Fic: Perfectly Presentable (Alice in Wonderland, G)

[alyse]

Title: Perfectly Presentable
Author: alyse
Fandom: Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Rating: G
Recipient: lecri
Disclaimer: Alice is Lewis Carroll's, not mine, but technically this still isn't copyright infringement as it's out of copyright.
Author's Notes: Written for lecri as part of the legendland Giftgiving. Lecri requested, among other fandoms, Alice in Wonderland, so I hope this suits.

Summary: Alice has decided thoughts on many things.

Percival was a perfectly nice young man, as nice young men went. The problem, Alice suspected, didn't lie with Percy. How could it, when Percy met all of the necessary proprieties, with his neatly pressed shirts and ties tied just so? The problem - in all probability - was Alice and Alice's alone, although Percy, being a well brought up young man, was far too nice to say so.

Not in so many words, at least, and Alice - who had little time for those who jibbered and jabbered as though their very lives depended on it when all they talked about was the weather - found herself wanting Percy to say considerably more on the subject than he ever would, drat niceness. Instead she was stuck with a boy who, while he didn't stammer or blush like the other boys she had known up until now (and that, at least, was an improvement), weighed his words up far too carefully before he let them spill from his lips.

That was probably, she thought a little unkindly, because Percy seemed to be under the impression that his words - and the opinions that were formed from them - actually had some weight.

"Don't you agree, Alice?" asked Percy with that slight pomposity to his manner that was becoming less endearing the longer she knew him. For a second Alice couldn't help but picture him as nothing but a neatly turned out suit and overstuffed tie; it was an interesting picture but she didn't giggle in spite of it. Alice despised girls who giggled, and refused to do such a thing, not even to hide the fact that she really hadn't been listening that closely as Percy talked. Or at all.

Percy watched her closely, some of his pomposity leaking out of him when it became clear that she wasn't as enamoured of his opinions as Percy was himself. But then, Alice had far more important things on her mind than Percy's latest views on income taxes or import duties.

"Do you think, Percy, that cats think deep thoughts when they pause in their washing? Or do you think that they just want to make us think that they're having deep thoughts when, in fact, they're doing no such thing at all?"

Percy blinked at her a little, his mouth opening and closing a few times in a way that was faintly reminiscent of a codfish. A slightly startled codfish at that.

"I... don't really think cats do much thinking at all, Alice," he said finally and faintly, just at the point where she was starting to believe that Percy's opinions, for as many things as he had opinions on, didn't really extend to anything important. "I know you're fond of your little creature -" And now Percy let out a little laugh, as full of silly things as the sort of false little giggle Alice wouldn't deign to let escape. "- but cats aren't actually that intelligent."

"Ah. I see," said Alice, as sombrely and seriously as was called for in this sort of situation. "You're more of a dog person, then?"

She thought it a perfectly polite question under the circumstances. Really, this was the kind of conversation that they should have had well before now, and would have done if Alice had not let her mother fill her head with all sorts of stuff and nonsense, which - to be true - had mostly been so that they could serve as cotton wool and block Alice's ears to most of what her mother said. Percy blinked a couple of times anyway.

He didn't look much like a codfish now. He looked more like a startled sheep, all stuffed with wool until he could barely move with it.

"I... care more for dogs, that's true, but I would hesitate to ascribe any sort of intelligence to them either, Alice."

She considered this for a moment and found herself entirely in agreement with him. "I like dogs well enough," she said. "But one could hardly describe them as great thinkers. Except perhaps my Aunt Cissy's terrier," she added in fairness. Now there was a dog that had a glint in its eye that suggested there was more on its mind than simply biting the postman. Not that her Aunt Cissy's terrier ever forwent that pleasure either. "But on the whole, they don't seem to have that air of plotting great plans, or planning great plots the way that cats sometimes do. Don't you agree, Percy?"

Poor Percy. Poor befuddled Percy. "Really, Alice..." And he let out another one of those little laughs, which sounded like he'd had to pull it out of a box from somewhere, and the sound of it quite decided Alice's mind for her. Not that Alice's mind wasn't usually decided, even when she had been listening to her mother and her mother had been stuffing such thoughts into Alice's head that it quite gave Alice a headache. "You do say the most extraordinary things sometimes."

"I think," said Alice, just as decided as her mind was, "that the things I say are really quite ordinary. In a manner of speaking, anyway," she added, still in the interests of fairness.

Poor Percy blinked again, and Alice felt a strange kind of pity for him, at least until he said - more sharply, she felt, than was called for - "Honestly, Alice, I don't know where you get these mad ideas."

She fixed him with a stare that could only be described as steely. That's how it felt, anyway. Like steel, hard and sharp and piercing, and Percy blinked again, quite tiresomely she thought. "I knew a man once who was quite mad," she said severely. "And I'm rather certain that he had no such ideas about the thought processes of cats or dogs or canaries come to that. Although I rather think that, on balance, he'd have preferred dogs to cats." Largely, she thought, because the cat he'd had to deal with was one of the most frustrating creatures ever to have existed either on this Earth or, indeed, in Wonderland. But she'd probably be better off not sharing that thought with Percy. The poor dear looked quite taken aback at Alice's words already, and her steel softened into something akin to sympathy.

Perhaps that show of sympathy was why Percy interjected, softly and a little plaintively, "But I'm not that fond of dogs, Alice." A little frown settled between his brows, arching his eyebrows together like a rather prickly caterpillar. "And I'm not entirely sure how we came to be having such a ridiculous conversation." His laugh this time was a little more genuine, but only just. It tinkled around the edges like broken glass, and quite set Alice's teeth on edge.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself that Percy was a Percival and there was no helping that; Percy wasn't entirely to blame, not when he was trapped in his neatly pressed suits and half-strangled by his perfectly tied tie.

"Never mind, Percy," she said brightly, taking hold of his arm with one gloved hand - the glove that didn't have moss stains on it because she would insist on running her hand over tree bark as she wandered more deeply into the woods, no matter how frequently her mother sighed about it or how forlornly Percy trailed in her wake as though he was lost and hoped she'd show him the way home. "We'll talk of other things, then.

"I hear that Mrs Smith's niece has come to visit. Have you met her yet? My mother says that she's perfectly charming."

Perfectly charming and perfectly presentable, she thought, ticking them off in her head as though there was a list. Perfectly pressed and perfectly pretty and perfectly... ordinary.

She would suit Percival perfectly well, Alice reflected. Better than a Percival could ever suit an Alice, especially an Alice whose head was so full of her own stuff and nonsense that there was barely any room left for her mother's particular brand, involving as it did marriage and children and a perfectly respectable life. It was a very sensible solution - and Alice prided herself on being sensible, even when the world around her was not.

And if the shadows on the path, as they moved through the trees, seemed to twist a little out of rhythm with the breeze, and if there was a hint of a smile that seemed to hang in the air as they passed, before fading from view with a sound that was more like a chuckle than the wind, well...

That was cats for you.

The End