I wrote this story ages ago but I never posted it here. I figured Hatter would have a terrified reaction to all of the horrible things that have happened—and still happen—in our world. The Queen is a pussycat when you hold her up to Erszebet Bathory. I urge you not to look her up unless you have a strong stomach.

Disclaimer: I do not own Hatter or Alice or anything else you likely find familiar.

o…o

Hatter has always thought that he's seen so much of the worst of human behaviour. The Queen and her loyalists, the Suits, Mad March and his ilk, the Tweedles, even Dodo—all of them monsters in their own way. People who kill, control, torture, hate, and destroy. He's lived in it. He knows firsthand what it's all about.

He figures he's lived in hell and survived it.

Alice's relative shock at what she found in his corrupted Wonderland convinced him that Wonderland under the Hearts was a terrible, scary place to live and that nothing else could compare. Living in constant fear of being arrested and beheaded without being given the chance to defend himself, in danger from the Resistance that he risked his neck to feed and help, in danger of being thrown to Dee and Dum and tortured forever—if not hell, what else was it?

Now he's in Alice's world, in relative safety. Or so he thinks.

For all that she's a good teacher when she knows the answer, there are still myriad aspects of her own world that she doesn't know about, and when she can't answer his questions then he goes for the library and gets lost in the books. It's here where he learns most—it's here where he learns the truth.

Sometimes the truth is terrible.

It begins with one book. One plain black-bound book.

The Diary of Anne Frank.

He's shocked at what he reads. The words and the story cut him deep and he doesn't know what to make of them.

"Did this really happen?" He asks Alice one day, when he can't stand not knowing anymore because just because there are books about it doesn't mean that it's really real.

"Anne Frank? The Holocaust? Sure it did. Why?"

He doesn't answer. He's too shocked.

He becomes disgustingly, morbidly fascinated with disaster. The Holocaust. Mass murder. Serial killers. Genocide. What is 'nine-eleven' and why is it so important? Jonestown? Waco?

The names float in and out of his head. Pol Pot. Adolf Hitler. Erszebet Bathory. Gacy. BTK. Ridgeway. Hussein.

People who wanted other people dead for no reason at all—people who hated other people just for existing and killed them for it. People who tortured. People who destroyed more and did worse than the Queen of Hearts could ever have fathomed.

Pictures of disasters, of the dead, of the tortured, of destruction make his own experiences in Wonderland pale in comparison. There is a huge wide world around him and there is many thousands of years of history just like this to learn.

There is so much hate, all of it needless; the Queen, at least, never bothered with those who didn't cause any trouble. She didn't send Suits to swoop into towns and houses at night and kill everyone there just because they were there. She didn't torture people herself for her own enjoyment, though the Tweedles certainly did; still, even they never went out looking for their own victims to play with.

The things that have happened here—the mass-disasters perpetuated by people who wanted nothing more than to just kill other people. Kill. For no reason. The things that have happened in Alice's world, in Alice's lifetime, so close to where Alice lives, all scare him.

Wonderland is nothing.

This place has the potential to be so much worse.

Alice lives in hell.

And Hatter is determined to protect her from it.