A Leopard's Shorts

Author: Sthrissa
Summary: Margolotta, Vetinari. This is something that occurred to me near the end of Unseen Academicals, and just wouldn't go away.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Spoilers: Slight spoilers for UA, maybe Fifth Elephant.

She awoke, burning with the memory of her panicked flight from an enraged army and an escape down a secret corridor to the exit – that opened to daylight and fire. She woke to the startled face of a treasure seeker, the victim of an unfortunate stumble and a bloody cut. He quickly became the even more unfortunate victim of her hunger.

As she relieved the corpse of the jewellery it had stolen from her ashes, she briefly regretted not first questioning him. Thus, from the next person she encountered - a foolishly bold foreigner - she would learn that fifty years had passed since she had last walked amongst Man; the magnificent empire that had taken her two centuries to craft, razed and left in ruins. He too falls, a victim to her ire. What followed were humiliating days slumbering buried in dirt like some common fledgling, and nights wandering ever further from the heartland of her former power, seeking the remnants of her servants. She found nothing.

Everywhere, she discovered that her enemies ruled; of her servants, there remained only the stories of them being hunted to oblivion. She found that the slaves, who had once cowered in terrified awe at her name, cowered still, but they now spoke of her with venom and reviled the memory of her greatness. After a while she became wearied enough that she even allowed those traitors to live - there seemed little point in killing everyone. And shamefully, she had discovered that the succession of corpse-filled villages had attracted attention which she no longer possessed resources to crush, for even the Igors had abandoned her banner. Thus she, an Empress, the majestic Death-Incarnate, was forced to hide from torches and pitchforks.

She learned to become discrete, flittering across the countryside, only sampling enough from dreaming slaves to sate her hunger. She began to pose as a travelling noblewoman-from-elsewhere; she purchased a carriage - windows painted black - and a nihilistic vagabond to drive her during the day. She journeyed into towns and slept within inns; she paid servants to cater to her will and under a new name she dined with local nobility. And everywhere still, she found her memory reviled.

When at last she found something familiar, it was the name of a fledgling from her Army of Darkness - Bela - who arrogantly had installed himself as a Count. She did not go near the castle. It seemed that those of her army who had remained alive, rather than avenge or resurrect her, had chosen to tear up the fringes of her empire to play silly games with the slaves. Eventually, she found a town beside a river, and seduced, wed, and ate the ruling lord there. She adopted his name and built herself a fairytale castle, ensnared an Igor, and waited.

The decades passed slowly, and still she found her name cursed; the time to rebuild her domain did not arrive. She learned to mimic the games of her kin, and formed an understanding with the ever-encroaching dwarves. She, who had once seen epic battles fought in her honour, became embroiled in a pattern of petty skirmishes against a race of savage animals that refused to accept the judgement of evolution. The generations flew by, and though the truth was corrupted by a history written by men, still, the appropriate moment did not come.

She did not notice as the meaningless days of patient exile grew to become increasingly tolerable, as she became lost to the security of a ritual existence. The occasional traveller to relieve her boredom, the vagabonds, the homeless and unmissed to relieve her hunger, and every couple of years, a few bites of a well-muscled youth from the town, for the sake of appearance. The endless tug-of-war with a pack of filthy mutts became less of an insult to her glory.

And when she at last met with her kin, the greatest of whom she had once commanded (under another name), she was not recognized, yet she found herself too resigned to be outraged. Existence. Tolerable banality, interrupted only by the meaningless victories against her pitiful neighbours.

And then He had come.

When she first saw him, the youthful, lean figure undertaking that walking buffet called the Grand Sneer, she believed him to be just another toy; a thing to be used as a welcome distraction for a few weeks, then discarded. Until he showed her how incredibly wrong she was. Until she learned to hunger for something other than blood. She had thought him to be a puzzle she could unlock, a youth she could eventually bend to her will. She had thought she could teach him, that she would him send back to that far away city as a man forever imprinted with her influence. In that confrontation of wills, she found herself taught, instead.

He was an individual most frustratingly unobliging, and she constantly found each of her victories transformed to ash. She tried to awe him with her elaborate castle, only to find its secret corridors turned against her. She tried to impress him with her knowledge of her neighbours' affairs, to find ridicule at her superficial insight. When she showed him her control over the minds of frightened slaves, and demonstrated the way to manipulate their superstition, she only later realised, that instead, she had been taught to see them as people. She tried to teach him hedonist pleasure, and found herself learning restraint. She spoke of futility and the petty unchanging nature of humanity's existence, and learned from him, hope.

She became addicted. To see the cold gears of that mind turn was terrifying, exhilarating. She craved to possess, to emulate that labyrinth, which even decades later, she found unfathomable. She still does not know whether it was the boy who had created that mind, to satisfy some infinite void; or whether he was some personification that had simply cloaked itself in flesh - perhaps there was never a boy at all. She imagines frost searing from an infant's gaze and experiences pity for the deceased mother. Whatever the case, by the time she met him, it was an ancient gaze that studied her from the face of an impossibly young man and spoke to her of worth; who taught her about becoming.

And by the time he left, she had learned true patience rather than the meaningless existence in which she had trapped herself. Thus she began to reconstruct an empire - this time wielding whispers and ideas, extending her domain with smoke and mirrors rather than a manufactured army. And decades later, when a Terrier stepped onto her lands, she found the pieces were finally sufficient for her to proceed.

When she next spoke to him, over the towers that extended his reach from Circle Sea to Genua, from the Hub to Klatchian desert, she would read warm, glowing praise printed on that paper. And for a time, she counted a victory.

***

Then, from Loko, deep within what was once a pathetic empire, there came the whispers of an ancient evil. Rediscovered, the manufactured servants of a regime whose collapse, she now realised, had been inevitable - a mistake to be corrected. But she had been well taught to shun wastefulness, and so, at the behest of a hand that stretched across a continent, she would ask a child to become.

It has been so many centuries now, since her true name had been uttered; long forgotten, even to those people in the heartland of her former empire, where stories circulate and superstition and fear still ruled. There lived no-one who could have informed him: neither the werewolves, nor the dwarves, nor trolls, nor humans knew the truth. And those vampires who might recognise her were either scattered dust or chose to be wilfully oblivious; the Igors knew, but in this, she was assured of their fidelity. She was almost certain he could not have learned…

When she next saw him, he spoke only of being her resolute ally. His support appeared unshakeable, as he offered promises to "help [her] in any way [he] can, of course". And although she had not changed her shorts so much as allowed them to rot to threads, his naïve conviction that people could be redeemed, remained insistent. He remained passionate as ever in his rose-tinted hope; he seemed as ever willing to bestow forgiveness.

And yet, with every impersonal, condescending “Madam” he uttered, she learns that he does not forget.

"Is it they who should be sorry?" asks a child. Her victory tastes of ash.

FIN.

[A/N: Admittedly I am rather biased against Margolotta, which may have coloured my reading of Nutt's comment, (and in reading a degree of amusement and almost contempt directed towards her by Vetinari). I usually more-or-less envision an asexual Patrician, too committed to Morporkia to emotionally attach to any one individual, and who has numerous, politically less-troublesome options, within the confines of his city, to choose from if he so desired (cough*Drumknott*cough - or Vimes -).

I simply cannot see a Vetinari/Margolotta relationship extending beyond a childhood fling, particularly given the fact they head separate and, potentially rival states. Furthermore, while it is implied Margolotta has simply transferred her bloodlust into control-lust, in UA particularly, it struck me just how much of an optimist Vetinari had to be – to have such a bleak view of people, and yet endeavour so determinedly in defiance of the universe. Margolotta’s rather self-serving motives seem incompatible with Vetinari.]