Cliché Prompt 3: What You Choose
She had not known what to do, here, on this battlefield. Honestly, she is still not sure how she had managed to defeat the Jabberwocky. With pure muchness, the Hatter might say. But now is not the time for reassurances meant for her. She regards the Hatter - the tasteless, thick blood of the Jabberwocky coating her tongue - and knows that this moment is not for her. It is for him. And, for the first time in her life, Alice knows precisely what to say.
“Hatter, why is a raven like a writing desk?”
The smile he gives her is full of sorrow and pride and hope and something else that does more than tighten his stretchy smile and puff up his chest. Something that makes his eyes glow and the tension bleed from his brows. Something…
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he confides.
She is entranced by that look, by the meaning that is bursting to make itself known to her.
The Hatter takes half a step forward - Why only half a step? she wonders. He is not a man who bothers with half measures! - and whispers softly in her ear.
“Fairfarren, Alice.”
His breath is warm and stirs the strands of her disheveled hair against her sweaty neck. When he half-steps back, that look is still there, straining against his simple, happy smile. Straining…
And then she is floating-flying-soaring (Yes, now she knows what it must feel like to fly!) up the rabbit hole and the light from the mildly overcast day blinds her as she scrabbles and scrambles out of the hole. For a moment, she sits on its edge, contemplating the abyss below her soles.
She remembers the Hatter’s parting expression. She recalls his nearness in that instant in which he’d bidden her farewell. Fairfarren. She regrets that she hadn’t thought to inhale just then. Or even lean her forehead against his shoulder. Or…
“Humph!” she scolds herself. She could not stay. There are questions she must answer and things she must do!
And she does them. Part of her is proud of herself for asserting her independence - she makes the path, after all! - yet part of her is appalled at her own speech to the guests who had come all this way to attend her engagement party. True, she had not consented to - or even been properly informed of - the engagement itself until it was too late to do anything about it, but these people do not deserve such ungrateful words.
And yet, for this very bad behavior, she is rewarded. Lord Ascot listens to her proposal, asks her to apprentice with the company and she can feel herself smiling but…
She is confused. Horridly confused. What is going on here? Why is her life moving onward without her expressed permission? Why does she feel as if she is a passenger in another girl’s body?
New work and responsibilities, her mother’s disappointment and London itself swirl, become a frightening whirlwind, around her. Surrounding her! For a time, she can only close her eyes and imagine pressing her palms to her ears. She does not want these duties, these boardroom meetings, these colleagues who look down their noses at her, a mere girl in their midst! Despite her efforts, she cannot keep her eyes and ear shut to them completely.
And then - at last! - a peaceful patch of clear weather calls to her. When she dares to open her eyes, she finds herself on the bow of a ship, dressed for travel. The color of her suit mocks her, reminds her of the garments she had worn in Underland, but this is not Underland! Where is she going? To China? On an adventure - a meaningless, silly quest that hardly compares to the death-defying trials she had endured recently - to buy spices for people who will only ever want more-more-more?! She stands on the bow of the ship, alone.
Alone!
She stares out at the flat, featureless water and the endless horizon. Two halves that are destined to be apart, no matter what her eyes show her.
This is WRONG!
Alice despairs as she considers the wide world before her. Where are her friends? Why is her life leading her away from them? Away from Underland and him?
NO!
And then a bright blue butterfly flutters past her cheek. “Hello, Absolem,” she whispers, relieved. Absolem is here and even if she is a stupid girl, he will take her home.
She watches as he ascends into the uncharacteristically fair English sky. She aches to join him, to go with him, to fly. The suit she wears is too bulky, layered, stuffy and heavy. The shoes are too stiff and tight. The air is too empty of laughter and the world around her lacks any trace of friendship or goodness or even warmth.
Friendship, goodness, and warmth… She had felt them in Underland, in even the most unlikely of places: at a moldering tea table in the shadow of a ramshackle windmill, in the Bandersnatch’s frumious hut, in the hat workshop at Crims with the Hatter’s iron shackle clinking with his every movement…
She stubbornly stares up at her fluttering friend. Tears stream from her eyes. They burn her skin as they spill onto her cheeks but she doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away.
Take me with you! Take me HOME!
The sky seems to scream with light, to pulse with infinity and still she does not look away.
She screams back in silence. Regret bursts forth from her very being in the form of a single word:
Hatter!
“Alice?”
She flinches, cringes against the odd, unyielding casing that rubs against her body.
“Alice?” a man’s voice whisper-lisps at her. She feels his hands on her face, cradling her head.
Emotion rushes, hot and thick into her throat. Hatter? she wants to ask, but can’t.
“Alice?” he tries again. His tone is tireless and taut with tension. “Have you decided to stay?”
And because the answer is a resounding yes, she opens her eyes.
The Hatter is kneeling over her on the battlefield, beneath the cloudy sky. The clouds themselves grumble as the sun endeavors to shove his way through and illuminate the realm of the White Queen with the light of victory.
“Alice?” he prompts again, waiting. As he waits, his fingers brush against her cheeks, wiping away her tears, and she sees the iridescent gleam of a viscous, purple liquid upon his stained and scratched fingertips. The blood of the Jabberwocky, she realizes, and the tears that had felt burning-hot against her face are one in the same.
Still, she cannot speak around the knot of Everything in her throat. How is it she is here again, having just lived months - no, years! - Above?
“Have you chosen Underland, Alice?” he lisps, his brows twitching as he cradles her armored form on the weed-crowded stones.
She studies his face. Behind the pleasant expression, she senses a desperation that makes him stare at her, unblinking.
Is that what she had just experienced? A choice? The blood had shown her what her life could be, were she to return?
“You,” he rasps. The tone sharply contrasts with his benign countenance. He clears his throat. “You could still go back,” he warbles, his voice cracking on the final syllable. “But you must take care not to shed another tear.”
The fact that he does not even notice the almost rhyme shocks her, awakens her to the gravity of the situation. She has cried out most of the Jabberwocky blood. If she loses any more, that path will be closed to her. Alice thinks about that path which leads to China. She imagines a path that doesn't... until it leads her to marriage to a lord. Unacceptable! The Hatter gently brushes her hair back from her temples and she leans into the thoughtful touch. She does not know where this path - the one that leads her from this battlefield - will take her. She suspects that, just as she had lived the one in London in a whirlwind of moments, she is living this one with the speed of a slow spillage of treacle.
She takes a deep breath. She fights against the hinges of the gauntlets to uncurl her fingers, to reach for the Hatter and hold him as he holds her.
His wide-eyed gaze travels over her erratically as she moves and shifts closer to him. He looks as if he expects to wake up any moment, as if he suddenly fears it is he who is the dreamer and she the dream. “Your family, Alice,” he reminds her, breathlesssly. “Your home…!”
“Is here,” she answers, at last raising her arms. He leans forward just as he had when she’d replaced his hat, accommodating her as she loops her shaking arms around his shoulders. She curls her steel-encased fingers into his jacket and hangs onto him. “I am home.”
Her eyes flood once more and the world turns blurrily violet. He trembles in her embrace and she turns toward the warmth of his neck and the softness of his hair. She inhales deeply, marvels at the spicy-yet-slightly-sweaty scent of him, and sheds those final tears. Their purpleness may very well stain his handsome jacket. If he minds, she will find a way to make it up to him… but she doesn’t think he will.
She has made her choice.
She does not know what she will do here, who she will be, but she will not be that lonely, ungrateful, ambition-drunk girl on a boat. She will not. She will be better. She simply hopes that the Hatter, and all her friends here in Underland, will show her how.