I don't need another fandom right now, but I seem to have found one anyway. I didn't expect to love "Alice" as much as I ended up loving it—and my shipper heart squee's at the Hatter/Alice romance. (Well, why not?) Hatter was my favourite character and we never hear anything about his past, so I felt like writing it.

This story is meant to sound like a narrative; Hatter is telling the story in the third person, but every so often he'll come in with an opinion or observation about the story so in a few places it switches into first person. I do hope it's not too painfully confusing!

Disclaimer: I don't own the character of Hatter, or Wonderland, or anything else you could recognize. It's either been written by Lewis Carroll or Nick Willing.

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Once upon a time there was a little boy named David.

In the memory he's a little boy, but I don't know how old. Maybe five, six years—little, young. Young enough, in any case, to be innocent and wide-eyed, irritatingly perky. Trusting. Stupid.

He has a mother and a father. He lives somewhere in Yorkshire but I don't remember where now. I don't know if he knew then, either. There are villages and cobbled streets, and farms, and lots and lots of sheep.

David's father is an American and he travels all the time. He's away from home a lot—weeks and months at a time—and when he's home it's never for a long time. But he bounces his son on his knee and brings him little toys and sweets and fantastic postcards from the places he's visited, with names that always sound so deliciously foreign and strange to him—Calgary, Miami, Columbia, Melbourne. His favourite one is from a place with a mundane-sounding name: New York. It was all huge towering buildings, lights, people everywhere. It's so different from everything he's ever known—small villages and sheep—that he can't help but fall in love with it the first time he sees the picture on the postcard and I'm not sure he ever fell completely out of love with it.

His mother is kind and she smiles a lot. But she doesn't do anything with the other ladies in the village and keeps to herself. David finds her a lot in the big windowsill with a book in her lap, just staring and staring and staring out the window like she's off in another world and has left her body behind. Perhaps she's absentminded. Perhaps she had something on her mind. He never finds out. The time never seems right to ask. But she spends a lot of time there. Sometimes she's there in the morning when he wakes up and she stays there until after he's gone to bed for the night.

So David learns from a very young age how to fend for himself. He wakes himself up and he feeds himself. He lets the seams out of his trousers when he grows out of them. He scrapes together the money to pay the milkman and buys bread and sausage because if he didn't there would never be any food in the house when his father wasn't around, which is to say most of the time.

He goes to school for a time. A few years. I'm not sure his mother ever noticed he was in school; she didn't notice if he was there or not, if he wandered off, if he went somewhere else for the day. Sometimes I wonder how David survived being an infant when he was dependent on her. It's possible she wasn't always that way. Maybe she was a good mother when he was a little sprog. Evidently someone was around to nurse him and burp him and change his nappies when they reeked. Maybe a nice old lady-neighbour or something came in a few times a day to make sure she hadn't killed the baby.

After a few years he stops going to school. He doesn't enjoy going because the teachers aren't terribly nice and crack his knuckles with a ruler when he falls asleep and crack his backside with a cane whenever he talks out of turn or asks too many questions or does something else that they find objectionable. He's found that means most of his behaviour. Children are to be seen and not heard, even in school where there are only other children. His mother doesn't notice he's not going to school anymore because she's too preoccupied most of the time with staring out the window. Whenever she is lucid enough to notice he exists, he lies quickly and comes up with a fictional teacher and lessons, knowing full well she won't be talking to anybody who might contradict his story.

Instead he spends his days in the public library. Even though he has a distaste for school, he's never found learning to be unlikeable. He'd much rather be in the library amongst all of those ancient books, reading what he wants whenever he wants without worrying about someone else's schedule. He absorbs it all, day in and day out. He's already learned his letters, after all—now all that's left is to learn the words that can be made with them. All of them.

David loves words. He learns to work in them the way artists work with paints or marble. He loves to talk. He loves to see what he can do—what he can get other people to do—with his words. Even at a young age, the knowledge that there is amazing power in language doesn't escape him. The full potential of that power does. It will be a long time before he knows.

The only thing he worries about is that his father might find out that he's not going to school anymore. His father is a businessman who takes education seriously and he wouldn't be happy if he found out that his son wasn't going to school anymore.

Fortunately, he always wires them a telegram a week or two before he's ready to come back to Yorkshire. In that time David can scrape together some spellers and books and papers with appropriate-looking lessons in them and spins stories for his father about how school is going. The stories always have to be far more detailed and well thought out for him, much more than those he spins for his mother. And through the power of words and the art of talking, his father always believes him. He finds it astonishing.

Are all adults this easy to fool? He doesn't know.

Even despite this, David is happy. His father sends them money, and while they certainly aren't wealthy by any means, David needs for nothing. Childhood is idyllic. He learns all he needs and is entertained all he wants with his words, his library. He has food. He has a bed. He has clothing. It isn't normal—and he knows it isn't normal—but it isn't bad, either.

And then one day his father is gone. He disappears. He went to New York for some business and he never came back. He ran away, or was killed, or something. In any case, he's gone and never seen or heard from again. For a long time he wonders what he did that made his father leave, what's wrong with him, thinks it could be his fault. But there is little time to think.

David and his mother are on their own and it's not long before even she in her permanent state of absentmindedness realizes that there's no way they can survive if they do nothing.

So they go to work. Both of them. She finds a job in a milliner's shop, sewing little baubles and buttons on ladies hats, which works for her because it isn't too mentally taxing and she can still live in her own little world while she does it. He becomes a common newsboy. He stands on an old milk crate on a corner—because he's a short little thing and it's hard for adults to notice him in a crowd—and shouts for people to buy his papers.

He couldn't be going to school now if he wanted to—there is no time for that. There is no time for books or for learning because in order to keep the rent paid and food on the table, they must both work.

Once upon a time there was a little boy named David, whose life changed for the first of many times when he was just a child.

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I hope you enjoyed this first chapter. I never write in present-tense and this felt a little weird to write—I hope it flows all right! I have a funny way of writing stories myself; by the time I post a story, it's either complete or mostly complete, and I post once or twice a week until all the chapters are posted. It sounds funny, but it keeps there from being wildly variant times between updates. (And it gives me time to finish!)

Feedback is always appreciated, but never demanded. Updates will come regardless.