Disclaimer: Trying my hand at my first fanfiction. I have no rights to the storyline or characters of "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland."
Author's Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this journey with me!
Nausea ripped through her stomach. Alice slowly drew a breath of her cell's cold, dank air through her nose—a feeble attempt to hold back the inevitable sick that had plagued her the last few weeks. She wouldn't be sick. She couldn't be sick. Alice refused to give these doctors another reason to judge her. For almost her entire life, Alice had been looked down on by those around her. Her father. His new family. They all knew her as the "crazy" girl. Poor, deluded Alice who made-up fantastic stories about falling down a rabbit hole into a world of hookah smoking caterpillars and giant, talking cats. Alice was used to their judgment however. The cold indifference and shame that had locked her away in this prison they called a hospital. But now, something was different. She was different and she wouldn't let her and Cyrus's unborn child live in the cold shadow of this world's judgment any longer.
It had been a total surprise, when two months into her interminable stay at Bedlam, a nurse had inadvertently informed her of her pregnancy. Alice had been "home" from Wonderland only one day before her father had carted her off to the psychiatric hospital. In her heart, Alice wondered if she could truly blame him this time. Returning home, she had stumbled blindly out of the portal that had blasted its way through her stepmother's perfect rose bushes. Not really sure how she had left Wonderland after her beloved's fatal fall into the Boiling Seas, Alice vaguely remembered the worried tones of the White Rabbit and maybe the firm, guiding arm of the Knave. Everything else was lost to Alice. She had returned to her realm in an almost catatonic state, mumbling an unheard call to her lost love and seeing an internally repeating image of Cyrus falling.
Alice's talk of magic and her faraway adventures had always been silenced by her father and Felicity, the woman he had married a few years after Alice's mother's death. Their steely refusal to believe her had been what had driven Alice back to Wonderland that fateful day she encountered Cyrus's bottle. That day marked the beginning of the most extraordinary, wonderful portion of her young life. When this time with Cyrus was stolen from her and Alice returned home tragically alone, she had come to see that no proof—tangible or otherwise—would ever alter the resolution of her father to live solely in this realm of coldhearted logic and propriety. Her stories, while humored and quietly suppressed during childhood, were no longer acceptable from a young woman of a respectable family. This was especially true when these stories involved talk of genie who was her one true love, cruelly ripped from her life by an evil queen.
These stories were how Alice had found herself locked in a Bedlam cell the day a large, unsympathetic nurse had let slip that she was carrying Cyrus's child. The nurse was in the midst of escorting Alice back to her "room" after yet another fruitless session with her doctor. Alice could not begin to imagine how many more days of these therapy sessions she would have to endure—silently sitting across a heavy table from doctors that constantly pushed her to admit that her stories of an enchanted land were just symptoms of a troubled brain, acting out the repressed childhood grief of her mother's passing. Alice was walking down the hall, sullenly staring into this bleak future when her life suddenly changed once more.
"And on top of these cockamamie tales, the girl is carrying some bastard babe!"
"Really?"
Alice jerked her head up from staring at the grimy floors at the same time as the large nurse's companion gasped in disapproval at Alice's condition.
"Mmm." The large nurse clucked her assent. "The doctor says she'll be about three months along now."
"Can you imagine?" answered the smaller, second nurse. "What will they do with the child?"
At this cavalier discussion of her child—a child Alice admittedly had suspected nothing about until this moment—a fire reignited deep within her. A hope, a passion that Alice had not felt since being with Cyrus in Wonderland, burned deep in her soul and she instinctively knew that maybe her future would not be as bleak as she had resigned herself to just a few minutes before. As long as she had a piece of Cyrus with her—and this child would be a beautiful legacy of their love—Alice had a reason to keep fighting.