Krem looked in the mirror, only to be forcibly reminded that he wasn't Krem. He wasn't even really he. Although the high-necked dress he wore concealed his chest, breasts were obvious, accented by intricate stitching. His thin shoulders were laid bare; the pale, smooth skin inviting the touch of the merchant's son waiting at the night's dance. Brown hair hung in curls around his neck and shoulders. His hair didn't naturally curl, but the aggressive, insistent ministrations of his mother the evening before, and a night of sleeping in annoyingly large curlers, had resulted in acceptablewaves.
He was short, though he thanked the Maker every day he was not nearly as short as some of his other friends. Hips widened alarmingly below his waist, though admittedly the effect was accentuated by the ample skirt he had been forced into. He hated the image he looked at, and refused to admit it was him.
He didn't have sultry, smokey eyes, or a large chest, or hips, or small feet. But he did. This cage he found himself trapped in did. His jaw clenched and his hands curled into tight balls, immaculately manicured nails digging into lotion-smoothed palms.
A deep breath, a step forward, nearly nose to nose with the mirror. He tilted his head this way and that, seeking out any hint of masculinity beneath the painted facade he was forced to wear. Some days, such hints were all that kept him moving.
The strong jaw, he liked. Sometimes when he was little, his father had let him brush on shaving cream and pretend to shave with a blunt bit of metal. He had always liked how each swipe revealed a section of smooth, strong jaw or cheek. As he grew older the motions, however little visual difference they made, made him feel more like a man. That it was feminine peach fuzz he removed didn't matter; what mattered was the act.
He shifted his head.
An assertive nose. It was strong and straight, not cute. It didn't resemble a button or a prim little bunny nose. It looked like the statues on show in the courtyard and in dark alleys, like the noses old archons sported in their portraits.
Where high cheekbones feminine or masculine? Krem could never tell since he'd heard both. However, he liked his cheekbones. He thought they added a certain handsome, dominant look to his profile. He flashed a smile at himself, and this close to the mirror he could almost believe...but his breath fogged the glass, and he forced himself to step back.
This served only to remind himself that he was, according to everyone else, herself. Which mattered more? Was how other people perceived him more important than how he viewed himself? He wondered as he fiddled with the dangling golden earrings hanging from his ears. They were family heirlooms, passed down along the female line throughout the decades, the centuries. The female line. He snorted, a rather unfeminine gesture his mother would have glared at him for.
But he was female, wasn't he? He had all of the female parts. He had been given a female name, wore female clothes, performed female duties. Did the external count, or the internal? It all felt wrong, every bit. The extra weight on his chest, the empty void in his pants. The octave of his voice and the brush of his hair.
Suddenly, red. Krem wasn't certain when his hand had found the fat red candle burning near him, but now its wax spattered the mirror. He stepped away, fighting to control anger, despair, depression, sadness...all of the things that assaulted him when these discrepancies found their way to the surface. What did it matter that he felt like a man inside? What he felt didn't change the boned corset he wore, or the heavy skirt, or the painful heels beneath his feet.
Once, he had tried to express his feelings to one of his closest friends, but the boy had only compared Krem's feelings to thinking one was a druffalo. In response, Krem had punched the guy in lieu of explaining that thinking one was a druffalo was not nearly the same as thinking of oneself as a different gender of the same species.
The encounter had ended in trouble for Krem, but the resulting extra chores and work had meant little. The question had given him pause, and the extra time from the punishments gave him time to think. Perhaps he was just as stupid as someone thinking they were a druffalo. The scabs on his knuckles from the punch...or three...served as a reminder of how strong his feelings were, however. He could still remember the blood on his once-friend's upper lip as the boy lay on the ground after the first unexpected swing.
With hands shaking from the vividness of the memory, Krem smoothed down the front of the dress he wore. It had been imported from Orlais, and he should attempt to keep it looking pristine. That way, his mother could return or sell it somehow to regain most of the money spent. Because all that mattered was the money; that was the reason he was meant to meet this merchant's son in the first place. He didn't even know the boy's name.
He scowled, and might have screamed in frustration, but that would have been unladylike, and his mother would have come running. The last thing in the world he wanted to do tonight was to attend a ball in a fancy Orlesian gown and attempt to win the heart of some merchant's son, and a close second was spending more time with his mother than necessary. It didn't matter that the son had wonderful hair and handsome features; the boy would only ever see Krem as a woman, and that was something he simply couldn't live with.
A flash. A brief, almost-missed glint on the vanity across the room from the full length mirror he had been using. His eyes almost passed completely over it, ignoring the momentary desire, but his gaze quickly returned to settle itself on the bit of metal. It was a razor. The piece was typically meant to shave legs and underarms, things he had been rebelling against these past few years, much to his mother's annoyance. But a blade sharp enough to scrape hair from calves was certainly sharp enough to scrape hair from a head, wasn't it?
He eyed the blade, then the door to his room, then the wax-spattered full-length mirror. In that mirror, he saw himself. The corset accentuating breast, bum, and hips, and the hair teasing against his skin to entice a suitor. His gaze hardened, like a soldier assessing a battlefield, and he picked up the blade.
In the smaller mirror of the vanity, he saw himself much closer when he sat, razor in hand. He saw those cheekbones, that nose, the jawline he was so quietly proud of. If only this hair wasn't there to distract.
And then he started.
He took a fist of those carefully crafted curls and hacked them away, slice by slice, until his left hand pulled free of his head holding a bundle of perfect waves. And he laughed, giddy at the lightness that encompassed him, as he dropped the locks into a wastebasket. His head moved freely without the weight of hair he never wanted, and his spirit soared at what felt like the first step toward a new life.
There, in that Orlesian gown, the daughter of the Aclassi house hacked away at his hair, shorter and shorter, until that wasn't even enough. With a bit of his father's shaving cream he'd taken, and an old horsehair brush he'd dug out of a garbage bin when his father was finished with it, he lathered the sides of his head.
Another laugh. With an inch or two of hair left and most of it covered in white lather, he was certainly a sight, and as soon as that razor started shaving away the excess, the binds that marked him woman, that giddiness grew. Sure, some women had similar hairstyles, but more men did, and that was what was important.
The entire haircut took just a few minutes, and at the end he reached for a hand towel hanging by the vanity mirror that was typically used to remove makeup. As he wiped away the pillowy remnants of cream and the prickly leftovers of hair, he kept his eyes away from the mirror, only looking up again when the sides of his head were bare and clean.
For the first time in his life, he looked into the mirror and saw himself, despite the beginnings of a high court dress that threatened at the bottom of the mirror. The one who was now Krem saw handsome instead of pretty. Confident instead of cute. Brazen instead of passive. Masculine instead of feminine. It wasn't much, this brave haircut, but it was a start, and as he walked down the steps from his attic room to see his parents, his back was straight because of more than the restricting garments he wore.