francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-25 03:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | alice, cheshire cat, door: tales |
Who: Alice & the Cat
What: A reunion
Where: Wonderland
When:After this.
Warnings/Rating: Creeptastic & nonsensical as balls.
It was happening again. Alice felt her heart lurch in her chest as she took in her surroundings. The woman – Miss King – said that it might be strange, finding their places switched, and it was a concept that she thought might be best experienced than pondered on. When she and her friend turned the door key and entered, she hadn’t been sure what to expect to be waiting for them. Wonderland was certainly not it. “Oh, no,” Alice huffed, less lament and more irritation in two small words. Green eyes looking from one side to the next and then down at herself. Gone was the simple, colorless shift and worn shoes she had back in the asylum. Now there was blue, so much blue for a dress, like she had worn as a child. There were her boots, black as night, new, shining, leather creaking as she moved to get a closer look at them climb up to her knees. Her hair spilled over her shoulder in golden waves, such a contrast to the lank, dull strands that clung to her cheeks most days. And there was her apron, crisp and almost clean if not for the splatters of red. It was like she remembered, there in the middle of the maze, angry shouts in one ear, purring in the other, and so much bl— “No.” She could feel something – she suspected a blade – in her pocket and she pointedly refused to check herself, her hands crossing over her forearms, feeling the faint raise of silvery scars on her skin, before folding them completely over her chest. “I’ve had quite enough of being mad,” she told no one in particular, or perhaps she tried to reassure herself. It had been a mantra as of late, trying to agree with everyone that these memories and this place, this Wonderland, were nothing more than delusions. Now, standing there in the places she had left as a child, she wondered why her mind was running amok again. Experience was but a single gossamer thread, silky, fragile, and, if one was careful, long. The idea that there should be three parts of the self—the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious—was but a poor man’s attempt to sever that thread into lengths more easily consumed and compartmentalized. It was a silly notion, one that seeded easily in the weakest of minds. The Cat did not hold with such nonsense. He knew there were no fractures between reality and unreality; dreams were no less true for being dreams, after all. The self existed as a smooth pane, single, whole—the curve of a crystal wave, that one could walk endlessly, should one choose and should one learn how to place one’s steps just so. And though he did not know where he had gone, or that he even had gone, when the Cat’s eyes opened on Wonderland, he was not surprised. Just as he had not been bothered to find himself in the mind of someone else. When one didn’t believe logic dictated, the unexpected became the expected. A smile curled like a cat on his lips. The Cat’s grin had little consistency, however. It meant both pleasure and pain, and a thousand and one other things. He was not precisely pleased to find himself home, no, but he was not displeased. He was here and that was that. In his form as a man, he stood in the green middle of the Queen’s topiary. Butterflies bright as jewels swam in the sky and he thought of catching one. Just to pluck its pretty wings off. Tall and stately, in a woolen frock coat done in deep charcoal, layered over a fine dove gray waistcoat, a starched collared shirt high on his throat tied with an ascot, and highbacked trousers, the Cat scrutinized himself. He felt the familiar weight of a top hat on his head. And, looking down, he saw blood spattered the cuffs of his shirt. It was only the gasp of a small, girlish voice, and the following mutterings that distracted him from further inspection. Alice. Feline eyes, a marbled blue and green, Alice’s old dress and the Queen’s leaves, gleamed with excitement and the Cheshire grin widened. Turning, he saw her, prim in her Wonderland outfit, save for the lacing of blood down the innocent white of her apron. Even better. She was older—as old as she had been in the asylum, but older than she had been in Wonderland, and that was good too. “Alice,” purred the Cat, his voice velvet. His eyes swept the walls of shrubbery and the bright pinpricks of roses throughout. “We’re back.” Oh, she knew that voice. It had been a companion to her in those childhood adventures and a fleeting one in her later years. That voice came with the feline face, or a man’s tall body, or no face or body at all. Sometimes it came from only a grin, like silver moonlight, and sometimes the words were whispered in the air with nothing at all to look at. “Cat,” she breathed as she spun on her heel to look at him, blonde hair sweeping back over her shoulder with the motion. The cross of her arms didn’t fall, no grand greetings for him, just a curious sweep of her eyes over his form, taking in the attire more befitting men from England. Not from Wonderland. To say it suited him well was an understatement, but the Cat was always good at slipping in as if he belonged. “You’re not real either,” she reminded him, as she had said a thousand times before, as a statement that demanded reality bend to make it true, or as a question mused aloud in lonely darkness. He wasn’t real, the doctors had said, with the kind voices and less than kind treatments. He was neither talking cat, nor smile, nor magical man who crept through shadows to visit her in her tiny rooms of the asylum. He was just a delusion of her delicate mind. So they said. In a sea spray of skirts, the girl whipped to look at him. A decidedly human reaction, the kind of human that came from a place of tarry blacks and smokestacks that smudged color out of the sky. Not a human like the Cat was now. The reaction too belied the years that had lapsed between their last visit to Wonderland, years the girl endured in the sepia darkness of a tiny room that had taught her to question her own mind and cut her shining thread to pieces. She appeared in rainbow shades now, vivid blues and corn yellows, a tumble of blond hair and wide curious eyes—all wonder in Wonderland, but inside she was still the girl in the room with sharp bones and thin skin. Her arms were tight across the swell of her bosom in a posture of defense. She teetered on the edge, glass waiting to be broken. The Cat saw that now, and he still smiled. Contrary to the doctors’ beliefs, he was very much real. He may also have been a delusion, but he didn’t concern himself with trifles such as that, and were he, that fact certainly didn’t make him not real. (It wouldn’t do to use the word ‘imaginary’ here, as there was nothing not real about imaginations or imagined beings either.) But the people of Alice’s world were deniers in every sense of the word. They decried that which they did not understand and chained the few minds of those who did, prodding them and poking them in hopes of making them forget. It never worked. Once eyes were open, they were nearly impossible to close. “Does it matter?” He asked, vowels flowing like honey, half-lidded eyes liquid despite the brightness of the sky above them. He stalked forward, toward Alice, on long legs, and reached her in the time it took to blink. She was older, but she was still small, and she was even more fragile. He didn’t touch her, but the Cat did smile down at the girl. (She was fortunate, as he was feeling particularly nice and it was as a human that he spoke most plainly, which, truthfully, wasn’t saying much, but it was something.) He offered her an elbow. “Come. Let us argue realities as we walk.” The question of their return had him wondering after the Queen. If they were back, was she? Death was ofttimes permanent in Wonderland, but words such as that meant little to nothing. Ofttimes was far from always. Did it matter, that was the question. She supposed it didn’t. She was there already, the trappings of her real life nowhere in sight and the center of her youthful refuge all around. She had come through the door to face whatever lay there, and she would face this illusion with her head up. As he stepped toward her she looked up at him, this tall cat on two legs. Proximity was something to be maintained in real, polite worlds, certainly, and there she would have taken a step back, but it was certainly less important in imaginary ones. And among friends and felines and everything in between. He offered her his arm, hands sliding along his arm before encircling it with a touch of familiarity. She took it with the beginnings of a shrug and airy, “Well, if you insist on dressing like a gentleman then you should walk with me as one.” Strolling through paths almost long forgotten, she took the opportunity to look around at this place she left. It was much as she remembered it; maybe better. “It’s more…” beautiful, “bright than before.” Then again so much seemed bright than the stark and empty walls of her room. Everything was prettier than dirty glass windows or cold floors. “Did you expect to be here?” A beat passed that had her teeth pressing upon her lower lip in thought. “Do you think it’s the same as we left it?” Thoughts were but objects made mental—tangible and multi-sided as ever. Anything could be a thought. One could take one of the Queen’s roses, for example, pluck it out from its home, and consider it, and one had a thought. It was really very simple. If one defined a thought as an object made mental, then an object was but a thought made physical. So if they were spinning away on some lost dreamscape in Alice’s addled mind, that did nothing to take away from the fact that they were most certainly not at the same time, thought and not-thought, real and not-real. They were physically present, were they not? Just as were the roses bushes that grew high into the blue of the sky—enough to cast shadows that spilled over their boots. Just as was the still-wet blood that painted them both down the front, and just as were the silver blades they both held in their pockets like pieces of a shattered looking glass—pretty, and ultimately destructive. That all said, the Cat could not read thoughts—not while they were mental. He could not have echoed words that hummed through Alice’s mind, one after another. But, when it came to reading, Alice was a favorite book of his, and he was awfully good at guessing. The flight of uncertainty behind the blooming eyes, the ripple in her irises as her pupils flowered black, growing with every inch that closed between them, and the slightest parting of petal red lips—all added to the teasing smile. It told him a story. But the good kind. The kind without an ending. As did the soft bird’s wing touch of her fingers on his arm before she looped her elbow through his. “It is brighter or you are dimmer,” he murmured, head bent over the Alice’s, allowing his words to flutter down to her just so. Both were true. He was amused by her astonishment. They walked, black and blue together, the night sky mingling with the day. The Cat took in the two questions in silence, dark-bright eyes flashing from one wall of the maze to the next. They would take a short-cut, he decided. Pausing in the middle of the pathway, with Alice still on his arm, he pushed a handful of leaves back. It grew tall. It was as easy as that. Gingerly, he stepped through the space he had created. On the other side, quite far away, he held his hand out to take the girl’s when she followed. “Everything is a possibility, Alice,” he said of expectation. The Cat peered over his shoulder. There was the Queen’s throne. (Was it her throne if she was no longer in it? What did it exist as before one thought of it as a throne at all?) Empty, but clean. There was no blood here. Curious. He turned back to the girl and smiled. “Do you think it is the same?” Dimmer. Alice merely turned her face up as he bent toward her, her glare tempered by her fondness of him, even if she couldn't quite admit to it, nor why. And in truth, it wasn't a jest, and she understood what he meant in a manner. She never felt quite so pale as she was in the asylum walls, never shone as radiant as she did when she was under Wonderland skies. Cat, wondrous and knowing Cat, was still as observant as ever, so remarking on her person as well as finding their way through this place long last visited. When he offered her his hand she took it little hesitation, question—for Alice was full of questions, no matter who was it was, and especially when it was Cat—silently strewn across her face. As for where they were, it was answered as she walked to the throne, and she slid away from her companion to peer closer at the curiosity. "That possibilities are endless? Yes." She spoke to him though she kept her eyes forward, searching for the same signs he was, and finding no blood in sight. "But nothing stays the same," she reminded him, leaning over the throne as she ran her fingers over it, searching for the bloodstains, the knife marks, any traces of the deed. Sliding her hand into her pocket she pulled out her knife, flecks of old blood staining the blade and catching the sun on the edge. Her reflection was so alike and unalike the last time she saw herself through it; her face now clean of blood and a decade older, a decade wiser one might have said. She turned on her heel, petticoats and skirt billowing once before she sat imperiously upon the throne, no crown to speak of save for the way the sun glinted upon her golden hair. The knife she balanced on the tip, turning it in a slow circle, digging a small dent into the arm of the throne. "If we came back, do you think she could? Would, since possibilities abound." The sharpness in Alice’s eyes, wet and green as a new leaf and surely as weak, earned her a smirk, but no further comment. The Cat saw that she understood what he meant as well as she could given her current state, and that was enough. A few details were lost on her and he watched them shear away and fly off into whatever oblivion existed on the opposite side of the hedge they’d just come through. They could be found again later, he decided. Wonderland’s palette of colors was extensive and there were few half-shades; everything was done up brilliantly, all boisterous bunting, baubles, and the moving emerald wings of a flower-kisser as it hummed in the air drinking nectar. Alice was not out of place. The cornflower blue of her skirts was clean and she had no shadow. She was brighter now than she had ever been in that room of hers, if also a touch dimmer than her last visit. In truth, had the Cat been capable of being dazzled, he may well have been. To see so much after his stay in a world bent on deprivation was overwhelming in the most pleasurable of ways. But it stirred not a whisker. His tail, though it was not present, flicked playfully. A soft breeze brushed at the top of the Cat’s hat. He swept it from his head gracefully and led Alice through the scratching brambles of the rose hedge. He saw the question marks drawn plainly, in a neat calligraphic hand, on the girl’s cheeks, caught in the length of her fair lashes. That was good. Were she ever to lose her curiosity, it would be a very sad day. “It had already changed as soon as we departed. We were not in it.” It was a statement made as the Cat moved away, accompanying Alice to the throne. He was a step or two behind her. He didn’t continue the thought—that if all possibilities were possible, then so too was the one that said nothing had changed. He smiled a smile of delight as the girl then began digging for clues to sate that curiosity of hers (which ought never happen; curiosity was one thing one ought never satiate, but rather stoke) before, finally, taking the Queen’s place. Feline eyes caught on the half-moon of the blade and in an instant, the Cat was no longer a man, but a cat, this time sleek and black as his frock coat had been. It took only the wish to change to change. There was no flash or puff of smoke. He simply became a cat. Light picked out shifting colors in his coat. The animal stalked languidly to the base of the royal seat, enjoying the feel of earth beneath padded feet, then jumped in one smooth arc into Alice’s lap. He shifted his weight with ease and poured himself into a comfortable curlicue, a spill of glimmering oil atop her skirts; he rested a lazy chin on the white back of her hand, his ears flat to his head. The Cat thought on the hotel door they had come through. “I’d say she already has.” The girl was sitting on the throne. He purred. Alice’s gaze kept shifting, turning the blade in circles and noticing the man, and then cat, between revolutions. As the feline approached her she slowed her turn, letting the knife still the moment she saw him leap. Though she had seen this imaginary man on and off for the years in the asylum, it was the cat she was most familiar with, and she turned a sunnier smile to him as he stretched out onto her lap. “Oh, has she?” She didn’t sound like she agreed though she sounded distracted, arms full now with a purring bundle of fur. With his head resting upon her she turned her hand gently, fingers curling to scratch at his neck, his chin. The knife, not forgotten, scraped along the arm of the throne, blade singing against the wood before she set it down, letting her fingers stroke the shining sides like the cat she petted. “This is a nicer dream,” she sighed, contentment slowly, slyly, seeping under her skin. Weapon in one hand, companion in the other, sitting upon relics of an old enemy, Alice was sure this was nothing more than a daydream, the best she had had in many years. “And would you say it is simply you and I in here? Or do you think traveling down the roads will lead us to another?” “It is a throne and you are upon it,” yawned the Cat with his usual canny austerity, butting his head against her porcelain fingertips as they stroked him. ‘Queen’ was as much a title as Alice. Nothing came with titles. She could be the queen, if she wished. The Cat’s claws caught in the material of Alice’s skirts as he stretched his front paws out in front of himself. His vision was sharper in this form, but he could no longer see Wonderland’s colors. The world from a cat’s eyes was an array of blues and greens and shifting, streaking beings that wanted chasing. The Queen’s red roses were but bruises on the faces of the tall green hedges. For some reason, this amused the Cat, whose purring intensified. The girl scratched under his chin and the Cat closed his eyes. It was nice to be out underneath the sun. He could feel it warming him, attracted to the darkness of his fur, as if it wanted to shine and shine and scare the black away, or discover what was beneath it. He let it try. No words were uttered to contradict Alice’s wistful sigh. The Cat continued to bask. One green eye opened, however, at the curious girl’s next question. He lifted his head, black nose in the air. Without a word, he hopped off of Alice’s lap and into the garden of grass. He laced against her heels, rubbing against her with more affection than he ever could as a human. But then he was taking off. The Cat did not run, but he was slowly erased from sight, fading shade by shade, until he was a weak gray against the bushes. He smiled at Alice. “It is as you dream it.” Those were the last words he spoke before all he was was a hanging white smile, tipped with cat’s fangs. It was time to move. There was no Queen of Hearts here. Now there were other questions search out. “It takes more than a knife and an empty chair to be a queen,” she said idly, the sharp edge to her voice softened as they basked in the Wonderland sun. His jump broke her reverie and she followed suit, sparing only one glance at the throne behind her. Cat was wrong, that she knew. There was no queen here, and if there was, it wasn’t she. And yet... The glance was a long one as she thought on the curiosity of power, and of wanting it. It was a thought she rarely ever dared to have in the asylum, so futile that she made it fleeting, burying it down the rest of her childish thoughts. There her life was not in her hands, too unstable to handle herself, let alone anyone else. Here where everything was different, and her hand tightened on the handle of her knife a moment before she realized she was gripping it hard. Shaking her head and herself of those thoughts, she slid the knife back into her pocket, a modicum of control clicking back into place. When she turned back to the Cat, no longer racing about her ankles, she found a smile and a riddle in his stead. “Now he agrees with me,” she muttered, absentmindedly pressing her fingers against that toothy grin and feeling the sharp prickle where her finger met the edge of his fang. Blood welled up quickly and she was just as quick to press it against her mouth to quell the wound. She should have known -- had know, truly -- but the urge to be certain, to touch, to taste, to open doors and climb to places just to know was a terrible habit to break, much progress made in her older years and so quickly undone in the presence of one Cat. “Would that I dream of Rabbit, then.” The White Rabbit who was a constant companion back home as well, albeit a stuff animal toy that never posed as many riddles as her nearly invisible friend here. He always knew where to go, even if he wasn’t so forthcoming in telling her. Turning down away from where they came she continued on, to paths she had taken many years ago, to the homes of animals she had once known, and away from the Queen’s lands and her gardens, empty of cards and full of memories. She barely glanced back to see her friend, expecting the smile to follow her and even if not, he’d show up eventually, when she least expected or when he was least helpful. Of all the things that might have changed, that was not going to be one. |