A/N: This has been edited/cleaned up a bit sense I know have a beta! Hope you enjoy and please review!
The luckiest of the Houndsditch children had been deposited at orphanages or assigned to alternate (if under-skilled) doctors. What remained of home's adolescence residents had either been "unaccounted for", left in the hands of street criminals and vagrants, or suffered fates as a new wave of factory workers.
As for Alice, quite frankly no one gave enough of a damn to find a use for her. A so-called troubled girl with no relations and no real inheritance was low on London's priority list. It had been predicted, Alice recalled Houndsditch neighbors' whispering loudly behind limp hands, that she would not last a week before running into the arms of a pimp. While the teenage girl's former nanny had offered Alice a place among the working women she managed, the rumors of Alice's acceptance of the proposal were as true as flying pigs.
Instead, nineteen year old found her own way of survival after what news papers called "Dr. Angus Bumby's Unexplained Disappearance" and "Unfortunate Close of Leading Home for Wayward Youths." Even if said way of survival had only been opened to her due to the pity of a local butcher's wife, Alice's present days' schedule consisted of bartering and pushing painfully inedible pork on passersby.
It was after one such day of haggling that Alice spied a white skeleton of a cat, very malnourished and perched atop a small mound of foul-smelling crates. Its face twisted, as if it were extremely disappointed or impatient.
"Hellos puss." The girl found her tongue dry as she addressed the matted animal. Dark thoughts, although largely unnoticed by her trauma-damaged brain, were starting to twine upward like constricting tentacles. Every time Alice faced a small white creature it seemed as if her head was in for a hell of a battle, literally. Eleven years ago, it had been a rabbit in a waistcoat that enticed her imagination into a mad adventure. Ten years after that, the same pale animal had summoned Alice back into the world of a shattered mind. Now, not even a year had passed since an albino feline, identical to the one currently present, had lowered Alice back into a wonderland still scarred from a distressed creator.
Before the girl could decide on whether her brain could handle a second, sanity-twisting adventure within a number of months, the cat alarmed Alice by leaping to the bricked street and trotting toward her.
"Puss puss?" Alice knelt as cat crossed the final stones between them. Habit extended a hand to be sniffed and the cat accepted the offer.
Just as the teenage girl hoped that she was just simply thinking too much with her wonderland mentality, the sickly animal before her did something that would make someone with more sanity reel back.
"You stink of pig snouts, Alice dear.I wonder, does that mean you taste of them as well?"
"Just because I smell horrid doesn't mean that I am, Ches Cat." An initial calm sigh at creature's words lasted only a moment before logic informed the girl that she should be alarmed that a London cat had words, let alone the voice of a wonderland occupant.
"Cat? That is you Cat, isn't it? Have I started to go mad again?" Although a moment of terror sheeted Alice white (or whiter than her usual unhealthy fair skin glowed), she was quick to cope oddity into acceptances. She had always been swift to overlook what the rest of the world considered possible and vice versa.
"Are you going mad? I wouldn't know Alice. As you may have noticed I'm not in your head." With this her Cheshire Cat's constant grin, the one that had been presently lacking, appeared on his face. It was an already ominous sight made more chilling due to his somewhat more typical feline anatomy, as compared to his artistic wonderland shape.
"Don't taunt me." Alice snapped, finding the courage to snatch up Cat only due to his current smallness; the feline's height was significantly grander whilst in her head's domain. "I've had quiet a day, and the last thing I need is a figment of my imagination making me feel foolish by simply stating the obvious. I have noticed you are not in my head, Cat. Even I am sane enough to tell when my hallucinations are inside my skull or not... I think."
"Be sure of yourself Alice." The girl could feel her cat begin to tremble with a purr. "If you aren't, then how are we suppose to be?"
"Oh enough! What are you doing here Cat? For that matter, how are you here? At least how are you here without the explanation of my insanity running amok once again?"
"You're in need of a guide." At this surprisingly simple response, Alice loosened the grip she had been strangling Cat's fur with. Her eyebrows raising a good inch in question.
"A guide? Some guide you usually turn out to be. Always speaking cryptically and in riddles. And if I am in need of a guide then why does it appear I am still in London? Actual London, not the Londerland my head sometime sees fit to puzzle me with. Half wonderland, half London is like an eyepot to the problem solving centers of my brain! I told you, I am in no mood for your confusing nature today!"
"Not all adventures involve knights and dragons." The cat's smirk, although continuous, dulled a bit as if he found the idea of such an uneventful quest boring. "Unfortunately, the venture to come is one of those 'everyday adventures.' So much less thrilling then insidious ruins and bitch babies, I know dear. But still, it is one that needs to be done all the same, and done in this so-called reality of yours. Which by-the-by, I might commentate, is quite insane in itself. It doesn't make me wonder why you created a land of wonder to begin with."
If Alice had been paying attention she would have scolded small creature with her wit. Yet, her organs felt as if they had begun playing a rearranging sport at the notion of 'adventure in reality.' Reality, Alice knew better to deign, was not something she was terribly good at. Insanity, for some reason, had always been simpler to handle then sanity.
Aiming sharpened cards at boojum, and wielding a surprisingly light giant hobby horse against card guards came natural enough to her. Yet here in London, Alice's hands were fragile and clumsy, her feet slow and swollen, her brain watered down with weight and stress. An adventure in reality was not something Alice fantasized she could handle efficiently.
"I'll have no part in a reality with you in it." Alice placed her cat down, more out of a sudden desire to hide her callous, blistered, and scraped hands from him then anything else. "Real life is enough of a chore without you muttering nonsense in my ear."
"Your mind is fierce and your heart hard, when you want it to be. What's one more excursion for the goodwill of both your imagination and its occupants?"
The girl had already started away from the feline the second he began his explanation, stepping over him with as much attention as she would give a puddle. Still attempting to ignore him as she realized, with a bit of unwanted fascination, that the laws of London's science did not seem to apply to her mind's creations, for Cheshire Cat materialized along her path, sitting atop a haberdashery sign post.
"If you run away from your head Alice, then how do you expect to save it?"
"I'm beyond saving. If I know anything, I know that."
"Only those who give in are beyond saving. Come now Alice. You sound like you've never had a day of psychiatric help in your life."
Holding her limbs back, Alice halted nearly directly below her cat. The girl's emerald eyes dilated irregularly while they refused to refocus on feline.
"We're not talking about an everyday adventure anymore." Alice felt her lip curl and saw the cat tense. Although she knew without looking that his grin would never falter the girl could sense Cat's eyes on her, ready to dodge his own conversation if she showed signs of bolting from it.
"Though you've insisted my advice be more fluid, you've always listened to heed this advice Alice. What happens in London is as important to your sanity as what happens in wonderland. Just like your infernal train and doll maker, rooted from events in this so-called reality a new foe, entirely of this world, is waiting to be challenged. And unlike the rest of wonderland's characters, I refuse to let you face it alone."
As the creature's last few words hung themselves in Alice's head, he began to disappear. His tail, the only part completely visible to teen girl, lay twitching until its tip joined the rest of his body in some unseen place.