Reflections in a Broken Glass
Time: Yes.
Place: England/Underland
Pairings: Red Queen/Stryker, Malice/Black Knave
Synopsis: Alice is dead; long live the Black Queen … maybe.
The day started much as usual. Edward Straker arrived early after working too late into the night before. His body was still stiff from falling asleep on the couch while thinking of all the things that needed to be done, including, of course, defeating their incomprehensible enemy. He read through reports while waiting for the new Lieutenant assigned as his personal aide to bring him his morning coffee, sweet and light, as always. So, when the door to his office slid open, he thought nothing of it.
"Oh, no, no, no, no ... Oh dear. Late again."
"What?" Straker looked up and realized the door was open about 8 inches, too small to admit anyone and that the voice he didn't recognize was far closer to the floor than seemed reasonable. Rising to his feet, he caught just a glimpse of what looked like white fur, erect ears and a black waistcoat scampering away from the door.
Long ears and white fur dictated a rabbit? Logic said that a rabbit could not get into the building without being noticed. Logic also said that rabbits did not wear clothing and mutter about being late. The door closed and opened fully as Straker moved toward it, allowing him to nearly collide with the very surprised looking Lt. LaCrosse who was entering with coffee and an arm full of folders. Straker looked her over, from the top of her white blonde head to the toes of her polished boots before his gaze came to rest on her face. Wide deep sapphire eyes met his icy gaze.
"Your coffee, sir…?" She offered it to him.
"Thank you. On the desk." He indicated his office with a nod and set off in deliberate pursuit of his hallucination. He hoped it was a hallucination. The thought of the aliens having control of … He squelched that thought just as he caught another flash of white and black heading out of the opposite side of the control room.
Mr. White stared at his over-sized pocket watch with one beady red eye and fretted. He should have found her by now. They promised him they'd put him in the right place to find her immediately. Instead, he was dashing about an underground maze filled with people and machinery and the only remotely Alice like person he'd seen was not an Alice at all. The Hatter was mad, that's all there was to it.
Oh, wait … of course he was.
Straker nodded absently to people who greeted him, moving through the installation like a ghost following that ephemeral shadow of a rabbit. He slowed his pace as he reached the interface between the business below and the business above.
He scanned the area for his objective.
Rabbit.
Waistcoat.
Wait a minute.
Suddenly this had a far too Looking Glass feel to it.
He was asleep. He was dreaming that was the only answer. With a faint smile he turned to head back to his office and almost walked straight into Paul Foster. "Paul," he greeted the younger man with a nod.
"Where have you been? We had a meeting scheduled half an hour ago." There was no mistaking the combination of concern and annoyance on Foster's face.
Straker checked his blackberry from force of habit. Given how hectic a day could become, he had made it a habit of noting any and all commitments in his electronic calendar. Yes, there it was: an appointment with Paul for just about the time he left his office. His dreams and his calendar seldom intersected. So, hallucination rather than dream. Ed worked to keep his shoulders from sagging at the following thought. He was going to have to talk to Dr. Jackson about this when he had a minute. "Sorry, Paul. Something … came up." He took a last look around the area for a shadow or glimpse of the odd rabbit before accompanying his third in command back to his office.
After the meeting, Straker checked security for anything out of the ordinary. At a time hack a few minutes after he bumped into Paul, he saw on the tape the one thing he did not want to see even if it derailed the diagnosis of madness: a rabbit. A large rabbit with tall white ears, wearing a black waistcoat and consulting a large pocket watch. He wondered vaguely if anyone else would see that or just dismiss it as a cut out for a movie production. The rabbit stayed on the film for a count of 30 seconds before vanishing.
For just a moment, he eyed his cold coffee. But it couldn't be the coffee; he hadn't touched it before the incident. The aliens were experts at mind manipulation, but what was the point of this? Why Lewis Carroll? He didn't even like the books, they were … nonsense.
Mr. White confronted his long time acquaintance Mr. Hightopp with a glaring eye. "I told you. There isn't an Alice anymore. I have looked."
"There's got to be an Alice. I can feel her up … there," the man pointed hastily toward the sky. He grimaced, his biliously green eyes looking odder and odder as he did so. His voice deepened suddenly and took on an edge. "We've got to have an Alice, or we're done for, ain't we?" He blinked and seemed to come back to himself. "Tea?" He proffered a cup to the hare.
"No. No tea. No Alice. That's that."
"One more look?" Hightopp pleaded anxiously. "It's not like it'll be a problem. Only Alice can see you up there." Again, the hasty point and grimace routine.
Mr. White shook his watch and sighed. "She won't like it if she finds out."
"The Queen?"
"Malice."
"Oh. Her. No. No, she won't like it. But that doesn't matter, we need Alice. You'll find her, I know you will." A manic grin stretched Hightopp's mouth until he took on a resemblance to Chessy. Not a reassuring look to a rabbit.
Mr. White bobbed his head and bowed in agreement. "All right. I'll go. One more time and one more only."
Out in the greening land stood a slender figure clad all in black and silver from her shining curtain of blue-black hair to the points of her silver filigree inlaid dancing shoes. From a distance, she looked overpoweringly beautiful and flawless. Up close, she was a distorted version of an adult Alice. The lace of her dress torn, the silver ribbon of her sash frayed and worn as were the scuffed dancing shoes. The eyes that peeped from beneath the curtain of hair were black as black, eerie in their lack of focus and coloring.
" . . Little Alice. Brave Alice. Killing Alice. Queen Alice. … Dead … Alice." The woman's voice rose from sweet muttering soprano to a banshee wail as she turned and drifted across the grass. She fell to her hands and knees, searching through the long broad blades for something she couldn't find. She looked up suddenly, the black stare gazing out across rolling hills of growing green.
"Hate Alice," she snarled. "Malice is Queen here now! The Black Queen, pitted against Red and White. Come my knaves …" She pulled the cards and the black chessmen out of the air by her will until they stood, rank upon rank behind her. She stared at them in their silence until a tremor ran through her body; she threw back her head and shrieked as though being tortured.
The sound rang through Underland until the White Queen and her court held their ears against it. Out in the wasteland, the Red Queen and her Knave listened until they too held bleeding ears against the onslaught of sound.
Only the Hatter stood his ground, grinning as though his head might split apart, his green eyes goggling slightly as he sipped his tea and tried to ignore the sound of Malice.
Ed Straker, tired beyond words, went home to his empty house, lay on his couch smoking a slender black cigar and tried very hard not to let his mind worry at the peculiar sighting of a white rabbit in a black waistcoat of formal and 19th century cut. It didn't work. Of all the items of the day that wearied him, the rabbit and his new assistant were the two he could not shut off.
He understood the reason La Crosse worried him. If the rabbit hadn't happened, he'd never have seen her surface resemblance to the pictures in Lewis Carroll's works. But the rabbit had been there and thus he'd noticed she was just the right size and build to play a teenaged Alice, much like the young woman Burton had cast in his version of the story.
He finished the cigar and took a relaxing hot shower before turning in at, for him, a reasonable hour.
Dreams are not always friendly. This night Edward Straker dreamed of tortures that were not his own. He was lost in a world of things too large or far too small, all of them bent on his destruction. He ran until he could run no more and then turned to fight. There was nothing there.
"We need Alice," a soft male voice told him from right next to his ear. Startled, he whirled to face a reverse colored version of himself. Midnight hair, eyes of ebony, black silk suit, skin like translucent milk … but he knew himself even in negative.
"Who are you?"
Stupid question when he already knew the answer.
"Know you not thy Knave, Sire?" the other asked with a smirk. "Know you not your right hand?" The Knave gestured behind him. Row upon row of Spades, Clubs and chessmen spread out across the land, crushing it until spinning silver light cut through them all.
Straker came awake on a sharp intake of breath. Sweat poured off him as though he'd run a race in record time. He had a hazy thought that the shower didn't last just as he caught sight of a reflection. There at the window was The Rabbit.
"Hey!" the thing objected as Straker threw open the window, grabbed the white furred animal and dragged him into the room.
"You. Who are you?" I'm talking to a two foot tall white rabbit in a waistcoat he thought and recognized the signs of incipient insanity.
The rabbit stood there, frozen in fright, for several minutes before clearing his throat and introducing himself. "I'm Mr. White," he offered. "And you are not Alice," he added after a moment. Except, it was Alice, just not The Alice.
"No, I'm Edward Straker." And I just introduced myself to a hallucination, he concluded mentally.
"I am not."
"Not what?"
"A hallucination. I'm Mr. White and I'm on an important mission." The rabbit puffed up a bit, then deflated. "Although it ain't no use. There ain't no Alice Kingsleigh, no how."
Straker stared at the rabbit. "Alice Kingsleigh, at least the only one I know, died 30 years ago. She was my great-grandmother."
The rabbit sat and stared back. "Died," he repeated, stunned. Alice. Died. Alice … the Alice … oh, no, no, no, no, no …
"And she was well over a century old."
"But – But …Oh, my." There really wasn't an Alice any more. Hightopp would be devastated. The White Queen as well. Malice … oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear … Malice. Oh, Dear! He blinked up at the man he was facing, unaware of the tears gathering and dropping down his face.
Ed frowned at the now woe-begone rabbit sitting on his bedroom floor.
The White Queen stared at her courtiers in dismay. "The Black Queen?" she repeated blankly. Her wide dark eyes under elegantly arched dark brows that contrasted with her silver white hair went oddly wider. "There isn't a Black Queen," she answered her own question. "There's me, the White Queen. There's my sister, the Red Queen who supplanted the Queen of Hearts. That's it. Just the two of us. That's all. And my sister isn't a queen any more." She turned to stare at the Hatter. "Who is the Black Queen?"
"Mmmm … mmm … mm … Malice," he stuttered, ending in an almost inaudible whisper.
"Malice," the White Queen repeated. "Malice? That's not good."
"No, your Majesty, " he agreed, not quite indulging in a bout of handwringing.
The White Queen sank gracefully onto an ottoman and looked to the Hatter for direction. "What do we do? She doesn't have the bandersnatch or the jabberwock."
"True. But she is … who she is."
"Quite. I wonder. Could I … We … talk to her?"
"It's worth a try, I suppose. " Hightopp didn't feel enthusiastic about the meeting proposed, but without Alice here to help, he didn't know what else they could do. "I'll arrange it." He bowed quite properly with a bit of a flourish and headed out.
Malice and her soldiers stood where Hightopp had last seen her, in the healing woods outside the burned down town the Red Queen had decimated. She eyed him through the shimmer of hair that fell across her face.
Habit made the Hatter bow, with a flourish, as he approached the newly proclaimed Black Queen. "Your Majesty," he greeted her with only a slight hesitation.
"Hatter. What word do you bring?"
Malice's voice slithered around him like cold snakes in pursuit of small game. He repressed a shudder and met her gaze as head on as he could. "Her Majesty, the White Queen, sends her greetings. "
"There is no White Queen. There is no Red Queen. There is no Alice. Only Malice reigns the Black Queen! Alice. Is. Dead." Upon her final pronouncement, she threw back her head and let loose with a ululating yell that could curdle blood at a thousand paces. Luckily, the Hatter was closer than that.
In the upper world, Edward Straker, great grandson of Alice Kingsleigh, was cautiously agreeing to go with the rabbit.
Ed was still more than half convinced that this was either bad food or an alien plot, but the rabbit was so very convincing. Then again, maybe he'd just lost his mind. He'd shown the rabbit the only photo he had of his great grandmother and the rabbit cried silently, touching the photo gently with one paw. Crazy or not, he felt obliged to help.
He dressed as for work and followed the rabbit to an ancient tree with a large burrow opening in its roots. He was familiar enough with the story not to be surprised by the access, although the express elevator style ride from the surface to Underland was both invigorating and dangerous. The passage was decorated, if one could use the term, with an amalgamation of esoterica which he had not entirely expected. Straker landed with a thump and no rabbit in a dusty ruin of a room with a lot of doors and nothing else.
All the doors were locked. Ed was a little concerned that he found this "normal" as well.
What was the next step in the book? He backed away from the last door he tried and into a table, knocking the table over. The top, glass, shattered into a flood of shimmering bits on the floor. In the midst of all this lay a glass bottle, intact, with a large label hanging from the neck.
Drink me.
With a resigned sigh, Straker removed the cork stopper and lifted the bottle to his lips, only to stop with a thought. Wasn't there a key? He looked around. Ah. Yes. Key. He picked up the locket sized old-fashioned skeleton key and was diverted by another thought. Something about a cake … In a small glass case near the base of the broken table was a petite four. He picked up the case and placed it next to the smallest door before eyeing the curtain next to it.
Behind the curtain was a tiny door, although somehow also an inviting one. He looked at the key and the smallest door. They matched. With a resigned sigh, he drank the potion and discovered that clothes do not always shrink with the body.
Well, that was annoying. Luckily, he had enough items in his pockets to put together a toga. He opened the door, wrestled his clothing through the opening without going out the other side until he was through. The petite four was now a large slab cake that he grabbed and hauled through the doorway. Sure enough, he'd just stepped into the clearing on the other side when the door slammed shut behind him.
True to the story, the Eat Me cake took him to something approximating his usual size. Dressed and as ready as he could be to face the nonsense of Wonderland, he set off down the clearly marked path in front of him wishing the rabbit would reappear and that he had some idea where he was going.
He also wished the refrain of "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" would get out of his head. This was not Oz and he was not Dorothy … Nor, he admitted with a touch of dismay, was he Alice.