My own little adaptation of Alice's many adventures, told from the Hatter's point of view. Thank you already for reading- the only thing you could possibly do to make me happier would be to review! Critiques and indications of what works and what doesn't are especially encouraged.
This story is the fault of "She Had the World" by Panic! At The Disco. It works surprisingly well for the two.
Her favorite phrase was 'curiouser and curiouser', he had hypothesized once upon a time. Odd that she used it to describe their world when Wonderland was absolutely ordinary in comparison to her.
Not that he realized that when he first saw her. Contrariwise, she appeared to be the most boringly typical example of a Little Girl upon first sight, very like the picture one might observe next to a definition in the family dictionary. Here we see exhibit A: Blue eyes and dress, yellow hair, bland and vapid expression. Twopence shall buy you a dozen in any schoolroom, but what would you do with them then?
Therefore, instead of requesting in a demanding tone that she might Please Present Her Invitation Or Leave The Tea Party At Once, he dipped his sleeve into his half-empty teacup and stared. He was terribly proud of his stares, orange-rimmed as they were, since they were able to display a fierce sense of madness that no amount of dithering or logical explanations could match. As madness had everything to do with looking into situations the correct way instead of conforming to preposterous social expectations, he was keen to show his off in every way that he possibly could.
Little Girl ignored him as she argued with the March Hare. He decided that he wished to know her name- if only he had a penny to throw in a well!
"Your hair wants cutting," he remarked once a natural pause sprang to life between the other's snippy comments, moving his steady, narrowed gaze from her oh-so-typical golden locks to her tiny face. Little Girl jerked her head around to stare at him, then scrunched her nose up. He would later learn that she always twisted her nose when attempting to come up with a witty response or the answer to a question, which usually detracted from the severity of her words; at that time, he merely reflected that it made her look rather more like a pig than a cat.
"You should learn not to make personal remarks; it's very rude," was her slightly irritated response. She spoke with great weight and dignity, thrusting her chin up into the air mid-sentence. And just like that she took control of the reality of the situation, gathering together the threads of conversation and spinning them into her thread.
It was dizzying.
He tried to snatch reality back as his eyes popped open wide and his hat nearly fell off of his head, attempting to puzzle her with a question that he himself had been pondering for the longest of times. This was his home, after all- or the March Hare's, rather, but he never bothered to care for the details. He could choose who was free and not in his own domain, including Time Himself, thank you terribly much, so why should he let Little Girl choose the route of the story?
Yet it was terribly fascinating how she tended to rigidly observe tiny formalities while throwing the most obvious of conventions directly out the window. Not that he minded, since Convention was a dreadful guest even on her good days, but the point still had to be made.
Thus and therefore, he decided to try something new, something which no right-minded inhabitant of Wonderland would do, and played by her rules. Only a few of them, of course; only to a certain degree, of course; but he explained things in a way that her straightforward little mind could comprehend, kept track of her ideas and held onto them. They were barely worth a shilling apiece, but as that made Little Girl worth seven times her previous amount and as she was dropping them about for free, he didn't quite mind.
Little Girl paid attention- that was something. Little Girl listened- a marvel- and Little Girl pondered, and didn't even directly address him as being Mad, which was a wonder and a blessing. She was clearly and painfully no inhabitant of Wonderland, but visitors had never been directly outlawed, and her very foreignness made her easier to talk to in a strange way. She was learning to speak with the twists and turns that their language naturally took as if she had been born with it on the tip of her tongue.
In fact, he was even starting to believe that they would be able to get along just spiffily, beginning to seriously consider demanding her name so he could issue her an invitation for another tea party in the future (and only March Hare had ever gotten one before, and only because he did technically own the tea set), perhaps even entertaining the notion of making her a hat when she stated that she 'didn't think'.
Well.
"Then you shouldn't talk," he rejoined, abruptly teetering so precisely on the edge of fury that his very fingernails were curling in.
If there was one thing he couldn't abide, it was an empty mind. With so many entertaining dreams to consider and whimsical fancies to breed, his was always working on overdrive- seeing another's mind empty and bland would send him shuddering and sneering any day of the week. And maybe he had already seen metaphysical proof of her ideas and quips, but those were facts, and what good were facts in proofs?
Little Girl looked deeply offended at his words, but he merely sniffed and turned back to March Hare's most recent antics, ignoring her as she got up and slowly walked away. He might have forgiven her if she had begged pardon, might even have given her better knowledge of the crime if she had tried to turn back, but was it his business if she was too stubborn and brainless to look past the obvious?
… no, it was not.
-o-
Time did pass, you know, even when it was frozen at 6 o'clock. He liked to walk by the entry to the garden and sneer in at his old friend-turned-enemy, that nasty old fellow. But Time himself couldn't control attention or meaning, and he was to realize that many of those un-hours would slip by like a dream.
Even the Royal Summons passed like a blur, colors and shapes and feelings fading together in confused whirls of color, very much like a memory of a dull and dreary day. Nothing slid into focus until he had set foot in the courtroom and saw her again. He wasn't in much a state of mind for seeing at that point, as he was simply dreadfully terrified of the Queen of Hearts and positively sure that she would recognize him and have his head off in a jiffy, and then who would wear his hat?
Still, when he spotted her neat blue dress through the throng of people, he stole a moment (for surely Time wouldn't mind one moment) to meet her eyes. Little Girl merely looked fascinated by the process, and her eyebrows lifted slightly as she looked down at him. It was terribly comforting to have one person in the crowd who wouldn't abandon his cause in seconds... hopefully. She seemed gullible and naive enough to take the loser's side.
But the cross-examination began and he trembled so terribly that his thoughts sloshed around in his head, would surely have splashed out of his skull if the hat wasn't holding them in. Not even his tea could calm him down in such a state, as he stuttered and hemmed to no end. He'd never had enough of a backbone to stand straight when the world was frowning down on him; he was near due to collapse in a puddle on the ground, liquidized by the Queen's glare.
And really, why did they need him as a witness? He didn't even like tarts, he wanted to argue, treacle could beat it out in a match on any weekday. But the rules of the courtroom were immovable, such that all he could do to bend them was dither and hope. Besides, attempting to calm his thoughts only led his body and face into more grotesque convulsions and shakes. To manage both would be inconceivable.
Yet somehow he got through the questioning, somehow he escaped with his life hanging on by the tiniest of threads. He hid himself behind a cluster of rosebushes near the wall, hat tilted over his eyes and bow tie shriveled around the edges, trembling violently and breathing heavily as attempted to keep his tea (still unfinished) from sloshing over the sides of the cup. In the background, a Cook of some sort was being questioned to no avail, but he couldn't care in the least for no Cook had ever helped him with the bread and butter; in fact, the words calmed him to some degree. He stood up carefully and dusted himself off, right as rain, as the courtroom erupted into chaos and the Queen screamed to the effect of heads being removed, of course; he was nearly out of earshot when the third witness was finally called to the stand.
Alice, he thought, scratching his head with one hand as he waved with the other for a passing nimbus to pause in its drearily roll across the sky, so he might catch a ride back to his house on its wisps. What in Wonderland could an Alice possibly be?