Ordinary - Chapter 1
Summary: Alice attempts to do her math homework in the library, but the Cheshire Cat keeps distracting her with catchy songs and very bad advice.
Rated: T
Total word count: 10,486
Fandom: Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
For the Alice in Wonderland Big Bang
Thanks to Fabulist for her betaing and support. And thanks to just_a_dram for putting the Big Bang together.
Chapter 1
Alice preferred the art history section of the library. It was situated in what was called the “old library,” the original reference section for the university. Over the years the building had been expanded and modernized, the architecture becoming more utilitarian and less of a place one would want to sit for hours.
To get to the old library, one had to walk through the anthropology section, then down some stairs into a dark corridor, until a flight of large, uneven stone steps rose up, seemingly out of nowhere. The stairs turned and then opened into a large room with a high ceiling and ample table space where Alice could sit for a very long time and spread all her work in front of her like a bed of blooming flowers.
The chairs were certainly not the most comfortable, but she knew that if she were to sit in something softer - like the great, green armchairs in the tea room in her dormitory - she would fall asleep immediately and never get any work done at all. So she sat in the library and watched the beams of light from the high windows creep across the floor, illuminating book shelf after bookshelf, one study table after another.
The chairs were all mismatched, some with carved swirls on the armrests, some without armrests at all, some with a battle scene between dragons and sitar players in relief on high backs, some with backs covered in old leather. It made picking where to sit that much more difficult because there were just so many options, so many possibilities.
This section of the library was interesting and decorative enough to encourage her mind to wander off when she should have been working, but somehow it always managed to bring her attention back once more, as if her mind went on an adventure, then returned safely home to a warm house and freshly buttered toast.
She was often scolded for her over active imagination, but her professors and peers had explained that that particular skill was never helpful when attempting to find the elegant solution to a problem. They told her over and over that she was just not very good at conjuring up all the little tricks that were necessary to produce a piece of elegance. It was true that she wasn’t the best at noticing patterns and little back doors to slip into a problem - at least, not without a great deal of time spent watching the light in the library creep across the floor and up the wall.
She tried to be very bad at math, as that was what was expected of her, but somehow she always stumbled upon solutions in the long run.
She told herself it was just luck or coincidence and continued on, attempting to solve a problem through brute force before she lost herself on a train of thought and returned to the art history section feeling a bit dazed, but with fresh eyes and a new song to hum under her breath.
The art history section had the benefit of being so difficult to locate that it was almost always empty. As such she had her pick of tables and no one ever noticed when she sang little songs to herself.
Counting by nines can you sing this rhyme?
I know we can dance, we can have a good time
Let’s count up to ninety, we’ll start with nine.
Nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six,
Forty-five, fifty-four, sixty-three,
Seventy-two, eighty-one, ninety.
That particular song circled through her head that afternoon, always just below the surface of her thoughts, like the sound of the books and the shuffling of the one other student in the room (who Alice assumed was actually studying art history and therefore had a more legitimate claim to the area.) She liked the song, even though it was childish. It reminded her of a time when mathematics involved addition of integers rather than the swirl of calculus spread out before her.
She liked the song even though it involved a long string of numbers which were almost never the ones she was supposed to be calculating or manipulating in her homework. A few times she wrote a number from the song by accident and would have to go back and fix it later.
She didn’t really mind.
Furthermore, she liked the song because it was infinitely preferable to the other tune that haunted her mind just below it.
Come sit with me by the lakeside,
And tell me of all your sorrows.
Come blush for me in the sunlight,
And I’ll tell you all of my fears.
Give me a chance to please you,
And I will be yours forever,
My girl with such light in her eyes.
That one was a very silly song, one which the other young ladies in her dormitory would hear and giggle to one another behind delicate, lace fans. Alice liked their fans because they always had very interesting fractal designs, but she was never able to hold one without looking a bit clumsy.
Such things as popular love songs were not readily aligned with Alice’s tastes, although she would admit that the tune was catchy in a way most songs were not.
But the main reason she didn’t want to think of the song (and the main reason that she spent so much time in the art history section) was slumped against the counter at the circulation desk, bored to tears because not a single person had approached him that day to check out a volume. He was not particularly attractive, if one were sensible about such things. His brown hair was a bit too long and he was skinny and freckled. But he spent most of his time staring into space in a way that was very familiar to Alice.
She liked to watch him over the top of one of her books. She liked to imagine what he was imagining.
“I agree,” the Cheshire cat said, from his place at her elbow, sprawled lazily across a stack of her notes.
“With what?”
“Everything.”
“One can hardly agree with everything,” Alice said. “One would soon become overwhelmed with obligations or be forever contradicting one’s self.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“Then I have found something with which you don’t agree.”
“Indeed! I will agree with that.”
Alice rolled her eyes.
“I agree,” the cat said.
“You have already informed me of that.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Just now what?”
Alice sighed and turned her eyes back to her mathematics. There were times when it was useless to have a conversation with the Cheshire cat. Such talk tended to go round in circles.
“I agree that it is a very silly song,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. Would you like to hear my version?”
“No. I don’t imagine that I would.”
The cat ignored her and began to sing.
Come sit with me by the lakeside,
And tell me of how you can’t swim.
Come blush for me in the sunlight,
And I’ll push you into the lake.
Give me twenty gold shillings,
And I will come to the rescue,
My girl with such kelp in her hair.
“I prefer your version as well,” she admitted once the cat had concluded and rolled onto his side.
“You like it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you agree! We are quite the agreeable pair! We should do something to celebrate.”
“Such as?”
“Fireworks.”
“Where would we get them? And where would we set them off?”
The cat groaned with a kind of mrowl. “Perhaps you would prefer to celebrate our agreeableness by spending the day frowning at one another.”
“Perhaps I would,” she snapped, but her attention had already drifted to the ceiling. “If they were very low fireworks. And if that light fixture wasn’t there. We could have our celebration in this very room. Roman candles could easily work.”
“We shall have to look in a book on classical Roman sculpture to find Roman candles.”
“Fire crackers would work too. But they’re so very noisy. We would surely disturb everyone.”
“Yes. That one other student would be most annoyed, and the young man at the circulation desk may wake up and look at us.”
“We can’t have that.”
“No. We should stay with the original idea of fireworks. Much less disruptive.”
“Of course, a palm shell firework would be the best celebration. That is if we could keep the explosion low to the ground and confined over the study tables so as not to set the books alight.”
“Would you prefer a Rococo firework or an impressionist firework?”
“Impressionist would do nicely.”
“Of course. We are trying to impress rather than confuse.” His eyes shifted to the boy at the circulation desk.
“I thought we were celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
Alice sighed, pushing the cat aside to pull a book on impressionist oil paintings from beneath his haunches. She flipped through until she found a print of a row boat upon a river.
“I quite like the colors of this one. It would make a lovely firework.”
“But the explosion would be water rather than fire and we would become very damp. As would the books.”
“I’m sure the books would recover.”
“Perhaps, but I wouldn’t,” the cat huffed.
Alice turned a few more pages, landing on an image of a haystack at sunrise. “This one is quite lovely, all pink and orange.”
“But then we would be buried under a pile of hay and sunshine. We may never make our way out again and suffocate or die of starvation.”
“How are we to celebrate our agreement if we disagree on how to celebrate?”
“That made no sense. Try again.”
“We are disagreeing on which firework to choose. Yet we are shooting a firework because we are agreeing with one another. Since we disagree, we have no reason to celebrate.”
“How troublesome.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Agreement once again!” The cat grinned at her, its tail flicking happily. “I knew things would sort themselves out.”
“I’m choosing this one,” Alice announced, pointing at a beach scene, then reaching her hand into the book to pull out a handful of sand and sea foam, of laughter and red umbrellas. It glowed in her hand, a million grainy specks of color, shifting and moving like waves in the shallows, flickering as if ready to explode if she handled it improperly or held it too long.
“It must be a smallish firework,” the cat reminded her eagerly. “You must depress it so it does not go as high as it would like.”
In a serious, scolding voice, Alice addressed the ball of firework cupped in her hands. “You come from a silly painting that I have never heard of before. I doubt I will ever look at it again and when your book returns to the shelf, your image will be lost to the ages until the moths eat you.”
The firework faded slightly, its colors spinning much less rapidly as its depression sunk in. Alice frowned down at it. “Oh, dear, that sounded very cruel. Do you think I was too harsh with it?”
“No,” the cat said, looking entirely too pleased. He would probably like nothing more than to say rude things all day long if given the opportunity. “You forgot to add that it smells like fish and has no friends.”
“I’m sure it has many friends!” Alice protested. “Lots of firework friends that all skip about together like fireflies or fairies.”
The cat shrugged. “It still smells like salmon.”
Alice bent to whisper an apology to the firework so the Cheshire cat couldn’t hear her. It did not improve the firework’s spirits very much at all, but it lifted some of the guilt from Alice’s heart.
Then she took the firework and threw it with all her might high into the air, where it exploded in a great burst of color - golden yellows, and sparkling blues and greens. Great streaks of sparks like the smears of color pastel against canvas trailed down onto the study tables to sizzle like the rain.
“Oh!” she gasped, then laughed as the sparks fell upon her, tangling in her hair and covering her books in glittering sand.
At her giggle, the other student looked up from his studies and gave her a very odd look from across the library. Alice cleared her throat and ducked her head, returning back to her mathematics with an embarrassed flush.
The Cheshire cat had vanished, the sand following closely behind him.
The boy at the circulation desk had not moved at all.
Chapter 2, 3, 4, 5
Rated: T
Total word count: 10,486
Fandom: Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
For the Alice in Wonderland Big Bang
Thanks to Fabulist for her betaing and support. And thanks to just_a_dram for putting the Big Bang together.
Chapter 1
Alice preferred the art history section of the library. It was situated in what was called the “old library,” the original reference section for the university. Over the years the building had been expanded and modernized, the architecture becoming more utilitarian and less of a place one would want to sit for hours.
To get to the old library, one had to walk through the anthropology section, then down some stairs into a dark corridor, until a flight of large, uneven stone steps rose up, seemingly out of nowhere. The stairs turned and then opened into a large room with a high ceiling and ample table space where Alice could sit for a very long time and spread all her work in front of her like a bed of blooming flowers.
The chairs were certainly not the most comfortable, but she knew that if she were to sit in something softer - like the great, green armchairs in the tea room in her dormitory - she would fall asleep immediately and never get any work done at all. So she sat in the library and watched the beams of light from the high windows creep across the floor, illuminating book shelf after bookshelf, one study table after another.
The chairs were all mismatched, some with carved swirls on the armrests, some without armrests at all, some with a battle scene between dragons and sitar players in relief on high backs, some with backs covered in old leather. It made picking where to sit that much more difficult because there were just so many options, so many possibilities.
This section of the library was interesting and decorative enough to encourage her mind to wander off when she should have been working, but somehow it always managed to bring her attention back once more, as if her mind went on an adventure, then returned safely home to a warm house and freshly buttered toast.
She was often scolded for her over active imagination, but her professors and peers had explained that that particular skill was never helpful when attempting to find the elegant solution to a problem. They told her over and over that she was just not very good at conjuring up all the little tricks that were necessary to produce a piece of elegance. It was true that she wasn’t the best at noticing patterns and little back doors to slip into a problem - at least, not without a great deal of time spent watching the light in the library creep across the floor and up the wall.
She tried to be very bad at math, as that was what was expected of her, but somehow she always stumbled upon solutions in the long run.
She told herself it was just luck or coincidence and continued on, attempting to solve a problem through brute force before she lost herself on a train of thought and returned to the art history section feeling a bit dazed, but with fresh eyes and a new song to hum under her breath.
The art history section had the benefit of being so difficult to locate that it was almost always empty. As such she had her pick of tables and no one ever noticed when she sang little songs to herself.
Counting by nines can you sing this rhyme?
I know we can dance, we can have a good time
Let’s count up to ninety, we’ll start with nine.
Nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six,
Forty-five, fifty-four, sixty-three,
Seventy-two, eighty-one, ninety.
That particular song circled through her head that afternoon, always just below the surface of her thoughts, like the sound of the books and the shuffling of the one other student in the room (who Alice assumed was actually studying art history and therefore had a more legitimate claim to the area.) She liked the song, even though it was childish. It reminded her of a time when mathematics involved addition of integers rather than the swirl of calculus spread out before her.
She liked the song even though it involved a long string of numbers which were almost never the ones she was supposed to be calculating or manipulating in her homework. A few times she wrote a number from the song by accident and would have to go back and fix it later.
She didn’t really mind.
Furthermore, she liked the song because it was infinitely preferable to the other tune that haunted her mind just below it.
Come sit with me by the lakeside,
And tell me of all your sorrows.
Come blush for me in the sunlight,
And I’ll tell you all of my fears.
Give me a chance to please you,
And I will be yours forever,
My girl with such light in her eyes.
That one was a very silly song, one which the other young ladies in her dormitory would hear and giggle to one another behind delicate, lace fans. Alice liked their fans because they always had very interesting fractal designs, but she was never able to hold one without looking a bit clumsy.
Such things as popular love songs were not readily aligned with Alice’s tastes, although she would admit that the tune was catchy in a way most songs were not.
But the main reason she didn’t want to think of the song (and the main reason that she spent so much time in the art history section) was slumped against the counter at the circulation desk, bored to tears because not a single person had approached him that day to check out a volume. He was not particularly attractive, if one were sensible about such things. His brown hair was a bit too long and he was skinny and freckled. But he spent most of his time staring into space in a way that was very familiar to Alice.
She liked to watch him over the top of one of her books. She liked to imagine what he was imagining.
“I agree,” the Cheshire cat said, from his place at her elbow, sprawled lazily across a stack of her notes.
“With what?”
“Everything.”
“One can hardly agree with everything,” Alice said. “One would soon become overwhelmed with obligations or be forever contradicting one’s self.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“Then I have found something with which you don’t agree.”
“Indeed! I will agree with that.”
Alice rolled her eyes.
“I agree,” the cat said.
“You have already informed me of that.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Just now what?”
Alice sighed and turned her eyes back to her mathematics. There were times when it was useless to have a conversation with the Cheshire cat. Such talk tended to go round in circles.
“I agree that it is a very silly song,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. Would you like to hear my version?”
“No. I don’t imagine that I would.”
The cat ignored her and began to sing.
Come sit with me by the lakeside,
And tell me of how you can’t swim.
Come blush for me in the sunlight,
And I’ll push you into the lake.
Give me twenty gold shillings,
And I will come to the rescue,
My girl with such kelp in her hair.
“I prefer your version as well,” she admitted once the cat had concluded and rolled onto his side.
“You like it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you agree! We are quite the agreeable pair! We should do something to celebrate.”
“Such as?”
“Fireworks.”
“Where would we get them? And where would we set them off?”
The cat groaned with a kind of mrowl. “Perhaps you would prefer to celebrate our agreeableness by spending the day frowning at one another.”
“Perhaps I would,” she snapped, but her attention had already drifted to the ceiling. “If they were very low fireworks. And if that light fixture wasn’t there. We could have our celebration in this very room. Roman candles could easily work.”
“We shall have to look in a book on classical Roman sculpture to find Roman candles.”
“Fire crackers would work too. But they’re so very noisy. We would surely disturb everyone.”
“Yes. That one other student would be most annoyed, and the young man at the circulation desk may wake up and look at us.”
“We can’t have that.”
“No. We should stay with the original idea of fireworks. Much less disruptive.”
“Of course, a palm shell firework would be the best celebration. That is if we could keep the explosion low to the ground and confined over the study tables so as not to set the books alight.”
“Would you prefer a Rococo firework or an impressionist firework?”
“Impressionist would do nicely.”
“Of course. We are trying to impress rather than confuse.” His eyes shifted to the boy at the circulation desk.
“I thought we were celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
Alice sighed, pushing the cat aside to pull a book on impressionist oil paintings from beneath his haunches. She flipped through until she found a print of a row boat upon a river.
“I quite like the colors of this one. It would make a lovely firework.”
“But the explosion would be water rather than fire and we would become very damp. As would the books.”
“I’m sure the books would recover.”
“Perhaps, but I wouldn’t,” the cat huffed.
Alice turned a few more pages, landing on an image of a haystack at sunrise. “This one is quite lovely, all pink and orange.”
“But then we would be buried under a pile of hay and sunshine. We may never make our way out again and suffocate or die of starvation.”
“How are we to celebrate our agreement if we disagree on how to celebrate?”
“That made no sense. Try again.”
“We are disagreeing on which firework to choose. Yet we are shooting a firework because we are agreeing with one another. Since we disagree, we have no reason to celebrate.”
“How troublesome.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Agreement once again!” The cat grinned at her, its tail flicking happily. “I knew things would sort themselves out.”
“I’m choosing this one,” Alice announced, pointing at a beach scene, then reaching her hand into the book to pull out a handful of sand and sea foam, of laughter and red umbrellas. It glowed in her hand, a million grainy specks of color, shifting and moving like waves in the shallows, flickering as if ready to explode if she handled it improperly or held it too long.
“It must be a smallish firework,” the cat reminded her eagerly. “You must depress it so it does not go as high as it would like.”
In a serious, scolding voice, Alice addressed the ball of firework cupped in her hands. “You come from a silly painting that I have never heard of before. I doubt I will ever look at it again and when your book returns to the shelf, your image will be lost to the ages until the moths eat you.”
The firework faded slightly, its colors spinning much less rapidly as its depression sunk in. Alice frowned down at it. “Oh, dear, that sounded very cruel. Do you think I was too harsh with it?”
“No,” the cat said, looking entirely too pleased. He would probably like nothing more than to say rude things all day long if given the opportunity. “You forgot to add that it smells like fish and has no friends.”
“I’m sure it has many friends!” Alice protested. “Lots of firework friends that all skip about together like fireflies or fairies.”
The cat shrugged. “It still smells like salmon.”
Alice bent to whisper an apology to the firework so the Cheshire cat couldn’t hear her. It did not improve the firework’s spirits very much at all, but it lifted some of the guilt from Alice’s heart.
Then she took the firework and threw it with all her might high into the air, where it exploded in a great burst of color - golden yellows, and sparkling blues and greens. Great streaks of sparks like the smears of color pastel against canvas trailed down onto the study tables to sizzle like the rain.
“Oh!” she gasped, then laughed as the sparks fell upon her, tangling in her hair and covering her books in glittering sand.
At her giggle, the other student looked up from his studies and gave her a very odd look from across the library. Alice cleared her throat and ducked her head, returning back to her mathematics with an embarrassed flush.
The Cheshire cat had vanished, the sand following closely behind him.
The boy at the circulation desk had not moved at all.
Chapter 2, 3, 4, 5