Character: Polly
Rating: A

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

Dressing the Part
by Amazon Syren

     There was a rag-bag in the attic.
     Old clothes that were too worn to mend or be given away, for the most part (Polly used them sometimes when her erratic Visitor showed up), but sometimes you found things that were almost whole.
     She lifted the old trousers out of the burlap sack. They were rough-spun linen. She remembered watching her mother dye them brown in a kettle of tea on the stove, back when she'd been fifteen and her mother was still alive.
     Paul had been sixteen when he got this pair of pants. He'd worn them to their mother's funeral, a year later, and they'd been an inch above his ankles already, even though Polly'd let down the hem until there was barely a hair's breadth left on it.
     She looked around, even though she knew she was alone in the attic, only the bats to watch her here, and they were all asleep. She lifted her dress carefully, and slipped the trousers on underneath.
     They felt so strange on her legs. Bulky and rough and chafing at her thighs. Granted, she supposed, it could have been worse. At least the trousers were big enough that they sagged on her hips — such as they were — rather than chafing anywhere higher up.
     She rolled the cuffs up to her knees — which didn't help the bulky feeling, even if it did make moving around a little easier — and tried to see if they showed under the skirt.
     Not that she was much of a judge, of course, but they seemed to be well-hidden.
     She walked back and forth across the attic floor, trying to get the hang of walking with something going ‘zip-zop, zip-zop' ever-so-quietly between her legs.
     She wondered if people would hear it.
     Oh, well. She could always say they were... bloomers, or something, if she got caught, couldn't she? Not, she thought (without too much bitterness) that anyone was likely to look.
     Polly scrounged a couple of dust rags out of the sack, so she'd have a reason to have been up here by herself, and lifted the heavy trap-door. She shifted her hips slightly, trying to reposition the trousers under her dress, and then started back down the ladder, away from her strange fancy and back to her normal life.