alice liddell (inquisitive) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-24 16:08:00 |
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Alice picked at her food, fork scraping against her plate, sound soft among the gentle murmurs of the other diners. Patients, she reminded herself, though inmates was a thought that immediately followed. On a good day she’d be hard pressed to label it as such. This was for the greater good, after all. The betterment of her person. The restoring of her once sound mind. But good days were few and far between, the treatments and surroundings weighing heavily upon her even after all these years. She’d been in Rutledge since the fire and every year, though she grew, she only had to see her reflection to know that she was still so unwell. Her blonde hair fell limply against her cheeks when not pulled messily off her shoulders. Though she kept to the mandatory meal times, she often didn’t hunger for anything, leaving her a mess of sharp angles and big green eyes staring out from a thin face. A stern look at the food still upon her plate made her stab the unsuspecting potato with her fork before making short work of it. Once the watchful eyes of the staff had shifted to someone else, Alice took a moment to survey the girl sitting across from her. There was something about the girl but Alice couldn’t place what it was. “Do I know you?” she asked abruptly. She couldn’t place when the girl had arrived there but Alice didn’t pay much mind to the other people. Her days were mostly spent with doctors and nurses and animals, some of which were even real. “You seem...” Alice couldn’t find the right word for it and let her fork lift as she shrugged. Mouse had grown accustomed to Rutledge years ago. She hadn’t gotten used to other things, but she’d gotten used to the place. Dark walls, and candles that didn’t flicker high over their tallow. Oil was for doctors and nurses and visiting days, but not for them. She had gotten used to the quiet still that was punctuated by the occasional scream before sedation. The special doctor came on Mondays, and the room with the tubs was warmed on Wednesday, and the room with the new electricity was better off remaining closed. Mouse knew all these things. She also knew that he was she, and that she was no longer he, but she had a harder time with that. And she knew that the doctors thought she slept because she was wrong; they didn’t realize that she slept because it was right. She knew Alice. Of course she knew Alice. Even before she’d seen the strange little blonde girl in Wonderland, Mouse had known Alice. Through her little brown eyes, when peering from a sugar bowl, she’d known her. And here, here Mouse knew her as well. Mouse was dark hair that was lank-long and big brown eyes. She had front teeth that were too big, and she was too flat chested to look like much more than a girl. She watched Alice’s fork with those sleepy eyes, and she looked up when the girl spoke. Mouse had seen Alice, and she’d seen her, and she’d seen her; Mouse had never spoken to her. “I seem,” Mouse repeated, an invitation, a whisper, as she scuffed her brown shoe against the squeaky floor. What did the girl seem, that was the question. Brows knitted over curious green eyes, Alice tried to place what it was about the girl. Was it something in the eyes? The teeth? The very quiet that exuded from the girl? “Different,” the blonde concluded after heavy moments of staring. She didn’t seem any more pleased with the answer now that it hung in the air between them and with a pronounced noise she speared another piece of potato with her fork. The word was on the tip of her tongue – very mousy was the girl — but all her manners hadn’t completely left her in this dreary place. “I think… I think you remind me of someone.” As to who, she couldn’t quite say. Mouse watching the spearing with those too curious eyes, wide and not precisely focused. She’d enjoyed all the treatments Rutledge offered, but she’d been queer even before then. She’d been queer since she’d been a he, small and brown, nose twitching in the Wonderland air. Perhaps it was life in the sugar bowl, for it had seemed very long indeed, quite a lifetime. But it was sweet then, and it was not sweet here. And she knew things, too. Knew that the blonde girl, fork and smile and curiosity of her own, had a visitor that Mouse would very much not like to meet. Mouse yawned. (Life had been strange then, when Mouse was very small, and when Cat was not. Life was “I’ll love you if,” and “don’t you love me too?” and “it would please me if you,” and things that still spun in her head and made her too eager to please.) “Different,” Mouse repeated, because different was safe. She couldn’t claim to not be different. Different made as much sense as any other word did. She pushed her own potatoes around her plate, watching one roll, then roll, then roll again. “I remind you of someone different too,” she suggested, because that seemed harmless as well. But she’d always been very bad at staying on topic, and different soon became something else entirely. “Who is to say what is different, and what is normal?” she asked. “Perhaps different is not, and not is.” Alice yawned as the girl did. Contagious, yawns were, and a sleepy haze tugged at her attention when she opened her eyes once more. That too felt strangely familiar, like she had done it a before from across a table, picking at the set food and plates and finding them wanting. Her thoughts followed the girl’s words as best they could until they turned and retraced their steps, tangling and muddling along the way. Alice shook her head to clear them loose, eyes settling on the girl as she found her way around her thoughts. “But if different is normal and normal is not then wouldn’t different become normal?” Perhaps her thoughts weren’t as clear as she thought. “Of course not,” Mouse said, a whisper and a lean across the table that was careful not to draw the attention of the nurses passing behind. “Normal is very dull. No one with any much muchness is ever normal. Normalcy is like a tart made of something other than treacle. It is very not normal at all, even if it’s called normal by people who don’t know any better. Normally. Really. Not normal.” It was all a mousey hissed whisper, all teeth that were too large and eyes that were too wide, but then a nurse passed, and the Mouse was all slouched shoulders and uncertainty once more. Gone was the whimsy and the oddly lucid madness, and in its place was a brown-haired girl of no important birth. Her dress was second-hand, and her shoes were third-hand, and the ribbon in her hair, well, that was certainly fourth-hand, at the very least. Mouse held her breath, and she stifled a yawn, and there was nothing but that nothing until the nurse passed again. “But you have always been as you are,” she added once they were alone again. Her fork poked a potato, filling it with holes. “Or have you?” curious eyes turned to her, and there was a question there that went beyond the question, that probed deeper. Much muchness. Where had Alice heard that before? She leaned in close, a revelation brewing there behind her eyes, but then a nurse passed by and the girl before her changed and what knowledge that had been scarcely at her fingertips scattered, leaving her grasping at nothing at all. The question about her had changed and Alice had a lingering feeling that the conversation, once more, wasn’t as it seemed. Her fork pushed her food around on her plate, her thoughts addled, brow furrowing as she peered down at her place setting. “I’m not,” she muttered, her fork piercing the food. “I’ve changed. It was inevitable. I’m different, now. Not—” Normal, was the word on the tip of her tongue but a glance at the passing nurse made her bite her words back until she had gone. “I’m not as I was, though I’m told that is for the best.” It was a lie but a small one, she thought, for there were times she felt so like before, so close to a place that existed only in fantasy that if she closed her eyes and dreamt hard enough she’d be there again. And then there were days, like now, that she felt so disconnected and far, and she reminded herself it was a good thing, even as it ached so fiercely it took her breath away. “I don’t think I can be the same as I was before. But I don’t think I am much different. Can one be different and unchanged all at once?” Mouse considered the question, then she considered her potatoes, then she considered the water she sipped a moment later. She considered the temperature outside, and she considered the lack of tarts for dessert. She considered a great many things, and all in a sleepy and silent span, her feet swinging from the chair as if she was just a mousy girl, brown hair long and lank and nothing remarkable about her, save her lack of remarkableness. The tips of her secondhand brown shoes squeaked against the floor, and she giggled, which just made the nurse return and glower and threaten floggings and other treatments for hysteria, ones that involved being naked and small and very much like a mouse indeed. “I don’t like cats,” Mouse finally said, which was apropos of nothing, and which was apropos of everything. It didn’t answer her question, but maybe it did, in a very roundabout way. Alice was Alice. Whether she was right or wrong, grown or small, broken or whole; she was Alice. And Mouse didn’t like cats. “What?” Alice blinked and looked up, her previous reaction to the nurse’s diatribe making her obediently look down and take a mouthful of food. But the question was heard, and the answer came a moment later, a thoughtful chew of her dinner and then lower lip along with. “I rather miss my cat, Dinah. Snowdrop and Kitty as well. But I haven’t seen them since...” Well, since the fire, but she hadn’t seen much of anyone since then and cats weren’t the ones to be remarking on. Except perhaps one other. “And they’re not all bad,” Alice admitted. “Strange, confusing creatures, cats. Knowing more than they let on, coming and going as they please, sharp smiles as they pick at bird bones. But affectionate still, knowing when you need to hear a heartbeat other than your own or to see another pair of eyes there in the dark. Strange friends, cats, but friendly all the same.” Mouse’s brown eyes were unblinking wide, and she regarded her sabotaged potato with renewed interest. Scuff, scuff, scuff went her shoes. “For you, cats come and cats go, and they’re warm fur and beat, beat, beat. They don’t stay. They don’t grow up small and hiss and meow. And what of those little birds and their bones? Those bones lived beneath feathers once. What of the mice with their innards spread on your pillow as a prize? What of them?” She was lost a moment, lost, lost and never to return. And then Mouse popped her potato in her mouth, ignoring her fork in favor of her fingers, and the mousy girl was back, a yawn and the back of her hand against dry-crack lips. A sigh, another potato, and Mouse looked up again, as if she’d just forgotten all that passionate speech entirely. “I liked the sugar bowl best. I don’t think cats like sugar very well.” She was a curious thing, elbows on the table and her legs spread wide beneath the table, her chaste and faded blue dress tugged and stretched across her knees. “Who knows what is for the best?” Mouse finally asked, hearkening back to an earlier point in the conversation without warning. She leaned forward, her dress almost touching the plate and the fork. “These people don’t know about wells,” she whispered. Alice could only blink silently as the girl spoke, distracted by the rapid fire words coming from her and the way she yawned and sometimes in the way the light glinted off her teeth. The switch from silverware to not had her starting, but the nurses didn’t care, long suffering sighs that suggested there would be punishments later but not now, not so late into the dinner. And now that they were speaking of sugar bowls and cats and wells, the nurses returning was the very last thing Alice wanted. The blonde leaned forward as the brunette did, eyes rapt, heart in her throat, as she scanned the girl’s face for what she thought she might find. “What do you know of wells,” she whispered back. “I know,” said Mouse, quiet and still, a whisper across the table’s wood, a secret, “that girls that live in wells are very, very ill.” She looked about, darting brown eyes and another scrape of her brown shoes against the floor. “Things look sweet, but aren’t, sometimes, and cats aren’t always soft,” she added. She sat back, and she pushed her plate away. Done and done, and the nurse scowled from down the table’s long length. But there was something to be said for becoming accustomed. Smiles and petting always came after terrible things, and Mouse had bigger problems than the ones on the surface. Mouse scraped the legs of her chair along the floor as she slid back, the sound echoing, echoing, echoing. “Like a well,” she mouthed, soundless as one of the nurses bustled down to her. Mouse thought, maybe, that Alice could be rather Alice, with time. She’d thought her pretty when he’d been a he; he still thought her pretty now she was a she. Blonde and bright and nothing red to her at all. Not even a hint, not even a bit. She stood when the nurse grabbed her arm, the mousey girl in institution blue. The nurse spoke, but the words were like nothing. Just sounds, and Mouse yawned. She fixed her sleepy eyes on the blonde girl. “Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie,” she whispered, too soft to carry as more than something across the table, more movement of her plump lips than true names. Alice’s eyes grew wide with recognition, green eyes sharpening then fading as she thought back onto what the girl was saying. Cats and sweets, and of course, wells. With those big eyes and big teeth, the blonde thought she could see it. A squint and there it was, she, he: a tiny little figure in a teapot or in her tears. “Mouse,” she breathed, the word hurried and hushed, as if she feared saying almost as much as much as she feared not. “It’s you. You’re—” Whatever she meant to stay died upon her lips, the presence of the nurses keeping her quiet and the girl standing at attention, keeping her seated. She watched, carefully tracking her movements though the predatory, watchful edge that might have once accompanied the look was gone, faded and washed away with time spent in these walls. The girl repeated names, familiar little words, and Alice watched her escorted out as the brunette’s words rang between her ears. What was it she said about girls? “Very, very ill,” she muttered as she took a bite of her bland food, mechanical movements under the watch of her guards. Very ill, indeed. |