I'm sorry but the princess is the castle // Shrimp

The late evening sun cast a darkening glow over the district, and for Madison Dewitt it was a common sight. In the past few months he had spent ever more time in his families tree house to keep himself occupied. None of his siblings really came up to it anymore; or at least if they did it was never with him. Madison supposed that such things were considered beneath most of them now as they had had to grow up so fast. But there was something about the solitude that he found appealing. Being alone with ones thoughts was not a terrible feeling if you were intending to be alone. And since no one really used the tree house for anything he had taken it upon himself to turn it into his private library. One full wall was taken up by a series of three bookshelves, each packed to the brim with books on every subject in existence. If he had been able to fit a desk in there, he would have, but scaling the rope ladder had been hard enough with the slats he had brought up one by one on his back for the shelves.

He had whiled away more afternoons than he could count reading in his little fortress, shut away from the world, and occasionally watching the district from his perch. However, this time, he wasn't exactly alone. Alice Sullivan was in the treehouse. A Sullivan. Madison was fairly certain that his siblings would not approve, but he wasn't inclined to tell them about anything because they only talked to him when they needed something; it was never about him. Of course, it wasn't like he had invited Alice to spend time with him, he had simply forgotten to pull the ladder up behind himself and she found her way up there. The girl had a habit of finding him, something that was intriguing, but he never spent much time dwelling on it. She hadn't said much of anything just yet, but he was sure that she wanted to. She had a bottle with her, something that smelled of strong drink. Madison recoiled inwardly at that.

More than a few of the books he had read about the human body had swayed him from ever desiring to engage in certain activities, and anything that was basically poisoning oneself was something that he intended to stay away from in order to keep his intelligence sharp. He sat cross-legged in a corner of the makeshift room, a book about fowl open to a page comparing the velocity of laden birds to unladen birds on his lap, gripping a cup of chilled tea in one hand. There was a small icebox in the treehouse in which he occasionally kept beverages. It was easy to carry a bag of ice up the ladder as long as it was in a pack slung across his body and so when it needed a refill, he obliged. Sipping from his cup, he watched his 'guest' warily over the edge of his reading material. They had not yet truly had an extended dialogue and thus Madison was not sure why Alice was always hanging around him. Every time that they had been near each other before, something or someone had interrupted before anything could be said.

However, she hadn't said anything yet, though he was sure he had seen her take a couple gulps from the bottle. Madison had nothing to say. He was not the type of person that started conversation; he observed, he reacted, he watched, but he did not instigate. He calculated, but he did not make the data known. There were plenty of reasons that Alice might want to talk to him, not the least being the common denominator of what had happened to their fathers. Or perhaps to talk about the death of her sister Cleo. Otherwise, she was likely attempting to get some information, and that was something that Madison was okay with because it wasn't as if people came to him for anything else.