#cur

She has all she needs to have to prove this. Corvid’s feet that crinkle on her eyes from each time you’ve made her smile, the paperwork she got registered overland, and most importantly, a feather and leaf from the Neonatal Cabbagestork who had delivered you to your mother on the unsuspectedly wonderful day now known as your birthday. 

Your birthday is one of Alice’s most favorite days of the whole calendar year. She knows all your favorite days too, being that she is your mother and all. She knows much about you; just how you enjoy your tea the most, which chocolates you tend to skip and pick over in boxes of sweets, the precise look on your face that says you need a hug, and what sorts of things you look forward to. 

Alice knows just how much you look forward to Parent’s Day each year at Auradon Prep. 

You see, Parent’s Day - along with Darents’ Pay, the Remarkalous Cow Crawl of Sluthering Seights, and the Diurnal Pock Parade (both Primary and Tertiary. The Secondary Diurnal Pock Parade is a well known farce and is only kept around to be exploited by greeting card companies and boiled peanut salesmen. It’s truly nothing short of a laughing stock) - is your most favorite holiday. 

Many may not consider Parent’s Day as such, but you and your mother certainly do. Why, the last time Alice can recall hearing you speak so eagerly about any such event was during preparation for the two dozen worm salute performed at the Changing of The Fertilizer in the White Palace’s gardens last year. What a lovely and commemorative day that had been. 

Traditionally, the usual process of preparing for a very Big And Exciting Day at the Wonderland Embassy involves lots of excitement. Typically you’d be running all over the Embassy in a flurry of giddiness as you got yourself dressed, nearly forgot to drink enough tea for such a busy morning, fussed with your hair until you gave up and let your mother fix it for you how you like. That sort of hustle and bustle. 

Alice can - and often does - fondly recall the state of your closet and bathroom and vanity on such joyous days (a state of chaos she only discovers once you’re both home and much too tired to worry yourselves with tidying up.) A large part of why Alice knows this is because she often finds herself in just that same state of getting readiness, and its ripple effects in her own closet and vanity. 

She’s sure she could never begin to guess where you get that particular trait from. 

But as the morning of Parent’s Day dawns, the Embassy is… quiet.

Eerily so. 

She walks through the halls, only to find them void of shoes and dresses being tossed about, lacking the standard trail of tea and cakes trailing from room to room. Even the royal Card Guards - guards comprised of cards - aren’t stirred up into anything remotely close to a tizzy. And Card Guards are quite impressionable, you see. If there were an ounce of excitement or a haypenny of anticipation anywhere within the glittering marble halls of the Wonderland Embassy, Alice would surely hear it. The fluttering of Card Guards rushing about and trying to be useful, the giggles, the chattering and chittering to oneself. 

Where are you?

It’s just then, that exact moment that Alice realizes with a sudden sinking in her stomach - the kind of troubled waterlogging of the grand ocean liner within her heart, at which you are always at the helm - that she’s unsure… well, that is… she doesn’t truly know just how much time you’ve been spending in Wonderland. 

Spending time in Wonderland, of course, is a part of your heritage. It’s only natural for you. But it is quite the dangerous heritage to inherit. Wonderland in all its wondrous beauty can be quite unimaginably dangerous, the hills and slopes so very slippery that one would surely lose one’s balance. Even with shoes comprised only of the purest velcro, the stickiest glue, and the stabbiest ice picks. 

Even for those who love the spontaneity of unsolid ground, they must have something to rely on. All dreamers must have a soft place to land. When not the ground, perhaps it’s a soft sort of person that grounds you, or a particularly fluffy feathered variation of the chicken dance performed at weddings, bat mitzvahs, and North East Wuzzlewick Stew Pot Inaugurations. Perhaps you find the sounds of nail guns constructing dog houses for in-trouble husbands soothing, or find yourself always able to relax when you rest your face just above a bowl of ice to breathe in the soothing smell of cold. 

Alice knows what grounds you, naturally. And what grounds you when you’re feeling flighty or floaty or all turned about is… 

Well, what grounds you is Ben.

Herself as well, of course. But she and him are two separate kinds of grounding. There’s the everlasting soft sort of comfort you get from the loving hug of your mother, even when her arms are not technically around you in that moment. But then… then there’s the sort of hand-in-hand, steadfast grounding found in the mutual company and understanding of a dear, dear friend. A peer who sees you as you are. As you have been. One who imagines you as you would like to be imagined. And Ben sees you not as his little girl, as that little wrinkly crying bundle delivered in a flurry of stork feathers all wrapped up in cabbage leaves, but as you are. 

As you hope to be. 

But Ben’s sturdy, gentle guiding hand seems to have slipped from yours most abruptly in these recent days. Some may say this is merely the normal pushing and pulling tides of adolescence. But Alice knows better. Alice knows most adamantly that this is not so. She will not believe that after all, after every year and day and weekend spent in company, after every giggle fit and shared understanding (both with and without words being present) that right now of all times, the bond you and Ben have built and fostered, the bond you share would arbitrarily begin to crumble.

Words must be had. Answers must be discovered. And neither can happen before Alice finds out where in the Red Queen’s Gardens you’ve run off to. 

But she knows with all forms of certainty that if there’s one place you’ll be found on a day such as today, sooner or later, it shall be the big and grandiose Parent’s Day event at Auradon Prep. So instead of continuing to flit about in circles, she selects her carefully selected outfit from her wardrobe, readies and steadies herself, and heads off to the school. 

Surely your heads will be right on her tails. 

There are two fogletoads sitting on your feet today. You find them there each and every time you look down glumly - which has been so much more than your usual metric for glumness. One is jovial, positively alight with whimsy and anticipation. On the other foot you have one as depressed as a weeping widower, coming to terms with the fact that he will never again wake up to fussy beverages brewing or large tufts of hair globbed up onto the shower wall. It’s most difficult to keep your balance on such an excitable day to begin with, but it seems impossible to even stand upright in your current state. Staying on your feet is proving to be quite the feat indeed. 

Knots of worry twist and tug, tangling up your insides as you wonder just how in the Red Queen’s Gardens you’re supposed to dilly dally and meander, how you’re supposed to just go about your business when half of your body - the left half - is trying to run into your mother’s embrace and rejoice in festivitating with her. All the while your right half is so heavy you feel it could only lie down in this very spot and cry for so long that you disrupt the water cycle, create your own floods to wash away all the confusion of what your world Overland has become. 

But the persistence of time is quite simple, and it is simply time to persist. 

So persist you must. 

You feel much like an uncured piece of kintsugi pottery. You’re holding yourself together, but… only just. Perhaps if you tie yourself up with enough ribbons and ruffles and eyelash glue, no one will notice that all that glittering gold is really cracks threatening to break your carefully composed composure. 

So you do just that. You wrap yourself up in the pretty clothes and all the other little bits and bobs you’d long since selected for just this day. You glue yourself down to that pretty blue dress you love so much, you tape down your stockings to hide all the ungrounded cracks creeping along you from the bottom up, lock your uncured form in a gilded display case of chokers and heavy heeled boots marked FRAGILE! DO NOT SHAKE SHOVE OR PITY!

You practice your smile in the mirror. You practice making that strange face over and over, the one that forces your cheeks to lie where your eyes cannot in a way that should be convincing to most. You try to coax out the crinkles that always bump up and down over the edges of your eyeliner, try to talk your shoulders into relaxing. 

And it’s that very moment that you realize what Ben means when he says- or, said. Used to say, you suppose - that you’re really quite transparent to those who know you.

You let the staged upside down frown fall from your cheeks with a defeated huff. 

“Shit.” You mutter, carefully pressing your hands to your face in a way that soothes without fussing up your makeup.

Then for a moment, you feel almost grimly lucky that there are really only two people who do know you well enough to look up at the sky and see if it’s truly blue, rather than being fooled by the blue tarps and stage lights you’re setting up to mimic beams of sunshine on a cloudless day. 

With your conviction as set as you can possibly make it, and a large amount of strategically placed vitamin d lamps of forced smiles and practiced conversation, you head to Parent’s day. The closer you get, the more you can sense it. 

The people. 

The crowds. 

Your dread builds, and you remind yourself again and again. You’re not doing this because you can, not doing this because you’re able to. You’re doing this because you have an obligation to do so. Plain and simple. 

As you search for your mother through all the bustle and hustle feeling much like a sailor lost at sea, with no lighthouses, no cartographers to guide you to shore, one thought lingers. It tugs at you, like a child tugging on your sleeve, eager and insistent to get your attention.