Poisoned Piece: Zwischenzug
Hatter was the sort of person who lived by appearing as he was not, projecting and exaggerating only whatever parts of himself he wanted to show. He could take the truth and twist it so far around that it sounded like a lie, and the things he could do with a lie weren't talked about in polite company.
Dr. Dee and Dr. Dum were not polite company. So when the room swirled on and they began to poke and prod around his brain he showed him all the smoke and mirrors, the masks and the web of lies he could throw over anyone at any given moment. He hid in the shadows of his mind as the pair observed the trappings.
"At last," one said.
"A challenge," agreed the other.
Dodo and Caterpillar talked, and talked, and talked some more, cover enough unknown subjects that Alice was merely listening now.. In fact, it had taken long enough to get to that point that Charlie began to nod off, Duck left all together, and Owl ducked out only to return with some clothes for her: trousers and tunics, mostly.
"They were my daughter's," she said, patting Alice absently on the shoulder. "She was about your age. I've kept them in good repair. You're going to need more than that dress if you're going to be running around outside."
There was nothing Alice could say to that but "Thank you." And then ask where she could safely change.
As the conversation meandered through the night, Alice adjusted Charlie so that he wouldn't wake with even greater back problems, and wished that Hatter was here. She wished for her father as well, out of habit as much as the fact that she knew they were close to being reunited. She wished Jack was here, for the knowledge that he was safe as much as the desire to smack him for getting her into this mess. And to top it all off she wished for her mother too.
"Perhaps this conversation could be continued after a night's rest?" Charlie suggested suddenly, scaring the crap out of her. Dodo and Caterpillar jumped too.
"There's room for the three of you in the maritime section," Dodo said, rubbing at his eyes and reaching for some more papers. "Ask Owl to show you the way."
Duchess had the plan for their escape laid out well in advance. There was a safe house in the city they could lay low in, at least until the search parties became less ardent, stocked with food and clothing for them both. What she was lacking was a good excuse to avoid talking with Jack. He stood leaning with his back against the door, not asking for anything verbally, but demanding it all the same. It was in the way he'd managed to recover his poise since leaving the Eye Room, in how he was block off the exit, in how his eyes followed her around everywhere. It was in the way he looked at her though he wasn't sure whether or not he should be afraid.
She felt naked. Not nude- she could handle being nude perfectly well, thank you- but naked: completely exposed and defenseless.
"You had this planned."
It sounded like a compliment, but Duchess could, as always, hear the questions he wanted to ask behind it: for me? For us? For what?
"Once it became obvious that you were going against your mother it seemed prudent to," Duchess hadn't meant to end her sentence there, but she had to swallow, and when she was finished the words still wouldn't come.
She had imagined this scenario before. On the run from the Queen, but free from the Court, he would be so pleased that she had thought ahead and she'd be able to pledge her reciprocated, undying love for him and together they could remake Wonderland. There had been none of his suspicion in the fantasy. There had been no Resistance ties just recently cut, and especially no Alice.
"We can stay here for a few days," she continued finally, avoiding his eyes as much as she could. "The search parties will likely pass us by."
"And then what?" Jack asked.
"We figure out what to do about your mother." The reply was less certain than she'd like it to be. Everything was.
Carpenter was thinking: he wouldn't call it remembering.
The house had been yellow; the shutters were blue, the roof was black, and there was a cherry tree in the front that was sometimes pink, sometimes green, and sometimes nothing at all. His apartment was a sterile white and red combination, same as any who worked in the Queen's employ.
The house felt more like home, in his memories, than anything he could feel about the apartment.
The wife's name was Carol. Carol Lewis when they met, Carol Hamilton when they married. A no-nonsense woman, a psychiatrist, able to just barely follow along with the Robert's neurobiology hypothesis the same way the Robert could just barely follow along with the cases of her anonymized patients. He didn't have a wife. He had the Walrus, who was hardly his partner in anything other than work, so it wasn't really a fair comparison. Of course he felt more for the wife than his Walrus.
And the girl… the girl was missing. But he could talk to someone who'd known her.
It felt to Alice like she had barely curled up on a bed made of sea shanties when Charlie was shaking her gently by the shoulder. Dodo and Caterpillar were continuing their conversation, without a thought as to whether she was there or not. It soon became clear to Alice that whether or not she would be allowed into the Resistance was going to be a source of great contention between the two men, which in turn was something of a source of contention between herself and pretty much everybody. She was beginning to think that Hatter's instance that she save herself and leave Wonderland without rescuing Jack or her father first was actually the Wonderland version of chivalry. Everyone's else version of 'you need to fend for yourself' ended up being more and more focused on 'because we aren't going to help you' rather than 'there's nothing else to do'.
It was depressing, the thought that if Caterpillar won this argument it would only be because they thought her father was still useful to them. What was more depressing was the thought of what Dodo winning would mean.
Charlie, however, pulled through for her again.
She hadn't eaten anything remotely approaching either breakfast that morning or dinner the night before, and there was only so much her body could ignore in favor of focusing on making herself appear useful. When her stomach growled right in the middle of pointing out that she wasn't exactly a useless fighter and the bruises she could see on Dodo's face proved it, Charlie passed over a cucumber sandwich.
"Thank you," she said, more grateful then she ever had been for a cucumber sandwich before. She'd nearly eaten it all before she realized that Dodo and Caterpillar had broken off were both staring at it.
She swallowed. "Charlie, do you have any more sandwiches?"
"Yes," he replied, uncertainly. "Would you more?"
"No, but I think our Resistance friends would," Alice said, turning from the knight to face the two men in question.
She knew the Resistance was a bit short on food: Hatter wouldn't have been able to bribe his way into the Library with two wheels of cheese otherwise. She'd been counting on it to get inside; she didn't know how else she was going to get this far, not without hurting anyone. And with Hatter now captured (don't think about it, Alice she ordered herself) the Resistance would likely be in even more dire straits. Hatter had said that they depended on him, that he was feeding them.
And Charlie was good at surviving, and producing. He'd shown them his inventions for tilling more soil than any one man's food consumption could require. Provided that Charlie was on board-
She looked back at the knight, who'd drawn himself straight and proud as he placed two more sandwiches on Dodo's desk. He winked at her as he sat back down. She smiled. Yeah, Charlie was on board.
When Hatter came back into himself, he first noticed that he was in a lot of pain. His bones ached and his head pounded and his gut twisted and his lungs burned and his throat was lined with razors and…
Perhaps it would be easier to list what didn't hurt. After a long time's thought, he realized that this list had a single entry: his hair.
He lay curled on the floor of his cell, dry heaving, as awareness trickled back in. His name was David Theophilus Hatter. He was 43 years old. His parents were Madeline and Janus from the Grand Chess Alliance. They'd died when he was young, and he'd look after himself with sneaking and thieving until he got his own business. He smuggled, and he sold Tea. He lived above his Tea Shop. He worked below his bedroom. It was all worth it; Alice was safe.
Alice… Alice was his… Alice wasn't his… Alice was worth it. It being, he supposed, the agony he was currently in.
Why was that-
The rest of his life seemed to take him all in a rush. He had a best mate, Dormie. He used to have a best mate, Mad March, who he sort of hated now. No, he didn't hate him, he just wanted him to go back to being dead. He hated the Tea, but he loved selling it, because he was really, really good at it. He liked to read…
There was something missing. Something that connected reading to Alice who he didn't like and wasn't entirely sure he loved either. His experience with love was that it was a strong, warm, glowing, prideful, slightly guilty emotion that kept you tied to a thing even when you'd be better off leaving it alone. He supposed that applied to Alice: just take out the prideful part and add in a heap of terrifying. Alice was- Alice was safe. Not for him, but from him, and everyone else.
There was still something missing, though. Something in between that very wet dress and running from Mad March. Something to do with books and birds…
How had he gotten into smuggling again?
Duchess's outfits were every bit as showy in hiding as they had been the past several years. Jack was unsure what to make of it, watching the hem of her dark green skirt fall several inches above what would conventionally be considered a decent length as she adjusted it. Her hands moved restlessly as she adjusted her top as well: technically a turtleneck, except for the part where the only opaque part of it was the circles covering her breasts.
He continued to watch. Duchess continued to fiddle. The clock ticked loudly on the wall.
It had more or less been like this for two days now: as the sun set, it would be two-and-a-half. They'd tried to talk about their plans, but it was a conversation greatly hindered by the fact that Jack had no idea how far he could trust Duchess. This made it impossible for him to reveal any of the hideout his Resistance ties afforded him. It also made it hard for him to take her suggestions seriously, not when they all had the disadvantage of him being dependant on her for food and supplies and to remain hidden. And so they sat, frozen in indecision until one of them lost their patience. They had both grown up in Court- it could be a very long while before that happened.
Duchess opened her mouth, and he straightened. She startled, then coughed.
The clocked ticked louder.
No, not louder. Quicker.
"Is it supposed to be doing that?" Jack asked.
The clock began to screech. Duchess ignored it, hurrying over to the window instead, gasping at what she saw between the blinds. Jack stood behind her and peaked over her shoulder.
Suits: they swarmed outside on the pavement like ants over a picnic, dispersing into every building in groups of ten and twelve. Jack swore, and ran for the bedroom.
"Jack!" Duchess called. "What are you doing? We need to leave, now!"
Jack reached beneath his pillow, and pulled out the gun Duchess had been wearing when they escaped. She hadn't noticed him take it from her things yesterday, something which he was very glad of now.
"Jack!" she hissed, rounding the door. She stopped short at the sight on him. Jack straightened himself, and checked the bullets.
"Jack?" Duchess asked.
"You're right," Jack said, as calmly as he could. "It's time to go."
She started towards him and he aimed the gun at her. She froze, and she melted: tears leaked out of her eyes and her shoulders shook as she became rooted to the spot. "Jack…"
"I can't trust you," he said, moving off to the side. She turned with him, not breaking eye contact. "I can't live like this, always wondering what sort of game you're playing, what it is you want from me. First you pretended to be my friend-"
"I didn't pretend," Duchess whispered. "Jack, I-"
"What is it you want? What is it you're looking to gain from this?" he cried. The gun wavered in his hands, involuntarily. "Tell me the truth!"
Somewhere, this had become not about the danger approaching them, but about the two of them. The conversation they'd spent the longest amount of time avoiding was upon them at last. Unfortunately, no one had informed the Suits of that.
The first one snuck up behind Duchess and grabbed her around the waist.
"Drop-" The Suit started, but never finished her sentence. Jack shot her between the eyes: Duchess stumbled out of her now-limb grasp then pivoted around the snatch at her gun, still in its holster. She fired off another shot. There was a grunt from the main room, and then they were left with the smell of iron and gunpowder, and the screeching of the clock: it's time to get out.
"They'll have heard that," Jack remarked, not thinking about how he had shot a person rather than a clay pigeon, not thinking that he had done it to protect someone he'd never truly known.
"We could probably steal a boat from the docks," Duchess said. "As long as we could make it that far."
"Let's use the service elevator," Jack replied.
The stepped over the corpses and around the blood, leaving the door open behind them. The walk down the hall was a quick clatter of heel on tile, and then the elevator doors dinging quietly against the thunder of footsteps drawing ever nearer up the stairs.
"I love you," Duchess said, quite suddenly. "I want you to believe that."
It took Jack the rest of the elevator ride to figure out that she was answering his question.
The dosed the boy with Apathy when they set him up. No one said anything, but you couldn't fool the Carpenter. He was dressed in the red scrubs he'd come to associate with long-term patients of the Tweedles, and the disaffected, glassy-eyed way with which he was studying some of the stains on his set were a sure sign of Apathy use.
Carpenter sat down opposite from him. He didn't look up, but remarked "I think my sleeve might be burnt into my arm."
Carpenter checked, and sure enough the sleeve of his right arm was riddled with burns that went straight to his skin, meshing the fibers to it.
"That's going to be very painful coming off," the boy remarked. No, not the boy: Carpenter checked his notes. Hatter, David T was still focused on his sleeve.
"Mr. Hatter," Carpenter said. Hatter didn't look up, but murmured "Go on, I'm listening."
"I'm here about Alice."
The effect was immediate: Hatter straightened considerably and looked him dead in the eye. "What about Alice? Have you heard anything? She isn't here, is she?"
That was the problem with Apathy, they'd found several years back. It wasn't an emotion so much as an absence of emotion, and as the chemicals from the subject's own emotions began to build up the Apathy wore off rapidly. The end result was something completely unmarketable, with a mild use as a tranquilizer.
"No she's still missing," Carpenter replied soothingly, trying to move the kid's emotional state back towards neutral. It worked a little too well, and his attention became refocused on his sleeve.
"I'm curious about her, though," Carpenter continued, trying to get his attention back. "She's certainly seems to cause a lot of trouble."
Hatter wheezed. It sounded like it wanted to be a laugh, and was trying not to be a cough. "The clockwork's not ticking properly."
Carpenter's gaze fell to the watch on his wrist, unnecessary and nonfunctioning and yet…
"Well, that too," Hatter said, following his gaze. "I was actually talking about the fact that you want to start asking me questions again after you've started taking bits and pieces out."
"What?"
"I had most of myself was when I was caught, but there are holes now. The doctors are cutting the bits of me out the Queen doesn't like, I think," Hatter explained, tone flat, like a student giving a presentation on the limbic system.
Carpenter shook his head to relieve it of its cobwebs. "Is Alice a part of these holes?"
"Alice is safe," Hatter said, the words slipping out almost unconsciously.
"Yes, but-"
There was a rap at the door, and Walrus pressed his ruddy face against the glass. His time was up.
"Alice is safe," Hatter repeated.
"Yes, I suppose she is," Carpenter said.
In the end, it was decided that Charlie and Alice would have to split up for the time being. Charlie quite rightly insisted that he be in the City of the Knights while it was hosting Resistance members, and Alice would need to be ready to make the journey to the Casino at a moment's notice, meaning that she would remain in the Library.
Dodo was beyond thrilled. Charlie and Alice even more so.
But that was all there was to do at this point. Charlie would lead a small group of Resistance members who had experience with farming out of the city, and Alice would wait for her chance to topple the house of cards. Until then, the only thing to do was to live day to day as best they could.
Next chapter can be read here.