Please see first chapter for disclaimer, rating, warnings, pairings, etc.

Author's Note: Thank you all so much for the response to the first chapter! Thirteen reviews? WOW! I'm so glad you all are enjoying the story so much, and I hope you continue to do so. Thank you all again, and I hope you enjoy this chapter!

-Chapter 2-

Falling

The constant rocking of the boat had been comforting on the trip to China. However, on the trip from China…

Alice Kingsleigh lay in her darkened cabin, an arm draped over her eyes to help make it even darker, trying to keep from losing what little bit she'd been able to eat. When she had left three months previous for China, she had been feeling fine. The headaches had been minimal, and she'd thought it was just stress. But after she'd been in that beautiful place for a while, the headaches became so painful that she was nearly blind with the pain. No one there could help her, so Lord Ascot had bundled her back onto the Wonder to send her home, staying behind at her insistence so they wouldn't lose the business deals they'd been trying to broker.

The door opened, letting in a sliver of light. Alice cringed further into her arm, wishing she could roll onto her side, but afraid to do so because of her nausea.

"I came to check on you." Sarah had worked for the Ascots almost her entire life, as a maid in the household. She had agreed to come along with Alice to China as a lady-in-waiting and a chaperone of sorts, just to make sure everything was done at least mostly properly. She had been nothing less than a lifesaver during Alice's mysterious illness.

"Nothing has changed," Alice whispered hoarsely. "I just hope you do not have any food with you."

"You need to eat. How do you expect to get better if you don't eat? You'll wither away to nothing and blow away in the next good sea breeze we have." A gentle touch of Sarah's fingers across Alice's forehead felt like hammers against her skull.

"I thought we were almost to port." The thought of being on the ship for even a few more hours was almost more than Alice could bear.

"We are. But there seems to be a bit of a storm coming up. It's getting quite windy, and there's an unnatural fog over everything. It might delay us a bit."

Alice was so sick (literally) of the inside of the Wonder - and even more than that, her quarters - she was tempted to cry. She might have if she knew it wouldn't help her head or her stomach.

Despite how dark it was in the room, Sarah seemed to be able to see how her words had affected Alice. Gently rubbing the girl's shoulder in a motherly manner, she said, "It will all be fine, Miss Alice. You'll see. You'll see the doctor, who will discover what's wrong with you and make it better before you know it. And then we'll be back here on the Wonder, returning to China, in less than a week. You'll see."

The words were meant to be reassuring, but Alice couldn't be confident in them. She'd had headaches before, bad ones. But there was something about this one that was different - worse. And it wasn't just that it was lasting so long, or getting worse each day. She couldn't put her finger exactly on what was wrong, but she knew something wasn't right.

Typically she was not a negative person. She prided herself on being quite positive, actually. But at that moment, she was feeling quite sure that there was no cure for what she had. She didn't know how, or why, but that she was sure of.

Alice's homecoming was not at all like what she or any of her family members had envisioned. It was not a grand affair, with celebrating and hugging and laughing. It was, in fact, kept very quiet so the young woman's head would not, in her words, explode from the pain.

The carriage ride from the docks back to her home was the longest Alice had ever taken - including that to the Ascot estate on the fateful day she turned down Hamish's proposal. Though Helen had the drapes drawn, it was still far too light inside, and the sound of normal London life going on, the horse's rolling gait, and the wheels clattering over the cobblestone was enough to make her have to lean out and be sick twice.

Helen Kingsleigh had always been a proper Englishwoman. While she had been more affectionate with her daughters than some women, she had not fawned over them. But now all of her attention was focused on her youngest daughter, trying to find ways to make the trip easier for the ill girl.

"The doctor will be here later today," she said softly as she assisted her daughter up the stairs to her room. "I promise we will get this sorted out as quickly as possible."

Alice was really beginning to wish everyone didn't feel it necessary to reassure her, or be so positively upbeat about it. The fact that it felt like her head had been split in two was not lending itself in any way, shape, or form to positive emotions or thoughts. (Though even the process of trying to think hurt, Alice grimly noted.)

Once she had safely sequestered her daughter in her bed in a mostly-dark room, Helen left to meet the doctor the moment he reached the front door. Though Alice had desperately missed her mother, she was glad to have some time to herself, if for no other reason than to recover from the carriage ride. She still had that horrible bitter taste at the back of her throat, which was throbbing in time with her head. There was a sliver of sunlight leaking through her closed drapes, and though she desperately wished to get up and properly close the drapes, she couldn't find the energy to move to do so.

Alice must have fallen asleep, for the next thing she realized someone was gently touching her shoulder and speaking her name, fortunately in a very soft tone. "Miss Kingsleigh?"

She opened her eyes, but immediately slammed them shut again when bright light stabbed them like red-hot knives. Letting out a wordless moan, she curled her arms over her eyes, trying to block out the light.

"I know the light hurts, Miss Kingsleigh. But I'm afraid I need it to examine you to see what is wrong. Please move your arms so I can have full access to your head."

The voice was kind and gentle, but Alice still had to make an effort to move. She was almost afraid to be examined for fear of what the doctor would - or perhaps would not - find. Everyone in Underland would be ashamed of me, she thought. They'd tell me I'd lost my muchness again. And perhaps I have…

The examination did not take as long as Alice thought or feared it would. In fact, it took such little time she was almost miffed, thinking the doctor didn't care enough to do it properly. But when he left he blew out the lamp that had been causing her head so much more pain than necessary, so she couldn't find it in herself to be too cross with him.

Alice fell into a pain-filled stupor for a while, until the door opened again to admit her mother. She was merely a dark shadow in an even darker room until she went to repair the slit in the curtains, when Alice caught a brief glimpse of her face. Though she had taken great care to clean it, her daughters still saw the tracks and the redness she could not wash away on her face and in her eyes.

"Tell me the truth, Mother," Alice begged in a whisper.

For a while the only sound was the swish of her mother's skirts, then the sound of her settling into the chair next to Alice's bed. She was probably gathering herself to say what she needed to. "The truth is, Alice, that the doctor has no idea what's wrong with you. He cannot find any physical trace of anything that causes the symptoms you described for him. You are not running a fever, your eyes react normally to light, and - other things I cannot remember," she said, faltering for a moment.

"So he doesn't believe me," Alice whispered.

"No. That is not it at all. He could tell just by looking at you that you are in great pain. He just cannot find any physical evidence of what is causing your pain." The brushing of Helen's hands over her skirt sounded like pounding footsteps to Alice's sensitive ears, but she didn't say anything. "He doesn't know what to do to treat you," she whispered. "He doesn't know what else to do, for anything."

This came as no real surprise to Alice. She knew there was something almost otherworldly about her headaches, so she had been fairly certain the doctor would find nothing, and thus be unable to "fix" her. The only thing she didn't know was if the headaches would kill her. It seemed likely they would, since they kept getting increasingly worse, and even if they didn't, living in a dark world barely able to eat and drink, let alone live her life normally, was close enough to death to count.

So that's it, then. She found that she was oddly at peace with the idea - save for one thing.

Tarrant. She had made a promise six months ago, one she had fully intended to keep at the time. Granted, the moment her hands had hit firm ground outside the rabbit hole, she forgot everything about Underland. But over time a flash of color here, the profile of a man there, a mismatched tea set, or something as simple as a hatpin recalled images in her mind, until she mostly pieced together what she was supposed to remember.

She had been waiting for the opportune moment to return to Underland. It would seem that time had come a little sooner than she had originally anticipated. Now she had to leave the fate of her father's company in Lord Ascot's hands; her mother and sister to their own devices; and the Above world itself to its own time and purpose.

Alice hardly noticed when her mother gently kissed her cheek and left the room. Her mind was spinning with thoughts and plans, and there was no stopping her now.

Waiting until the house was completely quiet was pure torture. Now that she had everything arranged in her mind and was ready to execute her plan, she was chafing to get started. But she forced herself to wait until everyone had gone to bed, then lit a lamp so she could see to write a letter. She couldn't just leave without doing something for her family and friends. Though the light hurt tremendously, she managed to pen a somewhat intelligible letter, which she folded, sealed, and left on her bed. Then, taking one last look around her familiar room, she left.

The only good thing about waiting until nighttime to make her trip was the fact that it was mostly dark. There was only a quarter moon, so it wasn't too bright, and patchy cloud cover concealed most of the stars. Pulling her wrap a little tighter around her shoulders, Alice debated briefly whether to walk or to try to ride. Her balance wasn't the greatest at the moment, but attempting to walk all the way to the Ascot household didn't seem like a good idea, either. In the end she opted for the horse, praying she wouldn't trip as she saddled the gentle mare she typically used when going horseback riding. Instead of the usual side-saddle, though, she used one of the saddles like the men used. Riding astride would help improve her already shaky balance and hopefully keep her on the horse long enough to get to the Ascot estate.

As she got underway, Alice realized that riding a horse would be safer for her, too. She hadn't really thought about what dangers could befall a young, unaccompanied girl in the middle of the night, but through some miracle she was left alone as she rode. Once or twice she sped up to a canter, but that was only because she was passing through some particularly dark areas, and didn't want to tempt Fate with the walk she'd been keeping Lily reined into.

Once she reached the Ascots', Alice kept her horse to the grass to try to muffle her hoof beats. She didn't want to wake anyone, and she especially didn't want Lady Ascot to release her dogs. She had met the creatures only once, and their ferociousness made her even more homesick for dear, gentle Bayard in Underland.

It took Alice longer than she'd anticipated to find the rabbit hole. Though it had only been a scant six months since she'd last discovered it, everything looked much different in the dark. Landmarks she'd thought she clearly remembered were blurred or even disappeared completely, leaving her riding in circles for a while. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but she was feeling a little better as she at last dismounted her mare by the old tree with the rabbit hole.

"Thank you, Lily," she said, palming the mare a sugar cube. As the creature happily munched, Alice wished she could talk. What things her horse must have to say… But even if Lily could talk, Alice had no time for conversation. Giving her horse's velvety nose one last stroke, she slapped Lily's rump, knowing the horse would go straight back home.

With that done, she turned back to the rabbit hole. It yawned open before her, dark and a bit intimidating, looking for all the world like a monster's mouth waiting to swallow her up. Shaking off those ridiculous thoughts, Alice knelt next to the hole and peered downward, relieved when she didn't see the bottom. She refused to think this was just a trick of the darkness and, with one last glance around her surroundings to say goodbye to her drab world, swung her legs around and pushed off.

The rush of air in her ears made her head throb even more painfully, but Alice bit back the scream that welled into her throat. She was not afraid, but the sensation of endlessly falling out-of-control with things chasing her in the semi-darkness was a bit unsettling. This time she barely managed to avoid the piano, rolling her body into a little ball so she wouldn't accidentally knock into it and upset its balance. But other things fell with her - books, vases, a phonograph, pictures…

When at last she bounced off the bed, Alice allowed herself to smile. She was so close to Underland now she could almost taste it. And perhaps it was the rush of falling, or the sheer joy of the thought of seeing her friends again, but now she was sure her head wasn't hurting quite as much.

This time she anticipated the fall through the floor onto the ceiling, and was able to adjust herself so she didn't land quite as painfully when the room righted itself. For a moment she lay on her side on the floor, catching her breath and regaining her senses. Her heart was thrumming wildly, just off the beat of the pounding in her head.

Alice had had quite a bit of time to think about what she would do, should she land in the Room of Doors again. In fact, she had changed clothes prior to leaving the house to prepare herself for just such an occasion. First she went to fetch he key to unlock the tiny door that led to Underland. Then she slid off her shoes, thankful when they just fit through the small opening. After that came her dress, which she had a bit more trouble shoving out the door. Feeling rather foolish wearing nothing but her under things, and seriously hoping nothing would happen by and steal her clothes, Alice went back for the pishalver. This time, she determined, she was going to do things right.

The drink tasted as nasty as she remembered. But as she shrank and the room seemed to grow larger around her, she decided the horrid taste was well worth it. Awkwardly tying her under things around her in a makeshift dress, Alice got a little bit of the upelkuchen and took off for the door.

She was back in Underland now, and she was going to make whatever time she had left count because she was going to go straight to Hatter, so help anyone who tried to get in her way.

~To Be Continued~

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