Here's the companion piece to Topsy-Turvy that was originally supposed to be based on Valora's "Extreme," just like I said! Again, if you haven't listened to "Angel" by Sarah Brightman before, I highly suggest you do, even if only for the sake of better understanding the things on Tarrant's list (you'll see what I mean by "list" when you get to roughly the mid-way point of this). It really is a beautiful song, though, I mean I get goosebumps no matter how many times I listen to it or how often, it's got kind of a...mystical quality to it, but it's not really mystical while at the same time it is in a way that's vaguely reminiscent of the way Mirana walks, like I can't really describe it, it's one of those things you just have to hear/see for yourself to really understand, and in this case it would be one of the ones you need to hear, obviously.
ANYWAY...
...I don't really go very deep into it here, but I'm sure you'll still be able to see by the second paragraph if not the end of the first that I sort of decided to use one of the fairly common themes found throughout the fandom in plenty of fics where during Alice's absence, Tarrant starts going into what I have seen varied as either: an even deeper and more rapidly progressing state of madness where he goes into his fits of anger more and more often; a state of depression where his colors just start to sort of fade and get uncharacteristically dull and tinted with gray and he's just in this constant haze and is distracted from his work and not even tea is helping, or; a combination of the two. For this, I decided to use the last of the three, and you'll see my version of that within the very first paragraph.
Once again, I own absolutely nothing, can claim none of it, including the characters, and I also have no involvement with Sarah Brightman, the creation of the song this is based on or the album it was released on or any of the other songs on said album, and I am making no profit from any of this, it is merely for the enjoyment of myself and, hopefully, others.
...Although I wouldn't mind if my crazy-smart friend who wrote three pages on the science of wormholes for fun when she got bored one time and is specializing in engineering even though we're still in high school and don't graduate until next year would build a cloning machine and figure out a way to get me a piece of Johnny Depp's DNA so I can make a clone of him to keep. I'm sure she wouldn't mind, I mean the girl is practically obsessed with the man—Well, okay, no, let me correct myself there. Macie is not obsessed with Johnny himself, she is obsessed with the characters he plays in Tim Burton's movies, partly because not a single time in all the years I've known her have I ever heard or seen Macie fawn over a guy of any status or age, celebrities or otherwise (I've never even known her to have a crush on a classmate).
The bigger reason for it, though is that she is literally THE biggest Tim Burton fan I have ever met in my entire life, no exaggeration. She's got a rather messed up, dark, twisted sense of humor that goes along perfectly with her rather cynical attitude and natural tendency towards pessimism, no matter what the situation. So Tim Burton/Helena Bonham Carter/Johnny Depp movies (especially Nightmare Before Christmas, which is her absolute favorite one of them all) are one of the few things in this world that she loves even more than confusing the absolute shit out of me with her fancy-ass mathematical/science-y mumbo-jumbo that I don't understand a damn bit of. I'm extremely right-brained, and she's exactly the opposite, which makes it so that e clash terribly, but we also click perfectly, which in turn makes our friendship extremely odd, and at times we can both get completely infuriated with each other, but the relationship also highly beneficial on both ends, and she's one of my closest and very best friends in the world. We're just proof that opposites really do attract.
Anyway, I'm rambling again, which I apologize for, she's just such an interesting girl (you should've seen the AiW themed party that we had at her house one summer with our group of close friends). So, anyhow, I hope you enjoy this, assuming you're even still here after that rant, and...yeah. Happy reading/writing! n_n
Tarrant let out a rather impolite word from the Outlandish language slip from his mouth as he instinctively jerked his hand away from the needle he'd pricked himself with. At first, his eyes bordered on turning orange, and he could feel anger—though whether at himself, the needle, or both, he could not say—beginning to broil up inside of him. He was about to reach for the needle and pitch it across the room, thread, fabric, and all still attached when he caught sight of the fabric. He hadn't really been paying much attention to it when he'd taken it off the shelf and started working with it, so he hadn't realized until just then that it was the same shade of blue he had so often seen Alice wearing every time she had visited Underland in the past. Seeing this drained him of all anger just as suddenly as he had been filled with it, and his eyes quickly returned to their usual green before rapidly fading into a dull greenish-gray, his clothes drooping and losing quite a bit of their color, as well.
It seemed as if all he could think about anymore was Alice, and when the rare occasion happened upon him that she wasn't on his mind, then there really was nothing but a cloudy haze of fog covering it. He had begun to fall silent more and more frequently in a manner similar to the way he did when the past caught up with him, but that at the same time was entirely different. Mallymkun and Mirana both seemed to have taken notice of these changes more than anyone else, and they had on more than one occasion exchanged concerns over the fact that his smile never seemed to reach his eyes anymore. Mally had also told the Queen that he seemed more prone to his fits of anger than he used to be, but also that as time had gone on, it had gotten to where his eyes, as they just had a moment ago, would begin turning orange with rage, but then something would happen or be said or catch his eye, or, on most of these occurances, it would be something that existed solely within his mind, and his eyes would change colors twice as rapidly as they had to orange, but instead fade into the lackluster greenish-gray that, for him, was an indication of sorrow or grief. The Queen and Dormouse both knew, perhaps by nothing more than that womanly intuition, that the reason for the changes was simply that the milliner had fallen in love with the Champion, which was something that he himself had also come to realize.
He wasn't sure if he was depressed, going even further into Madness than he had been before, or something else entirely. He just knew that he missed Alice, and that while he knew that she would never break a promise and would come back just as she'd said she would, he had thought it would have happened by now, because she'd said she'd be back before he knew it, and he had known it many times. He stood there in front of his workspace for several moments, staring sadly at the bolt of fabric with fewer than half a line of stitches completed on it. He couldn't even recall if he'd intended to make a hat or something else, but he supposed it didn't matter either way, because when he'd jerked his hand away after pricking himself, he had unintentionally ripped away at part of the seam he'd been making and left it ragged. He wasn't sure how that had happened, because even though he was half-Mad and half-out of it, he still knew for a Hard and Solid Fact that he had not been gripping any of the material in his hands when he'd pulled them away. Then he saw that there was a shred of it dangling from his pincushion ring, held into place by one of the sewing needles he kept embedded there, and realized that it must have gotten caught there while he was working and he hadn't noticed.
Being as small as it was, his newest self-inflicted wound had stopped bleeding by then, so he went to go clean and bandage it just as he always did with cuts and scrapes and pinpricks and the other things his hands endured. He knew that there were those who might not have bothered with the small things like this, but he was not one of them. Growing up as the youngest of eleven children did, despite what some people believed, have its advantages, and one of those was that he was able to learn from the mistakes of his ten older siblings and therefore not have to make as many of his own.
One of those mistakes had been when one of his sisters, Nettie, who was the youngest of the five girls, had been mending whatever it was that Jamie had managed to do to his shirt sleeve during the latest round of the never-ending prank war that he and Tarrant had spent the majority of their childhoods engaged in with each other, and she'd pricked herself with the needle, but dismissed it as being nothing of concern due to its small size. A few days later, her finger was all red and full of puss. Infected, their mother had said, and then Nettie had admitted to pricking herself and not telling anyone about it or doing anything afterwards. All wounds must be dressed, their mother had said, no matter what their size, so that they are protected from germs and don't get infected, but before dressing them, they must always be cleaned first in case any germs have already gotten on them.
Then he thought of something that Isabeal had said once. Being the oldest, she had always been full of Excellent Ideas and Very Good Advice and other such Useful Things like that, because she also had been very creative and very full of muchness. She had once said, when Anella was being all sulky because she missed her best friend who had to go Away for a while to visit family who lived elsewhere in Underland, that perhaps it might help if Ella tried thinking of all the things that her friend was, and that might make her feel less sad, so Ella had begun making a list of all the Good and Bad Things that her friend was, and it had seemed to help, and Tarrant thought that perhaps if he tried the same thing now with Alice, it might work for him like it did for Ella.
So in his head, he began to list all the Things he could think of that Alice was.
Could Alice be counted as his Shadow, he wondered? Shadows followed one around everywhere one went, and they were not nearly as muchy as Alice was, nor were they anywhere close to being as lovely as she was, and he couldn't very well carry on a conversation with one like he did with Alice. But then again, since they followed one everywhere, as he had already taken note of, and he was thinking of Alice no matter where he went, perhaps she was sort of his Shadow That Was Not Actually a Shadow. Yes, why not? That worked! So that settled it; the first thing on his list was that Alice was his Shadow That Is Not a Shadow.
He had heard Mally telling Mirana recently that Alice had become "nothing but a big raincloud in his life," and while he still wasn't entirely sure what that meant, he certainly didn't have anything against the rain or the clouds that the rain came out of, because without the rain, the flowers wouldn't grow, and he liked the flowers because not only were the ones that talked excellent conversationalists, but the ones that didn't talk were quite pleasant to look at, and they also smelled nice, and since the flowers did always seem brighter to him when Alice was around, then he supposed that in a sense, Mally was right, though he hated to think of Alice as being like the rainclouds since they spent all their time up in the air and never did come down to visit, though the rain itself was quite another story. Therefore, he decided that instead of a raincloud, the next thing on his list of Things that Alice was would be Rain.
And since he wanted so very badly to see her again, perhaps she was Longing, as well, and as much as he hated to apply such a word to his Alice, he felt it was somewhat necessary to add Pain, too, because it hurt that she had left, and it hurt even more that she hadn't come back yet. As much as he hated the Bloody Big Head, the color red also sort of reminded him of Alice because it was at the Red Queen's castle in Salazen Grum that she had gotten to see him working at his trade, but blue was a Much More Important Color in his mind when it came to Alice, so she was Red, but more than that, she was also Blue.
And of course, Alice was an Angel. His Angel, who was always In His Heart.
Alice, he supposed, was also at least some part of his Madness, and since her not being around made him sad, she was also, though he hated admitting it about her, his Tears and Sadness. Even though he knew that Alice would never break a promise, part of him couldn't help but be afraid that she might not come back, after all, so she was also part of his Fears. He recalled how she seemed to always be alert, even when she herself didn't realize it, and wondered if perhaps she was also Restless. He knew without a doubt, of course, that ever since she had left, she had been His Dreams, and when he wasn't focused on his work (or at least trying to be), she also became the Moments In Between the hours he spent in his workshop.
And again, his mind wandered back to that same word as before; Angel.
More than anything, that's what Alice was.
His Angel.
I admit, it took me a couple minutes to figure out a way that Tarrant's mind could ever possibly find a way to connect the color red with something good or pleasant in any way, let alone with a good or happy thought/memory of Alice, but then, having read both of the books, it finally dawned on me that she had never, on either of her trips there as a child, gotten to see the "Hatter" part of the Mad Hatter; that was something that, yes, she did eventually get to see, but it only happened while they were at Salazen Grum during her third visit (I sometimes like to call it the "Burton Visit," or the "Jabberocky Visit," both of which anyone is welcome to use if they want, I don't mind one bit). And I thought to myself that hey, there's no reason that can't work for what I'm needing to do here!
Although, to tell the truth, there were a couple other things in the lyrics that it might have been hard to work in if it weren't for the fact that the logic behind including it on the list didn't necessarily have make complete sense to someone from our world, or even to someone from Underland, just as long as it sounded like something that would make sense to Tarrant and that he might come up with.
Also, if you know the song or decide to go listen to it, you may have noticed that I left something off the list that was in the lyrics, which is the bit that goes "I am your angel/I am in you," I left out the "I am in you" part. I did this because I thought it would sound a little weird outside of the song, so what I did was I cam up with an alternative for it and instead put that Alice is Tarrant's Angel "who is Always In His Heart," because that didn't sound as weird, but it still sort of keeps to the general idea of the lyrics and manages to keep the fluff.
Anywho, I am going to very soon be starting on the next in this series of song-based one-shots and drabbles, which will fit with another Sarah Brightman song, also from the Dreamchaser album, and the next song is called "One Day Like This," and like I said in Topsy-Turvy, that and "Angel" are two of my favorite of Sarah's songs, definitely my favorites on Dreamchaser. I am also still going to continue trying to figure out a good way to work Valora's "Extreme" into a fic like I had originally wanted to and which is what this one started off as until I reached a point where it stopped working and I realized that, just like "Topsy Turvy," it was probably going to be a better fit for something from Alice's side, so that's what I'm going to attempt to do with it next, but not until after I get done messing with One Day Like This.
So, until that gets posted, fairfarren, all! :)