Inadorable

  Mention of suicidal ideation, industrial-grade brainworms.

  [colpse]

  Chapter 15Things the Victorians wouldn’t approve of24 February 2022She’s being so childish. Sneaking out of her room, hoping no one catches her, and doing all this for something entirely boring: Ace really needs to go pee. It’s absurd that she’s sneaking around in the middle of the day, during a time she knows most of the girls will be preoccupied with having lunch, but she does so nonetheless.

  She’s afraid of seeing people and having to talk to them. The idea that she might have to justify herself or her actions: actions that feel increasingly impossible to control. Sadness hits her harder than it did in the past, as do anger and fear. It’s as if something numbing her emotions has been taken away.

  And that means she’s prone to blowing up. She’s talked about it to Gwen some, or she thinks she did, they were whispers when they spent the night together again — she’s rapidly becoming addicted to physical touch — with Gwen mostly mumbling along whilst falling asleep. She’s the only person who doesn’t treat her like an unexploded bomb.

  Ace would really prefer she didn’t blow up in the ways she did. She always ends up hurting people, and she’s done far too much of that for comfort recently. Especially because when she hasn’t blown up at people, she’s ignored them. Kelynen is trying to give her some room but checks in on her daily through consensus, but she’s left her on read every time. She asks her if she’s fine, if there’s anything she can do to help, insists she doesn’t want to be too pushy but that she's there to talk if Ace needs it. Being awfully nice, but still treating her like an unexploded bomb.

  Probably because she is. But she doesn’t want to be, she doesn’t want to be reminded that she is, and cannot help but feel like she’s lost so much control over her life and is only continuing to lose ground.

  Tears roll down her cheeks: something else she’s done more of tely. It’s an ugly case too, and she has to blow her nose into a piece of toilet paper.

  After a few more minutes, she finally makes her way out of the room and back into the hallway, and the realisation that she’s spent too long bunkered down in the toilet hits her too te.

  Amy looks anxious, clearly having been waiting for a moment. She smiles for a second at Ace, then rapidly switches back into a more neutral expression, trying to figure out how to defuse her.

  “Hey.” She says. “Are you okay?”

  “Um.” Ace really doesn’t know how to begin answering that question. Yes, badly, obviously, but she doesn’t particurly want to talk about it.”

  “I could hear you crying.” Amy’s tone is more calm and collected than it usually is. It makes her sound painfully distant. “You did so for a while.”

  “I guess I did.” Ace looks down at the floor, scared of looking Amy in the eyes.

  “I’m so sorry.” Amy says, her usual confidence shaken and repced with something Ace has never really seen. “I should have been a better friend for you. A better girlfriend, maybe, whatever our retionship is supposed to be, whatever you want it to be. It can be anything, you know? Just tell me, and I’ll adjust, because god, I do want to be close to you. As close as possible.

  “Sorry. Off-topic. You deserve much better than what I was capable of offering. I’ve been trying to be fun and forgetting how to be someone who can actually give you what you need. And that’s my failure. Not yours. I should have been more attentive, or maybe less up my own arse, a bit less weed and alcohol and a bit more actually thinking about my actions— Ugh. I’m doing it again. Fuck.”

  Ace only feels worse for blowing up at Amy now, as she isn’t sure if she’d meant any of it. Or maybe she did, in the moment. It’s hard to even remember why she did it, other than that she felt a lot of hatred for herself and this pce and the people who made her end up here, lonely and broken and without anything of that which she was offered — well, she’s had the oestrogen, but she needs so much more — and Amy was the one principally responsible for this happening in the first pce.

  If it wasn’t for Amy she would still have been working at the bloody DWP, pushing people into misery doing the worst task you could ask of a civil servant, barely making enough to survive. She wouldn’t have had oestrogen, or have been wearing a bra, or any of the other things she refused to do until st month.

  Ace is, if nothing else, fucking stupid.

  “I’m so sorry.” Ace whispers, realising she’s left Amy without an answer for way too long. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “No, sweetie— you don’t have to be sorry.” Amy says, frowning at her, unsure if she should close the gap between them.

  “All I do is hurt people, Ayms.” Ace whispers, taking a step back from Amy. Not because she doesn’t want a hug, but because she feels too on edge. Too liable to explode again. “I was angry at Ms. Lambert and just took it out on you. I should be sorry. You do plenty for me.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that about yourself. You’re much more than your worst moments. That’s why I care about you. Why I want you to be the happy, confident girl you’ve always been meant to be.”

  “Ayms…” Ace tries to hold back tears. Why is she so nice? And why doesn’t she just hold her close and whisper her nice words?

  Because Ace pushed her away, and she’s afraid of hurting her. Like Ms. Lambert was. Couldn’t be intimate or even ptonic with her because of some invisible force, some character failure of Ace’s, that made them feel uncomfortable. One that Gwen, somehow, overlooked or pushed through and made her feel like a human being again, like a girl, even if she had to force her to believe it.

  What did Ms. Lambert call it again?

  She was ‘too easy to take advantage of’. People don’t know what she wants.

  Ace doesn’t know, either, but she needs love and support and Amy wants to offer it but doesn’t know that Ace wants it. Or maybe she does? Maybe she shouldn’t assume. Maybe she should just follow Gwen’s example: cim the things she wants and needs from people so obviously willing to offer them to her.

  And before she can think whether it’s a good idea, she puts her arms around Amy and holds her as closely as she can, as tightly as she can, because she doesn’t want to lose her again.

  ***

  Amy took her hand and gently pulled Ace closer and closer to her bedroom. She sits her down on her bed, smiles at her, kisses her on the temple and then switches to a more serious look, inspecting her.

  “What I want to do today,” She says, her tone a little sponsor-like. “Is make you even prettier and more beautiful than you already are.”

  “Um.” Ace blushes. That’d be a lot of work, at the very least. “Why would you do all that?”

  “Because you deserve to feel beautiful.” Amy starts working down a list. “Because I want you to attend an event tonight, which I’ll tell you about ter. Because your hair is messy, young dy, and because Eira has been on my ass for spending too much time corrupting Athenian youth rather than teaching them important lessons, or whatever, and a make-over counts as an important lesson whilst also giving us some quality alone time.”

  Ace does realise she hasn’t showered or really tended to her hygiene or appearance for a week, and looks like quite the mess as a result. It only adds to the massive amount of work Amy is taking on right now, but she doesn’t seem to mind much. She probably wants to have plenty of time to talk about things.

  “Now, because this is a very cruel punishment I’m going to inflict on you, I do have to ask you if you understand and agree.” She says, grinning.

  Ace doesn’t get the joke.

  “Um, yes?”

  “Say you understand and agree.” Her grin widens even more, and Ace feels even more out of the loop on the joke, but she assumes that it’s some kind of video game she’s been pying, or a new anime that she hasn’t infodumped all over Ace about.

  “I understand and agree.” Ace bites her lip, then looks over at Amy again, who has walked over to the bathroom door. She follows her tenderly, only barely understanding the situation she’s about to put herself into.

  Amy starts to undress, causing Ace to blush and forget that she ought to be undressing too, given this is clearly part of the make-over. She’s going to be properly cleaned, it seems.

  “So. I was thinking about the fact that I’ve probably been keeping too many secrets with you until now, and that it’s hurting you more than it’s helping you.” Amy tests the temperature of the shower water, then indicates for a now naked Ace to step in. “And that I might need a bit of a captive audience to get you through this, hence the shower.”

  “Captive?” Ace asks shily.

  “You don’t have a clean change of clothes, do you?” She smirks, stepping into the shower with her. “You’re going to have to borrow some of mine. Don’t worry, I have some dresses which should fit you just fine.”

  “Oh. Um. Continue on, I suppose.” Ace says, not sure if she should be entirely happy that she is stuck with Amy right now.

  “I’ve been trying to hide my past from you, as you’ve probably noticed. Yes, I’ve said it’s all part of operational security and such, and that I want to be all secret and like a cool female spy from one of those stories who will show up in your life and investigate your whole body and such. But it’s also because I wasn’t sure how you would react to it. Because I know you like to think of me as being the perfect little girl I portrayed myself as, innocent and sweet and the most transgender little thing with just a little bit of an edgy side.”

  Ace tries to intervene, but quickly feels Amy turn off the water and start to massage some shampoo into her hair. Pathetically, she moans a little at the sensation.

  “And yes, that is what I try to be, because I like being that person. You know I’m an artist and just enjoy pying a role and embodying it: god, I’m the one who introduced the concept of LARP to the bi-weekly DnD nights here. We all get dressed up as our characters. It’s fun. And some of those clothes are multifunctional for some of the other silly little things I organise. Sorry for the, uh, incident by the way. With the cell and such. I got really angry at Fey for a bit.”

  If Ace had any idea where this story was going, she’d try to guess it, but Amy just seems to be stuck in her own little story, and experience teaches her that she should just let Amy burn through whatever she wants to say.

  “Anyways,” She turns the water back on, continuing to massage Ace’s hair to ensure all the shampoo is washed out. “I definitely wasn’t always like that. Three years ago I was a bit of a channer. I’d go on those miserable little threads where some poor girl would post her face and basically beg to be insulted and degraded in public, and I would be one of the pieces of shit telling her that she’s a total hon, that she’s ngmi, that she’s too old or needs too much FFS or that her ribcage is wrong. Once, I, um, suggested roping. It’s fucked up, I won’t make excuses for it, because it’s an endless cycle of desperate girls making other girls miserable.”

  Ace feels a little repulsed by it all. She never went on that website herself, preferring to watch simir things happening to people much prettier than her on reddit instead, and believing that if they don’t make it then she won’t either. It’s hard to believe that Amy could be that cruel, though.

  Amy turns the shower off again and starts to put some conditioner into Ace’s hair now. “Loonie found me because she was looking for some particurly miserable boys. Not girls. God, that really wasn’t the initial pn there, but that’s a whole story that I do not have the time, nor the permission to really tell you today. That’s a Loonie thing, and you shouldn’t ask her about it. Where was I? Oh yes. Loonie found me there, and reached out to me, and made the whole offer in the end: I stop hurting all the girls around me but they let me, like, be the woman I always tried to be here. They paid for everything. It still feels like a miracle.

  “That first batch, so Jen, Fey and me, was a bit of a mess, though. We all ended up swimming, more or less, in the same ocean of nonsense. It’s really easy to recreate the circumstances of your misery if everyone around you was both perpetrator and victim of that misery. It took the sponsors a long time to undo it all, and that’s fine, because we were the first and you’re the second and we’re all kind of figuring it out still. So the second time around we looked for people who were stuck in self-destructive cycles like we were, but different rather than complementing cycles. We thought it’d go better, but for a good moment there, you and Gwen and Aoife were only making things worse for each other. Maybe it’s an inevitable result of bringing together a bunch of very hurt people: I don’t know. I should have paid more attention though, and been there for you when you did get hurt, and intervened more when you did hurt others, even if I did do it that one time with— nevermind. Details.”

  Ace feels incredibly embarrassed at the memory of blowing up on Gwen, someone who was, she now knows, just trying to be fun to be around. She does have a problem with being too forward, one Ace can’t quite pce, other than that it seems to come from a nasty past.

  Amy continues whilst rinsing the conditioner. “Maybe I’m too hard on myself there. I do try to do the best I can, but sometimes you’re trying to navigate without radar or GPS or even a compass, and you’re just working off vibes, and your vibes as to what’s right is wrong. Because I don’t want to hurt you, Ay, and you know that too, but that does mean I do need you to try to be more open. I heard you’ve been getting better at stating your needs, and I’m so incredibly proud of you, especially with you just hugging me today and being as adorable as I know you’re capable of being. Maybe we’re all getting better at this. I don’t know. Just, like, if there’s anything I can do or say to make you feel better, the best way of making sure I do is to just ask me. I know you, I think I know you well, but sometimes I’m still left guessing or entirely oblivious and I would rather not be, because you deserve so much better.”

  Amy breathes out, smiles at Ace, leads her out of the shower and gives her a towel to dry herself with. She’s out of words for now, and Ace has little to say, because everything that has been said still needs to be processed. Which requires her to focus, and probably sleep on it.

  That’s a little hard with Amy in front of her, also wet and a little shiny in the lights, preoccupied with a towel and being, just—

  Amy taps Ace on the forehead and whispers into her ear. “Bonk.”

  ***

  It took a little longer than it probably should have, but Ace eventually manages to get herself dry and into some underwear, despite lewd thoughts and one suggestive joke about tucking from Amy. Amy then brushed her hair, only slightly reminding her about ‘proper, dylike posture’ and applied some makeup. She still makes it look so quick and easy, where it takes Ace forever to get, perhaps, something one percent as good as what Amy does in a few minutes.

  She’s a little envious.

  Amy rummages through her wardrobe, eventually finding a dress that she approves enough to let Ace wear today. “This one is actually Jen’s.” She crifies, “I would say I don’t know how our wardrobes get a little mixed sometimes, but I do. I’m not sure the Victorians would approve of such acts, however.”

  Ace nods, blushing, feeling horrifically lucky to live in one rather massive house with Amy. She gets into the casual dress, which looks good on her, even if it requires Amy making sure she has some padding in her bra — something the best maids have, according to her.

  Amy manoeuvres Ace in front of a mirror and puts an arm around her. “Do you like it?”

  “Um.” Ace blushes, unable to look at herself in the mirror. It’s odd to look mostly nice, rather than completely horrific. “Yes.”

  “Because I do have a pro quo.” Amy smirks, knowing she’s already won after putting in well over an hour of effort. “It’s not a big one.”

  Ace knows this tactic, because Amy will drop it just before asking something that is nearly impossible.

  “I want you to be Alice all night. My Alice.”