Author's Note: I really must stop being absolutely horrible to all my favorite characters. Really. I'm such a bitch. After this I'm picking up a claim I cannot possibly fuck up. Like Hatori/Mayuko or Demyx/Kida. (I'm so completely serious on that last one. I think it would be the most hilarious thing ever. This is pre-Milo, of course I could never break up Milo and Kida. Probably because Milo's like my ideal guy. I HAVE WEIRD TASTE IN MEN OKAY jeeze. And it wouldn't really be romance, moreso just omg best friends! Because god the world needs more Demyx/Kida.

And Luxord/Megara. I HAVE WEIRD PAIRINGS OKAY jeeze.)

So, yeah, hopefully this marks the end of Depressfest 2008, but no promises.

If dedicated to anyone, it's Quillslinger, who got me into the pairing with her absolutely amazing "heart without a girl"!

Warnings: Fluffiness, darkness, some physical abuse, and the traditional grammar rape. Hints of Larxene/Naminé if you want to read into it that way. Based much more on book!Alice than Disney!Alice.

Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts, Disney, or Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or its sequel).

Among the Nonsense

#01: Stop:
Larxene's having a bad day, so Naminé bursts from her room and runs into an empty hall, but her eyes are on her feet are on the ground and she keeps running; no one is around to be surprised when the mirror doesn't break, but reality does, and she lands softly in a very backwards house.

#02: God:
"Oh, hello," chimes a tinkling voice accompanied by a body stepping in the door; there is a girl of Naminé's height, with yellow hair and white stockings, and Naminé's breath catches in her throat – this must be what it looks like to be saved.

#03: Command:
"Come with me!" and there is no turning back, no questioning how a looking-glass could be anything like a door (or a raven like a writing-desk) – only a hand, gentle and small as her own, and a cornflower-blue dress.

#04: Cool:
The world here is blazing in every direction – up-wise, side-wards, vertical-like – in every color of crayon Naminé has ever known; for the first time, she drinks it into her body, not her paper.

#05: Drive:
"If you cannot get where you're going," the girl tells her, staring with a pout at a particularly obstinate hill, "then you ought to try going where it is you're not going, because oftentimes the two are very much the same!" and Naminé wonders how she can bestow such odd words of wisdom, when she still has not offered her name.

#06: Fortune:
Alice, after introducing herself, realizes she's being quite rude and sits Naminé down to properly explain Wonderland: "Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it, it's only sense, and sense is hard to come by in Wonderland, unless you're very lucky."

#07: Hold:
Many things are very different in Wonderland, like the water (blue rather than clear) or the clouds (always a cream color, but never white), but nothing like the way Alice feels, small and rough and delicate, and the sensation of hands wrapped around Naminé's wrist for once, rather than her neck.

#08: Bother:
"You're the sanest person in all of Wonderland," says Alice, twining dirty fingers through Naminé's hair and looping it around itself, "which, to be perfectly silly, makes you just about the oddest!"

#09: Learn:
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are circling one another like tottering fabric marshmallows, bickering vehemently over whose turn with the sword it is – and Naminé wonders how long she's been in Castle Oblivion, to not even feel a touch of concern when Dee swings the blade round.

#10: Motion:
The wind in Wonderland is strange: it gusts past, and nothing moves at all, or else the air is still and the leaves rustle in a wild clamor; but always, always, Alice's waves seem to float about her head in a golden halo.

#11: Last:
"The absolute last thing on my mind is the Caterpillar's advice!" grumbles Alice crossly to a well-meaning Naminé, who is much too timid to ask what the first thing on her mind is.

#12: Sing:
Naminé has always contented herself to listening to Demyx sing, because that was his domain, in the same way that no one touched Marluxia's flowers or shuffled Luxord's cards; but when Alice's voices drips and dips in silver tunes, she can't help but hum along to a song she doesn't know.

#13: Thousand:
"I've forgotten, by now, what a thousand is comprised of," Alice goes on and on to no one in particular, as she's aware Naminé has no knowledge of numbers (and Naminé listens raptly, drawing circles as she talks), "or even how much it takes to make a two-tens; the Red Queen told me it's four one-ones and one two, but I can't help but think that last part is absolute nonsense."

#14: Hunger:
When Larxene leaves, the doors are always open, like a sleeping bear's mouth inviting spiders and disease inside.

#15: Fool:
Alice spots Naminé's red cheeks with a leaf and tells her, very, very gently, "Words like that don't matter in the looking-glass, where everything means the opposite – how can you be sure it wasn't a compliment?" and Naminé laughs.

#16: Ghost:
The last sliver of golden hair has just vanished from the mirror when the nightmare appears, locks of slick brass, teeth of diamonds, and says silkily, "Where have you been?"

#17: Wash:
Away from the sterile, white-washed walls of Castle Oblivion, Naminé loves the sienna browns of dirt, the creamy beige of dust, and the almond chocolate of mud thickening her skin.

#18: Safe:
The fire burns indigo, and green when Snap-dragon-flies whiz through the spiraling embers; Naminé occupies a tartan tablecloth with Alice, feeling through the fabric warm, thrumming earth, and a world whose only promise is sitting right beside her.

#19: King:
Naminé confesses to not liking the King of Hearts, though Alice assures her he's not so bad, aside from being terribly stupid (then rambles on about someone named Mable) – but Naminé will not be convinced otherwise, because she sees an absence in him, not of intelligence but of anything, that tells her even Wonderland is not forever.

#20: Wait:
"Just a moment, just a moment," says Alice and she slips through the looking-glass as though it were a sheet of water; time ticks by in the clockless room, and Naminé turns away when all that stare back at her are her lips slanting with disappointment, and Larxene's with cruelty.

#21: Blur:
Alice loves to chase the White Rabbit, who is always just a blur of worry and pocket-watch ahead of them; Naminé takes comfort knowing they'll never quite catch up, because she knows there will always be someone five steps ahead of her.

#22: Now:
She can feel it wherever she is, caged in white walls or almost-too-free in a field of talkative flowers, that her life is the temporary, it is the in-between, it is the twilight.

#23: History:
"Before Wonderland, I knew plenty of prime ministers and presidents and queens, all in proper order," Alice knells, "but now I only know the chess pieces, and the Queen of Hearts, who's been queen forever and ever as far as I can tell," and she looks expectantly at Naminé, who mutters, "There were only thirteen important people where I'm from, but they were never really worth remembering."

#24: Mad:
Naminé can hear Axel's laughter, spreading like wildfire all throughout the castle, and comes to the realization that perhaps she doesn't find the madness – perhaps the madness finds her.

#25: Hide:
Hiding in Wonderland is fun, if dangerous, for you never know if you'll ever be found (even by yourself); hiding in Castle Oblivion is much the same, except it is heat and fear and paranoia, and you hope to the dictionary definition of hope that at least one part of you will always remain lost.

#26: Child:
"You're only a child!" Larxene's words come out curt on hitching laughter, and Naminé shrinks; "You're only a child!" Alice laughs the sentence to her on breath of bells, and Naminé grows.

#27: Sudden:
A slap from Larxene is sharp and harsh and quick – and just as quickly forgotten, chased away by Alice's worried blues, her lightly calloused palm gentle as light over the shadow on Naminé's cheek.

#28: Wrong:
"Up and down are hard to discern, or at least more difficult than usual, in Wonderland Land," Alice tells her in a very educative voice, a mome rath resting on her nose making her look a cross between highly intellectual and highly stupid, "but right and wrong are things that never change, no matter where you lose yourself."

#29: Vision:
In dreams she can see strange things: tea parties, endless springs, Jabberwockies, and a boy in red who will come and ruin it all.

#30: Attention:
It is the first time Naminé has ever yelled in anything but pain, and Alice's blue eyes are tea-saucer wide, startled and curious – for once she is silent.

#31: One:
"If there is only one person out there for everyone…" Naminé begins, but never finishes; Alice is arguing feverishly with the Mad Hatter, absolutely impervious to her friend's whisperings.

#32: Naked:
Naminé hadn't once taken the time to step back and look at her body, all stick-legs and bony planes and sun-starved skin, but Alice insists she is lovely, and Naminé admits to feeling pretty with nothing but a hair ribbon around her wrist, Alice's fingers in her own.

#33: Precious:
When her pencils are shreds and cinders of color, crayon corpses in the wake of Larxene's temper, she has the looking-glass; when the looking-glass is a stiff and implacable wall, she has memories of a golden-haired girl in white stockings and buckled shoes.

#34: Time:
Despite what anyone in Wonderland says, Alice tells her no one is ever late, except perhaps the sun, because time comes and goes and skips and stops in such odd little bursts that no one could possibly keep track of it; so Naminé measures her days with Alice in smiles, heartbeats and mushroom bits.

#35: Young:
"There's a place you can go," says Alice, ignoring a particularly rude Tiger-Lily, "where you never age at all – but I shouldn't like to visit anyplace where I cannot grow old – as is natural – with you – as is wonderful."

#36: Power:
Larxene screams, a feral cry, not her usual hyena cackle; her eyebrows draw sharply downward and her forehead wrinkles in madness; for the briefest instant, Naminé sees the face of the Queen of Hearts, and is not at all afraid.

#37: Torn:
"To remember me by," Naminé writes the tiny words with shame, and slips the sketch of two girls between the folds of a handkerchief in Alice's pocket; Alice stirs for a moment, disquieted, then continues to dream.

#38: Change:
"You're different," Larxene says, pacing, letting words tumble off her breath as if they were light, would float away like bubbles of air; instead they fall gracelessly, cutting Naminé's ears wide open.

#39: Picture:
Naminé sniffs and gathers the papers strewn about her room, ignoring the tears that make her eyes itch, instead using the hem of her dress to wipe Larxene's spit from a blonde girl's crayon-and-pencil face.

#40: Book:
Alice mouths the words with Naminé as they read The Walrus and the Carpenter, Naminé's lips twisting with some difficulty around symbols she's never been taught to understand; in return, she properly illustrates for Alice what an upright walrus might look like, and they giggle over it for quite some time.

#41: Soul:
"Do I like you, that's a question of the mind, and do I love you, that's a question of the heart, and do I need you, well that is a question of the soul," says Alice rather plainly; Naminé replies quietly, "And I can answer all of them, though I've been told I'm ill-equipped to."

#42: Gentle:
Naminé rips open the box of coloring crayons given to her ("to discourage these silly thoughts that have been polluting your head lately") and snaps every single shade of black, grey, and white in half.

#43: Shadow:
Naminé has never been more afraid in her life, for so many reasons, when Alice says nonchalantly at tea, "I met a boy just the other day who had to sew his shadow on – how queer!"

#44: Eye:
Naminé realizes the trap too late; she's already read the words Alice's Adventures in Wonderland aloud, and Marluxia grins, glancing from her to the mirror and back.

#45: Need:
"I need her," she says softly to the hands folded obediently in her lap; he stops, turns, and waits with interest for her to go on.

#46: Never:
"All you've known," colorful portraits of the Mad Hatter and March Hare flutter to the floor in confetti bits, "all you know," a black silk ribbon is torn from her wrist, disappears into the folds of his robe, "and all you'll ever know," his hand slides between the wall and the looking-glass –it leans precariously toward her, and Alice appears for a moment, looking upset before the whole thing plummets downward, "is this place."

#47: Goodbye:
Naminé can't even feel the steady burning in her face and hands, can't hear cold laughter flooding the room, can't see red snowflakes of blood fall from her face; all she knows is the broken mirror in her hand, and the whisper of a reflection that isn't hers.

#48: Harm:
"Your mirror," sneers Marluxia, a tower of satisfaction and vanity above her, deaf to the words sliding along the tears: "My Alice…"

#49: Wall:
There is no place to run to anymore: the hallway stretches on, and then ends, a slab of white plaster yawning upward and leading nowhere, showing nothing, but screaming at her all the same.

#50: Believe:
She sifts through his memories, numb and at a distance, watching the reel of his life roll on; the whole world pauses at the sight of a silvery smile, blue topaz eyes against strands of wheat-gold; Naminé continues, blinks rapidly, and waits, and waits, and waits, and promises to believe again.