A/N: content note and warnings at the end. These will contain spoilers. Read them or not at your own risk.


The first sign Elizabeth has that something is wrong is that there is no one by her side on the bed. Jane has many lovely qualities that make her a good bed-mate – not snoring, for example, and not moving much – but waking up early is not one of them. That is not, however, something that alarms Elizabeth: Jane may not usually wake up early, but love is a strange thing, and it would not be entirely surprising if it has made her restless.

The second sign there is something not quite as it should is that she feels odd when she moves, sleepy and contented. She turns on her side, and her body is heavier than she expected, and when she reaches to her head there is no braid.

She wakes up then, and sits up, and it is then when she feels... it between her legs.

All breath rushes out of her mouth and her mind goes blank and she scrambles to open the bed's curtains (curtains?) and she stumbles off the bed towards a thankfully close mirror and she is not there.

She will not be able to reconstruct later what she thought. Madness, perhaps. Magic. A dream. But she is awake and concious and this strange body – not entirely strange, really, since she knows this face – feels entirely too real to ignore. It is there, and she knows, feeling its heart beat on a frenzied rhythm, that it is the thing pumping blood into her veins. Since this body's veins are hers. She has never thought too much about her body before, she has never any reason to doubt its working for her, and now... now she is concious that it does, except it is not her own.

She closes her eyes and prods into her mind: will he be there? But nothing, just her own thoughts chasing themselves into progressively tighter circles. She opens them again and watches these hands that are not her own and that she is clumsy moving. It is too much to watch them close to her face, too much to watch this body without the fiction of the mirror between them, so she closes her eyes again, and takes care to be looking at it when she opens them.

She could almost believe she is standing somewhere the mirror cannot see, and that he is standing there in the room with her. There is this feeling of disembodiment that comes over her while she watches it, like she is only tethered to earth by a thread: her gaze on him. Sudden fear makes her clutch at her arms: but they are not her arms any more, and horror claws its way out of her stomach and to her throat.

She gasps it out, bending at the waist and wanting to cry, but her eyes are dry. She does not know what this is, cannot understand it, and she cannot stop thinking thinking thinking about what it means.

Perhaps, she thinks, I am mad. Perhaps Jane is in this same room – but no, not this room, but their room at Longbourn – tearfully trying to bring her to her senses. And then, the alternative: perhaps she has always been like this, and she has just regained her senses. But no: would she think of herself as someone else, if she had?

She thinks, perhaps the mirror is lying, but she knows it for a futile hope, and takes care of not turning towards the mirror in renewed interest. She is gaining steadiness, and can recognize what feelings, what lines of thought will throw her into hysterics again. She takes care of not looking at the body, not thinking about the feeling of moving it, not feeling the diverse parts of it when they brush against each other, not trying to grasp that tenuous thought of not being there.


Content note: can be upsetting for dealing with body-image-like issues (bodyswap between people of different sex). Don't hesitate to send me a PM or leave a comment if you want/need to discuss (any aspect of) it.