Characters: Mal, OCs
Rating: C

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

Isn't She Strange
by Amazon Syren

     I think I always knew that I was different.
     I can remember being fifteen, barely more than a baby, and being completely in awe of the girls who would come and look after me (grudgingly, I'm sure) when my parents went out hunting together. My mother always assumed that I wanted to look like them.
     But even then I knew she was wrong. I never wanted to look like them. I wanted to look at them. Budding breasts and slim hips, draped in velvet. Long, dark hair as close to unbound as they could get away with.
     The most beautiful creatures I'd ever seen in my few years of life.

     I remember playing with my dolls, carefully sculpted porcelain creations with pale skin and dark eyes. One of them, Asphodelle, was my favorite. I took her everywhere. My parents would tuck her in with me at bedtime. They had no idea that I was kissing her china lips under my covers, wishing she was a real girl, before I'd even turned thirty.

     I remember my forties with an odd mix of feelings. The other girls my age were quickly becoming women (not an entirely unpleasant thing to watch), but they were all so desperate to grow up: to switch their walking shoes for high-heeled boots, their knee-length shifts for taffeta gowns and velvet cloaks, to wear their hair long and loose down their backs.
     I only wanted to hunt. To go flying with the boys of an evening in trousers and jackets, to find some human girl who'd foolishly left her window open and show her the time, and then the end, of her life.

     But, of course, that was out of the question.

     I was far too female to be one of the boys, and far too boyish to be one of the girls. Stuck between two worlds, and not able to be part of either one.

     By the time I turned fifty, I had resigned myself to a life of being an outsider.
     Even then, I didn't truly understand just how much of an outsider I'd eventually become.