Cold Tea
Author's Note: A short little thing, just because I needed something to write after reading a friend's story a long time ago.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything Alice in Wonderland related.
Warning: Nothing horrible.
Xxx
Cold Tea
Wonderland had always been my world, my mind, my imagination come to life.
It had always been a place where I ruled, and although my imagination could sometimes get the best of me, I had never felt out of place or threatened. After that first fated visit, I had learned everything I needed to know about Wonderland, but even so, I find myself learning new things with each visit. My world, Wonderland was a place of vibrant colors and strange and amusing creatures, paths that went in circles and some that went on forever. As I grew older, I still took pleasure in walking in circles because I saw something new each time. I liked to seat on the hedges and watch the Queen of Hearts make a fool of herself. I never grew bored. But I grew older, and I grew sick.
"You are dying," he once told me.
"Am I?"
He didn't seem to know how to react to that.
Wonderland itself changed. The leaves turned brown and turned to dust at my touch; flowers withered and curled up to die; the water, once cool and refreshing, turned blackblackblack and ugly. The Queen sat on her throne, her skin pale and wrinkled, black eyes starring unseeing into the distance while her cards fought each other. Soon they all fell, ripped and bent and faded. The White Rabbit stopped moving, the Mad Hatter stopped pouring, and the tea went cold.
I took it all in with a blank expression, feeling cold and numb. I had always felt alive in Wonderland. As I shut down, my world shut down as well. Because I was sick: cancer, they said.
And for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to care.
xxx
Author's Note: The idea actually came from my friend, Kate, who wondered what it would be like if Wonderland actually became someplace you had to fight to survive. I took a leap and twisted the concept around a bit, because her idea sounded too much like America McGee's Alice.