Disclaimer: The characters in this story are the property of SyFy and Nick Willing and are only used for fan related purposes.

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House of Cards

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Alice may have had enough of Wonderland, but Hatter was never meant to leave.

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Time, Hatter decides as he folds his arms behind his head and stares up at the cracked, white ceiling, is a fickle thing.

He's careful to keep that thought to himself, though. He's never forgotten the story of his great Uncle Hatter, twice removed, who found himself in a never-ending tea party all because Time got a little huffy.

He feels stifled, time stretched thin, each day lasting longer than the last. Alice doesn't say anything when she notices that the clocks around his borrowed apartment have stopped. She suspects he's stopped them himself; the drop of dried jam and a greasy smudge of the best butter she notices on the rim of the wall clock doesn't do anything to change her mind. She wonders why he would do such a thing but, careful and wary and still so surprised he followed her through the Looking Glass, she never asks.

Hatter has lost track of how long he's been on the other side. Minutes feel like days, hours years and he finds himself talking randomly at Time, recommending it quicken, pleading it to slow, bribing it to stand still whenever Alice is with him. But Time is, as ever, a stubborn mistress and the moments between classes, between work, between the humdrum life on this side of the Looking Glass, those moments with Alice fly by, slipping through his fingers like sugar dissolving into his morning tea.

It had been a flight of fancy, a whim, a fantastical notion that sent him from the world he always knew into a place he'd only heard about in stories. No amount of cream cake or chocolate would've been enough for him to forget Alice, the only Alice that mattered to him, the Alice of new legends. He couldn't stay behind, not in a world that had no need for him any longer—no Tea House, no Resistance, no reason for him to stay.

So he didn't.

One jump and Hatter left his life behind in favor of joining hers. It was the only thing he could do, following after Alice just the way he'd done her entire time in Wonderland. And, for a time, he was content. He was happy.

He still is. In a way. He slipped right into Jack Heart's shoes—figuratively, that is, seeing how Hatter's feet could never fit into the shoes the Prince—no, the King of Wonderland—had left behind when the White Rabbits came calling. He moved into Jack's apartment, sleeps in Jack's bed and goes out for pizza with Jack's Alice.

His Alice.

It's too easy, how simply he seems to fit in this strange new world. He has a new name—David—a new job—construction worker—and all the tea he can drink. He has Alice, the greatest thing he has to fear in this place is Carol Hamilton, and, for all the ways he's different, those differences help him fit in all the better.

If only he felt like he belongs here. Alice may have had enough of Wonderland, but Hatter was never meant to leave.

It's the little things that remind him he isn't in Wonderland anymore. It's the tea—which is better, he decides—and the scenery—which is… not, he admits—and the way everything is set on the ground—it's not so little but he misses the height. He misses life on the edge where one wrong step meant you were falling. He misses the thrill of the chase, the smuggling, the double-sided life of Hearts' employee and member of the Resistance. He misses the danger.

Not that things aren't dangerous here. They are. In this place there's no Scarabs roaming the skies, out searching for renegade oysters as he'd been used to, but Hatter had nearly been hit by one of the smaller ones that zoomed down the streets.

It's unnatural, he decides, for a flying machine to be on the ground. Give him his smuggling boat any day. And where did all the water go?

And that's not all. He'll spend a handful of minutes a day with his window open, his head hanging out. There's a box on the sill, filled with flowers of every color you could imagine: reds, purples, oranges, blues. Wildflowers, tamed in the city, Hatter's small piece of wonder in this strange new world. He pretends they make him happy but they really leave him unsettled. He tries to make the dirt as hard as he can, watering them only when they needed it, yet the flowers here never wake up. Always asleep, never awake, and nary a bread-and-butterfly in sight.

Alice can't always be there with him, and he misses the company when she's anywhere else.

He doesn't mean to be clingy, and he likes to think he's not too depended on her. But, it's just… well, Hatter is too used to having dozens of people around—the Tea House floor, the countless refugees hiding out in the Great Library—to feel at home in an apartment of one. For all his talk of friends once upon a time, Hatter doesn't make too many too easily. It's what comes of being a bit of a suspicious rogue himself. So suspicious, in fact, that he wishes the damn doctors hadn't taken his body armor off of him because, what with those Scarabs on the ground, he thinks everyone should be protected.

He wonders how he should explain that to Alice. He can't understand how that white robe of hers is good for anything other than sleeping no matter how many times she tries to explain. But, since her explanations usually end up with Hatter flat on his back after a particularly skillful flip courtesy of Alice, he doesn't mind.

Much.

It's the little things that reveal to Alice that he's not as happy as he pretends to be.

He'll make a mention of some sort of wonder that he misses before quickly covering it up with just how tasty pizza is, or how oysters—er, people in Alice's world—er, their world really know how to make a cup of tea. He'll make a joke of how solid a mirror looks before tentatively poking the center with his pointer finger, and laughing when nothing comes of it but a smudge on the glass. He laughs, mutters in relief, but Alice can't help but wonder.

She can't help but wonder just how much of it is words.

Hatter's good with words.

And Alice is learning exactly what he means when he says things that aren't precisely what she thinks he means.

To Carol, it seems as if she got a son when her daughter traded Jack Chase—Heart—in for this David. Before long, the introduction dinner turns into dinners every night in her apartment. Alice isn't ready to move in to Hatter's—Jack's—place and Carol doesn't mind the extra help with dishes. She doesn't say anything when he stays over, though her prim mother's smile has a finally tucked in the corner.

Alice finds his presence at home comforting. She'll sit at her desk, writing a report, reading her textbook while Hatter lounges leisurely on her bed. Sometimes he'll flip through her old dog-eared copy of Alice in Wonderland like a high school student leafing through a history textbook. He murmurs to himself, snorting here and nodding there when he finds something that the author actually got right.

Even she can tell that he's more homesick than he'll ever admit to her.

"You don't have to stay," she tells him when her guilt at being greedy—her guilt at keeping him with her instead of where he really belongs—gets to her. Her luck with guys has never been good, and she wonders if Hatter really meant it when he said her luck was changing. She asks, "Do you want… are you going to go back?"

"Hell, no," he answers with a cheeky smile. "With no tea shop and a prat like Jack Heart on the throne? I belong here, Alice, with you."

It isn't the truth. Not really, anyway. He's quite sure he belongs with Alice… it's just the here part that doesn't sit well with him.

He tries. Alice knows he's trying. It's more than she should've asked for, and she's not even sure she really asked. Not that she isn't grateful or glad or giddy that he's there with her. She is. But she's never been the sort of girl who defined herself by who she was with but, still, there's something so right, so perfect about Hatter and Alice that she can't imagine him going back. Even if it's obvious he misses Wonderland, even if he's doing everything he can to make it work here and it's just not right, she wants him here.

Alice wants him in her world with her far more than she wants to ever go back to Wonderland.

She knows she's greedy. Wonderland took her father from her. It's time she took someone from Wonderland.

And Hatter is only too happy to do that—for her.

Still, for all his words and his promises and his impressive attempts to fit in—she's more of an outsider than he is, even if he refuses to part with his trademark hat—sometimes Alice will visit him during a break between her classes and just find him sitting at his table. A house of cards, flimsy but stable if constructed by a capable hand, is more often than not set carefully before him and there's that familiar dimpled grin as he leans forward and blows and the house of cards simply falls.

Author's Note: This is a little something I had an idea for while working on two other Alice pieces: the next chapter of Gumshoe and a Supernatural/Alice crossover for the new_wonderland challenge (don't judge me, heh, it'll be... interesting when it's done). I wanted to see a little of what Alice and Hatter might experience after the initial honeymoon is over.

-- stress, 02.28.10