#and i'm sorry sylvain but do u expect moritz to know english SEWING vocabulary? yeah no. u will need to explain.

[andessence]

@polarean // continued.

Moritz holds the bedpost fast in her clammy hands as she watches him think and make comforting overtures at her like one coos to a frightened, cornered animal. ‘It is not bad to be who you are.’ Her knuckles are white from her grip. Does he really believe that? Moritz has about a thousand reasons to hate who she is, all backed up by the ire of her schoolmasters, the disappointment of her parents, and the rejection of her home, and all of these without anyone ever having to know what she is now, dressing up like a girl alone in some boardinghouse room in the dead of night to admire her own reflection. The stupidity had been fault enough to make her see that being who she was could indeed be bad. ———— But no matter how resolutely she attempts to reconcile herself to this sour truth, a craving for acceptance keeps her hoping it could be otherwise. It makes her wish that, for all her protests, Sylvain won’t stop trying to comfort her.

Melchior had once made her see that this was the nature of girls — to fight off a good thing as long as they could, and eventually to be won over, in spite of themselves. That’s the best proof she has that she’s a girl, deep down; she can’t help fighting off the good things she most needs.

Sylvain is looking at her dress — (It was Mama’s dress, and heaven only knows what she thought when she noticed it was missing. Did she discover the theft right away, or only days, maybe weeks after her son flunked out of school and disappeared? Surely she would have been too embarrassed to mention it except to Moritz’s father ... if the two of them even spoke about Moritz anymore and had not disowned her, leaving her name a taboo in her childhood home.) — but Sylvain is looking at it and he is asking her something about it that she doesn’t understand. 

“How to...? Sorry.”

She does not step back out from behind the corner of the bed, but her weight shifts, and she leans out, the skirt rustling, as if she might come forward.