AiW Kink Entry

'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Disclaimer: I don't own any Alice in Wonderland, least of all Tim Burton's amazing work. Nor do I own any of the scripted lines or rhymes below.

Chapter One – 'Nightmare Eclipse'

The colours were all wrong.

There was too much amber. There always was when he was angry, when he felt the raging madness climb up inside him, leaping and licking, burning way his mind like the flames of Horvendush Day.

That day…

Branded permanently into his memories, the day of feeling the naturally mercurial madness just snap, spoil and fester, everything he knew collapsing in chaotic dust and ash, vanishing before his eyes. His little niece* lying tumbled on the ground, the top hat (identical to his own) he'd guided her through making that very morning especially for the party askew on her head, before she burst to ash and nothingness in a flash of electric purple fire… "Uncle Tarrant…!"

All gone… vanished.

Just like she had.

She…

She had the colours he needed. He knew she did. He could see them in his mind's eye ("Put it out of your mind!"), he could almost taste them – Cool mint and fresh jasmine of pale eggshell blue cloth… Warm sunshine and spiced tea of wheaten white-gold hair… Sugar-sweet vanilla and honeysuckle of creamy skin… Hot, liquid velvet coffee and chocolate brown eyes.

Eyes… "Still she haunts me, phantom-wise, Alice moving under skies, never seen by waking eyes"… Oh, a rhyme… Never by waking eyes… a dream…

His own eyes reflect this dreadful flaming amber onto everything. How can he think clearly when he can't even see clearly? How can you see past your own vision? Bright, poisonous orange always at the corners… Swat it, get rid of it, grasp it, crush it… Pain, his own hair tearing in fistfuls from his scalp, stamped into the ground, strewn amongst dead leaves like glowing embers amongst ash… Hot, red… Red, anger, blood, "Downal with Bluhdy Big Heid!" So much pain, anger, loss and where was she, she was late, why had she left him? He needed her here, needed her to touch him, to tell him she hadn't been a dream.

Like a wish answered, a ghostly hand touched his cheek. She was back, she had come to save him! But…

The colours were wrong. White, too white. White isn't a real colour, it's all the colours and none of them. White was wrong, it showed darkness too easily, it only masked the faults, like snow over mud. Too white, whiter than a ghost, too cold, like frost and snow, winter blotting out everything. And this white-ghost-woman's face hovers before his own, her black lips moving, but he cannot hear, he cannot understand what she says. And he does not care. She is wrong, she is not the right one, she is not her… This wrong one had tricked him into thinking that shewas back!

Enraged, he slaps her hand away and reaches for her throat. Let her feel the pain he feels – she will pay for her trickery!

But now there are more hands, at his head, his necks, his legs, there are arms and torsos forcibly encircling his own, pinning his limbs to his sides, immobilising him. Cold metal encircles his wrists and ankles and the memories burst forth again, filthy black, grey and brown boiling over… He won't be constrained to wait for death again ("Off with his head!"), the Bluhdy Big Heid won't take him again… Bleeding red and black, she knows, the malicious, moronic murderess, but words that begin with the letter 'M' are no good any more, they're gone, she is gone, gone missing.
"We're looking for an 'A' word now", and it's always always always aloneness, abandonment, absence, like the absence of colour in this wrongly white room (bitter, bleeding, salt-in-the-wounds taste), the absence of her, of "Alice, Alice, Alice, where are you, why have you left me…?!

"I'll be back again before you know it." But she isn't there and he knows it.

You're late, Alice. Far too late.

Author's Notes

* Hatter's niece – I noticed a shot of a little girl lying on the ground with a top-hat on in Hatter's flashback of the film, and I decided to play with the idea of very personal loss for him on that day, explaining why he no longer seem associated with his clan. I thought perhaps she might have been his apprentice to hatting for the White Queen, as he says "Hightopp clan have always been employed at Court." But I didn't want to make her his daughter, so there you go. Niece.

Please R&R – Constructive criticism much appreciated!