The Trouble with Time, Part 2.7 - Roulette

There's stunned silence. Alice's head is almost spinning. She's so close to Vanessa now. That means everything is alright. Right? No? The King is looking at her thoughtfully.

Reclaim... her heart?

She's about to open her mouth, to say something. Anything. That this is unfair. That that wasn't the deal. That she's here now and she won't leave without Vanessa. But before she gets any of that out, King Oberon grins widely.

"Vanish them," he commands someone behind her. She spins around just in time to see one of the people clearly with the court dig out a vial of golden powder from her pocket, pour it into her hand, and blow it onto the three of them. She begins to mutter something under her breath.

Alice twists herself around again, to look at Vanessa, beautiful Vanessa, her face filled with fear, and starts towards her.

"Ness..." 

Then everything goes black.

~x~

Her face is cold.

Now that she thinks about it, her everything is cold, it's just that her face is colder than anything else. Except maybe her toes and fingers.

Alice moves a little, and finds that she's laying in snow. Someone to her side is moving. She opens her eyes and finds both Kevin and Sam. Se pushes herself up to a sitting position.

Vanessa, Oberon and the rest are nowhere to be seen. Neither is the fair, or the crowd, or the town. They're in a place where a seemingly endless open field meets and equally seemingly endless forest meets the endless black void of the sky above them. Stars twinkle at them, clearly mocking her. The moon is huge and round and yellow. The snow is a glowing white, reflecting its light in all directions. There's no other lights anywhere. If it was any other time Alice would stop and admire the beauty of it.

She stands up. Looks around again, just in case things look different from a meter higher off the ground. They don't.

She screams.

She screams her anger, her fear, her frustration into the world. She screams, because there is nothing else she can do. There's a Vanessa-shaped hole in her, and seeing her again set it hurting more terribly than anything else has ever hurt before. She knows if she tries to push it down, to ignore it, it will destroy her.

So she screams, because the longing doesn't allow for anything else.

And when the scream ends, she sobs. Again. And again. And again. The sobs rocking her entire body.

Arms wrap around her. They're trying to be comforting, she knows, but nothing in the world right now will comfort her. Even so, she allows it, those arms being the only thing that's keeping her together at all, keeping her from becoming a puddle in the snow.

It goes on forever. It's all her world is now. Just cold and dark and tears and pain and longing.

Slowly the tears begin to fade until there's none left. Even the sobs end. The pain and the longing are still there, she's filled to the brim with them, while at the same times there's a gaping emptiness in her that's even greater than the feelings that make her full.

Eventually she eases away from Sam's tightly holding arms. They look at her, a worried look on her face, but also a look of pain and sadness. Kevin is by their side, a similar look on his face too.

She nods to them, as if everything was alright, even though nothing in the entire world is right.

"What happened back there?" Sam asks quietly. She's not sure if they're asking her or Kevin, but she doesn't want to talk.

"The King said it wasn't enough that we found..."

"Yes, Kevin," Sam snaps, interrupting him. "I was there. I know that." They sigh and look up at Kevin. "What I meant, was how did we get here?"

"The King's court magician cast a travel spell on us, I believe."

"Why?"

"Because the King told her to."

Sam just stares at Kevin for a moment, incredulous.

"Why did the King send us to... the middle of nowhere, I guess? He could have done literally anything with us, and he sends us here? Why? He doesn't want us to... reclaim Vanessa's heart in the next ten days, so why not simply lock us up and be done with it?"

"Because he likes the game. He did agree to the bet in the first place, and now he wants to see his game of roulette until the end."

"That's not how roulette works," Sam interjects.

"Fine. Poker. Whatever. He wants to see if we can do it. Which isn't to say he isn't willing to cheat and make sure we get dealt a bad hand whenever he can." Kevin shrugs. "Or maybe he knows we can't do it, and simply likes to see us try and suffer."

"What did he mean, reclaim Vanessa's heart?" Alice finds her voice. It sounds small in her ears. Kevin hesitates.

"I'm not sure," he finally admits.

"Have they brainwashed her? Made her hate me? Us? Made her forget about me?"

"She wouldn't have answered the conch if she hated you. And she clearly remembers all of us. We might not have had a lot of conversations with her, but we know that," Sam tries to assure her. She's not assured.

"Maybe it's a trick? They told Vanessa to talk to us, to trick us."

"What has she said, at any point, that would have tricked us into anything? And besides, she's been interrupted multiple times by them, unable to talk when they're around."

"Maybe they wanted information on our moves through her? They could have told her to fake the interruptions to make us think the conch is a secret and they don't know we're communicating."

"She's not going to get much information out of us if she can only manage a half a minute of conversation at a time. If it was fake, they would give her more time to exctract the information before interrupting."

"But maybe..." she begins, but Sam raises their hand to silence her.

"Kevin, tell her," they turn to him.

"Like I said. I don't know what the King meant," Kevin repeats. "But I don't think Vanessa is in on a big plan with the royals to fool us. It doesn't quite add up."

Alice can feel the void inside her slowly begin to fill with anger.

"The King is playing with us. Us and Vanessa. And the coward won't even tell us what the game is," she wouldn't recognise her own voice, except she can feel herself saying the words.

"So what do we do now?" Sam asks quietly.

"Now," Kevin says, "we need to find a place where we won't die of hypothermia during the night."

________________________________________________

What.

Just. What.

I don't unrestand. I don't.

The topic for tomorrow is Reflect.

~matleena