Fic: The Stories We Tell
There is but one main- but crucial- difference between the people of Earth and the people of Wonderland. On Earth, there are stories of disappearances, where entire continents are lost and people are snatched away. In Wonderland, however, there are stories about the things which appeared.
Gaeta was finished.
Frack the Cylons, frack humanity, frack the entire fracking fleet, he was done. He'd had it up to here with morality and politics and the nagging feeling that they weren't all they were supposed to be. So yeah, he ordered the stand down, he'd faced the firing squad…
And ended up here. It's certainly not Elysium, and it wasn't mundane enough for Asphodel, which meant that…
The locals- or, he supposed, the people who came here before him- called it Wonderland, with the accent on the irony. It has exactly two things going for it: fake limbs that don't itch, and refreshing honesty. Whenever anyone admitted that they were the bad guys, there were no murmurs of denial, no qualifying statements about the speaker being drunk, or suffering the effects of prolonged torture. They're the bad guys. There are no good guys here. There aren't even better men. And no one expected things to be any different. So he marches around in his silly hat and follows orders like the good little soldier he never had been when he was alive, without a thought to what he was doing.
If, privately, he did sometimes think of 'here' as Tartarus, than it was just that. Private.
Over a thousand years ago, he'd fallen through a lake, and his Lady had risen up to meet him, to guide him towards the fabled hold of Avalon, where he would rest until he was needed.
That was bollocks, he'd decided somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred years in. He wasn't being kept somewhere safe, he'd been left to rot! Bloody Guinevere and her wandering eye and her diva mentality. She'd probably forgotten he existed.
But he did exist, still, unchanging apparent from the periodic regrets: that he'd used the Holy Hand Grenade on the wrong killer rabbit, that his reign had been brief, that the he'd grown restless after finding the Grail. He couldn't have just been happy with Holy Grail?
Evidentially not. He was in Wonderland, after all.
"And you're the once and future king, you bloody idiot," he mumbled to himself.
"Eh?" Duck asked.
"Nothing," Dodo replied. "Get back to work."
He didn't know where he was, or what was going on, all he knew is that he couldn't move and his arm, his right arm hurt worse than he thought it was possible to hurt.
"This is the Oyster that's been giving you so much trouble?"
The voice was feminine and imperious; it reminded him a little bit of Helen. Hatred bubbled instinctively in his veins, and he could make himself focus enough to see a blurry red mound in front of him.
"He's unusually resistant to our sprays, something which we think might have to do with the unique antibodies in his blood. You can see, he's fighting it even now!"
"Are those antibodies of any use to us?"
"On their own, no. But they do make him an excellent candidate for medical experimentation."
A hand reached out and traced the brim of his fedora. "Make him a Hatter."
"Your Majesty?"
"A Hatter, like the one the original Queen of Hearts had. Do what you want with him, so long as when you're through, you've given me a Hatter."
His face is suddenly wet, and the world dissolves with the words "As Your Majesty wishes."
He loved his wife, he really truly did, but sometimes he couldn't help but think that there was something missing.
He'd wanted a daughter; maybe that was it. A little girl called Molly, with a penchant for drawing. But that was unfair to Jack, who if not quite the son he'd envisioned him being, was still his son.
(If he'd envisioned his hypothetical children with straight black hair they could never have had, then it was a good thing they were only hypothetical, wasn't it?)
Maybe what he really needed was a friend, someone who understood him. He was King, though, and the closest he would ever come was the sort of give and take trust between himself and the Ten of Clubs. He had his wife, that should be enough for any man, shouldn't it?
(He called the nagging little voice that he sometimes let talk him into sparing someone's life 'Julian'. He wasn't sure why. It just seemed to fit.)
It must have something to do with his wife. It wasn't her fault, of course: how could it be, when she was at the center of his everything? But she was so rarely happy these days, so rarely smiling. Perhaps he should do something for her, something like flowers.
(She had the roses he planted for her painted red, and they withered shortly thereafter. He was terribly disappointed; hadn't she once said that she liked growing flowers?)
He'd just put the finishing touches on the latest draft of his paper on the limbic system when there was a knock on the door.
"Yes?" he called.
"Dr. Hamilton?"
"That's me," he replied, looking up. A long-haired man in a white suit has standing in his doorway.
"Do you suppose I could have a moment of your time? This won't take long."
And it didn't. One spray to the face and he went, compliantly, out the door and into the waiting taxi car, which sped away to New York, and the Looking Glass.
The thing is, of course, once you understand the patterns you can work them your advantage. Say, for example, you don't want to go around educating anyone in your kingdom, for fear of the Ideas they might get if allowed the congregate in learned masses. Well, it wouldn't be long before your whole country collapsed, because you do need people who know how things work to keep it running. So, you sort of… outsource the education to other worlds, and then snatch up the finished products as needed. A little brainwashing there, a little convincing there, a few slight liberties taken with the time-space continuum, and you were all set.
Until someone, equally as clever but in an entirely different way, decided to reverse the pattern. But that is another set of stories entirely.
A/N: Who wants to play 'guess the fandom'?
Additionally, that next AU… might take a while. I just did a rough outline of the whole "Hatter went to Earth pre-miniseries" and ended up with a chapter count of thirty. Meanwhile, the Suit!Alice one looks to be another seven parter. I'll switch off between the two, and whichever hits 20,000 words first I'll start posting.