Alice, in her own section of Wonderland, was making good time when she saw the mansion. She really hadn’t meant to stop. Just meant to poke her head in, say hello to Cook and pinch the baby and be on her way. She wanted to get home and with her errand not exactly completed in the sense that the Rabbit still lived, contrary to Red’s desires, she just… Well. The truth was, she didn’t really have that many friends. And she rather liked Cook’s pepper soup. So she turned her steps to the gray stoned manse and walked around the house on it’s gravel drive, heading for the back and the kitchen door, the gravel crunching under her feet in a way that made her wince, because sweet Jesus, it was too damn loud and anyone could hear her coming.
Except the hearth was cold when Alice let herself in to the enormous flag-stone paved kitchen. And no pepper flew through the air. No smell of baking bread from the ovens. No Frog had been at the door either, which rather surprised Alice. The footman was always coming and going with some nonsense for the Duchess from Red and no sign of the jerk.
Cook sat by the hearth, slumped, apron bundled in her lap, brown skirts clean, not a streak of flour on them anywhere, her beige shirtwaist equally clean. The dishes were stacked and neat by the drain board. The only consistent thing was the baby, wailing away in his bassinet, alternating between pig and human form. But Cook moved not at all to console him, which was nothing new, but something… Something was just not fucking right.
“Cook?” Alice ventured.
Cook looked up slowly, veritably this world’s or any other’s ugliest woman, followed only by the Duchess. But Cook didn’t smile, seeing Alice there on the threshold.
“Oh. Hello,” she said.
Alice stepped all the way and went over to the baby who had graduated to hiccuping sobs and oinks, picked him up and began to rock him. He clung to her neck, fat little arms holding on tight, his white baby clothes smelling of detergent and baby.
“What’s wrong?”
No soup. No broken dishes. No pepper. No footman. What. The. Hell, Alice thought furiously.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Cook started to move, her face clearly saying that yes, something absolutely was fucking wrong. Alice went over to the ice box, found the baby’s bottle and began to feed him. He didn’t need changing, which meant Cook hadn’t been completely checked out.
Meanwhile, Cook shuffled to the hearth and swung the huge cast iron soup pot out of the way on its hook and began to build a fire, but she didn’t move in her usual jerky fast way. She moved like an old woman.
“Why is everyone lying to me today?” Alice asked, not meaning to use her trained killer voice on her oldest friend, but it rather slipped out.
Cook slowed and then stopped, faggots half built in the fireplace.
“How can you possibly understand? No one’s ever told you. No one’s ever known.”
Okay, the riddles were to be expected, Alice decided, but sweet Baby Jesus!
“Cook. Please,” she tried instead.
“What’s older than Time, what lives for Wonder, and what would you give for your Heart’s Desire?”
Alice blew a breath out in a short puff. Baby had settled down, redness going away and retaining more of his baby form, only the pig snout to indicate his other shape.
“Must we? Really?”
“It’s riddles or nothing, my love,” Cook said and went back to fire building. Had a fire going in short order and began the back and forth trips to fill the pot alternately with small buckets of milk from the ice box. The ice box never ran out of milk, a fact that Alice was very jealous as, since every time she was at home, there was never a damn drop of it.
“Like that, is it?”
“Like that.”
Alice sighed.
“All right then.”
“I’ve said more than I should.”
“Alices are that important, are they?”
“Not Alices,” Cook said, shaking her head. “The Alice.”
Alice felt her eyebrow rise. So much for her damn Game Face.
“The Alice.” Alice just left it hanging out there, but Cook didn’t rise to the bait. “Huh.”
“I’ve said too much.”
“Everyone keeps saying that shit and it’s getting old.”
“It’s a rare truth. You should be grateful for it.”
“Can’t say that I am,” Alice remarked and put Baby down, who had nodded off on her shoulder and tucked him back in to his bassinet.
“You shouldn’t have come back. You should have stayed away, like you promised,” Cook said, stirring the pot desultorily and pouring in the pepper, but with none of her usual gusto.
“Red…” But Alice didn’t finish. Cook was right. She hadn’t been forced to jump down the rabbit hole. No one had showed up and pointed a gun to her head. Just a big fat red envelope and like she’d never shredded orders before and pretended she never got them? Yeah, right.
Her gut tightened. She was already peeved by the whole thing already. But this was shaping up to piss her completely off. Timothy said she had anger issues. She knew she had anger issues. She didn’t see why she needed to deal with them. Waste of time. But he made a point and often that her anger clouded her ability to analyse situations. She always had countered that analysis was for the analysts and she was a shooter, yes?
He never agreed.
Worse, she was starting to see his damn point.
But seeing his side of the argument didn’t stop the fact that she was now officially fucking angry.
Which wasn’t helped a damn bit by the Cat materializing in the door.
“You’re still here? Shouldn’t you be getting a move on? I thought you said you wanted to get back in short order? Or was that not true?” the Cat queried disingenuously. “Shouldn’t you be at the March Hare’s already?”
“Bite me,” Alice replied. Drew her handcannon and fired in one smooth, well-practiced move. Except the damn Cat was already vanished, leaving behind the grin.
Cook threw a dish on the floor in solidarity.
“I should be going,” Alice sighed.
“If you hurry, you’ll get to the March Hare’s in time for tea.”
Alice shuddered.
“Oh, come now. Anyone could have made that mistake,” Cook chided.
“I’ll take your word for it. Feel better, Cook.”
“Get smart, my love. Your gut isn’t going to be enough this time.”
And on that last cryptic warning, Alice let herself out just in time to see the Frog Footman coming up the drive. She nodded at him as she walked and rotated her shoulder, holstering the hand cannon. As she left, she could hear Cook begin to sing to the baby:
Speak fiercely to your little boy,
And train him to be fearless:
Give him rifles, bombs as toys,
Because he’ll needs be deathless.
Chorus
Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!
I speak fiercely to my boy,
I teach him to be fearless;
For he can kill with joy
His skills with guns are peerless!
Huh, thought Alice. That was new.
