Fic: PG: The Hangover
The shop was in better shape than he’d anticipated.
He climbed in the back way because there was a far lesser chance of his being ambushed if he went straight into his office rather than through the comparatively open-to-loiterers bidding area. Sure enough, the back was virtually untouched, the green, green grass of his home only slightly wilted in his absence.
The teas he had displayed behind his desk, to entice his informants to be a bit freer with their information, glinted seductively at him as he turned on the lights. He crossed over to the desk, and picked up one of the bottles: the word Peace emblazoned across the front. He stared at it for a while, then put it back on the shelf, unable to drink it, not quite willing to destroy it yet.
He hung up Alice’s- his purple coat on the rack again, and then stood there, at a loss as to what to do next.
What was the matter with him?
This was exactly what he’d wanted. Ding dong, the Queen was gone, and he wasn’t. Not only was he not gone, and not dead, he was young and whole and therefore perfectly capable of building a new life for himself. They’d won. Wasn’t he supposed to feel victorious or something? Anything?
He really should feel like a hot shower and a change of clothes, if nothing else. Actually, no, he did feel like a hot shower and a change of clothes. He was disgusting and smelly and he ached all over, which was probably why he was having trouble feeling as pleased with himself as was his right.
One extremely hot shower and a change into his favorite outfit later, and he was about as pleased as a cucumber faced with vinegar, which is to say, not very pleased at all. He also had visitors, which was to say, he could hear looters wandering about the front of his shop. He decided that he should probably try and dissuade them from causing his property further harm, which was to say, he was an idiot.
“Okay, seriously? Ratty?” Hatter said, hands held at the level of his eyes. “I gave you a full bottle not a week ago. And, I’m not sure if you noticed, but there was a revolution between then and now. There is no way you could possibly be wanting for Excitement.”
And really? The bottle he traded Alice for was the last one he planned on selling, so he was just plumb out of luck.
“I’m not,” Ratty grunted, sounding a bit pissed but holding his gun far too steady to be anything but stone cold sober. “I need something soothing, Hatter. The whole world’s gone mad.”
“Yes, well, you could say-”
“And don’t start yammering to me. I know what your part in this was.”
“Do you know what yours was?” Hatter asked reflexively.
Ratty cocked the gun.
“Ask a silly question…” Hatter murmured, and then spoke a bit more loudly: “Look, are you going to make any demands, or do you just like pointing that thing at me?”
Ratty seemed to need to think about that for a time. “I need something soothing. I know you’ve got stuff in that office of yours. Just get me something to calm my nerves.”
“Okay,” Hatter said, moving back towards the office.
Ratty raised the gun slightly higher. “I do like holding at gun to your head, though.”
That was entirely unsurprising, given the number of people who had threatened him over the past week of so. He was beginning to think he might be some sort of trouble magnet. If it weren’t for the fact that Alice was so very obviously not attached to his side, or anywhere else…
“Do you like it more than a bottle of Serenity?” Hatter asked.
“No,” Ratty replied quickly, lowered the gun again.
“Let’s just go in here then,” Hatter said, reopening the door. He walked across the room to the desk, and pulled the bottle of Serenity from the shelf. He walked almost all the way back to where Ratty stood, entranced by the site of the elixir, and the Hatter tossed the bottle high up into the air.
“Catch!” he yelled.
Ratty cursed and looked up. Hatter knocked him flat with his right hand and caught the bottle with his left, then bent down to retrieve the gun while Ratty was still too dazed to moan over his surely-broken nose.
“Sorry. Tea Shop’s closed, mate,” he said, replacing the bottle on the shelf. He tucked the gun into the back of his trousers and hauled Ratty up and out through the front of the shop. “And you know what? It’s gonna stay that way.”
Pity there was no one around who could be appreciative of his flair. That probably would have cheered him up.
Ratty curled up into a ball as Hatter shut the front door. He then looked around to take a fuller estimate of the damaged done. Two of the windows to the side were smashed, but he could block those off with the tables that had been overturned for no good reason at all. All the tea that had been displayed for prospective buyers was gone, of course, but he wasn’t too worried about that. He couldn’t muster up the concern for anything here at all.
This was what he’d wanted, right? A clean slate, a chance to do something that was both profitable and didn’t involve sucking out bits of people’s souls? He couldn’t do that with tea. He could do with the insurance money, but that was for later.
He should probably block those windows before any other unsavory types came in, or the weather starting to do something horrendous.
He’d finished with that and way back in his office trying to figure out what it was he could do independent of tea when there was an almost timid knock on the backdoor. Curious, and a bit lacking in the proper inspiration, Hatter opened it.
“Hello!” said the club, hauling himself up into doorway. “You must be Hatter.”
Hatter smiled, but didn’t move enough to actually let him inside. “And if I am?”
“Then I’m in the right place,” the Club replied.
Hatter weighed the gun in his trousers with the amount of threat the average Club posed, and found the scales tipped greatly in his favor.
“Alright then, come in,” he said.
The Club did so, closing the door and then hovering nervously as Hatter leaned back against the desk.
“The King of Hearts,” the Club began abruptly. “Has ordered the destruction of all the teas, to be supervised by your truly and like suits. You will be compensated in full for the value of the teas as given previous to Her Late Majesty’s fall from power.”
“ID?”
“Huh?”
“If you think I’m throwing that lot out just because some bloke in a silly hat tells me to, you’ve got another thing coming,” Hattter said. “So, ID?”
The Club sighed, and showed him a picture ID marking him as a Club Three at the Casino, which would have scared the crap out of him on any other day but the one he was in right now, which kind of made him want to push him out the door without giving him the benefit of getting on the ladder first. The Royal Edict was slightly more compelling towards listening to what he said, and after checking it for the obvious sign of fakery, he nodded, satisfied that it was as real as anything could be these days.
“What about the teas the looters got?” Hatter asked.
“I assume you have records?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then you can be recompensed for those as well.”
He thought for a moment, then decided he really didn't care one way or the other, except that if he was going to give that honesty thing a proper go he should probably keep at it a bit longer.
“Is it going to cause trouble if I give you the real ones rather than the cooked ones I’d have been giving the Queen?” Hatter inquired.
“Huh?”
“The Resistance doesn’t run on fairy tales, you know,” Hatter said. “Besides, the way the wind’s blowing these days, my contributions might end up being tax deductable. The records won’t match up with yours, though.”
“I-I think I should have a copy of both, if possible,” the Club stammered.
“Suit yourself,” Hatter shrugged. “Just hold on while I get the reality version.”
When he returned, the Club was staring at the straw-porkpie he’d been wearing for the past several days.
“You were the one who threatened to cut off the Queen’s finger,” the Club said slowly.
“I would have gone for her head, but I didn’t want anyone to say that it was the irony that did her in,” Hatter replied, setting the book down at his desk. He took a stack of papers out of his desk, and then grabbed the copy wand from the jar. “If you want to start flushing teas, the loo’s over there. This is gonna take some time.”
“I- yeah. Okay,” the Club replied. Hatter concentrated on the copy wand as he moved behind him, ignore the clink of glass on metal and the sound of running water. Scan from top to bottom, pause, regurgitate from bottom to top, clear and repeat until…
He didn’t bother adding Ratty’s finder fee to the end of his real records. He thought Alice might appreciate that.
“This stack is the ones that’ll add up with your stuff, this is the ones detailing my Resistance transactions,” Hatter told him, handing him two folders. “Get back to me about the tax deductible thing, yeah?”
“Yeah. Okay,” said the Club, looking mildly bewildered as Hatter steered him towards the door. Hatter considered asking him to pass along a parting shot: something like “Tell Jack I still think he’s a prick,” but then decided against it. More trouble than it was worth, really, especially if word of it somehow got back to…
It was funny, he mused as the door swung shut behind the Club. He had always played one side of the fence against the other, and no it’d finally come down and all he could think of was someone in a different set of pastures entirely.
He hoped she was happy, in her world of pizza and children’s stories. He hoped Jack was the sort of leader she thought he was. And Hatter hoped he could remember what the hell his plan was for this situation, because he’d always had a plan ready and waiting for an eventuality, and not having one was driving him batty.
And he really didn’t, he realized that night, while trying to get comfortable on the fold-out bed. He had a plan for the Queen finding out about his Resistance activities, a plan for Dodo finally refusing to use his services, a plan for Dormie ratting him out, a plan for the Bellman being a double agent, a plan for any of his few informants at the Warehouse or the Hedges dying or blabbing, a plan, in short, for anything that could go wrong. But somehow, he’d never gotten around to planning for things to go right.
He could understand the oversight. When so many things could kill you, why bother to brace for something pleasant? That didn’t change the fact that he still had no idea what he was doing. Half his contacts would be in jail shortly, the other half had been more or less trying to kill him recently, which was bound to make things awkward at the very least. Dormie was alive and still as reliable as a narcoleptic could be, so he probably had a business partner, if nothing else.
Giving up on sleep as a bad job, he stood up and began to pace. What could he even do, though? He’d gotten pretty good at the whole drug-dealing-information-brokering-smuggling bit, all of which would shortly be illegal and very likely wrong as well. So given his propensity for finding the holes in the enforcement portion of the law, what could he do? Work for enforcement?
His bare feet crunched over the grass as he paced around his desk. No, that just wouldn’t do. He wasn’t exactly what you would call a lawful person. Did he want better laws that encouraged a great deal less death and destruction? Yes, of course he did. Did he think that would solve any problem entirely, or even plan on following all the laws himself? No, of course he didn’t.
Dressing that dull would probably kill him anyway.
He could do something privately, he supposed. There were plenty of people who would want to find loved ones, or their bodies, or hated ones, or their bodies or even just plain old possessions. There should be a business in that, and a lucrative one too. He should- he should-
He should be scheming. He should have a brain buzzing with ideas. He should be having Dormie over to weed out the sick ones, he should be getting in contact with the Bellman about who was going to return from whatever place the truly dangerous and/or endangered refugees were sent. He knew he should, and yet he wasn’t, even though it was in his best interests. The path was right there before him, and he couldn’t get his feet to move.
He ended up in from of the coat rack again, clear doors swung open and fingering the sleeve of the purple coat.
Pizza. And lots of other things.
He’d need to go through the looking glass, which would necessitate being nice to Jack, if only for a little bit. There was paperwork he needed, he was sure, although provided the new King had control over the White Rabbit and was willing to let him through that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. He probably wouldn’t be coming back: he’d sign the shop over to Dormie and let him deal with it. Maybe he should suggest the whole private eye thing to him: for someone who spent so much time dreaming, he was really very unimaginative. Good with numbers, though, and practical. He was always straight to the point. Point being that, one way or another, Hatter was going after Alice.
It was perhaps, the best plan he’d ever had.