"There's no time for us.
There's no place for us.
What is this thing that builds our dreams,
yet slips away from us?

There's no chance for us.
It's all decided for us.
This world has only one sweet moment
set aside for us.

...Who wants to live forever,
who dares to love forever,
when love must die?"
-Queen

Fred's life, his memories, who he was, and who he'd become sprang to life before his eyes in brilliant technicolor. His parents, his sister (his beautiful, wonderful, sweet sister...), his brother, Mirana, the fields and woods of Witzend, Marmoreal, the doors, the beauty of Underland, every charge and assignment he'd taken in Elphyne, ...and the pain of Iracebeth's eternal darkness. His eyes saw only the past, there was no cavern, there were no walls nor floor around him. He was falling, falling through his vision – careening towards the madness. Lost in himself, he didn't feel Lizzie as she caught him the best she could as he fell to the floor.

"Fred!" Lizzie cried as she shook him, not caring for her own safety. "Fred!" His eyes were open, his pupils dilated eerily, lost in another world. She sat, pulling him into her arms as she had during his nightmare the day before. Her tears wet his face as she rested her forehead on his. "Fred," she pleaded, "come back to me. Please, Fred...look at me. Please, It's me, Lizzie, please, Fred..." She wasn't going to let him give up, not now! "DAMNITFREDWAKEUP!"

Through the darkness, Freddie heard a voice. It stopped his fall, but not the vision, which shifted now to events which had transpired after he had left Underland the last time. He saw the armies of the Red Queen, marching across Witzend and Iplam, cutting down young and old alike in their wake. He heard Iracebeth, the White Champion dead, command the Jabberwock to show no mercy as it attacked the clans gathered on the Hill. He saw his brother, Tarrant, digging the trenches that would hold the bodies of their people, then fill them – dragging their stiffened corpses, broken, bloated, and dismembered into the pits until they lay layer upon layer. Their pale, unseeing eyes focused on Fred's in silent accusation.

His vision ended and he awoke, finding Lizzie's eyes staring at him in place of those of the dead. He rolled out of her arms and onto his hands and knees where he retched violently until his body trembled. Lizzie put her arm around him, but he shook it off.

"No!" He picked himself up. "Just leave me be..."

He ran back through the cavern towards the outside, knowing his way even in the dark – he'd been here many times before. If it had only been himself, without Lizzie, he would have kept running. There was a door in the first chamber of the cave, he could open it and be gone and disappear again, this time forever. No one else would ever suffer again because of him. He left the cave, passing by the door and stumbled into the fading light of the evening sun and sat down, leaning against a tree a short distance away. Now that he could see clearly, with all his past laid out before him, his heart grieved for what he knew he must do. Lizzie, his Lizzie...he had to send her home. She deserved so much more than the broken man he knew himself to be. Her heart would heal, he told himself. If she could see inside his, she wouldn't want him anyway. He sensed her approaching and fought with himself over just how much he should tell her. She knelt beside him, and waited. After a few minutes, Fred raised his tear stained face. His eyes, unreadable, met hers. He said nothing.

"I need to know," she said softly.

He turned his eyes from hers, looking instead across the horizon and sighed. "It doesn't have a happy ending."

"Your life isn't over, yet."

It might as well be, he thought.

He told her his story, most of it anyway, as she sat listening. He did not tell her why he had gone to the Outlands, only that it was a place he had visited on his travels, surgically removing the reason from his narrative. He felt her anger as he told her of Iracebeth's fortress and what had happened there. Then of his vision at Hightopp Hill, running though the door, only to find that it had been bewitched. He found himself, not near Marmoreal where it should have led, but in a small brick room, behind a fireplace. He ran through the fire to find a creature named Stibbler waiting for him. Knowing the door would not be safe to return through just then, he was forced to wait in the land he would come to know as Elphyne until nightfall. Stibbler was kind and professed to have no knowledge of Underland or any other realms save the one from which Lizzie was from. He offered him a drink, "to take the edge off, lad" as Freddie waited impatiently to return. The bitterness of the drink itself masked the potion it contained. He remembered feeling strange, as if he couldn't think clearly, everything about himself becoming more and more like a dream.

"What did you give me?" he asked, fearfully.

"I'm sorry, son," the goat-man pleaded, "the Red Queen has my family...she'll kill them if you return. I didn't give you the one she sent me," he held up a small red vial. "I swear, lad, someday when it's safe, I'll show you the way back home."

His memories slipped like sand through his fingers until they were gone, taking Freddie with them.

As Lizzie listened to Fred's story, she saw what he could not see, how the pieces of himself that could never truly be lost or forgotten - the innate person who he was, shone through in the man that she knew. His kindness and patience with children, his loyalty to those he cared for, his selflessness, and so many other facets of his personality. She felt nothing but hatred for Iracebeth, not only for the depth of her cruelty for the murder of so many innocent lives, but for laying the guilt at Fred's feet.

"Fred," she said when he had fallen silent, "it wasn't your fault. She was the one who sent the armies and the Jabberwock, she made the choice, not you. You tried to warn them."

"No, Lizzie, it was my fault. I knew she would come for me, and if I'd been smarter would have slit my own throat before she did. I would have gladly done it to spare them."

Lizzie was appalled at his self-degradation. "Don't say that!"

Fred continued, ignoring her, "They should have strung her up and let her die slowly. Lopping off her head was too quick."

Lizzie was confused, hadn't Alice said that they'd banished her? "Alice said they exiled her and Stayne..."

The change in Fred was immediate. Anger, hatred, fear, and a dozen other emotions flashed over his face as he stood. "She's not dead? What do you mean, they exiled her?"

"To the Outlands. Alice said.."

Fred began walking towards Torineil, shouting various words she took to be obscenities. "...Damn slurking, slurvish, skut!..." The penalty for her crimes should have been execution. He should have known Mirana wouldn't kill her sister.

"Fred, wait..." said Lizzie, running after him. He took the claymore from where it was fastened to the horse's armor, and buckled it around his own waist. "What are you doing?"

He didn't answer her, but addressed Torineil instead. "Thank you for your kind service, Torineil. You should go back to Marmoreal. I can take Lizzie there faster myself by door."

"You are certain?"

The sky was already growing dark. "If we leave tomorrow at first light, we should reach Marmoreal by evening." He removed their packs from the horse's back and bid him farewell. Lizzie watched as Torineil left on his way to Marmoreal.

"What was that all about?"

He still didn't answer her, but began walking back up the hill towards the cavern. "Come on," he said. "We'll need to make a fire. It gets cold here at night."

Lizzie decided to bide her time and helped him find wood before night fell. Something wasn't right, he hadn't looked at her once since she'd told him Iracebeth wasn't dead. This was a mood of his she wasn't familiar with and the fact she couldn't read him worried her tremendously.

When the fire was made, instead of sitting down as he normally would, Fred continued to avoid her, wandering off into the dark instead. She called for him, but he refused to answer, and with the light from the fire behind her, she could see nothing out into the darkness. Little did she know he was less than ten feet away, sitting in the night, watching her as she looked for him. After a while she wrapped her cloak around herself and lay down. If he was waiting until she fell asleep to come back, she'd pretend she was until he did. She didn't know how long she lay there, her eyes watching the fire from the slit she'd left under the bottom of her hood. Finally she heard the soft scrape of his boots as he returned and sat down. She sat up, ready to tackle him as best she could if he decided to run off again.

"Stop avoiding me and tell me what's going on."

"You're supposed to be asleep," he said without looking at her.

Lizzie got up and moved over beside him.

"What is it you're not telling me?" she asked. "Why are you in such a hurry to get to Marmoreal? I thought you hated it there."

Fred still refused to look at her and said quietly, "You have to go home, Lizzie. Mirana will know how to get you there."

"What are you talking about? I'm not going anywhere, I'm staying here with you!"

He turned to her, his blue eyes shining fiercely with unwept tears in the firelight. "No, you're not! I'm sorry, Lizzie, but you have to leave."

She searched his face, trying to understand why he would be sending her away. The only thing that came to mind was that perhaps he'd realized that she wasn't the right one for him, after all. "You don't want me," she said, softly.

"That's what you think?" he cried. "You think I don't want you? Don't ever say that! You deserve so much more than I could ever give you. You're all that I have left, and I swore I would never hurt you again. I'll never let anyone be hurt by me again."

"And you think sending me away isn't going to hurt me?" she asked, baffled. "I love you, and I swore I'd never leave you!"

Her words cut at him and he closed his eyes briefly, turning from her. It wouldn't be easy to make her understand. "Everything I touch dies, Lizzie. Everything I've ever loved has been destroyed because of me - because I'm a freak. Iracebeth took it all from me, piece by piece, and left me nothing but her madness. When you're safely gone, I'll find her, and I'll do what I should have done instead of running away."

"What do mean?" She was desperately afraid she knew exactly what he meant.

"I have a destiny here, Lizzie. A life for a life. A soul for a soul. She stole minelongago."

"You're going to kill her..."

He shouldn't have told her anything about his plans for Iracebeth. He could feel her searching for a way to change his mind. "Go home, Lizzie," he said softly. "Find someone to make you happy and forget about me. I'm not worth shedding tears over." He stood up and walked to the edge of the firelight.

Lizzie went to stand in front of him. "How can you say that about yourself? All the things that happened to you, none of them were your fault!" She paused, taking his face in her hands, making him look at her. "What did she do to you that, even now in exile, she has such control over how you live? So much that she could make you turn away from the one who loves you more than life itself?"

He realized how well she must know him, that she could ask the question that no one else had ever asked. From the time she had begun hunting him in his nightmares when he was 16, until today, 23 Underland years and half a world away later, Racie still held him in the palm of her hand. He couldn't remember a time before he lived in fear of her.

"That's another story..," he said quietly. "And I don't want to talk about it. You should sleep, we have a long walk tomorrow." He turned and walked away, disappearing back into the darkness beyond the fire, leaving her alone.

Lizzie dreamed of Fred, the Fred before he remembered his past, and of the final kiss they'd shared. She woke in the morning to find him sitting a few feet from her, asleep with his back against a tree. He looked so peaceful as she knelt beside him. What could have happened to so destroy his spirit? Whatever it was, she sensed it had happened long before Horunvendush Day. That had been a savage act of war, but something about his demons seemed far more...personal. She ran her fingers through his hair and he opened his eyes. A ghost of the Fred she missed smiled at her before he remembered where he was. She placed a gentle kiss on his lips, but he didn't return it.

"Please...don't, Lizzie. That won't make things easier."

She sighed sadly and moved back beside him. If he was going to push her away, she at least wanted to know why – a real reason, not just that he thought he didn't deserve her (which was crap anyway).

"I want to know what's wrong with you," she said. "The real story – the one you don't want to talk about."

He didn't answer her. They sat in silence for a long, long time. Lizzie was just about to get up when he spoke, so quietly she almost couldn't hear him even though she was sitting by his side.

"It was a summer day, and I was seventeen..," he began in barely more than a whisper.

Lizzie listened, horrified as he told her what Iracebeth had done to him and why he'd gone to the Outlands. About the darkness that had haunted him since that day, the day she'd forced him to partake of her madness. Lizzie knew she was the only one who had ever heard this story. Mirana and Tarrant had never understood, convinced he simply preferred to be alone. In reality he believed that someday Iracebeth would have him killed and wasn't willing to sacrifice someone else's happiness for his own. She wondered if there had ever been a time, other than the previous morning behind the waterfall, when he had thought of himself and what he wanted. She understood why he wanted her to leave, but it only strengthened her resolve to stay, knowing that he was pushing her away to try and protect her from the monster he deemed himself to be.

He finished his story, and Lizzie put her arms around him and held him while her tears fell for the pain that he'd lived with for so long.

"Don't cry for me, Lizzie," he said, quietly. He didn't want her to feel sorry for him. "Please, don't cry for me."

"Why not?" she asked. "Someone should, and I don't think you ever have."

"I didn't tell you so you'd feel sorry for me. I wanted you to understand why you have to go. I have nothing, Lizzie, not even myself to offer you. Her madness is still here, haunting me, and inside I'm dead...like the plains of Iplam."

She met his eyes and placed her hand on his face, softly brushing his cheek with her thumb. "It doesn't have to be that way. Let me help you learn to live again."

He shook his head sadly. "It's too late for me," he said, ignoring the part within himself that wanted so badly to stay in Lizzie's arms and let her love him. He removed her arms from around him and stood. "Come on, we need to leave."