Black-ribboning started out as one of the various semi-insane ideas that Mal's mother brandished about with all the pride of a rather bad fisherman with a good catch. She was a nice enough old bat, though fairly prone to the kind of thing that sort of deals with social issues in ways that completely skew off the point, which is why Mal has, to this day, a lasting aversion to all things involving Lepidoptera as foodstuff.
As was his wont, Mal's father complained at first. Quite a bit, in fact, and at length, mostly at the dinner table, so shocked by the sight of his wife drinking water with cochineal coloring that he completely neglected to seal up the veins of the placid young virgin that was his meal, allowing the pretty young thing to perish while he hopped around twitching and shouting. Mal might have been amused if she had been present, but she was held up in her room with the new chambermaid.
Ahem.
When she was finally informed, she wasn't much impressed, but she wasn't really worried either, being well used to the ways of her mother. What was a surprise, though, was that this fad actually did have a way of sticking. Going off blood was, of course, not the most fantastic thing ever, as far as her worldview was concerned, but at that particular point in time, she had far more interesting things to take the edge of her hunger off. Cold sweat's not much of a problem when you're busy with the other kind, after all.
It wasn't that she never thought about giving up or rebelling or suchlike, because she did, every morning when she was getting dressed, because giving up a lifelong dietary habit is one thing, but wearing stupid, impractical, aggravating clothing that happens to stifle one's preferred gender expression is quite another, where Maladicta is concerned, but whenever she got too upset about it there was always a subservient around to promise the quick removal of the offending apparel.
And then there was the coffee.
She discovered it a couple of weeks after the whole cold bat debacle began, when she was scrounging around the kitchen in something of a frenzy because she was bloody hungry, and she didn't even notice the new chef which was quite a pity because she was absolutely lovely. Even if there had been the chance that she would have noted the sweet-eyed blonde after obtaining her sustenance, though, that disappeared the moment she ingested the first drop of coffee, because she was hooked from that point onwards, like a particularly pathetic fish.
And so she swapped her midnight liaisons with the help for cup after cup of the tropical brew, and suddenly discovered herself spending a lot of her time in front of the mirror, which was something that she had never thought that she would do. She flattened down her not-insubstantial bust as much as she could, and prodded at her hair until it looked like it might be short, and she marveled.
Every time she did that, though, the urge to escape grew stronger, because one thing that vampires certainly do not like is being trapped, and so when her mother moved on to the next stage of her obsessing and just mentioned in passing that maybe Maladicta might like to go to Ankh-Morpork to get the Black Ribbon too, just for some kind of closure, since she stayed home when we went, Mal latches onto it.
After Ankh-Morpork, and leaving the containment cells that really were cages, and horribly closely situated to the sound of harmoniums, at that, Mal travels the world a little bit. She's in no hurry to go back home, and this was as easy a way as any to hide herself to her parents, and she did kind of want to hide, because in Ankh-Morpork, Mal had discovered cross-dressing.
Perhaps that's a rather hyperbolical way of putting it, since she had, of course, been aware of it in some vague sort of way for quite some time, but she did get into it in a major way, and the dizzy-happy-blissful feeling it gave her was as good as chambermaids and freedom, though not quite as wonderful as coffee, which was forever destined to figure importantly in her life.
She wasn't particularly enthused with travelling after about the twelfth small, dull country she ran through in her trousers and her bindings, leaving behind her a wake of particularly cheerful young maidens who really couldn't be called maidens anymore, so when she saw the sign for the Borogravian army, her thoughts could be summed up as being nonchalant and along the lines of why the Hell not.
And so, as was the way of her life, something that started out incredibly small became something very, very major.
A/N: I rather enjoyed working with this idea.
~Mademise Morte, April 28, 2012.