Fandom: Burton's Alice In Wonderland, with numerous nods to the original books
Characters/Pairing: Alice/Hatter, the White Queen, the March Hare, the Dormouse
Genre: romance/drama
Disclaimer: I don't own them. But they totally own me.
Summary: She doesn't take any more kindly to fate after her adventures in Underland than before. If anyone's going to arrange her affairs, it will be Alice herself. After all, she doesn't want the figments; only the reality.
A/N: Mostly, I think, this comes from all the posts I read about people wanting there to be a Hatter equivalent on the ship at the end or, at least, Jack Sparrow. Because I don't think Alice would take very kindly to an "equivalent."

Seas Too Far To Reach

with your body next to me, its sleepy sighing
sounds like waves upon a sea too far to reach
but I'll gather up my men and try to sail on it again
and we'll walk and quietly talk all through the country of your skin
made up of pieces of the places that you've dreamed
and that you've been

-Okkervil River, Seas Too Far To Reach

It didn't occur to Alice that she might possibly be the type to succumb to sea-sickness until after the Wonder was pulling away from its berth. By then, of course, the sudden suspicion could not do her much good. Certainly she could go to Captain MacManus and ask him to turn back; but then she would never find out for certain. And that would never do. No, far better to stay in her place and wait.

The edge of water, brown from the offal and effluent of the docks and ships forever coming and going, stretched farther, ever-widening. She had done her duty in waving goodbye, and thus the last of her familial obligations were discharged for the time being; the time being in question incorporating a span of some six months. She felt giddy at the thought of it. Alone at last! Well, she amended, sweeping a glance around the crowded deck, perhaps not alone. But certainly more alone than she had ever been.

Apart from the recent stretch in the Underland; but the lure of the memory, the calling to stand still and slip into a reverie, was falsely seductive. She hadn't the time for it, and shook it off, though not without effort.

Instead, there was the settling-in to be done, if she wished. She had a cabin all her own, of course, and into it her trunk had been deposited. For a moment she wavered on deck, torn between going below and sorting out her belongings and staying above and testing out the effect of the open waters on her stomach. She actually took three and a quarter steps towards the hatchway before turning about again and casting a longing glance out past the railing, into the wild, wide open depths stretching to the curving edge of the world.

"Is there a problem, Miss Kingsleigh?"

Captain MacManus appeared at her elbow, face muddled into a concerned expression. He had a curious set of features that lent him the aspect of a thoughtful bloodhound, mournful and long-nosed and unusually jowly. He reminded her strongly of Bayard, as a matter of fact, but she couldn't think about that now. Not when he had questioned her so kindly, and was reaching for her arm.

"I'm fine," she said. "Just a bit indecisive, that's all. Never mind." She tucked her arm close to her side to thwart this overture; Captain MacManus was kindly enough, but Alice did not feel like being kindly'd at. Not in that way. Not when she could still feel the warmth of other hands, ghostlike and months-gone, tucked in hers.

But now was not the time to think of that, either.

Captain MacManus retrieved his hand to tuck it with the other in his pockets. "Now, Miss Kingsleigh, there's no room for indecisiveness on this deck. I run a tight ship, as you'll soon find out. What is it that's troubling you?"

"I am waiting," she replied, "to see whether I'll get sea sick or not. I'm certainly hoping for the latter, but only time will tell."

Captain MacManus gave a shake of his heavy head. "You're a strange one, Miss Kingsleigh. Ah well--- I can't say I wasn't warned." He lightened this statement with a jovial chuckle; Alice went on staring at him, now in some consternation. He'd been warned? Who on earth would have thought to do such a thing? Someone who knew her a bit too well, perhaps, and it wasn't as though she could rightly contest it; she was a strange one, comparatively speaking. But it concerned her all the same.

"When you say that you were warned---" she began.

But Captain MacManus had moved on, with the effortlessness displayed by those who do not, habitually, pause for too deep a think about anything. "Supposing you take a turn about the ship and familiarize yourself with everything, eh? Carter there can help you." He signaled with a brief lift of his hand to a young sailor across the deck from them. The young man was at their side with alacrity, hands clasped behind his back; he gave a nod to Alice and a salute to his Captain, who began to give him instructions for the care and keeping of strange young women one must conduct about the ship. Alice lost interest very quickly, half-turning away from the two to stare again out at the ocean. The land was by now only a strip of darkness, nothing but a demarcation separating the horizon from the sea; and soon would slip away to be nothing at all.

Alice realized that she was walking on wood, on water; and this struck her as very curious indeed.

Captain MacManus finished up his instructional soliloquy with, "And make certain she doesn't take a tumble overboard. We don't want her washing up on some deserted island, now, do we?" The smile with which he accompanied this seemed to Alice a particularly lugubrious one, as though he was already contemplating the reaction he would receive, should he be forced to have to convey the news about Alice's unpleasant demise to her mother; but Alice herself did not see the point in dwelling on the depressing. On the contrary, she could readily picture herself strolling about barefoot and half naked on the sand of some impossible island, never before touched or even seen by a human.

"With me, Miss Kingsleigh?" the sailor named Carter was saying, and with an effort she pulled herself back from the sandy beaches and followed her leader down the deck.

"My imagination has certainly become more vivid since my visit to Wonderland," she mused to herself as she followed the boy; and a burr of a voice, thickened with a momentary heaviness and the speaker's unsure grasp of reality, breathed in her ear, "Most definitely." But when she turned her head, so swiftly as to nearly lose her balance, there was no one there. Only Carter, trying to impress on her the importance of a set of heavily knotted ropes as they related to the sails being let up and down.

Alice felt quite out of sorts, after that. At last, she said, "I do believe I'm seasick after all, Mr. Carter. Perhaps I'll go to my cabin."

"As you wish, of course," said the young man, looking somewhat relieved. "There is no better place to be ill than in one's cabin. That is to say--- I do hope you benefit by it. The cabin, that is. Not the sickness."

She nodded to him, uninclined to pay him much more attention than that, and went on her way.

The voice did not reoccur. And Absolem, if it was he, was nowhere to be seen. Alice buried her disappointment beneath layers of dreaming, seating herself by the porthole in her cabin and watching as the acres of water outside went by, none quite the same as another, but all, somehow, just alike. No, she was not seasick after all. But even this discovery of a personal strength could not rouse her from her preoccupation.

The trouble, as far as she could explain it to herself, was in dwelling too much on the past and not enough on the present. Here she was on a ship, bound for the darkened areas on a map that showed only as Beyond, having left behind family and friends and prospects of marriage and settling down. And could she live in the moment, could she focus her mind on the adventure that was going on here and now? She could not.

"It's certainly a failing, Alice," she told herself sternly. "And one you must work hard to correct. What would the Hatter say if he saw you moping like this?"

She considered this; it was not an unpleasant thought. At length she arrived at a conclusion.

"He'd say you needed some tea," she informed herself decidedly, and left the cabin immediately to try and find her way to the kitchens.

It was on account of not paying the proper attention to her introductory tour round the ship that she became lost almost immediately. For a good ten minutes, Alice wandered about with her hands clasped behind her, occasionally knocking on doors and being reminded constantly of the room in which she had first landed, in Underland. Surrounded by locked doors, and keys either nonexistent, out of reach, or far too small. It was frustrating, especially to a young woman determined to make her own way in the world, that she could not even locate a source of tea.

She found that she was rapidly adapting her step to admit for the sway of the sea-borne ship, to adjust for each sideways toss or slip to the left, one hand reaching out to ghost along the passageways, should she need the added support. At any rate, getting one's sea legs was a sight more easy than traipsing across a moat, leaping from bobbing head to bobbing head; but that was a memory more easily dismissed than many, for she had no wish to dwell on it. A quick shake of her head and she was free of it. For the moment, at least; though it had a way of surprising her in the midst of her dreams which she did not like.

Now was not the time to think of that. Now was the time to find some tea.

She turned a doorknob and found herself out of the interior of the ship, on deck once again, in the wan sun and the ghosting mist and the pitching spray. For a moment she stood, fingers still curled around the knob, eyes drifting closed, and her head worlds away at the feel of the wind.

Dusty sunlight, and a ruined windmill, and a table stretching before her laid with tea things and welcome companions with secretive smiles.

"Miss Kingsleigh?"

The voice interrupting her thoughts was vaguely familiar, and when she opened her eyes she found that it belonged to the young sailor whose duty it had been to conduct her about the ship earlier in the morning. She could not quite grant him a smile, but she did lift her chin a little, and give him her full attention, aware that he looked worried.

"Are you alright, Miss Kingsleigh?"

"I'm fine," she declared easily, without pausing to consider whether this was the truth or not. "I was looking for the kitchens, to have tea, and got lost. I don't suppose you could point me in the right direction."

The relief on his face was curious; she could not fathom the cause of it. But his smile was kindly, and immediate, and real; and he offered her his arm as he spoke. "I'll do you one better, Miss. Allow me to conduct you to the Captain's dining room. You can take tea there to your heart's content. Soothes the nerves, doesn't it, tea? Puts me in mind of my mum's hearth, growing up. I was always getting in some scrape or other as a lad, and tea was the remedy which cured all ills, up to and including mumps, and a broken heart. O'course, it was my facility with scrapes which caused my father to encourage me to take to the sea; so perhaps I can thank my broken bones and cracked head for the life I lead now."

Alice had given his arm a considered stare during this monologue before taking it; she now cast a glance up at him as he led her back into the corridor. "Do you really have a cracked head?"

"Cracked as an egg," said Carter cheerfully. "But don't you worry, Miss Kingsleigh. I'm not as mad as I seem. Not quite."

"You certainly are more talkative now than you were earlier," she pointed out. He took her along the hallway to the fourth door, and opened it for her, bowing her through before following in her wake.

"I fear you weren't paying attention to my lecture; for which I cannot blame you. It was tiresome, I'm sure; but, you see, if you had paid attention, you would have found the dining room on your own. And so I'm rather glad you didn't, for I wouldn't have had an excuse to accompany you." With this, he gave another smile, and a short bow. His long hair, tucked back smoothly and caught in a ribbon, was of dark auburn, and the ends of it flopped over his shoulder as he stood straight once more.

Alice seated herself at the empty table. The light in the dining room was wintry and pale, and made her feel strangely melancholy. The tea table was not nearly long enough, she thought.

She looked up again to the young man.

"Did Captain MacManus ask you to look out for me? Is that why you were so concerned?"

He had the grace to blush.

"He did indeed. But you know, Miss Kingsleigh, perhaps I would have been concerned regardless. It happens, you know."

She folded her hands before her on the table, straightening her back. "What happens?"

"Young men are concerned over the welfare of pretty young ladies," said Carter, abashedly, and gave another quick bow, backing out of the room. "I'll call for tea. Don't stir yourself."

He was gone, and the door closed behind him. Alice said aloud to the empty room, "But may I stir the tea?"

The empty room said nothing back; which was only to be expected. She was left, nonetheless, with a strangely dissatisfied feeling, and wished she had someone to talk to. The young sailor was eager and entertaining enough, she supposed, but there was something lacking in him. He looked too much like a simulacrum and not enough like a reality. It was the reddish hair, the pale skin, the recurring smile, the cracked head. The likeness of him carved a pit in her stomach, a void across which there was no bridge. She leaned her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, and looked out the window with a faint frown.

Was everything in her world designed to remind her of another? That way, she was sure, lay madness. Was that not the driving force behind insanity, after all? A desire for things that no one else believes in, realities as solid as a the table before her, that could manifest themselves only as dreams, as figments of the imagination? And yet she believed in them still.

Alice reflected that her close acquaintance with the terms on which madness manifested itself could not help but be worrying to her family. Perhaps that was why Captain MacManus had been warned. It was more than turning down an advantageous marriage; it was more than the unexpected futterwacken in the middle of a crowded garden party. It was something in the blood, something she'd shown for years, ever since she was a child. Alice Kingsleigh was a strange girl, and there was no getting around it.

Her thoughts had taken a morbid turn; she sat sunk in a daze, curling in on herself. "I don't suppose tea can cure this," she muttered to herself; and something, someone, came out of hiding to answer.

"Nonsense, my dear," came the lisp, "tea helps all manner of ills. And if what can't be cured must be endured, then at the very least it will give you the strength. I know it."

She turned her head very slowly, so as to catch the speaker from the corner of her eye, if he should indeed be there at all. But the room was as empty as it had been when she first entered; more so, for she'd lost the desire to carry on a conversation with herself.

The tea, when it arrived, was a welcome diversion indeed. She sat alone at the table and poured it for herself, her mind drifting back to a time--- so very long ago--- when she had stumbled upon her very first tea party, and been simultaneously ridiculed and welcomed, stared at and sworn at and storied at, been given tea and denied cake and sat at the head of the table for one brief and dizzying moment, looking down the stretch of used tea-things and asking questions for which there were no answers. What happens when you get to the beginning again?

She shook herself, told herself firmly that this was not the time to think of such things. But her memories would not be denied; and what better time could there be, besides? She was alone with the tea service and the seas outside.

Helplessly, she gave herself up to a reverie, in which the reality of the present had no place.