entrancelogs | If you don't control your temper, [open]

Entry tags:

If you don't control your temper, [open]

Who: Barbie and You!
Where: Around Wonderland
When: Arrival and throughout the month
Rating: PG for language, updated as needed
Summary: New to Wonderland and trying to figure out what fishbowl he is trapped in now
The Story:

Arrival on the Beach

Not being stuck to a magnetized dome is a good start. Except nothing looks familiar. Even the sky overhead seems different than how it had looked through the dome in Chester's Mill. It definitely isn't the same street he'd been on with an SVU barreling down on him and Linda. This isn't even the beach at the lake, which is a good thing as there is at least no scent of methane. Except all of those changes meant Barbie has no idea where he was.

Crossing his arms over his stomach, mostly to hide the shackles that kept his wrists cuffed together, setting off to try follow things up towards the structure he saw in the distance.

Around the Mansion

Rid of his cuffs and cleaned up a bit, Barbie has seen the flyers, and still none of it is making a lot of sense. So he sets off to explore the house of his new alien overlords to try and desperately find answers. Not that he isn't used to not having them, but maybe this time things will be different.

So he pops his head into a few rooms, checks out the food situation, and if he is seen turning faucets on and off a few times can anyone really blame him?

Exploring the land

It's not that Barbie thinks there's a dome somewhere around Wonderland under a miniature dome, but well, he's out searching for a damn miniature dome with a damn egg, and maybe a butterfly, in it.

Set up with a flashlight and some equipment from the closest after having learned about them, he heads out into the forests though at times it's closer to dusk than might be safe, exploring to see how similar this place is to the world he knew.

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"Oh, God, you weren't there." Julia shakes her head, realizing that she has more information to catch him up on. She takes his hand, leading him over to a table so they can sit down, though she doesn't move far from his side.

"The Dome talked to us. Me, Norrie, Joe, and Angie. It came to us in the form of Alice and told us it was there to protect us. It said it was just learning how to communicate with us and that's why I needed to protect the egg."

The same way it came to her to tell her about the monarch, but this was different. When she saw Joe, it was almost like watching a recording. Julia never imagined the Dome would ever communicate with them.

"I'm not sure this place isn't like the Dome somehow," she says, lowering her voice slightly. "I think there might be some kind of way to communicate with it, too."

"No, I was preparing to be lynched," he points out, keeping his voice light and teasing. There is nothing light and teasing in his eyes though. He's faced death before, but like that was something else entirely. Even if he chose it over risking her life, or the egg.

Though in Barbie's mind they're one and the same. He protects her, the egg protects her, Julia is safe. That's all he needs.

He tenses though at the egg coming to them again. Especially as Alice.

"Are we sure it's not part of the dome all together?"

It's a question that's been in his head since the moment he arrived.

He receives a narrow glare. For Barbie, it might have only been a few minutes ago, but Julia has been mourning his death for weeks now. It's not funny, which is obvious by the look in his eyes, but her own face stays serious. Just because he's safe for now doesn't mean either of them should drop their guard.

As long as Big Jim is still looking for the egg, they're both in danger.

"I thought that too when I got here, but I don't think so," she admits. "There's some similarities. We're confined to this area, and there's these challenges every couple of weeks. People call them events. It's way more complex than what happened in Chester's Mill, though. The kind of stuff that happened at home was just normal survival stuff, right? The water running out, or the fire. It's more specific here. The events come from other people's worlds. But it gets worse, Barbie..." She reaches out, taking his hand. "There's going to be a war. One we're going to have to fight in."

At least he gives her a sheepish look then, though for him it is still very much gallows humor given that he has only just escaped from that very device.

"When you got here..." She says it like it's a long time. Enough time for her to think about what it is that this place is. As she goes on speaking about why this place isn't the Dome in her mind.

"Julia..." He says her name softly. "How... I was told about the war the moment I arrived. From a man that helped me remove my cuffs but... How do you know all of this?"

Because while it makes sense she's only been here for a few minutes, just from her tones alone he can tell already that isn't the case. Even with his talk with Frank he hadn't learned that much.

It's only then that it occurs to her she hasn't told him how long she's been here for. Julia frowns deeply before she reaches out and takes his hand. She's not entirely sure how to explain this, largely because she's not sure she understands it herself.

"I know this is going to be a little hard for you wrap you're head around but I've been here for almost two months, Barbie. I was here when the Queen of Hearts announced the war." Everyone knew that carnival was only going to end badly, but as far as Julia could tell, no one had been expecting that. The nominal relief she'd felt at being out of Chester's Mill and somewhere else was dashed pretty quickly with that announcement, and she doesn't feel any better putting it on Barbie, either. "When we come here, time won't pass back home. So when we go home, we go back to the same moment we left. If that's not weird enough, people from the same worlds don't always come from the same time, either. That's why you remember things that haven't happened to me yet."

Perhaps it's the way she seems to pause, though it's more than likely how she takes his hand. Maybe they've only been together for a short time, but he truly does feel as if he knows her well enough to know that isn't good. At least not great.

He is quiet, listening to what she's telling him, trying to understand what she's saying. He swallows, opening his mouth and then closing it.

"When you dropped the egg, did it bring you here?"

Because after the dome and the egg, the idea she's been here for weeks and he hasn't known time has passed doesn't surprise him as much as it really should.

"Or... are we sure we aren't still in the dome? After the lights, could it be the same but different?"

She's been in Wonderland longer than she had known Barbie, longer than the Dome had been over Chester's Mill. Life there has almost become a distant memory, like a story she was told about someone else's life; not in the way that Wonderland supposedly robs them of their memories, but it is a bizarre sensation nonetheless. The two weeks before she ended up in Wonderland had been a whirlwind, and her life had changed so dramatically that Julia isn't always sure she had a life before the Dome, before Wonderland.

The fear and concern that the Dome had brought started to fade over time, but it hasn't made mourning Barbie any easier. She hadn't known him long, barely processed the changes he made to life, and certainly hadn't come anywhere near understanding what his role in all of it was, before she ended up in Wonderland. The reality of it is that the moment she met him she'd felt a pull, like a string wrapped around her heart tugging her towards him, as if there was never a time when they weren't inexorably tied to one another.

It was love at first sight, really, but Julia hasn't allowed herself to dwell on it, hasn't allowed herself to accept that the universe could thrust something so precious into the ruins of her life only to, within a breath, extinguish it all together.

She looks down at her fingers entwined in his. She took off her wedding ring after the first night they were together, after she realized there was no point in the performance of Mrs. Shumway anymore. The Dome had fractured their lives in more ways than one, and Julia just wishes she knew if this was supposed to be the start of something, or the end of everything.

"I thought about that too but... I don't think so. Whatever this place is, it's not like the Dome. Maybe on the surface - being trapped, or the events - but it's not the same. I don't think the Dome has anything to do with why we're here." It's not a particularly helpful answer, but it's not necessarily a bad one, either. "I can't say I'm upset that it brought you here, though."

It is exactly how Barbie feels about life before Chester's Mill. He talks about being in the Army, his family, even the early days coming to Chester's Mill while enforcing for Maxine. None of them though seem real after only two weeks. Now they seem like a movie he watched. He can talk about it, and feel immersed in it, but none of it feels like his life.

He wonders what it would have been like coming to this place as Julia had, without anyone to truly ground her to herself and this place. She offers him that. Even just in the few minutes he's had to know that she is there, and real, and whatever the Dome was, life does move on.

"That's... I'm glad I'm here. We're here. Wherever you end up, I want to be there." Of that he can at least speak fully and honestly. He knows this is what he needs. Her. The two of them to talk this out and work together to try and figure out what is going on.

Together he truly does believe they can do it.

"So what do you think it is?" He knows her well enough even in that short time to know that she's already started formulating a thought or two. "Any idea how they managed this?" They hadn't entirely worked that out with the Dome, but they couldn't help but wonder. He would always think that, want to know the answers.

Although she'd had reservations about wishing Barbie could come to Wonderland, knowing that he isn't going home just to die has assuaged them. It means he's okay, that she made the right choice. Maybe it means they have a future together, whatever that might mean to the Dome. It said it was going to protect them, and so far, it had.

The Red Queen claimed the same, though, and Julia hadn't believed her. Yet, here was Barbie. The part of her life she tried to force down, to try to lodge into the back of her mind because it was too painful to think about. A memory that, maybe, she would have been willing to give up just to ease the pain of the wound it left. Just having him here was enough for her to wonder if, maybe, she had misjudged the situation completely.

"I'm still going through the archives, but there's plenty of theories. One of the main ones seems to be that Wonderland is it's own world, and our worlds - all the places where people here come from - are dragged towards it. The overlap dumps people here or causes the events. I don't know if I buy it, though. I don't think anything about this place is random." Her hand tightens around his. After all, if it was random, what are the chances of Barbie ending up there? "From what I've been able to put together, though, we're definitely this place's power source. Our memories are, anyway, but maybe our lives, too."

"How far back do those go?" Because he hasn't looked into it, not yet, but he can't help but to be curious himself. Not surprising at all though that Julia is looking into it and combing through those. It's literally part of the woman that she is.

"So it's the center of the universe, and we're all just planets around it? So to speak," he says, chuckling softly at the idea of it all. Not that it's funny. It's rough and stressful, and he isn't sure what it's going to mean but he will hold to one truth. They aren't alone in this.

"We were trapped in a Dome that may be either the government or aliens," he points out. "I'm not ready to disbelieve in anything." Not after what he's seen, and before all he's about to see in this place.

And then wait what?

"Please, what?" He is trying to process it all but then she is saying that and he isn't sure what to think of it all. "What about our memories and lives? How?" Not that he should ask that. An egg may have caused it all before, and how much different is this?

Perhaps she had been naive to think someone has already told him. Julia doesn't particularly mind being the welcome wagon in general, but this is different. This is Barbie. Having to be the one to tell him this hurts.

She leans in her chair, closer to him. "Wonderland uses our memories. It takes them and somehow converts them into power so it can feed off of them. I know how insane that sounds, but from what I can tell it's true." It really doesn't sound anymore insane than a supernatural dome trapping an entire town, but the Dome was their normal. Wonderland isn't. "The longer we're here, the more memories we lose over time. It's usually connected to the events that come from our worlds, and no one seems to be sure if Wonderland isn't taking memories outside of that, too. It's kind of impossible to trace to what memories people lose because they don't have them anymore."

That is the terrifying part for Julia, knowing there are parts of herself that are slowly being erased.

"The archives go back, I don't know, maybe almost a decade? It's patchy, but luckily the network helped in keeping pretty decent records." She lets out a resigned sigh. "Barbie, I'm sorry, I know this is a lot to take in."

He's been so busy asking question about his life before and how it relates to this place that he hasn't thought to ask more about how this place relates to his life starting over here.

Obviously he had gone about learning all the wrong ways, and needs to accept what Wonderland is, and not try and force it into the mold he knows.

"So they just vanish and we go into it knowing eventually we'll, what? Lose them all? How long is the longer we're here? Do we have a clue about more than a decade?" Maybe it's for the best that he's learning this from Julia. If he'd been told this from anyone else, there's a chance that Barbie wouldn't listen. At the very least he wouldn't believe them. Coming from Julia though, he had no reason not to believe it. Fear it, sure, but not think it was a lie.

"Have people tried recording the most they can about their lives, to see what does vanish and to remember them?"

Already he's considering doing this, though for all he knows it could be memories of a scraped knee in third grade, and not meeting Julia.

He offers her a near smile. "Not your fault. You're just the messenger."

In a way, it doesn't help that he believes her. She still feels like she's making all of this up, like it's a dream and she's filling in the blanks with things that don't make sense until she finally wakes up. Julia isn't trustworthy; she hasn't felt trustworthy since what happened in Chicago, and admitting to Junior what she had done only to have it revealed to Barbie at the worst possible moment only proved to remind her how ashamed she was of what she had done.

She wants people to believe her, to trust her. Maybe that's why being the monarch feels so important to her, though it doesn't do much good here.

"I haven't really got a straight answer to that. I get the impression that writing it down won't help but even if it did... You can't write down everything. And if Wonderland is slowly taking our memories, it's going to start with the things we wouldn't even think about writing down."

It doesn't mean she hasn't been trying it; Julia has taken as many notes as she can and written down everything that comes to her about her own life, just to see. Still, she doubts the good it will do. "The fact of the matter is, I have no answers and about a million questions. I can't tell you anything about this place for sure. It's like the Dome all over again."

Believing Julia is easier than dealing with this place directly. In a way, it's cheating. The basic leg work is done, and he just has to go on after that. He doesn't have to face this without all this knowledge. Not like Julia had to.

Which is why he wants to give her all the benefit of the doubt that he can. Not just for her sake, but for all that she offers him in knowing what all is going on for him.

"How slowly? Do you see the damage in others that they've gotten swiss cheese for memories?" It gave them a time frame at least to try and figure out just where they stood at least. And just how much time they had to try and work this all out.

"Well, at least you're not in this alone then. We were working on figuring that out, we'll figure this out. At the very least keep our heads above water, right?"

It helps to be believed. Strangely, Julia hasn't had much of an issue in that department when she talks about the Dome in Wonderland. Maybe it's because whatever doubt people might have had about the supernatural or the unbelievable have been obliterated by Wonderland's existence, but no one looks at her like she's crazy here.

"No one I've met is that far gone," she admits. "So far the only person who seems to be is Alice, but I haven't been able to talk to her yet. From what I've been told, she's lost all her memories of home but one."

She wishes she had more information than that, but there's only so much she's been able to glean from the elusive residents.

"Oh," Julia says, reaching into her shirt to pull out the chain around her neck. "I had these when I left." She pulls it over her head, her palm open to reveal his dog tags as she presents them to him.

"Alice." He repeats the name back to her, knowing where this is going. "So like Alice the kid in the books and the movie? That Alice? So she's really part of this?"

Pausing, considering that as he sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. "So it really is Wonderland, and not just a name they're using to cover this place and whatever it is?"

Without Alice, he has assumed that because thinking that is easier than the truth. A truth wherein this is a place that became a fairytale in their world, it's hard to handle. Even so much as he's trying.

Though thoughts of Wonderland come to a halt in that moment, blinking as she holds out his dog tags.

"You... Oh..." His hand closes over hers, but he doesn't take the tags right away. "Maybe that's a good thing. So you would have them here to remember me."

"A part of it as much as we are. It seems like she came here the same we did... Whatever way that we did. But, yeah, it seems like this place really is Wonderland."

She doesn't like it anymore than he does, even if she has been here long enough to at least get used to the idea.

His hand around hers grounds her back into reality, though, and she leans into him. The fact that he's here with her has yet to fully sink in, she realizes. It feels like she's been so long without him. "That's why I kept them at home," she admits, knowing full well he'll understand what she means. She thought she had left him to die; they both knew that it was likely when he made the choice to protect her and the kids. The dog tags were all she would have left of him.

"And no way of finding out why she's stayed this long? Is that what we have to look forward to?" Already he's thinking about it. About the people that are there, who say they haven't been there that long. What if they have though. What if they have and aren't aware of it because of the memories lost?

"You sure you shouldn't keep them then?" Not that he's planning to die, but not sure if he should worry about it being the case in this place. He smiles though, squeezing her hand. "Kidding. I have no plans to die. Not here. Not home. Promise."

"It's not like she has a choice. None of have a choice. We're no better off than we were under the Dome." She sighs, her head falling to the side in a brief moment of resignation. "But we're no worse off, either."

There's no way to tell what's true and what isn't anymore. Barbie will figured that out pretty quickly, just like Julia did.

She leans closer, pulling one hand away from him so she can cup his cheek as she presses a kiss to his lips. "You better keep that promise. I already thought I lost you once. I'm not doing that again."

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If you don't control your temper, [open]

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