I swear I didn't mean to go so long without updating. I've been working on the next chapter, but it's coming along quite slowly. I won't make any promises about when I'll be posting the next chapter, because I honestly don't know! I hope you'll forgive me. If it helps, I've got an idea to write a sequel to this story. It'll be baby!fic, which for me is absolutely bizarre, considering I can't stand children in real life. (A sequel would also the opportunity for me to use a rather in-depth Robert-and-Alice backstory that I had all planned out but that I couldn't fit into this chapter.)

I hope you enjoy the read. It's rather more serious than the previous chapters; it's also going to be the last chapter that will appear on the main page for updates. After this, the rating jumps to 'M'! Feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated.

o…o

Alice stands in the hot spray of the shower with her head down; briefly the water running off her body and hair runs murky, days worth of grime and scum and dirt of all kinds rinsing off. For a while she just stands there because the hot water feels good and she needs to relax a bit.

Before she got into the shower, Hatter jokingly asked if she wanted company and her knee-jerk reaction was to say hell yes, but she was filthy and disgusting and an actual proper shower was a priority over fucking him unconscious. She reminds herself that there'll be plenty of time for shower-sex later.

Shower-sex and lots of other things.

She doesn't want to use up all of his hot water so she finishes her shower quickly. The clothes Hatter got for her aren't really to her taste—brown velvet leggings so long they almost cover her feet and a short-sleeved pale pink dress that barely comes halfway down her thighs—but at least they fit, and they're dry and clean so she's glad to have them.

Fed and clean and with a change of clothes she feels like a new woman and she sighs contentedly as she steps out of the bathroom. Hatter is fussily arranging the blankets and the pillows, trying to make his bed like someone who never ever makes his bed. He glances up at her as she walks into the room and goes back to fussing, then does a double-take and stares. She can't imagine why he's staring because she isn't showing any more skin now than she was in her other clothes.

She smoothes her hands over the absurdly short dress. "Thanks for the clothes," she says. "Feels good to be out of the dirty ones."

He snaps back into reality. "Oh, yeah—no problem."

"How'd you get 'em, anyway?" She narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. "You didn't steal them or anything, did you?"

"Credit me with some scruples," he huffed with feigned indignity. "You know me—I know people. I called in a few owed favours."

She crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows.

"Or it's entirely possible that all I had to do was say that the Alice-of-recent-legend was looking for a change of clothes and people were climbing all over themselves to give me their old things." He nods to an old-fashioned footlocker next to the open wall-panel. "Plenty of extra stuff in there. You'd be surprised how charitable people are being when it comes to the woman who saved the whole world."

"And naturally you handed me the tiniest dress, right?"

His grin is all angelic but thinly disguised cheek. "Can you blame me?"

She doesn't answer; instead she goes to sit on the trunk at the foot of Hatter's bed; the dress rides up her butt and she's silently very grateful for those thick leggings. "This is gonna sound a little weird," she begins, not knowing how to segue into this and deciding to just head right into it. It wasn't two hours ago that she was anxiously waiting for Hatter to come back so she could jump his bones, but Alice is nothing if not practical and she knows there are things they'll have to sort out before they can go any further. "What now?"

What she expects him to do is make some silly sexual joke, maybe make a lewd and completely welcome suggestion, or do something to make her laugh and then grin one of those knee-jellying grins. What he does is adopt a serious expression and sit down next to her.

"I know you can't stay here forever, Alice," he says. "You don't belong here—it's not your world."

"I belong in New York."

"But…" he stretches the word out, as if he's still thinking while he's saying it. She suspects she knows what he wants to say and sighs heavily, her head hanging.

She's not running for her life anymore and she's off the adrenaline high she's been on while running and fleeing and fighting this whole time, which was what she was all too willing to attribute her sudden and intense attraction to Hatter to before. She feels approximately normal again and she still feels the same way about him—she's stupid in love, head-over-heels, all of that stupid cliché stuff she's long since shoved into the realms of fairy tales and dime-store erotic fiction and romantic comedies and other things that were all fantasy and no reality. She's rolled her eyes for years at people who fall for things like that and here she is falling for it herself.

That she loves Hatter doesn't change the fact that he's Wonderland and she's New York and in order for them to be together one of them is going to have to uproot their whole life and replant themselves in an entirely new world. Alice knows she's as stubborn as a pig and Hatter is much the same way—he's stubborn in an entirely different way than she is. His stubbornness is a sneaky 'I-will-do-what-I-want-no-matter-what-you-say-but-I'll-find-another-way-to-go-about-it' kind of way; he's had to be fluid and change himself again and again over the years in order to stay alive, but she remembers what he said. Wonderland is his home and he can't leave.

"Hey."

He tilts her head up with his fingers to meet his eyes. His eyes and smile are nervous, unsure; he's worried just like she is.

"So, I can't stay in Wonderland and you can't follow me back to my world."

He frowns for a second and then the frown melts into a slow smile, his mouth turning up at one corner and his eyes crinkling slightly.

"Who says?" He asks.

"Huh?"

"The way I see it is this," he starts, tucking a bit of wet hair behind her ear and then resting his palm on her cheek. His hand is warm. "Jack'll be a good King. I know that—I don't like him, but the things I don't like about him are what'll make him good at what he does. He's going to pick Wonderland up and dust it off and do his damn best to turn it around and make it what it used to be—full of wonders."

"O—okay," Alice stutters. Is he trying to convince her to stay? Wonderland without its culture of Oysters and Tea and danger might be a nice place but it isn't where she wants to spend the rest of her life.

"He won't put up with the crap that's been going on in this place and there are enough people unhappy with it—not just in the Resistance, but all over—who'll help him. Wonderland's gonna undergo a big change. But, you know, I don't know that kind of Wonderland. The Wonderland I know how to live in, the place I've known my whole life, is the one that doesn't exist anymore. The stuff I do every day isn't needed anymore—it was useful for me before, but it'll have no place in the kind of world Jack's going to make."

She holds her breath because now he's going in an entirely different direction than she thought he would go.

"One way or another, I'm gonna have to pick up and start my life all over again. Start from scratch. If I'm gonna go through all that trouble, I might as well really start over and follow you back to—to—where did you say you lived?"

"New York?"

"Right. That. New? Why's it new, did something happen to the old York?"

Alice has to laugh—it's a sort of wibbly laugh, but it's still a laugh—because she's never given any thought to how weird names prefaced with 'new' would sound to someone who never heard of it before. If he's going to leave Wonderland and transplant himself in the Empire State, he's going to need a very intensive crash-course in her world so he doesn't stand out as a total lunatic—

And then her thoughts grind to a halt and back up and go over that again, like a mental double-take. Hatter wants to come back with her through the Looking Glass. Hatter wants to leave Wonderland and stay with her. Just like that he's ready to abandon the only life and the only world he's ever known and start over again completely in her world.

"You—really?" She squeaks the words out at a piercingly high pitch that sounds like someone stepped on a cat.

"Haven't heard you make a sound like that yet," he says lightly, his thumb gently stroking her cheek. "Is it a good sound or a bad sound?"

"It's just—you're sure?"

He rolls his head back and she hears his neck crack, rolls his shoulders in a half-shrug. "I'm sure enough," he finally tells her. "Look, with every major life decision there's always going to be some chance, no matter how small, that you'll want to go back on it—that's life. But right now, I'm sure. More than once I thought I'd lost you, my troublesome Alice, and I couldn't do anything about it. I'll be damned if I let you disappear forever when there's something I can do about it."

Her bottom lip trembles as she realizes he's serious, completely serious, and she trusts him, and she can't think of anything else to do but throw her arms around him and hug him. She launches herself at him with enough force that he has to steady himself with his hands and his hat is knocked right off his head.

She thinks she might cry but she doesn't; instead her breath comes shaky and erratic but her eyes stay dry and Hatter holds her and nuzzles her hair and murmurs unintelligibly, but gently and reassuringly, over her head.

"Okay?" He asks finally.

"Better than okay," she says.

He smiles and kisses her soundly. "Think you can stand Wonderland for a few days while I get things sorted?"

"Sorted?"

"Get my affairs in order, sell the shop, see about getting a new identity for your world—there's people here quite adept at forging the appropriate documents to make someone blend in and disappear on the other side of the Looking Glass. Well, there's sometimes a need for that kind of thing, inside the law and out," he explains quite candidly. "I think enough people still owe me enough favours that I can get the things I need."

Then he pauses.

"What will I need, anyway?"

In order for him to start over in her world she knows he's going to need enormous amounts of paperwork—a birth certificate, driver's license, whatever the British equivalent of a Social Security card is because there's no way he can pretend to be American, a passport, possibly a visa. However happy she is she knows there's a lot of things that need to be done in order for him to blend in on the other side of the Looking Glass and she doesn't know how to go about getting it all done.

"Maybe we should talk to Jack—or to someone who's done this kind of work, sending people from Wonderland through the Looking Glass," she suggests, talking quick when she sees him flinch at the mention of Jack's name. She doesn't like him, either, but she's willing to ask him for help. If nothing else, he owes them.

"You're right. I suppose in the meantime you can teach me how to not stand out in this New York place."

She can't help but grin. "Among other things," she says slyly.

His knowing smirk tells her that he knows exactly what she means by that and he pulls her into his lap; the dress rides up even more when she shifts to sit astride him and he rests his hands on her hips. There's all of a micron between their lips when the wall panel slides open and a squeaky little voice comes from the doorway.

"Boss?"

Hatter's head snaps back. "Dormy, whatever it is just sign it or cancel it or order fifteen more!"

Alice doesn't know whether she wants to laugh or scream that they've been interrupted again. She settles for neither and instead stares at the ceiling and silently curses the god she doesn't believe in for interrupting them.

He has to go and deal with the tea-junkies who are throwing rocks at the already broken-out windows, desperate to find another fix. He tells her to stay put as he goes to deal with them—they're dangerous, she suspects, and when he comes back he looks tussed and has a bloody nose and she realizes that what he hasn't told her is that Wonderland will get far more dangerous before it gets better under Jack's rule. The whole world has to dry out and most of those people probably don't want to; an entire population of people deprived of their drugs will be at best mad and at worst dangerously violent. The natural target for their ire is the tea-dealer who worked secretly for the Resistance and played a major role in destroying their precious supply.

They both have to leave to survive.

o…o

Alice had wanted to go with him when he went to talk to the Resistance about getting the appropriate papers that would let him start a life in New York—it makes her giddy when she thinks about it, that Hatter's coming back with her!—because she figured she might be some help with regards to what, exactly, he'll need. If nothing else, she could keep a hand on his butt the whole way to the Great Library and back again.

But Hatter nonetheless has poignant memories of Dodo taking a shot at both of them, and he knows better than maybe anyone that Wonderland is a dangerous place—more dangerous now in the tumultuous shift between governments than it was before. So he's refused to let her come with him, afraid that the Alice-of-Recent-Legend might be among the targets for the more desperate among them.

She argues with him, but Hatter's just as good at arguing as she is—as any New Yorker, really, which is a point in his favour because he'll fit in quite nicely there—and remains unmoved and un-persuaded. So she changes tactics and gives him a big-sad-eyes look and kisses him sweetly, pressed up against his chest. He hums and purrs softly.

"Oh, you're good."

"It's working, is it?"

Instead of answering he grasps her hips and rolls his against her; she can feel the telltale bulge and electricity shoots up her spine. If nothing else she's having some effect on him but Hatter doesn't concede arguments easily.

"So I'm going with you." She doesn't pose it as a question so it doesn't leave room for an argument.

"Absolutely not."

She scowls at him but it melts almost immediately when he kisses her forehead and then her lips. She's becoming extremely soft for Hatter, she thinks; normally she's as stubborn as they come and wouldn't let herself be told she couldn't go somewhere like this. But she can't argue with him when he kisses her and runs his fingernails gently up her back, raising goosebumps through the thin fabric of her dress.

"I'll be back soon—everything'll be fine, yeah?"

"Of course it will."

"You've got access to my wonderful stash of highly illegal black-market books, I'm sure you can entertain yourself for a few hours while I'm gone."

"I can entertain myself in other ways," she says, pulling the dress up a little and pressing herself against his thigh, baiting him intentionally. He grunts and for a second she wonders if he's going to put off his trip for a little while and they'd lock themselves back here for a few hours. They still haven't yet, and she knows he wants it just as bad as she does.

"Wicked thing, you," he hisses, then bites her ear. "I'll deal with you when I get back."

"Is that a threat?" She asks, copying his signature light and flippant tone. "Because it's not a very effective one."

He grins and gives her one last kiss before he lets her go and flips his hat onto his head with a flick of the wrist and the ease of many years of practice. His expression goes serious as he heads for the sliding wall-panel that serves as the door to his apartment.

"This doesn't open from the outside unless someone knows where the switch is," he tells her, his voice low and dead-serious. "Except for me, you, and Dormy, no one knows—do not let anyone in here. I don't care if they say they're King Jack and his whole royal entourage."

"Yes sir."

"I'm serious, Alice. You saw what happened earlier. Don't let anyone come back here. I'll let myself in when I come back, all right? Promise me?"

"Okay—promise I won't open the door for anyone."

And with that he leaves her by herself in his apartment. She sinks into the soft plush sofa—now she kind of wishes she hadn't teased him because now she's wound herself up. Rather than relieve the tension herself again, she decides to go through Hatter's stash of highly-illegal-black-market-books to kill time until he gets back.

Time slips away from her as she goes through the collection. Several of them she recognizes from her own world; there's the entire Harry Potter series and a few Stephen King titles among the books that are clearly Wonderland. Some of the books aren't books at all but magazines and what look like university papers, including—for reasons she can't even begin to guess—a copy of the 'Unabomber Manifesto'.

She gets absorbed in reading and doesn't know how long she's been here. There are three clocks in Hatter's apartment, but none of them are running and all of them read different times. One is missing its minute-hand and another has a second hour-hand obviously taken from a different piece. She wonders why he has them—maybe just for decoration. Her father said there was no need for a watch in Wonderland and she can't remember having seen any running clocks anywhere, but Hatter is definitely the type to collect things no one needs or uses just for the novelty of having them.

Oh god.

Her father.

Her eyes go unfocused on the page in front of her, staring blankly at the words without really seeing them. Her memory takes her right back to the Casino floor where she saw him die. "I'm proud of you," he'd said. "You're a hero." She'd been so happy she found him again, so relieved that he remembered her and that Robert was back instead of the Carpenter—the Queen's pet scientist—and he hugged her and it was the first time she'd hugged her father in more than half a lifetime. And then it was all taken from her, just like that. Just as quickly as it had come. She cried then because she was losing him all over again—this time permanently, for good. He wasn't 'missing', he was really dead.

With everything that had been going on at the time—like the entire Casino collapsing around them—there were other things more pressing than crying and she'd had to leave. Leave him there. She didn't have time to think or feel at all as they ran for their lives and the fact that her father really was dead hadn't sunk in.

Until now.

Robert Hamilton is dead.

"Daddy's gone."

She says it softly, almost a sigh. This is the first time she's had to stop and think about this since it happened, the first it's actually had the chance to really sink in. She waits and expects to feel the tears surge like a tidal wave, expects to feel her chest and her throat constrict in that uncomfortable way it does when she's trying to cry and trying not to at the same time. But her chest doesn't get tight and her throat doesn't iron-fist constrict, her eyes don't burn, and the tears don't come.

Her father is dead and she saw him die, after years of searching he was right there and she lost him. So close, but so far. She watched him die in front of her, bleed out and breathe his last—alive one minute and then dead the next.

Again she whispers to herself and says, "He's dead."

The sadness is there, the pain still biting, but the tears don't come. Instead saying the words are almost liberating, putting to rest the ghost that's followed her since she was a child.

Her father is dead and she can't change that, and in the past Alice has never been so nonchalantly accepting of things that 'can't be changed', but this time she knows there are alternatives that are much worse. She could never have found him at all, and been left her whole life wondering without answers, because the only thing she's hated more than him being missing is the fact that she didn't know why. Or he could never have woken up at all. He could have survived the Casino's collapse and then gone on to live the rest of his life here as the Carpenter, never remembering being Robert or the life he once had, or he could have died but died the Carpenter.

Things could have been so much worse. They could also be infinitely better, but she can't dwell forever in the past and on what-ifs. She's done that for too long. She has her answers, and given everything that's enough and it's time to move on.

When Hatter comes back she's laying on his bed with books scattered all around her, her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling while she's deep in thought.

"Alice?" He leans over her directly into her field of vision and it startles her because she hasn't heard him come in. She sits up so fast she nearly brains herself and him. "Shit—careful!"

"You scared me."

"You okay? You looked a little out of it."

She nods. "Just… thinking."

"About what?"

She gives a shrug and rolls her neck. "Just about my dad."

He sits down next to her, looking suddenly worried. "Oh, spades, Alice, I'm so sorry—" he starts, his voice soft, obviously preparing to reassure her and ready for her to go all to pieces. She hushes him by pressing her fingers against his mouth.

"It's okay," she says. "I feel all right, really. It's just… it's over. It's been this huge mystery in my life for so long and now I have answers. It wasn't my happy ending, but happy endings are for kid's stories—and this isn't a kid's story."

He kisses her fingers and takes her hand gently, stroking little circles on her palm with the rough pad of his thumb.

"I'm still sorry," he said softly.

"What for? You didn't do anything."

"I know. But I worry. You sure you're all right?"

"Yeah. Really, I am. I expected to be a wreck when I thought about it, but I think… I think I'm over that. As weird as it sounds. I've spent too long crying for my dad, I don't think I've got any cry left."

He puts his hand on her cheek and she leans into it.

"I was just… remembering."

"Remembering?"

"Things about him. The little things, you know? The good things. I never think about those as much as I should. Always too caught up in thinking about the fact that he wasn't there."

"What d'you remember?"

She shrugs.

"Tell me?"

"He used to eat butter," she says, not sure why she's thought of that particular memory.

"Butter? What?"

"I dunno what made me think of that. But he used to take butter out of the fridge and let it soften up on the counter. Then he'd eat it with a spoon."

Hatter made a sick face. "That's disgusting."

"Yeah, I know. My dad was the kind of guy who would just sort of casually eat a whole block of cheddar while standing at the fridge door to see what there was to eat. The last few years before he left—before he was taken—he was trying to eat better and went all crunchy-granola."

His eyebrows are a little raised and he looks amused at her familial anecdote. In truth, she is too, because it's been a long, long time since she's really thought about the small things like this.

"It used to drive my uncle Frank crazy, because my dad would eat like that and never gain weight or clog his arteries. Uncle Frank could add an inch to his waist nibbling a piece of lettuce."

He snorts and then laughs, just like she hoped he would.

"Remembering the little things makes me miss him a little less. And it's less painful now than it used to be. Now that I know the answers." She closes the book she'd been reading and puts it on the stack on top of the steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. "What about you?" She asks.

"What about me?"

"You must've had a dad. Unless reproduction works differently in Wonderland than it does in the real world."

Again he laughs. "No, it works the same way."

"Do you remember him at all?"

"'Course I do. Was just me and him for a long time." He stops and thinks for a few seconds, turning his hat over and over again in his hands. "My mum… well, she tried. Life here's been rough for a long time and she turned to the Oyster tea. At first it was just a little Calm or a drop of Tranquillity. Sometimes some Relaxation to help her sleep. Lots of people who aren't junkies do things like that—makes it easier to live. But then she started trying more and more and, well… you know."

She nods knowingly and clutches his hand gently; he squeezes it back but it doesn't seem like the memory hurts him.

"Anyway, it was just me and Da."

"What was he like?"

"He knew everything," he says. "He remembered a time before the Queen, and he remembered books and I guess he read all of 'em because I remember whenever I asked him something he always knew the answer. And it wasn't him just giving me a silly wrong answer, either."

She leans down on her side and holds herself up on her elbow and rests her cheek on her fist. He leans back on one arm and uses the other hand to gently toy with her hair. He shifts and she shifts and they lay down on the bed facing opposite directions, their heads side-by-side, staring at the ceiling. There's a broken, swirling pattern painted on the plain plaster, a little like Van Gogh's 'Starry Night'.

"He taught me how to do that, you know," he says, waving a hand at the pattern on the ceiling.

"He was a painter?" She frowns a little as they turn their heads to look at one another. "Why does that surprise me?"

"You thought my father was some silly, mad, tea-guzzling caricature?" His voice is mockingly offended. "I suppose it's warranted. He was. We all are, I think, in my family. Comes with the territory, like crooked smiles and funny hair."

She laughs softly and traces her fingers down the side of his face, fresh-shaved whiskers sharp on her fingers. He twitches ever so slightly, involuntarily.

"Do you miss him?"

He hasn't said what happened to his father, but somehow she knows that he met an untimely end. The odds are certainly in favour of it—it seems few people in Wonderland live out their natural lifespan.

Hatter shifts a little and says, "Every so often it'll hit me that there's no one I can go to anymore with a question. I don't miss him horribly every day, though. Guess I just don't think about it."

She sits up and hovers over him, her hair making a curtain around their faces as she makes frowning upside-down eye-contact. "Why not?" Her tone is curious, not accusatory.

"If I missed and cried for all the people in my life who've died, I wouldn't have time for anything else." He reaches up and tucks some of her hair out of the way and idly traces the curves of her ear with his fingertip. "Life's for the living, after all."