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An Additional Ten Trips Through Wonderland (Trips 66-70)
An Additional Ten Trips Through Wonderland (Trips 66-70)
Author:AkaiNagi
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Alice/Tarrant
Summary: Prompts 5-10 (Table 7) from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
10_prompts. This chapter is dedicated to the Tarrant cosplayer I ran into at Anime Boston.
Prompt: The Edge
The Hatter, domesticated as he is, has always teetered on the edge.
And now he has been pushed off.
Alice’s statement is ringing in his ears. Home? He wants to laugh, but he can’t find the voice. She is home. Home with her husband and child. In the home they have made over the past five years.
What she means is she wants to go back. Back to the world she came from five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl travelling through a world of dreams.
In their life together he has denied her very little. But he will deny her this.
His voice is even, controlled. The look he gives her is tender. He even smiles.
“No.”
“Tarrant, please listen to me. It’s only for a visit – to see my mother and sister – I miss them so badly. The Queen says it would be a simple –“
Something breaks in her husband and Alice finds herself slammed against the workshop door with so much force she momentarily loses her breath. Fingers dig into her shoulders, gripping her so hard they will probably leave bruises. His green eyes flashing brightly, he descends into outlandish tones, a sure sign he has lost control. “I said nae,” he growled. “Ye will nae leave me. And wha’ about our bairn? Would ye take her away from me? Or would ye leave yer own child behind?”
In a desperate attempt to bring him back to his senses she does the only thing she can think of. She wraps her arms around his neck and, clinging to him, presses her lips firmly to his. It backfires. Rather than bring him back to himself, it inflames him further. His Outlandish side, fueled by fear and anger and need presses her against the door, one hand kneading her breast, the other hitching her skirt up to her waist. She holds him close to her, refusing to remove her arms from around his neck, her gaze fused inexorably with his own.
There is the divesting of clothing and a hurried frantic joining that causes Alice more sadness than pleasure. This is not about desire or love or the usual reasons two people become one. It is about desperation and fear and the overwhelming need for reassurance. So she holds him close, trying to convey to him without words that she is there, and that she is his. She will always be his, even if she is a world away.
And when the act is finished, they sit entwined in a rumpled heap on the floor.
“Why?”Tarrant asks in a low, sad voice, barely above a whisper. His madness has burned itself out for the moment, leaving confusion and hopelessness in its wake.
Alice kisses his forehead and rests her head on his own. Her voice is choked with emotion. This is hard for her, as well. To leave her beloved husband and baby daughter, if only for a few days, is not something she does easily or lightly. “I want to see my mother. My sister. To see their faces. To hold them. To tell them I’m all right and happy. I want to tell my mother she has a grandchild. I want to see her face when I tell her.” She sighs. “I wanted us all to go, but the Queen says there are laws governing who can go to the Overworld, and that it isn’t allowed.”
Tarrant pulls away and looks her in the eyes. He has always loved her eyes; cool and blue and deep. “And if I tell you not to go? If I forbid you? Will you leave us anyway?”
Alice smiles, framing his face in her hands. “And is that the kind of wife you want? One you have to chain to your side? And would you respect me for meekly doing your bidding? We both know I have far too much muchness for that.”
The ghost of a smile passes over Tarrant’s face. “So when do you go?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll be back within the week. The Queen’s arranged everything.”
“Then will you do something for me?” Tarrant asked.
“Yes?”
He pulled her closer, burying his face in her hair. “Stay with me like this. For just a little while longer.”
Prompt: Stray
He can feel it.
The moment she leaves his world, he can feel it.
He has declined to be there for the actual departure of his wife, preferring not to see the exact moment when Alice ceases to exist in his world. Instead he sits in their room, watching Lara asleep in her bassinet. The child is blissfully oblivious to the fact that her family is in turmoil.
He did not know that he would feel it, let alone so keenly. It is like the bottom has dropped out of his heart, leaving him teetering and unsupported; without a base or a touchstone. The feeling is so sudden and startling that he gasps aloud. Struggling to quash the unwelcome emotion he focuses instead on his daughter. Her face, the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the small movements she makes as she dreams whatever it is that babies dream about. He reaches down and caresses the tiny head with its fine, pale hair. She looks so much like her mother.
His fears, he feels, are very real. What if Alice is unable to come home to him? Despite the Queen’s assurance that the way will be open for her when she decides to return, the irrational part of his mind (and, being half-mad, that is no small part) refuses to be reassured.
And in the deepest, darkest secret place in his soul, no matter how much trust he has in his Alice, no matter how sure he is of her love, part of him is afraid she won’t want to return to him. Not when she is surrounded by her family and the comfort of the world she was born into.
He is ashamed for doubting her so, but he is only human. And a man in love. And the losses engraved in his soul run deep. He can’t help but fear that the great joys he has found will be snatched away, not this time by a Jabberwocky or an evil queen, but by a world he has never set eyes on, and by people he has never met.
Prompt: Once More
Margaret had thought she would never see that face again.
When one of the servants ran into the parlor crying that Alice had come home, Margaret’s heart leapt into her throat. Jumping out of her chair, her needlepoint tumbling from her lap onto the floor, she rushed to the front door to find a woman standing in the foyer. She was taller than she had been at nineteen, and her face was leaner, having lost the last of its childish roundness. But it was the same mane of unruly golden locks, the same blue eyes that shone, the same voice that cried out with joy at the sight of her sister.
“Margaret!”
The two met halfway, throwing their arms around each other with exclamations of joy, tears streaming down both their faces. They made such a ruckus that the servants began to gather, watching the spectacle. Some of the older ones, who remembered the youngest Kingsleigh, shed a tear themselves at the happy reunion. The newer servants were left puzzled and asking their older counterparts who on Earth this new visitor was. Even Lowell was lured from his study upstairs and watched the exchange with nothing short of shock.
“Alice, my dear little sister, where have you been?” Margaret asked when the two found speech again.
Alice grinned widely, holding her sister’s hands tightly in her own. “I’ll tell you all about it! First, where’s mother? I simply have to see her.”
All the joy drained out of Margaret’s face. The tears began to fall again, this time tears of sadness rather than joy.
Suddenly Alice knew. She just knew. And the knowledge was terrible.
She was too late.
Prompt: Kiss
It was a clear day. Warm and bright. Margaret led Alice to that place where she had hoped never again to stand, and then departed to stand a distance away; giving Alice the privacy she needed to say all that she needed to say. She faced the stone engraved with the names of her mother and father with lead in her heart.
A wave of denial washed over Alice as she began to speak. How could she address this hard, cold slab of stone as if it were her mother? It was absurd. Her mother was the very antithesis of hard and cold. She remembered, in her youth, likening her mother to such when she was being strict or laying down punishment. But behind her hard exterior had been a great well of love and kindness, especially where her family was concerned.
“Mother,” she began. “It’s Alice. I’ve finally come back.” Alice choked back the tears that were threatening to spill already. She had too much to say to fall to pieces now. “Margaret tells me you got most of the letters I sent you. I’m glad. I’m glad you weren’t left wondering whether I was alright or not. Tarrant and I are well. We’re still ridiculously happy together, as much as you and father were.”
She smiled weakly. “I came to tell you that you’re a grandmother. Tarrant and I have a little girl. Her name is Lara. She’s beautiful; she looks just like a Kingsleigh, with blond hair and blue eyes. She’s such a sweet child, she hardly ever cries. She’ll be a year and a half soon. It’s hard to believe time has passed so quickly.” The knot in her throat became too much to bear and the tears began to fall.
“I’m so sorry, mother,” Alice sobbed. “I’m so sorry I didn’t come back earlier. Why did I wait so long? I just thought you’d always be there. Margaret told me how much you wanted to see me again. I could have made you so happy just by visiting you. It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be there. The time just never seemed to be right. And when the right time comes I’m too late.”
Alice let her tears fall, wetting the ground of her parent’s grave. She cried until there was nothing left. Until the sharp pain in her heart subsided into a dull ache.
“I’m going back home soon, back to my world. This hasn’t been my world for a long time. I’ll go back to my husband and my little girl. And I’ll bring your memory with me.
“I want to thank you, Mother, Father. I want to thank you for my life and for helping make me who I am. You were the best parents a daughter could ask for. I love you mother. And I’ll tell Lara about you and father. She’ll grow up knowing all about how wonderful her grandparents were.”
Alice leaned down and placed a single kiss on her parent’s headstone. It was warm.
Prompt: Decay
The Queen has heard. One would have to be deaf not to have heard the rumors flying around the Palace at Marmoreal.
Hatter’s gone Mad again.
It’s Mallymkun who comes to the queen pleading for help. For her to intervene and save her dear Hatter from himself.
She finds him in his workshop, of course. This is where he spends the majority of his time, day and night, since Alice disappeared to the Overworld with a promise to return in a week.
That was two weeks ago.
She finds the Hatter sitting at his work table, playing with his milliner’s scissors in what can only be described as a disturbing fashion. Snipping and snapping them in mid-air, it’s as if he’s trying to tailor the very fabric of reality itself. His world has become so unpleasant that he feels the need to remake it.
“Your Majesty,” he greets the queen without getting up, without even taking his eyes of the snip-snipping of his scissors. “I’ve been contemplating things that begin with the letter “D.” Would you care to join me?”
“Despair …” he begins. “Disaster … disappointment … disappear … decay … damnation … derange-“
“Dear …” the queen counters. “Desire … devotion … delight … destiny."
Tarrant finally looks at her, an endlessly tired expression on his face. His scissors snip one final time before coming to rest on the worktable. “I think mine are more apt,” he says sourly.
The queen gives a smile that is confident, comforting and beneficent all in one. “My dear Tarrant. Alice will return.” She shakes her head. “Do not doubt your own wife so. She wanted so badly for you to go with her. For you all to go together. She was heartbroken when I told her the laws did not allow it.”
He sighs. “And yet she went anyway. Without us.”
The Queen’s eyes grow just a little harder, and anyone who didn’t know her could easily miss the note of gentle castigation in her tone. “You alone, Tarrant, should understand her feelings. You who have lost so many. You begrudge your wife a chance to see her family one last time?”
Tarrant meets her gaze with his own, his eyes luminous and flashing with the light of his inner turmoil. “Your majesty, it is precisely because I have lost it once that I cannot bear losing it again.”
“That reminds me!” he declared with a grin that is more grim than merry. “I think I shall move onto the letter “L.” Would you care to join me again?”
“Lost … leave … lonely …”
He is still reeling off his litany of “L” words as the queen departs, closing the door gently on the scene that is more sad than mad.
“Lament … lies … late … late … late …”
Love.
Please come home.
Author:AkaiNagi
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Alice/Tarrant
Summary: Prompts 5-10 (Table 7) from
10_prompts. This chapter is dedicated to the Tarrant cosplayer I ran into at Anime Boston.Prompt: The Edge
The Hatter, domesticated as he is, has always teetered on the edge.
And now he has been pushed off.
Alice’s statement is ringing in his ears. Home? He wants to laugh, but he can’t find the voice. She is home. Home with her husband and child. In the home they have made over the past five years.
What she means is she wants to go back. Back to the world she came from five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl travelling through a world of dreams.
In their life together he has denied her very little. But he will deny her this.
His voice is even, controlled. The look he gives her is tender. He even smiles.
“No.”
“Tarrant, please listen to me. It’s only for a visit – to see my mother and sister – I miss them so badly. The Queen says it would be a simple –“
Something breaks in her husband and Alice finds herself slammed against the workshop door with so much force she momentarily loses her breath. Fingers dig into her shoulders, gripping her so hard they will probably leave bruises. His green eyes flashing brightly, he descends into outlandish tones, a sure sign he has lost control. “I said nae,” he growled. “Ye will nae leave me. And wha’ about our bairn? Would ye take her away from me? Or would ye leave yer own child behind?”
In a desperate attempt to bring him back to his senses she does the only thing she can think of. She wraps her arms around his neck and, clinging to him, presses her lips firmly to his. It backfires. Rather than bring him back to himself, it inflames him further. His Outlandish side, fueled by fear and anger and need presses her against the door, one hand kneading her breast, the other hitching her skirt up to her waist. She holds him close to her, refusing to remove her arms from around his neck, her gaze fused inexorably with his own.
There is the divesting of clothing and a hurried frantic joining that causes Alice more sadness than pleasure. This is not about desire or love or the usual reasons two people become one. It is about desperation and fear and the overwhelming need for reassurance. So she holds him close, trying to convey to him without words that she is there, and that she is his. She will always be his, even if she is a world away.
And when the act is finished, they sit entwined in a rumpled heap on the floor.
“Why?”Tarrant asks in a low, sad voice, barely above a whisper. His madness has burned itself out for the moment, leaving confusion and hopelessness in its wake.
Alice kisses his forehead and rests her head on his own. Her voice is choked with emotion. This is hard for her, as well. To leave her beloved husband and baby daughter, if only for a few days, is not something she does easily or lightly. “I want to see my mother. My sister. To see their faces. To hold them. To tell them I’m all right and happy. I want to tell my mother she has a grandchild. I want to see her face when I tell her.” She sighs. “I wanted us all to go, but the Queen says there are laws governing who can go to the Overworld, and that it isn’t allowed.”
Tarrant pulls away and looks her in the eyes. He has always loved her eyes; cool and blue and deep. “And if I tell you not to go? If I forbid you? Will you leave us anyway?”
Alice smiles, framing his face in her hands. “And is that the kind of wife you want? One you have to chain to your side? And would you respect me for meekly doing your bidding? We both know I have far too much muchness for that.”
The ghost of a smile passes over Tarrant’s face. “So when do you go?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll be back within the week. The Queen’s arranged everything.”
“Then will you do something for me?” Tarrant asked.
“Yes?”
He pulled her closer, burying his face in her hair. “Stay with me like this. For just a little while longer.”
Prompt: Stray
He can feel it.
The moment she leaves his world, he can feel it.
He has declined to be there for the actual departure of his wife, preferring not to see the exact moment when Alice ceases to exist in his world. Instead he sits in their room, watching Lara asleep in her bassinet. The child is blissfully oblivious to the fact that her family is in turmoil.
He did not know that he would feel it, let alone so keenly. It is like the bottom has dropped out of his heart, leaving him teetering and unsupported; without a base or a touchstone. The feeling is so sudden and startling that he gasps aloud. Struggling to quash the unwelcome emotion he focuses instead on his daughter. Her face, the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the small movements she makes as she dreams whatever it is that babies dream about. He reaches down and caresses the tiny head with its fine, pale hair. She looks so much like her mother.
His fears, he feels, are very real. What if Alice is unable to come home to him? Despite the Queen’s assurance that the way will be open for her when she decides to return, the irrational part of his mind (and, being half-mad, that is no small part) refuses to be reassured.
And in the deepest, darkest secret place in his soul, no matter how much trust he has in his Alice, no matter how sure he is of her love, part of him is afraid she won’t want to return to him. Not when she is surrounded by her family and the comfort of the world she was born into.
He is ashamed for doubting her so, but he is only human. And a man in love. And the losses engraved in his soul run deep. He can’t help but fear that the great joys he has found will be snatched away, not this time by a Jabberwocky or an evil queen, but by a world he has never set eyes on, and by people he has never met.
Prompt: Once More
Margaret had thought she would never see that face again.
When one of the servants ran into the parlor crying that Alice had come home, Margaret’s heart leapt into her throat. Jumping out of her chair, her needlepoint tumbling from her lap onto the floor, she rushed to the front door to find a woman standing in the foyer. She was taller than she had been at nineteen, and her face was leaner, having lost the last of its childish roundness. But it was the same mane of unruly golden locks, the same blue eyes that shone, the same voice that cried out with joy at the sight of her sister.
“Margaret!”
The two met halfway, throwing their arms around each other with exclamations of joy, tears streaming down both their faces. They made such a ruckus that the servants began to gather, watching the spectacle. Some of the older ones, who remembered the youngest Kingsleigh, shed a tear themselves at the happy reunion. The newer servants were left puzzled and asking their older counterparts who on Earth this new visitor was. Even Lowell was lured from his study upstairs and watched the exchange with nothing short of shock.
“Alice, my dear little sister, where have you been?” Margaret asked when the two found speech again.
Alice grinned widely, holding her sister’s hands tightly in her own. “I’ll tell you all about it! First, where’s mother? I simply have to see her.”
All the joy drained out of Margaret’s face. The tears began to fall again, this time tears of sadness rather than joy.
Suddenly Alice knew. She just knew. And the knowledge was terrible.
She was too late.
Prompt: Kiss
It was a clear day. Warm and bright. Margaret led Alice to that place where she had hoped never again to stand, and then departed to stand a distance away; giving Alice the privacy she needed to say all that she needed to say. She faced the stone engraved with the names of her mother and father with lead in her heart.
A wave of denial washed over Alice as she began to speak. How could she address this hard, cold slab of stone as if it were her mother? It was absurd. Her mother was the very antithesis of hard and cold. She remembered, in her youth, likening her mother to such when she was being strict or laying down punishment. But behind her hard exterior had been a great well of love and kindness, especially where her family was concerned.
“Mother,” she began. “It’s Alice. I’ve finally come back.” Alice choked back the tears that were threatening to spill already. She had too much to say to fall to pieces now. “Margaret tells me you got most of the letters I sent you. I’m glad. I’m glad you weren’t left wondering whether I was alright or not. Tarrant and I are well. We’re still ridiculously happy together, as much as you and father were.”
She smiled weakly. “I came to tell you that you’re a grandmother. Tarrant and I have a little girl. Her name is Lara. She’s beautiful; she looks just like a Kingsleigh, with blond hair and blue eyes. She’s such a sweet child, she hardly ever cries. She’ll be a year and a half soon. It’s hard to believe time has passed so quickly.” The knot in her throat became too much to bear and the tears began to fall.
“I’m so sorry, mother,” Alice sobbed. “I’m so sorry I didn’t come back earlier. Why did I wait so long? I just thought you’d always be there. Margaret told me how much you wanted to see me again. I could have made you so happy just by visiting you. It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be there. The time just never seemed to be right. And when the right time comes I’m too late.”
Alice let her tears fall, wetting the ground of her parent’s grave. She cried until there was nothing left. Until the sharp pain in her heart subsided into a dull ache.
“I’m going back home soon, back to my world. This hasn’t been my world for a long time. I’ll go back to my husband and my little girl. And I’ll bring your memory with me.
“I want to thank you, Mother, Father. I want to thank you for my life and for helping make me who I am. You were the best parents a daughter could ask for. I love you mother. And I’ll tell Lara about you and father. She’ll grow up knowing all about how wonderful her grandparents were.”
Alice leaned down and placed a single kiss on her parent’s headstone. It was warm.
Prompt: Decay
The Queen has heard. One would have to be deaf not to have heard the rumors flying around the Palace at Marmoreal.
Hatter’s gone Mad again.
It’s Mallymkun who comes to the queen pleading for help. For her to intervene and save her dear Hatter from himself.
She finds him in his workshop, of course. This is where he spends the majority of his time, day and night, since Alice disappeared to the Overworld with a promise to return in a week.
That was two weeks ago.
She finds the Hatter sitting at his work table, playing with his milliner’s scissors in what can only be described as a disturbing fashion. Snipping and snapping them in mid-air, it’s as if he’s trying to tailor the very fabric of reality itself. His world has become so unpleasant that he feels the need to remake it.
“Your Majesty,” he greets the queen without getting up, without even taking his eyes of the snip-snipping of his scissors. “I’ve been contemplating things that begin with the letter “D.” Would you care to join me?”
“Despair …” he begins. “Disaster … disappointment … disappear … decay … damnation … derange-“
“Dear …” the queen counters. “Desire … devotion … delight … destiny."
Tarrant finally looks at her, an endlessly tired expression on his face. His scissors snip one final time before coming to rest on the worktable. “I think mine are more apt,” he says sourly.
The queen gives a smile that is confident, comforting and beneficent all in one. “My dear Tarrant. Alice will return.” She shakes her head. “Do not doubt your own wife so. She wanted so badly for you to go with her. For you all to go together. She was heartbroken when I told her the laws did not allow it.”
He sighs. “And yet she went anyway. Without us.”
The Queen’s eyes grow just a little harder, and anyone who didn’t know her could easily miss the note of gentle castigation in her tone. “You alone, Tarrant, should understand her feelings. You who have lost so many. You begrudge your wife a chance to see her family one last time?”
Tarrant meets her gaze with his own, his eyes luminous and flashing with the light of his inner turmoil. “Your majesty, it is precisely because I have lost it once that I cannot bear losing it again.”
“That reminds me!” he declared with a grin that is more grim than merry. “I think I shall move onto the letter “L.” Would you care to join me again?”
“Lost … leave … lonely …”
He is still reeling off his litany of “L” words as the queen departs, closing the door gently on the scene that is more sad than mad.
“Lament … lies … late … late … late …”
Love.
Please come home.