Mal is noticeably taller than her parents by the time she's eleven, and yet she is still short by human standards. Tall for a girl, maybe, if you push the truth and pad her shoes, but the fact is that she's little more than a slip of a child. Her parents are even less in terms of height, though they do make up for it in girth.

It's hardly inexplicable, all things considered. She's first generation undead, her parents both having been bitten rather than born to it themselves, and it's inevitable that in some way she'll outstrip them, as must every child their caretakers. It's not in kindness or compassion (and she's quietly convinced that's another reason: her parents have been Black Ribboners from day one, whereas the community stepped in and insisted she be fed on blood until such a time as she was finished growing, and surely there was a reason why), and it's certainly not in refinement, so instead she gains height.

She watches as her limbs stretch and her flesh elongates on the frame. She listens to the workings of her innards and wonders at her own frailty. She grows slim and short, forever short by the standards of the majority, and no matter how much she works at it, how diligently she trains, she cannot look significantly muscled. She is strong, though, and that is enough for her.

She teaches herself to drink coffee when she's sixteen and her brain has finally, finally finished knitting itself together. It starts out innocent, ironic, but it quickly stops being so, and if she thought she was skinny before, well. Well.

And Mal looks at herself in the mirror when she's buzzing away on a caffeine charge and when she takes the razor to her skin, to smooth away her hair the better to see her silhouette, she sometimes wishes she could just keep cutting the excess away until she was nothing left but bone. Life might be easier for a skeleton, even a diminutive vampiric one.

She teaches herself to get drunk on sunlight and to love religious symbols and to dress herself so she looks like any boy of the village, any human boy, because she may be hardly anything at all but neither are they, and one day she leaves her home so attired and she discovers girls and from that moment on there is absolutely nothing for it.

She'd thought she'd known intoxication before, knew the chemicals and shifts that could bring her shooting high, but that was nothing at all, and for the first time in a long while she feels like she fits in her flesh. She doesn't know, can't say for sure, if it's the clothing or the company, but either way, something is working that never has before, and that's certainly something.

Mal bids her parents goodbye, spine straight and eyes proud, and as they watch her leave all they can think of is how much she has grown.

A/N: I started out trying to write a Monstrous Regiment fic for Femslash February but somehow I ended up with this instead. Perhaps I should try again.

~Mademise Morte, February 7, 2013.