Characters: Alice, Annagovia
Rating: C

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.

Under My Skin
by Amazon Syren

     Alice has a secret.
     She has, of course, many secrets, lined in scars on her toast-rack body, but the biggest one is inside her.
     She talks to the Duchess – she doesn’t hide that. There’s no shame in that, at all.
     Usually, the Duchess comes to her looking like she does in her pictures: An eighty-year-old woman with a sad, sad smile. She talks to Alice in the Safest Place – the place where no-one can follow – or she lays her head in Alice’s lap and she cries. There’s nothing secret about that.
     No. The secret is this. Once, only once, Anagovia came to her as a girl her own age.
     “This is what I was before I became the Little Mother,” she explained. “This is who I really am. Not the Duchess, just Anagovia. Just Anna.”
     Anna…
     Anna had held out her hand and they had gone to the Safest Place, and Anna had kissed Alice. Kissed her and touched her, so soft and sweet and gentle. When she’d come back to her body, she’d been sure it hadn’t been real, that she’d committed a very bad sin in her dreams.
     But no.
     When the Duchess came back to her – as the Duchess, again, not as Anna – she had said, “I just wanted you to understand… Sometimes it can be nice.”
     That’s the secret.