Work Text:
She denies him, and she becomes something else in his eyes. Something even less worthy of respect than he already found her. Women like her, living in the margins, are tolerated for what they provide. When she refuses her services to a man she knows to be cruel, she loses that scrap of toleration, and becomes simply someone wicked in his eyes.
To those like her, though, she becomes a symbol. A sign that refusal is possible and necessary. She is, for the frightened women she knows, something a little like what Ribbon was for her. Ribbon had had another name, a private one, but Ribbon was what she went by, and so how Lacey thought of her. She had not been all that much Lacey’s senior, truth be told, but she had had a great deal more experience, and had seemed, at nine-and-ten, so very worldly to a girl of six-and-ten. Theirs was an intimate friendship, in the way of women newly grown and still adapting to a cruel world. Ribbon had taught her what she needed to know, how to say the right things and look the right way, but also how to stand her ground and say no, even in the face of danger. Under Ribbon’s gentle guidance, she had become a self-certain sort of woman. She and Ribbon had slept often beside each other, and held each other on hard nights after hard days. It was a purer, deeper thing than she had shared with any other, before or since, for since those far off years she had drawn further and further into herself. So too had she become more bitter, more jaded, and far more furious.