You protect fellow tigers. You see their stripes and a sense of recognition strikes you. In the midst of battle, the spilling blood smeared over all of you seems to bind you in a new type of blood relative.
The battle by no means ends, but suddenly the captain shuffles you away.
“The camp is secured. Please, for the babies-” You nod, accepting this protected status. Though, through the length of the three month term, you never stop working.
You can feel a building sense of pride and motherhood stirring with the beings inside of you. You build mud huts as long as the sun blazes above. The screams of combat provide a constant soundtrack, but you and a cropping of elders are the only ones who have reason not to battle. Together, you build walls, dig wells, make homes, tend the wounded.
Day in and day out, you create life in your gut and in the entire village around you before finally you find yourself weakened with child and constrained to a mat.
In a new montage, the final days of the pregnancy mount around you. You can feel the little beings inside of you, growing, thrashing and kicking inside of you eager to enter the world. Sleepless, uncomfortable, swollen nights bleed into the sudden, shearing arrival of the birthing itself.
They escape from you, finally, with eager lips. You meet the cubs first when their weak mouths search up your stomach for the budding, swollen nipples lined down your chest. Your entire world has been changed.
The alien form of the tigress’s body has suddenly become a gift as you watch it give life to quickly growing cubs. You’re moved, with help, into a small hut that will be permanently yours. Still resting most days, you sleep on a comfortable mat with with growing cubs and during the days you work your claws that are growing ever more familiar to weave out a blanket of wool, furs, and hairs. You sit with elders, still working, when they rest and hear the stories of their village.
“The legend of the warriors once tells us each stripe we have is the mark of a duty fulfilled. An enemy slain is a stripe, hut built, child raised. When our ancestors pass, they give us only their most proud stripes, then we must earn our own in our life. You have certainly earned your own.”
When their eyes open for the first time, you feel yourself purring. When they begin to mewl and murmur to you, you imagine when they are old enough to say, “Momma!”
You never thought you’d be a mother, but now, you couldn’t imagine not being one. When they sleep, you count their stripes and wonder which of your deeds are on Milanka’s forehead or Shirtina’s tiny tail. There, you think, that’s the hut I built racing down Aratara’s back.
You hope you get to see them earn their own.
Written by Picklessauce69 on 19 May 2016
The end (for now)