When Revenira was three and being taught how to write her name (a lengthy process even when she was fully grown and could scrawl out sixty polysyllabic words a minute), she was sent to Maladicta's house, so they could learn together. It took the greater part of an hour and one exercise book apiece to get through their names.

When Revenira was eight and started on percentages and the like, Maladicta was known to visit with her parents often so she could help (or often be helped) with the mathematics. Their names, they discovered, were sixty-four percent the same, and that was individual epithets, not letters.

The girls became close friends, Rev being hopeless at writing with any particular speed or flourish though very good with numbers and Mal repeatedly failing math though writing extremely well (and quick enough to have her name finished within fifteen minutes).

All through their thirteenth years of life, Revenira and Maladicta completely failed to take interest in boys. Mal was caught in a haystack with a pretty tavern-owner's daughter (who was all of one year older than Mal), and Rev was found in the cellars, fumbling with a servant woman's child (fifteen years of age, and should probably have known better). They were never caught together, though, not that there was any opportunity. They never did anything like that with each other - not then, anyway.

In Rev's fourteenth year, she began to notice things about Mal she hadn't before - how lovely (well, sexy, but that was basically the same thing, right?) she looked when she was out of breath, how long and smooth her legs were, the naughty, hells-yes-I'm-not-supposed-to-be-doing-this look in her eyes when she was up to mischief. Which was always. Mal began to see her friend in a similar manner - how soft and delicious-looking her mouth was, how nicely rounded her breasts were, how she was simultaneously the most and least innocent person Mal knew.

Awkward stuff like that.

When Revenira turned fifteen, she received, as a gift from her mother, a corset. Maladicta, who had achieved the same age about two days earlier, had received the same (and had promptly started planning how best to destroy it and make it look like an Accident). When there was quite coincidentally a Grand Ball maybe a week later, Mal was parceled off to Rev's house together with clothing her mother had picked from her wardrobe, corset included. Her traveling clothes were a bit more practical and didn't involve skirts, since she had specifically arranged for them. Rev had no such reprieve, though she did manage to stay in her nightgown until about two in the afternoon - incidentally, Mal arrived at one-thirty post-meridian.

Mal didn't knock on the bedroom door, not like she ever did. She slammed it open without a care for the wood then shortly bounded onto the bed. There she bounced on the soft of the mattress, waiting for her friend to emerge from the mess of fabric.

"Go away," said friend pronounced, venom on the edges of her voice. The words were muffled from the blankets that hid Rev's blush, as Rev attempted vainly to button her nightgown up, since it was her habit to sleep with it unbuttoned to just below the point of decency. She had gotten it to the point where it merely exposed a lot of cleavage when Mal tore the covers off her.

Rev raised an eyebrow, her blush disappearing, though it resurfaced on Mal's face almost instantaneously. For her part, Mal managed not to swear. Or drool, though she didn't exactly look away either.

"Mal," Rev whispered, her voice husky with sleep, "I love you dearly, but would you please get the hell off my bed? Also, stop eying my chest like that. It's not like my blood tastes particularly nice, you should have figured that out by now."

Mal tumbled right off the bed at that, and Rev grinned, pulling the blankets back over her head and trying to go back to sleep. She did not bother with her nightdress buttons either way. The look on Mal's face had been quite amusing.

Mal sighed exaggeratedly.

"Rev, if you don't get up, say, now, I shall clamber onto you and either tickle you or kiss you until you do." The words escaped her mouth before she had quite gotten them in order, and if she'd had any hope of her facing turning any less red any time soon, it vanished quite resolutely.

"Come on, then," Rev said brightly. "That sounds exceptionally agreeable."

There was a pause of silence in which Mal considered turning into a small flock of bats and fleeing the country.

"Look, things between us can hardly get any more awkward," Rev said with the air of having gone over her words many times before. "It's not like I haven't seen you when I should have been sleeping the past year or so, and it's not like you can even look at me without your imagination running off, so could you just hurry up and get it over with?"

The bedclothes were lifted tentatively, and a nervous Mal slipped under them. The two girls regarded each other in the filtered-through light, trying to make the moment last.

There was a kiss, and then another, then a tangle of limbs, and a hand slipped under a loose shirt, and then tongues were involved, and then there was a lot more that decency would not allow any description of at all, in which clothing played an absolutely minimal part.

Mal watched lazily from the bed as Rev struggled with her corset, quickly realizing why most women employed maidservants for the sole purpose of helping to get dressed. The smock she wore beneath the stays was thin and black, and Rev's long hair was in some disarray.

"Do you want some help with that?" Mal asked lazily, not really wanting to join in the fray that Rev seemed to be initiating with the piece of fabric.

"Only if you think you can get me into the stays without promptly removing them, Mal," Rev said tiredly, rolling her eyes.

"… Hm. Why d'you say stays? Isn't it a corset?"

"Corsets in the style of those from the century of the Frosted Moth are known as stays. Stays are known for being extremely comfortable, putting underwire of any sort to shame, and making your torso achieve a sort of tapered cylindrical shape."

"Are they also known for being difficult to wear?"

"They are, apparently. I get the feeling I look like a damn idiot trying to get them on."

Mal grinned. "You do, actually."

"Damn. Would you help me, then?"

"Right now, you look like a damn idiot. If I attempted to help you with that, I would. There's no question, really."

"I am absolutely going to take a sadistic pleasure out of watching you struggle with your stays, I swear."

Mal blanched, and in a scant moment she was standing behind her friend and trying to get the laces of the corset through the grommets. Rev laughed and was duly poked. "If you laugh, or talk, or, or breathe, you just make it that much harder, you realize."

"Too bad." Rev laughed again.

"Mal," Polly said slowly, trying very hard not to giggle in a mad-scientist kind of way, "why exactly has your mother just presented me with a corset? Vampires don't get fat, do they?"

"When they're pregnant, yeah, they do, but pregnancy and corsets don't really mix. It's traditional to give vampire girls corsets on their fifteenth birthdays."

"I'm not fifteen, Mal."

"Since you were older than fifteen when you were Changed, it's something for you to wear to your first Grand Ball, which only girls over the age of fifteen attend, anyway."

Mal, Polly reflected, could pronounce capital letters extremely well. "What was your first Grand Ball like, then?"

Mal paused, thinking. "Far too long, with too many people chaperoning me and my partner. I fronted up late with my stays really, really loose and a visible set of teeth-marks on my shoulder. I think my mother would have died laughing if she was a bit less dignified."

"Dare I ask?"

"Well, if you think I was disheveled from that little description, you should have seen Rev." Mal grinned easily. "Actually, I think I've still got the woodcut."

She went to her bookshelf, removed about ten volumes of an encyclopedia and started knocking on the heavy wood of the back of the shelf. After a while, she dragged a flat-ish sort of box out. Opening it, she started rifling through the pictures. After a while, she tossed one to Polly.

Polly stared at the woodcut and started to laugh. The artist had been excellent, and had captured Mal's failing attempt at nonchalance very well. Mal's shoulder was indeed marked by a set of rather sharp teeth. At that point in time, Mal had had rather long hair, straight and black. She didn't appear to be any taller than she was now; though she was maybe a bit more rounded than the almost stick-thin she was now. The girl next to her had an almost self-satisfied smirk. She was tall and buxom and her dark hair was loosely curled and just about escaping the style it was presumably meant to be. Her clothing looked like it might have, at one time, been demure but was no longer quite so.

"She's very pretty. You said she was called Rev?"

"Mm-hm. Revenira."

"What happened to her?"

"Her mother married her off to some rich old fool when we were eighteen. Rev was planning manslaughter, I believe. She might have managed it, actually – she was a capable girl. I think it was mostly because marriage would've added another two pages to her name. She hated it so when she had to write her name out. You, my dear Polly Perks, should be damn glad you've got such a short address."

"And thank the Gods for that," Polly says, smiling. "Do you miss her?"

"I have you now, Pol. Why in the world would I ever need anyone else?"

"You make a good point."

"Hush."

A/N: This was my first attempt at the Discworld and a proper lesbian pairing. I look back on it with fondness.

~Mademise Morte, November 7, 2010.