AN: This could be read separate from or before my other Alice fic Curiouser and Curiouser. They take part in the same 'AU', if one would call it an AU.
Oh bother!"
Alice sighed heavily as she laid down the bush and moved her skirts a little too late out of the way of the flowing water. She watched as the colour seeped into her petticoats, staining the white cloth a reddish hew. She wasn't too concerned, they were only petticoats and they weren't her best anyway, but none the less it was annoying: wet petticoats clung to one's legs like a small child. Alice glanced around for her kerchief which lay on the deck by her side and mopped up the spill. It was fortunate really that the water had landed in her petticoats and not the paper. The paper was still dry and that was all that mattered.
Alice set the water bowl upright again and lifted the painting towards her, inspecting it critically. It wasn't the best she had ever done, she knew in a heartbeat, but she didn't care. She studied the man she had painted patiently, lovingly. She looked as his orange hair, his piercing green eyes and his outrageous clothing and smiled. He is like a friend, thought she.
Although Alice had many friends, they were distant people, men in the world of business and the crew. Alice felt, somehow, that they never really saw her as a human being. She was just Alice Kingsley to them, the young, pretty, eccentric girl with ambition aplenty but no future. They were friends, but not friends. Not people she could turn to when her sleep was haunted with fire breathing lizards, no one to comfort her when she felt alone.
But there was someone, this man in her mind- an imaginary person. That was who she painted now. Sometimes she thought she saw him, in a crowd, at the end of her bed, waving down at her from the crow's nest. She thought she saw him smile at her, whisper sweet words of comfort and kindness in her ear when she couldn't smile herself. He was like a ghost or an almost forgotten memory. He was always in her dreams, Alice was sure, but when she woke he disappeared and faded along with the adventures they had in her mind. Alice compared him to the stars; they look so close, so beautiful. They twinkle at you temptingly yet, however much you try, however close you get, they are always that little bit further away, leaving you grappling with nothingness.
Alice wrote about him, penning stories in her spidery script. He was a hatter by trade, she decided. He made hundreds of hats, from cloches to tamo'-shanters to fezes. He drank tea with his friends- a mouse and a rabbit. No, a hare. A march hare. Scones would be needed of course. He fought for justice and against evil.
She was happiest when she wrote about the man with the orange hair, she felt free yet, at the same time, she felt sad. It was like her heart broke a little more with each line. She just couldn't work out why.
Alice knew that with time she would forget about her friend. She had business to attend to, countries to explore and a family to raise. She knew that she would sail further away from the stars untill even the half-forgotten dreams faded. It was there, on the deck of a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean that Alice Kingsley painted her imaginary friend. Where she vowed that she would cling onto him as long as she could, as best as she could and pray that they day he vanished altogether like sand down a plughole never arrived.
Alice wondered if her hatter would make a hat for her.
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