Hatter is a con man, and so he really doesn't understand why Alice gets so upset when one of the first things he does when he gets to her world (other than calling a hospital to pick her up, waiting a day, and then kissing her breathless) is find himself a little crime.

He doesn't even steal anything at first, just walks into a back-room poker game (the suits on the cards are very amusing for awhile, all things considered) and wins a round or two. He's very good at poker, Wonderland-style, and doesn't find much of a difference between his version and theirs. He walks out of there with a pocket full of spending money and no one the wiser.

He also knows how the world of crime works. He played both sides for years, after all, and did it very successfully. His tea shop had even been a well-respected establishment, and in a corrupt Wonderland, having a well-respected and profitable business was no small feat.

The problem, he supposes, is that the government of Wonderland was very openly corrupt. There's a lot of wiggle-room for unscrupulous forms of business in a country with an openly corrupt government. Alice's home, however corrupt her government may or may not privately be, is a little different, and the little niggle is that he hasn't quite figured out how to navigate through its darker corridors completely undetected. Yet.

"Hatter, how am I going to explain this to my mother?!" Alice hisses through the bars, and Hatter smiles up at her apologetically, unsure of what she expects him to say.

She is lovely even in the terrible fluorescent lighting, though, and he gets up off his cot to lean against the cold bars and admire her instead of answering.

She flushes. "Hatter! This is serious." She leans closer to him to whisper, "I don't even want to know how you got yourself put into the system so quickly. You weren't born here! How do you have a birth certificate?"

He tangles his fingers with hers, and is pleased to note that in spite of how obviously peeved she is, there is no resistance as he pulls her hand towards his face. He rests his cheek against the back of her hand, and marvels at the infinitesimal softening of her face looking up at his. How in the world, he wonders, has he ended up with her? "You're probably better off not knowing the answer to that." He says quietly, with just a hint of smirk. "And you don't have to tell your mother."

She frowns at him, but she doesn't pull her hand away. "I can't believe you tried to bribe a police officer." Her fingers flex in his grasp, "What were you even doing, anyway?"

"I don't think you want to know that, either. 'Plausible deniability' is the phrase, right?"

Her eyes flare with alarm, and then narrow. "Hatter."

"Alice?"

She rolls her eyes, and startles the hell out of him when she grabs the collar of his shirt and hauls him closer. Her kiss is quick and hard at first, but his mouth curves slyly when her hand slides from his collar to grip a fistful of his hair and the kiss deepens into something hot and liquid that turns his knees to jelly. When she pulls away, she looks more amused than angry. "What am I going to do with you?"

Hatter's eyes are heavy-lidded in the wake of her kiss, and he says musingly, "More kisses, I think." When she scoffs and pulls away from him, he feels the cool air chase away the heat of her body, and nods, "Definitely more kisses."

She sighs and steps out of reach, leaving him hanging on the bars looking at her. She smiles. "I'll see you in a few hours." She says, and he knows that this is true. She'll be waiting, and maybe she'll rough him up a bit for getting caught, but he isn't worried. He's even a little excited by the idea.

Hatter is a con man and, if he can say so himself, a bit of a rogue, but this is alright, because Alice likes him this way.