Chapter 9Cobblestones3 February 2022“Do we really have to?” Ace asks, sitting cross-legged on the stones of the cell floor. Her right leg hurts a little as she does so, the still sensitive scald burns pressing against a rock that is sticking out slightly. She presses it down more harshly, hoping she can feel a bit of pain.

  Kelynen is looking down at her, her arms crossed and leaning against a wall with her shoulders. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Can we do so ter?” Ace tries, really not wanting to deal with people right now. She came down here to escape them, not so Kelynen could be angry at her.

  “It’s for yer own good, Alice.”

  She rolls her eyes. As if it ever could be.

  “Ye can roll yer eyes all ye want, it doesn’t make this discussion any less needed.”

  “Hard to believe that when it doesn’t seem that anything here is done for my own good.” Ace tries to control herself from exploding yet again, if only because the st explosion gave her quite the horrible headache.

  Rather than respond immediately, Kelynen takes a second to inspect the boy-thing in front of her. The disgust in her eyes is palpable. “Things here are the way they are for a reason. I’m sorry ye feel like they’re not in yer benefit.”

  “It’s hard to justify the way I’ve been treated here.” Ace sneers at her sponsor. “I want to go home. This pce is just not for me.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not an option.”

  “Why not? I’ll just take what meagre funds I have left and get on the next train to Leeds.” Ace shrugs. “They probably won’t even bat an eye at the fact I pop up after having been gone for just a week.”

  “You can’t leave. For one, you signed away your right to uniterally pull out of the programme in the contract. I need to approve your withdrawal from the programme, and I’m not going to do that. Not over being a little annoyed at your roommates.” Kelynen slips into a much more formal voice than normal, but also a more intimidating one. It’s too controlled, too intentional, as if every word is not only being weighed but also leveraged to get something out of Ace.

  “I’ll just walk out the front door whether I have your approval or not.” Ace bluffs. Chances are she doesn’t make it far if she tries to escape on her own. She’s in the middle of the most rural parts of Wales, during winter, and she has no clue which direction she should go if she wants to reach the nearest town. Not to mention that it looked like it was snowing.

  “I would really recommend against doing that.” Kelynen says, and Ace is unsure if it’s because of the issues she’s come up with, or because of things that she would do to stop her.

  “Why won’t you just let me leave?”

  “Why do you want to leave?”

  “Because you lied to me!” Ace shouts. “You come to me and promise me the world and you didn’t deliver! I’ve been scalded. I’ve been thrown into a cell. I can’t fucking sleep because of Aoife going on all night, pulling me deeper into the issues of her shitty sleep schedule. I have to deal with a girl who is constantly and inappropriately horny.”

  Her voice comes out rough. Painfully masculine. Everything about Ace is. She returns to a whisper, wanting to feel like the man in her is less present than he is. “Everyone is so disgustingly casual about it.”

  “You’ve been here for a week, Alice.”

  “So? A week is a long time. That’s a week I could have been on oestrogen, which you aren’t giving us either.” She adds, with even more bitterness than she imagined she could muster.

  “Do you think we can change Gwen and Aoife to be entirely to your liking within a week? How do you think we could do that? Should we take your standards and enforce them on these girls?”

  Ace can’t believe that Kelynen is really going to defend them. Why is she so invested in forgiving them for their actions when they are so beyond the pale? Why is she avoiding her questions? “Those two are cking basic decency. So yes, I would hope you make them act in ways which do not harm the people around them?”

  Kelynen rests her face in her hand and sighs dramatically. “I really need you to listen carefully to what I am about to say.”

  “I don’t want to hear excuses for their behaviour.”

  “I don’t care if you don’t want to hear this, I’m going to tell you because you need to hear this.”

  Ace rolls her eyes in lieu of a proper response to that bollocks.

  “We don’t just take a completely random selection of trans girls. We select those who would be unlikely to transition any other way. The ones who are so stuck in their own misery and self-hatred that they do not only harm themselves, but the people around them too. The ones that for one reason or another end up outside the mainstream transgender community. Because they don’t want to be part of it, because they get thrown out of it, because they settled in much more toxic spaces. People come here because they are desperate, Alice. Because they just can’t make it out there. That includes Gwen and Aoife, who did not have it easy and are still struggling with many issues.”

  “If that’s true, then you should just let me go because I do not want to deal with people like that. I was promised a chance to transition, to learn new skills, to do… exciting things. To become the woman I want to be.” And will probably never be, especially not if she does walk out of this building. “I didn’t sign up for a reform programme for trans girls. If I go home I’ll just… figure it out. I’ll find a way to transition.”

  “If I thought you could make it out there, I wouldn’t have brought you into the programme.” Kelynen notes drily. “Like Gwen and Aoife, you would not transition without serious effort being put into pushing you forward, every step of the way. Amy did as much as she could from such a distance, and made almost no progress. There’s just a few pces on earth which could make you do everything you’ll have to do. And I’d rather not have you end up in the other pce.”

  “I’m not like— not like them!” The words come out much more emotionally than she had hoped. “I’ve been trying to escape people like that for ages. Left server after server because I just couldn’t deal with the constant depression and the expectation to put up with all kinds of sexual nonsense. Do you know how painful it is to log onto some group chat you joined so you can rex and escape from the rest of the world, to be with people who understand how painful it is to be unable to transition, just to run into someone talking about their ‘massive hog’? To have that done to you whilst you don’t want to think about your own body, because it just reminds you of something horrible you’ve been cursed to live with by biology?”

  Kelynen flinches at first, then paces up and down the hallway a few times whilst rubbing the wrist of her right hand. She seems to be stuck in thought, and for a second Ace wonders if she triggered her in some way. “Sometimes people hurt others, unintentionally that is.” She sighs. “And that means we need to be forgiving.”

  “I can’t help but feel that you are too forgiving.”

  “I’m sure you think that.” Kelynen fails to restrain a ugh. “The way I see it is that being forgiving to others means you can be more forgiving to yourself. Especially if you know people do not mean any harm, or are acting more out of pain than intent. As long as people try to do better, I’ll continue to give them chances.”

  “They don’t seem like they want to do better.”

  “And you do not know what they have gone through, do you? I’m not at liberty to divulge this knowledge — I don’t think you would respond to it well, anyhow — but you need to know that they are hurting too. And you’re no less vulnerable than them, Alice. Gwen and Aoife are no less deserving of what we offer here than you are. If you want perfect trans girls who have never done anything wrong, I’m sure you can find a few self-described ones on Tumblr.” She waves her hands dismissively. “Trans women are disasters at the best of times. It’s what I like about them. Some are happy disasters, and others need all the help they can get.”

  Ace looks up at Kelynen and stares her in the eyes, unsure what she should say at this point. It’s not that she’s wrong — she’s struggling to think of one trans girl who seems like she has all her shit together who wasn’t a sponsor she met at this pce — but it doesn’t make any part of what’s going on here something she should accept.

  “Yet you seem to be having fun more than really reforming them.”

  “Would you rather we were all miserable all the time, took everything way too seriously and enforced rigorous standards until people break? I didn’t come here to do that. I’m here to help people. Not to hurt them. And helping them requires patience, love and endless amounts of emotional bour. So yes, I do try to have fun, if only to maintain my own sanity through everything. We try to teach the girls to not take things too seriously. It helps with coping.” Kelynen stops pacing in the hall and returns to the cell.

  Ace, noticing that this isn’t going to end anytime soon, slowly gets up to her feet, intending to leave the conversation as quickly as possible. None of these weak excuses are particurly convincing her that staying at the manor for the next five years is the right choice.

  “If you’re going back to your room—” Kelynen stands aside for her, letting her walk out if she wants to do so. “Make sure to apologise to Gwen.”

  Is she really going to make her apologise to Gwen? She was the one in the wrong! “I don’t see why I have to.”

  “You’re going to apologise to her.” Kelynen commands.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I’m not willing to py the ‘what if’ game, Alice. You’ll say you’re sorry, because you hurt her a lot. If she’d hurt you that much, or even one millionth as much, you’d be demanding she apologise as well.”

  “She hurt me too.” Ace rolls her eyes at Kelynen and tries to walk to the stairs, just to find a surprisingly strong grip around her arm pulling her back. She turns around to see her sponsor looking at her very disapprovingly.

  “Not so quick, young dy. We’re going together.”

  ***

  If the walk back up the stairs to the first floor didn’t feel forever, then the first seconds in the bedroom certainly did. The awkward silence of having to talk to someone you don’t want to talk to seems to increase exponentially when it is being enforced by someone who holds power over you, and having that done when you’re an adult just makes it even worse.

  It’s humiliating. She’s being treated like a child!

  Rather than talk to Gwen, Ace takes a moment to look around the room, because it seems to have changed rather a lot in such a short time. Some sponsor must have come through and decided to clean up the total disaster that had built up over the past week or two. For one, there is natural light now, as the curtains have been drawn open for the first time since Ace moved into the manor. The piles of clothes have been removed and it seems that some kind of air freshener has been applied to the whole room. Probably needed, it did reek of Ace.

  Aoife, in something that cannot be a coincidence, seems to be gone.

  Gwen is curled up in bed, uncharacteristically silent. The only sound that could be heard was the ruffle of her pulling the duvet even further over herself when Ace entered the room.

  Kelynen pces a hand on her lower back and softly pushes Ace forward.

  When the silence remains, the sponsor coughs expectantly.

  Gwen is the first to speak.

  “Leave me alone.” She sneers, rolling over to face away from Ace.

  “Not allowed to.” Ace responds. “They’re making me say sorry. So— sorry. I guess.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  The painful silence returns. Kelynen looks at her disapprovingly despite having done what was asked of her.

  “Sorry for what?” The sponsor asks, wanting to extend the awkward conversation rather than let everyone be.

  “Sorry for…” Ace tries to think about what she is supposed to be sorry for. The answer is supposed to be nothing, given she merely expined the harm inflicted upon her, during the process of which Gwen probably felt bad about what she did and started to cry.

  It’s hard to understand that reaction, given that she would be happy if people were that clear about their feelings of hurt if she happened to cause them.

  “For…?”

  “I’m sorry that you feel that way?” Ace attempts. Kelynen thought she could get away with an apology like that earlier, so it must be fine.

  “I’m sure you are.” Gwen whispers, seeming like she genuinely feels miserable right now. “If you’re not going to be actually sorry, you shouldn’t pretend to.”

  “It’s not my choice to—”

  “Forget it.” Kelynen says, supremely annoyed. “I’m sure you two can figure it out.”

  The sound of the door closing and locking is overwhelming. The sponsor’s departure sucks even more life out of the room, and with it leaves only more conversation neither really wants to be involved in.

  “So…” Ace lengthens the vowel until her voice hurts, which is sooner than she would have hoped.

  “Why aren’t you sorry?” Gwen asks, after a moment. “You’re going through a lot of effort just to make it clear that you don’t care about what you did.”

  “I was just being honest.” Ace sits down on the side of Aoife’s bed. If she’s going to be forced to carry on this conversation, she might as well try to sit down comfortably. “I felt like I had to say it. Maybe you felt it was a personal attack, or something—”

  “It was! It fucking was! You hate me, Alice. I’m not stupid. I can see it. I can feel it. Don’t pretend like you don’t.”

  Ace isn’t sure how to respond to that. She can’t deny that she’s been very annoyed with the girl — it feels rather petty and pathetic when she sees her in this state, though — but hate? She hates her behaviour, not Gwen herself. “But I really don’t…”

  “You certainly act like you do.” She pulls the duvet so far over herself that she’s fully covered. “You gre at me, are obviously just waiting for me to leave, you yell at me when I do anything wrong. And I’ve been trying, Alice. I’ve been trying to not get on your bad side. Because— Because I just want to get along.” She cries again. “I just want to cheer things up a little. Aoife is so miserable and unwilling to go along with things and you’re always so… annoyed at us.”

  Ace sits around in silence for a moment, slowly thinking through it all. It’s hard not to believe her through the tears. It’s still hard to believe that Gwen would want to please her out of all people — she’s a horrible, nasty boy — but at least she knows that now. She yelled at her despite Gwen doing her best to be nice to her, and it took her this long to find that out.

  Ace is, more than anything else, a fucking idiot.

  “Hey.” She whispers. “I’m sorry. I should have known I was being insensitive.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?” Ace is only a little confused by what Gwen means.

  “Yeah, you should have.” She whispers back. “It’s okay. I know you’re a little…”

  “A little?”

  “A little slow.” Gwen sits up, wiping away some tears, trying to force a smile.

  “Yeah.” Ace blushes. “I guess I am.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m very slow myself.” She softly knocks on her forehead and mimics a hollow, echoing sound. “It’s quite cavernous, up there.”

  “You don’t have to talk yourself down like that.” Ace frowns.

  “I’m going to do so anyways.” Gwen shrugs. “It’s true, after all.”

  Ace wants to argue that no, it’s not true, and that she really should be kinder to herself. But then she looks at Gwen, sitting cross legged on the bed, eyes still red and a bit of make-up (concealer, maybe?) running down her cheeks. Perhaps arguing with her is the st thing she should do at this moment.

  Seeing the girl in a state like this makes her feel cruel and petty. She has plenty of reasons to be angry, but clearly she shouldn’t be the target of that anger. Like Ace, Gwen seems to be trying (and failing) to deal with the situation she’s been put in.

  “Hug?” Ace offers, feeling sorry and completely out of other options to try to comfort her.

  Gwen looks at her a little confused at first, but smiles when she notices that Ace is being genuine. “Yeah. I think I could go for one.”

  With a few careful steps — her foot hurts a lot — Ace crosses the gap between Aoife’s bed and Gwen’s, sitting down behind the girl and softly taking her into her arms.

  She’s not sure how long she should hold her, but Gwen doesn’t seem to mind, and before she knows it she can hear a soft snore emanate from the girl in her arms.