It may be petty and it may be infantile, but I am just so glad I'm making actual posts now that I'm going to post this nonsense to celebrate the moment.
_____________________________________________________
Anyone else would have panicked.
Anyone with a sense of self-preservation and a firm fear of death would have stuttered and stammered in an attempt to piece together a reply capable of pleasing their perpetually discontented queen. Anyone, that is, but her Ace of Spades.
He may not have known why hoods were to be worn up at all times, or the rules of the croquet game he had spent the best part of an hour watching—if honesty is mandatory, even the origins of his own title baffled him—but what he did know was that to answer her was to engage in a battle as vain as Her Royal Highness herself. Saying the wrong thing would most certainly result in his head and shoulders parting ways, whilst saying the right thing did not necessarily guarantee his safety, merely that she would search for flaws elsewhere, and were he to take too long to answer her question in the hope of threading together just the right expression, then those four infamous, dread-inducing words were likely to cut his thinking—amongst other, more tangible things—short.
And yet, with what seemed like an inevitable death looming over him no matter which path he chose, in spite of the fact that her eyes were no doubt glaring hatchets at the back of his hooded head (as they always did), the Ace of Spades continued to escort the queen, unburdened by her menacing presence. His fellow Aces had learnt that the best person to care for the queen was one who could function under such pressure and Spades survived every encounter with the queen by, oddly enough, ignoring her demands with such skill that she could find no flaw in his methods.
All the attention that everyone else would have spent on words, Spades invested in navigating around the slabs of stone that managed to make a slalom course out of a perfectly plain corridor, the obstacles he knew to be the familiars of his fellow Ace, the weapons of war to his soldier’s sword. The moment he faced the door was the moment he stepped to the side and allowed his charge to have her grand entrance whilst he followed after her heels. Before the doors could bounce off of the walls and close upon his face, but after a lick of hostile red hair had raked itself over his stubbly and unsuspecting jaw, he slipped through the threshold, between the bickering twins and made his way to the first vacant seat his veiled eyes laid themselves upon.
In the time it took for the queen to make her political point through the medium of chairs, Spades had sat himself down in the seat closest to the door, perched his forearms upon the obsidian table, and laced his seven remaining fingers together in front of him in lieu of a greeting. Standing a couple inches short of six feet, the Ace of Spades was not the tallest, the heaviest, or even the most muscular of the four Aces who formed the Red Queen’s vanguard. But this was by no means a great surprise, for in their land of wonders—and that term was used quite wrongly—few things were as they should have been. The Ace of Spades dressed almost as humbly as a monk amidst the sea of taffeta and silk, plaid and checkerboard patterns that would form their gathering.
The gentle ticking of clockwork and the clattering of fine china upon the tabletop was worth as much to them as the voice he now kept to himself. He had plenty of questions to ask; why the meeting had been called, why one was never supposed to accept a cup of tea from the hare, and what a ‘Bisque’ was in a game of croquet, but Spades had long since given up on asking his companions questions, for what they considered adequate replies seldom made a hint of sense. He instead opted to acknowledge the presence of his companions with a slow panoramic glance across the table from beneath the apex of his hood. King, queen; rabbit, hare, diamond, club; Dum and Dee, and a handful of vacant seats between them, plenty of their flock to wait for, much to the Queen’s chagrin, but the Ace of Spades, with a grasp upon time crippled by the eternal night of Hueco Mundo, could wait forever.
Anyone with a sense of self-preservation and a firm fear of death would have stuttered and stammered in an attempt to piece together a reply capable of pleasing their perpetually discontented queen. Anyone, that is, but her Ace of Spades.
He may not have known why hoods were to be worn up at all times, or the rules of the croquet game he had spent the best part of an hour watching—if honesty is mandatory, even the origins of his own title baffled him—but what he did know was that to answer her was to engage in a battle as vain as Her Royal Highness herself. Saying the wrong thing would most certainly result in his head and shoulders parting ways, whilst saying the right thing did not necessarily guarantee his safety, merely that she would search for flaws elsewhere, and were he to take too long to answer her question in the hope of threading together just the right expression, then those four infamous, dread-inducing words were likely to cut his thinking—amongst other, more tangible things—short.
And yet, with what seemed like an inevitable death looming over him no matter which path he chose, in spite of the fact that her eyes were no doubt glaring hatchets at the back of his hooded head (as they always did), the Ace of Spades continued to escort the queen, unburdened by her menacing presence. His fellow Aces had learnt that the best person to care for the queen was one who could function under such pressure and Spades survived every encounter with the queen by, oddly enough, ignoring her demands with such skill that she could find no flaw in his methods.
All the attention that everyone else would have spent on words, Spades invested in navigating around the slabs of stone that managed to make a slalom course out of a perfectly plain corridor, the obstacles he knew to be the familiars of his fellow Ace, the weapons of war to his soldier’s sword. The moment he faced the door was the moment he stepped to the side and allowed his charge to have her grand entrance whilst he followed after her heels. Before the doors could bounce off of the walls and close upon his face, but after a lick of hostile red hair had raked itself over his stubbly and unsuspecting jaw, he slipped through the threshold, between the bickering twins and made his way to the first vacant seat his veiled eyes laid themselves upon.
In the time it took for the queen to make her political point through the medium of chairs, Spades had sat himself down in the seat closest to the door, perched his forearms upon the obsidian table, and laced his seven remaining fingers together in front of him in lieu of a greeting. Standing a couple inches short of six feet, the Ace of Spades was not the tallest, the heaviest, or even the most muscular of the four Aces who formed the Red Queen’s vanguard. But this was by no means a great surprise, for in their land of wonders—and that term was used quite wrongly—few things were as they should have been. The Ace of Spades dressed almost as humbly as a monk amidst the sea of taffeta and silk, plaid and checkerboard patterns that would form their gathering.
The gentle ticking of clockwork and the clattering of fine china upon the tabletop was worth as much to them as the voice he now kept to himself. He had plenty of questions to ask; why the meeting had been called, why one was never supposed to accept a cup of tea from the hare, and what a ‘Bisque’ was in a game of croquet, but Spades had long since given up on asking his companions questions, for what they considered adequate replies seldom made a hint of sense. He instead opted to acknowledge the presence of his companions with a slow panoramic glance across the table from beneath the apex of his hood. King, queen; rabbit, hare, diamond, club; Dum and Dee, and a handful of vacant seats between them, plenty of their flock to wait for, much to the Queen’s chagrin, but the Ace of Spades, with a grasp upon time crippled by the eternal night of Hueco Mundo, could wait forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment