Characters: Loki, Billy, Teddy, Tommy. To a lesser extent, America, Verity, Wanda Maximoff, and Rebecca Kaplan.
Pairings: BLT (Billy/Loki/Teddy polyamory)
Warnings: accidental pregnancy, dysphoria, cissexism
Note: Random future fic! Takes place about 3 years post-canon. Teddy is about 22 here, Billy just a few months younger. If you need an explanation as to why Loki, Billy, and Teddy are in a poly triad, see my fic Be Careful Making Wishes in the Dark (although Maybe, Baby is not a canon sequel to it).
Loki realized ze was pregnant the day of Kate's 24th birthday party. It wasn't Kate's actual 24th birthday, because the Rhino attacked downtown on her actual birthday and ruined all of their plans.
The belated party was better anyway, because it involved paintball and frozen yogurt.
Loki was in zir slighter form for the party (as ze had been for the past week), mostly because ze found the perfect dress for the party and wanted to make sure it would continue to fit.
At the end of the night, drenched in sweat, ze let zir paint splattered dress fall to the floor and finally allowed zir body to shift back into zir usual form.
Except.
A million tiny changes occurred simultaneously; hormones flooding zir veins or dispersing, bones lengthening or thickening in places, flesh shifting just slightly. Among all of these changes, one small lump of cells was still.
Loki paused in zir shape-shifting, and poked at zir abdomen experimentally. It didn't seem different, just the same soft fleshy skin over firm muscle. Still… ze reached out with magic as one might examine one's body: flexing each muscle individually until ze found the problem.
There it was, lodged in the uterus ze so rarely had: a tiny, almost insignificant bundle of cells.
"Oh," Loki said aloud to an empty room. "Oh shit."
Loki didn't come clean for almost a month.
"So are you serious about wanting to play PS3 with me, because I will kick your ass so hard-"
"I'm having a baby."
"I'm sorry, what?" Billy shrieked.
"Seriously?" Teddy asked. Loki gave him a look. "Wait, really? You're not just trying to get Billy to shut up about video games?"
"I am seriously pregnant."
"Is that why you've been a girl for so long?" Billy asked, eyes wide and starstruck.
"I haven't been a girl the whole time. But yeah, that's why I haven't been using my other form."
"How?" Teddy asks desperately.
"The usual way? How else does one get pregnant?" Loki asked.
Teddy looked pointedly at Billy.
"Fair point."
"Is it ours? Are we going to be fathers? Oh god I am too young for this," Billy babbled, reaching his hands up to cradle his forehead.
"It's gotta be mine," Teddy realized aloud. "It's not like you even- you know," Teddy elaborated with a vague hand gesture.
Loki agreed, "You do tend to keep a buffer zone between yourself and my vagina."
Billy groaned loudly. "Can we not talk about your vagina?"
"I'm pregnant. I think my vagina will probably be coming up a lot in the next several months."
"Stop," Billy begged, drawing out the word so that it seemed to have several extra syllables.
"Vagina," Loki taunted.
Billy flinched away, a gesture he exaggerated so far that it seemed more like he was about to transform into a werewolf.
"You're ridiculous."
"You're going to be a mo- a parent-person!"
"Yes," Loki said slowly, "we all are."
"Wait, what do you get when you cross a Skrull/Kree shaped like a human with a frost giant shaped like an Asgardian?" Tommy asked two months later, casually sitting on Loki's kitchen counter.
"Why are you in our apartment," Loki responded.
"No but seriously, how are you and Teddy even reproductively viable?"
"The same way a Skrull/Kree hybrid is possible. The same way you and Billy even exist at all."
Tommy waited patiently for Loki to continue, which means he paused about seven seconds before blurting out,
"How?"
"No idea. Murphy's Law, probably." Loki tapped zir chin thoughtfully, and added, "Or the inverse law of fertility."
"How are you doing that?"
"Very carefully." Loki paused and lifted zir head up from the couch cushions, as if just hearing the question. "Wait, doing what?"
"Looking so… pregnant!" Billy asked, waving his hand at zir body.
Loki sunk deeper into the cushions of the couch. "Very good, Billy. You've noticed."
"You're wearing an empire-waist dress and eating pickles. You don't even look real, you just look like a drawing of a pregnant wo-"
Despite zir heavy belly and full bladder, Loki sprung up in a sitting position to glare at Billy.
"-oman," Billy finished lamely.
Loki groaned loudly and flopped back down onto the couch.
"-Person!" Billy corrected himself. "Shit, sorry, it's not a Girl Day, huh?"
"It's never a girl day recently," Loki admitted, zir voice muffled in the cushions.
"Really?" Billy asked, eyes lingering on Loki's clothing. "Cause you've been wearing a lot of dresses."
"They're easy and comfortable, but I hate this."
"Hey," Billy moved to sit down next to Loki, lifting zir legs into his lap as he sat. "What's going on with you?"
"I can't change shape."
Billy furrowed his brows. "I thought it was just the uterus you couldn't change?"
"I don't mean the actual power," Loki explained, "But no matter what I do, I'm going to look like a pregnant woman. Even if I change everything else to my usual form- I guess it isn't even that, anymore- I'll still look like a woman and I'm not."
Billy patted his spouse's legs consolingly. What did you say to dysphoric pregnant shapeshifters? Billy wished Teddy was there- he was way better with shapeshifting woes than Billy. Also better with dysphoria, oddly. The dissonance between they scrawny shape Teddy grew up in and the towering form he now inhabited wasn't the same as gender dysphoria, but it gave him more perspective than Billy had.
"Ok, uh." Billy thought quickly, brainstorming possible responses. 'Ok, break it down into parts you know how to handle,' Billy thought to himself. 'Frustrated partner. Frustrated dysphoric partner. Frustrated dysphoric pregnant- screw it.'
Did Loki want validation, distraction, or solutions? Only one way to find out:
"That sounds shitty."
"It's incredibly shitty," Loki agreed. "It's never been like this! Any time I got uncomfortable, before, I could just shift into a different shape! Now I just feel stuck."
"I thought you couldn't shape-shift when you were a kid?" Billy wasn't clear on exactly how long Loki had the child form before Billy's own spell aged zir up, but it was at least three months. Surely this problem had come up during their time on the run from Mother?
Loki shook zir head. "It wasn't a big deal when I was - when I was in the child's body. It wasn't really mine, for one, so it wasn't as big an issue if it didn't fit exactly right; I didn't expect it to. And that body didn't have-" Loki made a hand gesture with a meaning Billy could only begin to guess at.
"Tits?" Billy inferred.
"Secondary sex characteristics," Loki agreed. "No beard to shave, no breasts to bind, I didn't look so much like a girl or a boy, mostly just a kid- if that makes sense."
Although Billy had no reference point for feelings such as these, he was beginning to see how it affected Loki.
"Ok. Anything I can do?"
Loki wriggled a bit and scrunched up zir nose. "Distract me?"
Billy laughed and gathered as much of his spouse as he could into his arms. "Sure thing."
The day the twins were born was hectic and terrifying for everyone but Loki.
Loki had been through childbirth before, of course.
But Teddy, Billy, Thor, Tommy, and Verity had not.
Giving birth, as a shapeshifter, was almost cheating. Moving one's organs around to avoid sword strikes is only possible for the very lucky or the well-trained, but to avoid wounds you know are coming, and have ample warning for? Child's play for a being such as Loki.
In contrast, Tommy was practically vibrating in place in the sitting room, glancing at the clock every seven seconds. Billy and Teddy were huddled together on the couch, trying to keep eachother calm but mostly just exchanging anxieties.
As the oldest men in the room, Thor and Mr. Kaplan were trading stories about Billy and Loki's childhood. Their attempts at smalltalk were awkward at first, but the tension quickly bled from their voices as Thor shared the story of Loki trying to adapt to Asgardian food after his adoption, and as Billy's father regaled the entire room with the story of Billy's thumb-sucking days.
By long tradition and the Asgardian midwife's insisting, only women were allowed in the birthing room.
"I feel the need to point out that I am not a woman," Loki managed to say between contractions.
"Don't get smart with me," the midwife says firmly, "you can give birth. That's what matters."
"Why didn't you just say that?" America muttered moodily, trying to stand as far away from the bed as possible.
"Is this a magic thing?" Verity asked from her position next to America. "Do I have to leave?"
"It's my home. Stay as long as you like, Verity," Loki bit out.
Billy's mothers glanced nervously to each other.
"I gave birth in a hospital with surgeons at the ready," Rebecca Kaplan confided to Wanda Maximoff. "Now I'm sitting in a room while a Norse goddess helps the god of mischief give birth to my son's husband's children. How did my life become this?"
Wanda shrugged. "I didn't really ever give birth," she tells Rebecca, "Billy and Tommy were made with magic." She paused, considering. "Twice, actually."
Rebecca didn't know how to respond to that.
The twins come out blue and green, respectively.
+1
The twins are five the day their powers manifest.
Loki and Teddy are pretty sure they will both be shape-shifters later on, but Skrull shape-shifting can't be tested until the kids are old enough to concentrate on a new shape while holding their old shape in their minds.
They can't not be shape-shifters, right? They're the kids of a Skrull and a Loki!
(Billy thinks about his cousin Luna and stays silent.)
It isn't shapeshifting they manifest at age five, anyway. It's their mutant powers. The mutant powers they absolutely, positively should not have:
Naomi throws a tantrum and sends up sparks of magic when Teddy tells her she can't eat the Oreos yet.
Sarah just super-speeds them out of her father's hands.
"This is your fault," Teddy tells Billy over dinner.
"I didn't even contribute genetics, how is this my fault?"
"Does causality mean nothing to anyone in your family?" Loki demands.
And thus the third generation of inexplicable mutant Maximoff twins are born.