#can i headcanon that the chief just doesnt know how to pronounce it and HE said it wrong lol

[avani008]

For 5 headcanons, could you please write more about Kanta, Durdhara, or Bala with her husband Kumar Verma?

Kanta (previous here)

1. When Kanta returns from the mountains at last, it is her sister-in-law who she goes to see first. “Tread carefully,” the steward who guides her warns; “the Empress...the Empress-that-was is of course displeased. She’s thrown others from her chambers on the flimsiest pretext.”

Kanta frowns. “She’ll see me,” she says with quiet conviction, and the steward, ashamed, falls silent. 

Far from throwing her out, Draupadi throws her arms about Kanta’s neck. “It’s all right,’ Kanta soothes, even though Draupadi does not so much as sniffle into her shoulder. “I’m here.”

2. She visits her brothers next, their faces still so familiar. 

“It is good you came now,” Bhima says with terrible sarcasm. “In a day’s time, you might have missed us together; we are to return to the wood at the King’s command.”

Yudhisthira flinches, but Kanta doesn’t comfort him. 

“Tell me,” she says, “what must be done next.”

3. Mother Kunti blames herself.

“I promised the Princess of Panchal an empire when she wed my sons,” she mourns, “and look what she has now instead: a throne of twigs!”

“I promised myself to protect her as I would you or my brothers,” Kanta replies quietly. Her face betrays nothing, and yet Kunti’s gaze flickers anxiously in her direction.

“If I had been with her, Dushasana would not live to the results of his actions today,” Kanta whispers, guilt lending venom to her voice, and Kunti strokes her hair gently. 

4. “Will you go with them?” Mother--Radha, the first and best mother Kanta has ever known--asks, and Kanta shakes her head. 

“I have shared one exile with my brothers,” she replies. “I do not care to share another.”

“Then--” Mother hesitates “--you will wish to reside your royal mother?”

Kanta looks at her to laugh for what seems like the first time in entirely too long. “Dear one,” she says with real affection, “if I must wait fourteen years for the war that will be my revenge, who else might I do so than with you?”

5. Radha’s house does not put her in contact with the princes of Hastinapur very often, but neither does it protect her from them. At last the encounter Kanta has dreaded for decades is here; Prince Duryodhana stands before her.

“Come back,” he begs, in the same tone he once used to beg, Marry me. “Who are they to you, when we have meant so much to each other? Not enough that you didn’t run from them not a month after they wed, and stay away for fifteen years since.”

(He has not married, after all these years. She wishes she was not so aware of this fact, or that that familiar ache start anew in her chest.)

“And how long has it been since I ran from you?” she retorts, because it is always easier to be cruel. They will meet, sooner or later, or enemies on the battlefield; better that Duryodhana accustom himself to it now.

But he offers none of the sharp counters she remembers so well, and his eyes still follow her as she turns away.

Kanta despairs. 

Durdhara (previous here)

1. At last, Durdhara decides, Bhima is ready. He might never be the sort to pay polished comments or hold his tongue, but Durdhara calculates he might, after all, pass for a prince if one doesn’t look too carefully. 

“Very kind of you,” Bhima drawls when she tells him this, and Durdhara frowns. Sarcasm she hadn’t bothered to instruct him in, but naturally in this he would be a prodigy. With time, she might grow accustomed to it.

2. ...She does not.

But eventually the urge to strangle him for his stupidity ebbs, and Durdhara accepts this as the best she might expect. 

3. “I’ve helped you,” she pronounces, “now you must help me.”

Bhima, to give him his due, doesn’t pretend ignorance. But he does look quite alarmed and announce hurriedly: “I won’t kill anyone for you!”

Durdhara huffs with exasperation. “As though I would ask such a thing!”

(And she wouldn’t. Not really.)

Bhima’s face relaxes and brightens with curiosity. “What, then, did you have in mind?”

4. When Bhima sends her brothers tumbling from the trees, Durdhara hoots with laughter. 

“Serves them right,” Bhima tells her later, “for being so unkind to you--”

His eyes are dark with indignation; poor Bhima, beloved by his own brothers, has never known the cruelty that being her father’s disregarded daughter brings Durdhara daily. 

“So it does,” Durdhara sniffs, and pats his arm in thanks. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he replies gruffly. “You’re not alone now. You’ve me and my brothers instead.”

So she does. Durdhara tries--and fails--not to smile.

5. When she is twelve, her Uncle Shakuni comes to visit them. 

The rest of her siblings don’t know how happy Mother is to see him, come all the way from Gandhara, but Durdhara does; and while all her brothers and Dushala scatter to follow Yuyutsu on his latest escapade, Durdhara stays behind to sit by Mother’s side and listen to his stories. 

She likes Uncle Shakuni, who pays more attention to her than that maid’s son, unlike everyone else. She likes Uncle Shakuni who tells her she is worth a thousand of any other and looks at her with pride glinting in his steely eyes, unlike everyone else. 

He is the one who takes her aside and teaches her the foods most conducive to concealing poison: venison, wine, and sweet kheer. 

“Do you know how to make kheer, my child?” Uncle Shakuni asks, apropros of nothing. “No finer present you might make your father’s bastard to show him your love--with this spice, too, brought directly from Gandhara.”

Durdhara reaches for the vial, knowing exactly what her uncle intends. But it is true, too, that she wonders suddenly what Bhima might think, and what he would say, and how he would never understand after all. 

No harm in only keeping the poison safe for now, she tells herself fiercely; and who knows what tomorrow might bring?

Bala & Kumar Varma (previous here)

1. And then comes the day that the ministers begin to buzz with questions about an heir. 

Mother might wax lyrical about the joys of motherhood, the myriad wonders of pregnancy, but Bala takes no more than an instant to consider swollen ankles and an eternally upset stomach before she knows what her answer will be.

“The Prince Consort and I,” she says sweetly, “will choose an heir worthy of the throne ourselves.”

2. “A pity,” the Chief Minister says, shaking his head, “that the Princess Ambika will likely never bear a child. He should, of course, be the obvious first choice to consider.”

An image swims before Bala’s eyes, of a child cursed with Ambika’s unflagging enthusiasm and energy and Devasena’s reckless stupidity. 

Her heart stops at the very thought; “Yes,” she murmurs when at last she can speak without shuddering, “a pity indeed.” 

3. Every noble family in Mahishmati parades their children before Bala, and none of them meet with her approval. 

One is squint-eyed, the other too prone to swoon at the slightest sight of blood, and the last has a sense of fashion that even Ambika would scorn--she can hardly believe where they all come from. 

“You must choose eventually,” Mother says, and Bala tries her best not to make a face in her direction.

4. The queue of candidates becomes ever longer, but, sadly no more promising. 

Bala decides she’s had enough when she looks up to find: “Sethupathy?”

“I assure you,” he bows low, “that my heart is devoted only to the service of our noble country, and that I should be honored to call you ‘Mother.’” He bows again, and looks up at her with what he must suppose an expression of filial piety.

“Sethupathy,” Bala says, as gently as she can manage, “Sethupathy, you are older than I am.”

“So?”

5. When she comes across her husband in the gardens, Bala’s temper is understandably short. When he begins, “I have been putting great thought towards the problem before us--” her hopes sink.

“Surely, my dear,” she hastens, “there’s no need--”

“No, no, no!” He waves his hands in the air. “I have thought about it all. This is Vaishali,” he indicates the child who toddles in his wake. “She’s the daughter of one of Devasena’s old friends, while she and her husband lived, and has nowhere else to go.”

Bala sniffs. “There is no end of orphanages in the city,” she points out.

Kumar Varma ignores this in his enthusiasm. “But only think! If she is from Kuntala, none of your nobles could object, could they?’

True, Bala thinks, and studies the brat quickly. She’s quiet, which speaks in her favor, and well-dressed, which does just as well, and--

“What,” she asks, very seriously, “are your thoughts about learning to become a warrior worthy of the throne?”

The girl’s face brightens suddenly; she waves her arms about, not unlike Kumar Varma a few moments earlier. 

“SMASH!” she says, and Bala’s heart is full.