Title: Ennui (V5.0)

Author: Derien Nada (derien at rulesthe dot net)

Fandom: "Monstrous Regiment" (Terry Pratchett, Discworld)

Warnings: Spoilers for "Monstrous Regiment," Femslash, angst. 
 
Rating: PG

Pairing: Mal/Polly

Disclaimers: Maladicta and Polly and their whole world belong to the inestimable 
Mr. Pratchett.  I'm not making any money off of this and not much to speak of off 
my actual day job, either, so don't bother to sue me.  The first line is directly 
from the book and the last two lines I paraphrased just a little.  I can't take 
any credit for the description of her smile.

Notes: This is for Tronella, who said, "If you write Maladict/Ozzer I will love 
you forever.:)" And I told her I didn't have time.  And then I spent lots of time 
trying to think about other things and be productive on other stories, but I can't 
stay away from this idea.  This may not be the story she hoped for, but it was the 
one I had to tell.  I got wondering at some of Maladicta's actions.  She watched 
Polly to the point that Polly noticed and found it unnerving.  She continued to 
hide her gender after all the others had revealed theirs.  How was it that she 
decided to put on her uniform and set out again on the same day and hour that 
Polly did? 
 
Credit where it's due: Thanks to Daegaer and Eor for extensive commentaries and 
several re-readings, and again to Eor for listening to me chatter on and on about 
the story incessantly.


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"Maladicta had disappeared."  But of course everyone is somewhere, until they're 
discorporated into their component molecules.  

She began her disappearance by taking her new dress uniform with its Corporal's 
stripes and folding it tightly into the very bottom of her new travelling trunk 
under her gleaming new coffee making engine.  The uniform had been specially 
designed for the last recruits of the Tenth Foot Light Infantry, also known as 
the Ins-and-Outs, after they had brought peace to the country of Borogravia.  
They had enlisted in the army dressed as boys, but when it was discovered that 
they weren't, their trousers were taken away.  Their new uniform had a skirt, it 
was feminine in cut, and in it they had been paraded around and turned into cute 
non-threatening little female mascots.  Angry and confused, she told none of the 
other Ins-and-Outs where she was going, sealing her disappearance.  

Raised in a very traditional vampire family of Borogravia, she had rebelled, as 
the young often do.  Two years ago she'd joined the wearers of the black ribbon 
and transferred her addiction - she no longer drank human blood.  Though the 
craving never entirely went away, she had learned to assuage it with coffee.  
Still, with the turmoil she was in at the moment she thought of the dark makeup 
and black lace nostalgically.  It was a defined role that she knew how to play, 
behind which she could hide herself.  Finding her parents and brother guesting at 
the estate of a family friend, she joined them there, moving on with them when 
they went to their winter quarters in the city where they met up with two of her 
sisters.

She sat quietly in the corners of the drawing rooms, and sat, too, at the parties 
and dances.  The young men still didn't want to dance with her, though now they 
attempted to waylay her in the dark end of the garden or the back hall.  She had 
at least gone from being "that boring black-ribboner" to being an object of gossip.  
Although gossip was attention, and attention of any sort usually warmed a vampire's 
ego, along with this notoriety came thinly veiled barbs and ridicule.  She endured 
numerous comments about how black velvet looked much better on her than red and 
white, and how short hair was unbecoming and made her face look sharp.  Maladicta 
privately thought a sharp look suited her quite well.  Her mother remarked that 
she couldn't imagine a daughter of hers in trousers.  "How terribly gauche," she 
sniffed.  Her family members did their best to ignore her when there were others 
present, and her younger sister openly complained that her own chances of making 
a good match had been ruined by Maladicta's behaviour.  

Yet through the long dull evenings in the drawing rooms or sitting at the edges 
of the parties she was haunted by a scent which whispered below the perfumes 
surrounding her. There had been seven young women disguised as boys who had joined 
the Ins-and-Outs, but the other five stood like flat shadows in her memory behind 
the flame that was Polly.  Polly, whom she still sometimes thought of as Ozzer.  

Poetry writing being an acceptable pastime among vampires, she would sometimes sit 
down with her pen and paper, but the result would be a list of words, each scratched 
out and replaced by another.  Words like 'aspiration,' 'motion,' 'action,' 'thought 
and desire into reality.'  That last phrase was heavily scratched out, and the word 
'desire' almost completely obliterated.  

Falling into a malaise, she retired to one of the ancestral country homes, the 
mouldering little castle in the hills from which she had first set out dressed in 
boy's clothes, months before.  The castle clung precariously to the rocky pine-clad 
slope high above the road to Munz.  Munz, where she knew Polly had gone to tend her 
father's inn, The Duchess.  She couldn't quite bring herself to go visit Polly, but 
it felt a little ... not better, certainly not easier, but somehow more right, to be 
geographically nearer to her.  

The only servants at the castle were an elderly couple who had been in service to her 
family all their lives.  Their lives had been greatly prolonged by this service - 
their son-in-law looked as though he could be a grandfather - yet even so the castle 
was too large for two elderly people to keep up with the maintenance.  

One morning not long after she'd arrived at the castle Maladicta wandered along a 
castle wall under a sky which sat like a pewter lid on the hilltops when a movement 
between the pines below caught her eye.  It quickly resolved into a small sleigh.  
This would be the son-in-law arriving with supplies, as he did every ten days.  She 
knew he would have some coffee for her, as she'd been running low, but she waited 
until he left before descending through the many halls and flights of stairs to the 
stone-flagged kitchen.  She had come here because she didn't want to have to talk to 
anyone and had avoided him so far. 

The kitchen was the domain of the old woman, always warm because of the huge fireplace 
which she kept always burning (Maladicta suspected they slept there when none of 
her own family was in residence).  The old woman looked up from her mending and 
gestured toward the table with a silent frown, indicating not only the location of 
the bag but also her opinion of a vampire drinking coffee.  

Maladicta breathed in the heady scent appreciatively, a shiver of delight running 
down her back.  Having replaced her addiction to blood with coffee she now needed 
to have coffee always available; withdrawals could and had sent her into a 
hallucinatory state, and she never wanted to experience that again.  After she had 
recovered from the hallucinations and subsequent jitters she had thought of making 
a necklace of beans so that she'd never be faced with the situation again.  So that 
her friends would never again be faced with the choice of possibly having to drive 
a stake through her heart to save their own lives.  Somehow she hadn't gotten around 
to it, yet, but now as she stood in the warm kitchen and breathed in this scent she 
recalled Polly saying that it was a good idea.  She put a handful of beans in her 
pocket and spent some time wandering around the castle trying to find something 
with which to drill holes and a cord to string them on.  It wasn't as if she had 
anything else she needed to do.  

Up in her room she pulled back the heavy deep red velvet curtains to let the light 
in on her desk, and began to drill.  A few beans broke, but they would all get ground 
later.  She couldn't fit many on the string, with a knot between each one to keep 
it safe, but she thought it would do in a pinch.  When she pulled the cord tight 
the dark brown beans lay against her white throat.  She admired the somewhat savage 
look of it, and found herself hoping Polly would, too. 

When she next happened to see the son-in-law's sleigh arriving she decided to speak 
to him.  Running to her room and delving through the closet she found a red velvet 
gown which she shook the dust out of and quickly pulled on.  She encountered him in 
the kitchen and, after officially making his acquaintance and asking how prices were 
in Munz and if it had been hard to find any of the needed items, asked him if he 
knew of a Duchess Inn in Munz, and the innkeeper's daughter.  

He gave her a sharp look and she thought he was noting her short hair, but all he 
said aloud was, "Oh, aye, the lass is a great help to her father, I'm sure."

"She must have a sweetheart by now...?"

That question thawed him a bit.  "No, miss, and to my mind the sooner her father gets 
her married off the better.  Though where he'll find someone who'd have her I don't 
know.  She's a bit of a wild one, if you don't mind my saying so."  

"Yes.  She is."   She gave him a smile that displayed her teeth.

With more privacy she attempted more poetry, which included a lot of phrases about 
hiding, about images and facades, about lures and traps for fabulous beasts which 
ignored the bait that they were offered.  

She had known she'd made a good-looking young man, and she'd held out hope that 
Polly would fall for that good-looking young man.  When their time together was 
obviously coming to an end she had made a last-ditch attempt to impress Polly by 
revealing herself as female to point out how well she had played a male.  Polly 
had been profoundly uninterested.  Maladicta had been slapped in the face with the 
fact that she had failed to be fascinating, she had failed at something vampires 
were supposed to excel at, the hunting method which brought the victim to the predator.  
She had been bested in the most humiliating way by Polly's indifference.  

Now, looking at her poetry, she realized that she hadn't thought beyond a certain 
point.  She had wanted to be the object of Polly's desire, but if she had accomplished 
that goal, what next?  Reveal that she was female and find Polly was no longer 
interested?  Break her heart?  Maladicta was stunned to find that both of these 
potential outcomes honestly bothered her, now.  That wasn't something her upbringing 
had prepared her for.  Vampires lived for the conquest; the concerns of those they 
conquered were not important.  

She thought her poetry had improved and that it was as good as any she'd read by 
other vampires.  It was still trite, self-centred, egotistical and very, very bad.  
She burned her poetry.

In the last months of the winter she spent more time reading by the light of a candle 
which guttered fitfully in the drafty library.  She found an astounding amount of 
poetry by humans in the library, and was somewhat mollified to see that, while some 
of it was quite good, there was also a good deal which was just as bad as her own.  

When the weather permitted she walked the parapets in breeches.  The thought of 
swanning across them in a diaphanous underwired gown turned her stomach and it was 
far too cold.  Besides, the snow and ice thick on the stone would make delicate 
shoes quite dangerous.  On clear nights the towers were surrounded by dizzying 
stars, and this seemed the natural draw to the eye.  However, something always 
drew her gaze back to the ribbon of road below which led to Munz.   

When she picked up her pen she didn't try to force her thoughts into meter and 
rhyme and metaphorical images.  She wrote things like, "What am I?  Not Vampire, 
not Woman.  Polly told me that I am Myself.  What am I?"  and  "Not caring whether 
I'm male or female, perhaps that was a kind of acceptance that I am who I am.  
But I want..."  She didn't want to even write it.  She wanted Polly to care who 
she was.  "I need to know who I am before I can show who I am," she wrote, and 
hated the bouncy rhymey sound of it, but knew it was true.  Her chances to show 
herself to Polly had passed, Polly had gone back to the Duchess, to her normal 
life, and probably soon enough would marry and begin having children.  Maladicta 
felt hollow and lost at this thought.  Sometimes she couldn't understand why she 
continued to wake up and walk around. 

Eventually the snow began to melt, the first flies hatched in the puddles and the 
bats of the castle again flew out to feed in the evenings.   She watched them 
swarm out and envied them their wings and near invisibility - they could fly to 
Munz, unnoticed.  The memory of Polly's scent again filled her mind.  Then, late 
one night as she was stargazing and woolgathering into the colder hours, a bat 
flew near her and she caught images from its tiny brain.  Polly, crossing a yard, 
with a baby on her hip.  Along with the image came the memory of her scent, which 
the bat had picked up from Maladicta's mind and interpreted as a cue to find this 
person.  The building which dominated the yard must be The Duchess, Maladicta 
realized.  Smaller than she had imagined it might be.  But whose was the child?  
Certainly not Polly's, there hadn't been time.  

From that point the bats became her eyes into Polly's life, and though the brief 
glimpses served only to increase her longing to be in Polly's presence they gave 
her a new reason to get out of bed.  She recognized Shufti from one batty memory, 
in skirts, with her hair grown out and her belly svelte, and she realized that 
must have been her baby.  She saw Paul playing with the child, and among the 
random older men she thought she picked out the one who must be their father, 
who looked most like an older version of Ozzer or a smaller Paul.  

Then came a morning when a very late-returning bat brought her the image of Polly 
closing the gate of the inn-yard quietly in the predawn gloom.  She was wearing 
the ridiculous feminine mascot uniform, but the aura of it was slightly altered 
by the addition of a rucksack with a horse-bow slung off it within easy reach, 
as well as two cutlasses.

Maladicta suddenly felt so vibrantly alive it was almost terrifying.  Polly was 
on the move again, life would no longer be boring.  A scant, and incredibly busy, 
hour later she was running down the steep footpath through the pines and boulders 
which was the shortest way to the road, skirt collected with one hand to keep it 
from catching on the brambles too much.  The dainty feminine boots with their tiny 
heels were murder on the rocks, and she nearly turned her ankles a half-dozen times. 

Once on the road she attempted to stroll nonchalantly and be quick at the same time.  
Soon she overtook two people who her nose informed her were girls, though they were 
dressed as boys.  Together they approached the waiting ferry on which Polly already 
stood, smiling, next to a rather cowed-looking guard.  Maladicta tried to clamp 
down her usual cynically bored expression over her joy.   She waited until the 
ferry was in mid-stream before gave Polly a smile that would have been sheepish, 
if sheep had different teeth.  

"Thought I'd try again," she said.


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End "Ennui" by derien nada (derien at rulesthe dot net)