Something grasped at Matthew's shoulders from behind and he heard a quiet, confused muttering come from there. Alfred, he thought. Alfred often did things like this; picked him up or held him, forgetting his strength. But Alfred had just left and - it was strange. The hold was like that of – well, not the pinch of fingers. Like small hands. Or what Matthew imagined small hands would feel like on shoulders. Matthew flicked a glance over his shoulder and then fell forward in surprise, suddenly free of the hold – and sitting on the floor. There, standing in his living room like everything was perfectly normal and all the right size, was a – a – it wasn't possible.

Matthew stared into space, shocked, until it spoke. "Where are your wings?" Stupidly, he reached around to his back, as if surprised at the lack of wings protruding, grasping at the skin there.

A thought pierced his mind, a single grain of sense forcing it's way through a crowd of confusion. That is a person, it told him. That is a man. Matthew stared at him. "I thought you were Alfred."

The man tilted his head to the side and blinked. "Oh. That's…where are they? Do you even have th – I don't think you could fly without them." The man began to move forward, stretching out a hand towards Matthew's shoulder, but, almost involuntarily, he crawled backwards in a violent flurry of movement, and the man paused. He squinted at Matthew.

This was not possible. Matthew was about to consider the possibility that he was having some ridiculous dream, but dismissed this theory since he'd been doing laundry previous to this. People don't do laundry in their dreams. But this was not possible. Strange, tiny men do not just wonder into your home and inquire into your lack of flying ability.

"Did my papa make you?" Matthew asked the man. That was the only halfway plausible conclusion he could come to. A moving…a frighteningly real, though of course not real, doll. A doll that was obviously baffled by his question. Frighteningly. Frighteningly real. Terrifying, really.

"Uh, what? Of course not, I'm," he straightened, lifted his chin a little, and grinned. "I'm the prince." He faltered, his eyebrows lowering in doubt. "Don't you know me?"

Matthew studied him. The 'prince' was maybe half a head shorter than him and was dressed in tones of dark blue and black. The style of the clothes suggested crappy 1400s dramas, whilst the cloth itself looked untarnished and expensive. The fine threads of silver that weaved through his jacket matched the colour of his hair, which was deeply in contrast to the uncomfortable red of his eyes. He stood straight-backed; in fact the only thing about him that did not seem practiced and pristine was his slightly bumped nose and the bruise on his jawline. He should have come across astringent and formal but his unsure expression, which was at odds with the sharp angles of his face, made him seem very childlike.

"No," Matthew told him. "I don't know you."

The man opened his mouth to speak but, seemingly at a loss for words, closed it again. After a long, drawn out moment, he seemed to regain composure. "Well, my name is –"

"Get out." Matthew spoke so quickly that it came out like 'gehrowat', though he was too worried about this ridiculous hallucination to think about enunciating. Perhaps I really should be concerned for my sanity, he thought and, as an afterthought, I will not listen to anymore of Arthur's stories.

Matthew supposed that if someone had asked him before what he would have done upon meeting someone like himself, he may have expressed some sense of vague euphoria, and that would have been because he really didn't know. What do you do when the very situation you've been hoping for your entire life comes along? Of course, never open hope, not the kind of hope you're allowed to feel. It's a destructive kind of hope. Hope for something so impossible that you just wish that you didn't feel it. For every second he spent hoping, there were two spent scolding himself.

While lost in this tirade of self-pity, he had forgotten for a moment that the apparition of an indignant prince still stood before him.

"That was rude," the prince told Matthew. His red eyes were wide and unblinking and the way he said it, it didn't sound like an accusation. "I need to introduce myself, and then you'll offer me tea, and then I'll leave, but you won't say 'get out'." He squinted a little. Even in my imagination I am surrounded by airheads. "Anyway," one side of his mouth lifted into a half smile, "my name is Gilbert." Airheads with stupid names and, now that I think about it, stupid accents. Matthew studied Gilbert's only slightly endearing smile for a short moment before scrambling to his feet. This is ridiculous. In fact, the more he came to terms with the situation, the more ridiculous it seemed.

"I can't make tea." Matthew threw his hands up, looking from side to side, encouraging the man to take in the doll house-esque surroundings. "No power. Besides, isn't it rude to come barging in to someone's house and start grabbing at them and asking about their lack of – extensions?"

"Extensions?"
"Extensions."

Gilbert took his bottom lip into his mouth and furrowed his brow in concentration. After a few silent seconds, he breathed out a heavy sigh and said, with a high pitched and disturbing laugh, "Princes don't need to be polite."

During what was the possibly the bravest moment in Matthew's life thus far, he moved forward with his fist raised to punch Gilbert, but to no avail since he caught Matthew's hand in his palm, just a small distance from his face. Gilbert used both hands to bring Matthew's fist down to his chest level and scrutinise it, so that Matthew staggered forward a little. He flattened out Matthew's fingers and pointed at his thumb, which had been tucked into the centre of the fist.

"Don't do that," he murmured. "You'll break your thumb." He released Matthew's hand and Matthew pulled it up to his chest, cradling it with the other, a stricken and slightly offended expression on his face.

"How did you even get in here?" Matthew asked.

Gilbert flicked his wrist in the general direction of the front door of the doll house. "It wasn't hard."

"I meant the house," Matthew explained, his voice slowing. His inner voice chided him for his rudeness. It occurred to Matthew he'd never been so bold, though it was also true that he'd never had a chance to be.

Gilbert sneered. "This is a house. Are you stu- oh." A strange epiphany-like expression settled over Gilbert's features and he looked at Matthew with a strange mix of horror and intrigue. "You know you're in a human house?"

Matthew considered trying to hit Gilbert again and afterwards noted he should stop spending so much time around Arthur. "Of course I do. How did you get in?" Matthew repeated.

His expression cracking, Gilbert started to laugh again, his hands covering his stomach as he rose into the air, circling the room as his laugh rose in volume. He made obvious attempts to speak but they were cut off with gasping breaths. "You – I – are you – !?" His laughter eventually began to fester out when he hit his head on the overhanging light, and he sank to lie on the floor, holding his sides and looking over at Matthew occasionally, only to dissolve in giggles once again each time. Standing only to go and lean against the wall, Gilbert wiped his eyes and stared at Matthew with a scrutinising expression. "You live in a human house."

"Your skills of deduction are uncanny. How did you get into the human house?" Matthew once again inwardly scolded himself for his bad manners, but honestly aside from his kind demeanour he wasn't really very patient and especially not with impossibly short albinos who come wondering into other people's houses and messing up the lights on their ceili- he flew. Matthew, thinking back, recalled the faint buzzing sound and blur that hovered over his back and was now hidden from sight. He flew. Matthew staggered backwards, his hand lifting to rest on his forehead and his eyes swivelling to the ground. He flew.

Matthew barely registered that Gilbert had started talking again, and his hand slid from his forehead to the top of his head where it began to knead anxiously at his hair, his mind flicking between crappy overdone cartoons and the fluttering, buzzing colours at Gilbert's back as he hovered, between borrowers balancing atop strands of grass and the man who stood in front of him.

Feeling once again a small hand come to rest on his shoulder, Matthew looked up. "Are you alright?" Matthew, almost deliriously, listed that Gilbert found it difficult to make his way around 'r's, and when he looked up from the crimson stains of his eyes, he saw thin, veined strips peaking over Gilbert's silver hair.

Wings. Oh.

And with that, much like his father upon seeing him years before, Matthew dropped to the floor, unconscious.