Chapter Text
Jon will be the first to say that he is not the most attuned to his body. He has been known to get lost in his work and regain awareness hours later, desperately needing a drink of water or a piss or something. He hardly ever notices when he’s hungry, only when he’s suddenly much bitchier than normal, at which point he would try to eat something. Georgie used to find bruises all over him that he could not explain, simply because he didn’t notice when he ran into something hard enough to bruise. Georgie also joked that with his poor diet, he might just bruise spontaneously, which, fair.
All this is to say, the flip crept up on him.
In retrospect, it was so obvious what was happening. Every type B learns in primary school the signs of a type flip in one direction or another, as they’re not wholly uncommon. That is, after all, the evolutionary advantage to having a type that is specifically capable of flipping to either A or O depending on the ratio of types in a population. It’s less common in big cities where most people are surrounded by enough people of every type, but in smaller towns, a predominantly type O population will cause a lot of B-to-A flips, and vice versa.
Jon, despite technically living in a big city, almost exclusively surrounds himself with type As. Not on purpose, not through any conscious sexism – although there is data to suggest that type Os are less represented in academic workspaces – but purely because his three (3) coworkers happen to be type As. One of whom now literally lives in the archives. Where Jon also lives. Despite having a flat he could still be living at, but where he only manages to return a couple nights a week.
An added layer that contributes to type flips is bodily stress: malnutrition, dehydration, poor sleep, illness. In the case of a protohuman, these symptoms would only be experienced during a time of strife – a drought, a famine, etc. No reason to have a whole caste of reproductive failsafes sitting around when the species may be in trouble, so, time to flip. In Jon’s case, however, he just gets so caught up in work that paltry things like food and water and sleep don’t rank highly on his list of priorities.
So, here’s Jon, constantly underfed and poorly rested, constantly in the archives, surrounded by three textbook type As leeching their goddamn pheromones into his airspace. God, his body must think he and his three assistants are the last four humans alive on Earth. Of course he would O-flip.
Naturally, none of this occurred to him until after weeks of symptoms, that, again, are so glaringly obvious in hindsight. The increased appetite, the sudden preference for soft textures, the hypersensitivity to smells and sounds. The ambient discomfort between his legs while things… subtly rearranged themselves. He wrote it all off as ‘just feeling off at the moment’ and let his work consume his focus. Even his assistants picked up on it. Tim commented on the sudden change from dress shirts and slacks to knit jumpers and floor-length skirts, and Jon shooed him away and insisted that he ‘remain professional’. When Martin wordlessly starting bringing Jon biscuits with his many cups of tea throughout the day, Jon rolled his eyes and accused him of being a mother hen. When Sasha disabled the beeper on the microwave and the electric kettle in the breakroom, he… well, he honestly was just impressed she knew how to do that, but he didn’t consider that she might have done it for him.
It wasn’t until one day, after a long stretch of time hunched over at his desk, he felt a dampness in his boxers that alarmed him. Jon is not well attuned to his body, but he’s not so out of touch that he would piss himself. He stood up and hurried to the bathrooms, grateful that it happened to be the dead of night and everyone was either at home or sleeping in document storage.
He sat down on the toilet and looked down to see a spotting of blood in his boxers, and it all clicked.
“Oh.”
Right. O.