Chapter 18No more secrets?27 February 2022“Ay! Please come over here, darling.” Amy is sitting on a chair next to a table, her legs crossed and one elbow leaning on the wood.

  Walking on heels is surprisingly hard. Yes, she’s walking on a low heel, but she’s never really worn any shoes which had any kind of heel. At first, Amy held her arm, then only her hands, finally just walking next to her. She did so annoyingly gracefully, causing Ace to get distracted, lose her bance, and somehow fail to knock Amy over in the process.

  The girl is stronger than she looks. Maybe Alice should try to use the gym as well, someday.

  Amy pulls her into an excited hug, and Ace realises in this moment that she both zoned out and actually made it to the other side of the room without losing her bance, at least until Amy glomped her.

  “You’re doing so well. Sure, you’ll still need to practise,” Amy immediately kills Ace’s hopes that she could get away with not doing something as tedious and repetitive as this. “But it’s a great start.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Pitch, darling.” Amy whispers.

  It’s been less than 72 hours since they’ve made the deal they did, and the girls have been utterly unquenchable since. Ace and Kelynen spent three hours yesterday doing various voice training lessons, and Amy was convinced that Alice should start off every single conversation trying to do at least some vocal feminisation. Starting off with — what else? — pitch. Kelynen said it’s technically not the most effective training overall, but that it does tend to be retively easy and thus, the best option for Ace right now.

  “Thank you.” Ace repeats, this time approximating the pitch they’d decided was both higher than she usually speaks, whilst still being comfortable.

  “You’ve nothing to thank me for: this has all been you.” She smiles. “Do you want to keep these on, or would you want to switch back to something easier?”

  Alice thinks about all the things she still needs to do today: talk to Kelynen, help with dinner, pick up Aoife’s present that Amy made sure to get ready in time for her birthday tomorrow and the few odd errants she’ll be asked to run on any given day. Amy might be happy if she keeps them on, but her feet would be less so, and Amy is less likely to make her feel pain than her feet are at this point.

  “I’ll wear something easier, I think.” Ace says, unable to look at Amy and face the disappointment that is sure to be there.

  “No worries. You should take everything at your own pace, and then a little extra. And we’ve already managed a little extra today.”

  Amy smirks like she’s completely outmanoeuvred Alice, and she has: by just asking her to do more, which she can’t really refuse — at least not without some uncomfortable feelings in private pces — and she’s already doing more than she would otherwise have done. Like walk on heels, or start voice training, or wear any feminine clothes at all.

  Ace changes into her normal shoes: comfortable sneakers, so she can quickly and effectively get across the manor. Her feet do actually hurt a little already: probably something to do with how she walked, or whatever, but Amy seemed more interested in seeing whether she could walk at all first before seeing if she could walk comfortably.

  “You’re so mean.”

  “I know! I’m trying to be.” Amy beams.

  ***

  “Thank you so much, Fifi.” Rose takes the pte from Aoife’s hands. “It smells lovely.”

  Aoife isn’t sure if the food smells lovely: she hasn’t smelled much since she caught coronavirus a few months ago. It sucks, but it’s not exactly something she wants to tell others about: hence, she lies, and avoids all details to cover that fact up as effectively as she can. “It does.”

  “Just in case it tastes a little weird; we were missing some ingredients so I improvised a little on some of the vegetables.” Aoife expins whilst sitting down on the chair next to Rose. “I tried to follow the rough guide you had in that book, with taste profiles and such.”

  Rose takes a bite from the sagnette that the girls had cooked today: Aoife’s turn to decide the meal, with help from Ace and Eira. The rotation nded on her, and luckily, it means she doesn’t have to choose another meal for another ten days. In this case, she just chose the most common choice over the past month from the others. Given that Ace and Amy make up the majority of the times the sagnette has been chosen, Aoife is pretty sure about who is at fault for the distribution being the way it is.

  It’s got plenty of vegetables anyhow, and would be really good for her, if she could manage to get over her guilt and eat more than the minimum amount they will let her get away with eating. She can’t count as accurately as she used to, given everything is made fresh and with high-quality ingredients here, but she’s pretty sure it hovers around 1300 calories per day. Breakfast, something with bread for lunch, and then something with plenty of vegetables for dinner.

  An amount of calories much higher than she is comfortable with, but also one that is rgely unavoidable, lest she draw too much attention to herself.

  The texture of the fork is nice, though. It’s clearly old, well-loved silverware, and it feels like it might be as old as the pce itself: around the 1870s, after the original burned down and was renovated by some old ancestors of a family that then married into the Lamberts.

  The cheese is nice and melty at least. She might not like eating, but she can at least enjoy it.

  “It’s a little off, but in a good way.” Rose concludes after another bite. “You might even be able to fool Elle into thinking it’s the same thing, and that’s the most important part.”

  “I thought the most important part was that it was made with love, or whatever.”

  “Sure, but if you tell Elle it’s made with love, she’ll get all weird about it. If you tell her it’s made with tomatoes or whatever, she won’t particurly mind the fact it’s made with just about everything but that.”

  Aoife had expected this Elle woman to be a bit of an oddball from the beginning, but seeing her in person definitely added to this impression. She looked at her sisters with a near unsatisfiable interest, an unquenchable lust, and at her and the other first years with sheer impatience for when they, too, would become avaible to satisfy her.

  She’s happy making her wait. If nothing else because it would be funny to watch her get increasingly desperate and annoyed about it. She’s seen enough of Elle to know she would stay polite throughout, too. But that’s not good enough.

  Aoife wants her to beg for it. Because yes, she will take the free HRT, FFS, GRS and all the other acronyms she offers, and yes, she will accept a pce to live and the food she doesn’t particurly want as well as everything else Elle is doing for them. Aoife will, if she is interested, have sex with the aristocrat — though nowhere in her contract did it state she has any obligation to do so. But she will not submit to Eldine Lambert. Because she will be proud to be a woman, stand strongly and firmly, and never be the whimpering little mess that Elle no doubt enjoys to see.

  It also doesn’t befit an Irishwoman to submit to an English one.

  A little easier fantasised than done, though, certainly. She’s not a woman yet, let alone a proud one, one proud enough to bring an aristocrat to heel. She’s still trying to be a girl in the first pce. And someone trying to be a girl can’t exactly bring up the confidence to do that to someone as powerful as Elle is, though the thought is amusing.

  “Hm? What’s so funny?” Rose whispers to her, causing Aoife to give her best attempt at a female giggle rather than just smiling to herself like a maniac.

  “Elle getting all worked up over a sagnette.” She lies, distracting herself from her own thoughts before she feels too horny about it.

  “Nothing that hasn’t happened before.” Rose giggles too, hiding her smile behind her hand. “It really is quite easy to get her into that state of mind.”

  ***

  Kelynen was watching her earlier. She saw how busy Amy was with her, and let Amy do as she pleased — the universal strategy of the sponsors, it seems — but the moment Alice finished serving dinner the woman pounced on her with serious intent to do something.

  The ‘something’, it turns out, was to be yet another sister deciding to try her hand at putting some make-up on her face. It’s actually quite horrible, given they simultaneously insist she practise and that they get to use their own skills on prettying Ace up in more ways that she even imagined existing before she came to this pce.

  Alice, sometimes, regrets the fact she basically signed away her right to say no to these kinds of things. The sponsors would only use it for generally cruel and unusual purposes, rather than sexual ones, but they still use the right gleefully and entirely to their own benefit. She feels like they use it to their own amusement as well, especially when they sit Alice down on a swivel chair, don’t let her see the mirror, and only turn the chair around so she can see the effect after it’s been fully applied.

  She’s blushing so badly. Unfair.

  “So? Do ye like it?” Kelynen asks, admiring her creation.

  “It’s nice.” Ace says, struggling to look at herself — and it is increasingly herself she’s seeing.

  “Come on, ye can come up with some better adjectives than that.” Kelynen frowns.

  Alice pauses for a moment, put on the spot and forced to come up with words which suddenly seem impusibly impossible to bring to mind. She narrowly avoids her mild panic turning much more serious by coming up with another entirely undescriptive term. “It’s great.”

  “How about pretty?” Kelynen offers.

  It’s not pretty, though. Maybe it would be on someone else — someone with a nicer base to work with — or in the abstract sense of it being a good job, which helps improve things, but Ace is not pretty in any sense of the term and no amount of make-up can solve those issues.

  She can’t exactly deny it, however, if only because it would be rather rude. Alice has been rude plenty of times in the past, but she’s trying not to be!

  Kelynen sees her struggle with the question she posed. Ace can’t even say the woman did this entirely on purpose — she’s clumsy, and sometimes she just says things — but she should still know better. She went through the same phase Ace is dealing with right now. Alice knows, rationally, that things are going to get better, but it’s hard to imagine right now. She waited way too long to get on oestrogen in the first pce. Now she’s impatient for any results, because she’s already thrown away too many years of her life.

  “Ye don’t have to say it is,” Kelynen gives her an out, which Alice gratefully takes, at least before the next sentence follows. “But I would want ye to tell me more about how ye’ve been doing tely in that case.”

  Ace wonders whether there is anything worse than near a dozen meddling sisters who genuinely care about her well-being and comes up short.

  “I’m fine.” She says after a few more seconds, immediately earning herself a raised eyebrow from Kelynen and a wave of shame across her whole body from herself.

  “I’m not fine.” Ace admits afterwards.

  “You did spend a week in your bed.” Kelynen points out in her sponsor voice, then decides to stick the rhetorical knife in even deeper. “And only stopped doing so when someone caught you sneaking around.”

  “I guess.” Ace looks away. She can’t really look Kelynen in the eyes right now.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “You shouldn’t be!” Ace snaps a little, raises her voice, and it comes out too masculine, too raw.

  “It’s my job to be worried about you.” Kelynen’s words force Ace to sag a little. Of course Kelynen cares. “I care about all of you girls, and I want to see you succeed. To be safe, happy and comfortable with yourself and your future. I’m not much good as a sponsor, but I can see that you’re struggling and I won’t just let you suffer like that.”

  Ace really would prefer it if Kelynen did just let her suffer in her own troubles. If she would just go away, in a sense, not because she doesn’t think she isn’t nice, but because she’s too much for her at this moment. She can’t just tell her to, but she can tell Kelynen things that will make her want to leave Ace alone, by hurting her like she’s hurt so many before. Weaponing her words, through his voice, showing her male socialisation in being nasty to women and willingly harming them. And what for? Because she can’t just bullshit her way out of things? Pathetic.

  Ace sniffles as Kelynen wipes away the leaky stains of make-up on her face. She can’t do it, not anymore, because she would hate herself too much if she did.

  The words feel impossible to say. There’s so many of them, and they’re so impactful. If she says everything she wants to say, which she has to say, she’ll only get more attention and more understanding from her sisters. They’re too kind, too quick to love her. Unconditionally, it seems. But love can’t be unconditional: people always have expectations and demands, things they want to see her do and a person they want to see her be, not in the same way everyone here wants her to be the best version of herself, because that’s not real, it’s artificial. It’s a trick to lull her into a false sense of security. Her mum also wanted Ace to be the best version of himself, said she would always support her even if he was gay or bi or whatever, as long as he wasn’t like ‘one of those’.

  Ace tried to tell her mum that she was, in fact, ‘one of those’, hoping she could rely on it being a bluff, her love actually being unconditional. The next month, she didn’t get any of the meagre support her family sent her to help afford her bills as a student anymore, and she had to drop out of university.

  Kelynen watches her intently, clearly deep in thought, probably weighing her options as to whether she should give up on Ace at this point whilst waiting for Ace to say something.

  Ace can’t say anything, nothing of substance anyways. Words are too hard to come by, so she settles for a question, if a painful one.

  “Why me?” She asks. There are so many people more deserving of this than she is!

  “Because you deserve it.” Kelynen has such simple responses ready: Ace is going to be skewered. She feels it.

  “I don’t.” Ace trembles, tears in her eyes. “I’m a horrible person.”

  “You’re not. And even if you were — an absurd notion — you’d still deserve a happier, more comfortable life than you’d had before.” Kelynen seems different. Less id-back. She’s focused, in a way, and Ace doesn’t know what.”

  It takes her a long while to formute in her head, and then turn into sounds and words, even if it all comes out painfully male. Fittingly so, but a reminder she doesn’t want to deal with at this point. “All I did for years was hurt people.”

  “So?” Kelynen asks. “Even if it's true, which isn’t the case, who should care? Plenty of people have hurt others and ended up being better for it.”

  “Not people who are as bad as me.” Ace insists, her words feeling more feeble by the moment. “I blow up at people. All the time. I get angry, at others or at myself, and I just detonate, and when I do, I want it to hurt.” She hates admitting it to herself, let alone others. “So they don’t put up with me anymore. Because they’re better off like that. Because I’ll hurt them if they do.”

  Kelynen is uncharacteristically silent. Usually she would rush into an answer, trying to prove Ace wrong, to outmanoeuvre her rhetorically, and put her into some logical trap.

  Now, she pauses.

  She sighs.

  She’s desperately holding back tears.

  “I didn’t want to tell ye this yet,” She talks softly, in a near-whisper. “Because it’s never an easy story. But I think ye need to know where I came from. The things I did.”

  “Ye need to learn about Dorley Hall.”

  Given Kelynen’s tone, Ace isn’t sure she should want to.