Childhood's Dreams are Twined
Growing up, Yuri had heard his fair share of literary nonsense – whether or not it stuck with him through the years was an entirely different story. His mother loved reading him tales, fables, all the like, but he'd been much more attached to his father's doings during the few years he had with them. Had he known the fate his family would have to suffer through, perhaps he would have listened to the bedtime stories a bit more, but he knows he can't turn back the sands of time.
If there is one memory he has of his mother's stories, it's when she would read him excerpts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Yuri can't tell anyone why this memory is so clear because he hasn't a clue, but even the voice in his head wants to reinforce that dwindling memory.
Because every time he hears it, that person is screaming and the sounds of chains and misery and so much malicemalicemalice the underlying, soothing tone of the reading of a book to a young child and agony and his head is splitting straight through the middle...!
For some reason, he always thinks it's Lewis Carroll.
It's the only book he really knows. He might buy it one day, just to see what he missed out on, what follows with his mismatched memories.
And then Yuri laughs at himself, calls himself stupid for even bothering. Wonderland sounds like a dream world, an opiate's utopia, but he knows that there's no such thing as a happy world. His own dreams render him frightened, haunted by laughing masks and graves and is that his heart beating that fast? He's seen the cruelties of humans and monsters alike, and Wonderland is a lie.
So every time he passes a bookshop in his sojourn – puppeteer pulling his strings this way and that – he doesn't go in to buy the book.
Sitting on the rickety-rockety train ride, he almost regrets the decision. Or maybe he doesn't, remembering belatedly he gets motion sickness. Yuri hates the boredom entailed in following the puppet master's orders, wishes he could concentrate on something long enough to smooth the train ride over, but distraction is dangerous.
Save the girl save the girl save the girl save the girl
He almost cries out and hits the seat, uncaring if he startles the few and far between passengers (and the soldiers, but why are there soldiers? Oh, right, the girl! But wait, still, why the soldiers...?). He's come to the ass-end of Manchu, on orders he doesn't understand, to sit on a train heading to some place he probably doesn't want to be, because if he doesn't he'll go absolutely batshit.
Yuri imagines if his mother was still alive, she'd be ashamed of his tongue. He wouldn't get a story for it, that's for sure.
And to further his thought on this spot of ill luck – Oh! That gentleman is overdressed, Yuri thinks, but what really gives him the chills is that dark, oppressing aura radiating off the man – and why can't anyone else feel it? - and the tell-tale feeling of ! of a monster, no doubt about it.
Something tells Yuri that the man is in no danger, and his gut (and a small shout in his brain, which causes his eye to twitch) tells him that this man is not good.
He lets the gentleman advance into the next car and waits. When the screams and gunshots ring out, he sheds his meager disguise and decides, hey, it's time to do something. Belated, who knows, but what he cares about is rescuing this damned girl.
Later, after losing an arm (and unceremoniously reattaching the numbing thing) and nearly being ripped apart by unadulterated dark magic, he considers this mission accomplished. Yuri doesn't know who this girl is or why the voice was so insistent upon her rescue or what the hell kind of magic she pulled off back on that train, but he admits that she's probably the cutest thing he's seen in a long, long time.
And when he learns her name, Alice, something seems to click.
