Title: In At The Window (1/1)
Characters/Pairing: Hatter/Alice, Charlie
Rating: PG
Genre: humor/fantasy
Summary: It's been two weeks since any adventures were had, and Charlie's feeling a little left out. Post-mini series.
A/N: A short piece for k_puff on LJ, who wanted Hatter and Charlie bro-times. Also has a few references to At The Drop of A Hat.

In The Window

Hatter's grown accustomed, mostly, to the noises outside Alice's apartment window. They wake him up of a morning, less of a rooster crow and more a series of machinery squawks, like a robotic chicken gone horribly awry. This particular morning, though, the sound stretches right through awful, past shrieking, and straight on to ungodly. There's a clockwork cat being murdered outside the bedroom door, by the sound of it; a whole pride of clockwork cats. Alice stirs, mutters, steals Hatter's pillow and buries her head underneath it. On second thought she takes the covers from him, too, and swathes herself in them, bundled like a mummy.

"Whasit?" she says.

"Grr," says Hatter, tugging ineffectually at the covers. He is unable to recover them, and Alice swats at his hand till he stops. The noise continues. Hatter sits up and stares round the room.

"I hate this place," he says.

"Boo," says Alice, indistinctly.

He doesn't, of course. Not really. It's different, that's for certain sure, but not to the point that he can bring himself to loathe it utterly. It has certain redeeming qualities, such as pizza, and the fascinations of the Underground system, and balloons. He's not quite sure how nobody in Wonderland ever managed to come up with balloons. It seems like such a simple concept, now that he knows about them.

And then, of course, there's the greatest Redeeming Quality of them all, who, having stolen the bed things, is curled up in a ball, attempting to ward off the world. She's good at that, is Alice. Good at warding things off, and overcoming them, and triumphing in general.

He smiles at the bundle of bedcovers. The noise reaches the earsplitting range typically reserved for dog whistles and crowd control. Alice kicks at him, a touch softened by the sheets, and he rouses himself from the bed.
"Alright," he's saying as he approaches the door, "alright, alright, alright."

Charlie is bending over in the hallway, turning the handle on some complicated thing with a spout on the front, from which the sounds are emanating. He stands up straight at the sight of Hatter, who squints at him lopsidedly, unable to quite believe that Charlie is the source of the noise. Not that Charlie isn't often the source of noises. One might almost say frequently. One might even go so far as to say that, these days, if there was a strange noise Charlie was almost undoubtedly the culprit.

"Are you doing that on purpose?"

"My friend," declaims Charlie, settling his shoulders back and puffing out his chest proudly, and in the process completely ignoring Hatter's disbelieving question, "the time has come."

"To get up, apparently." Hatter rubs at his face with both hands. He needs a shave. He needs a hat. He needs some tea. "You could have just knocked on the door, you know, Charlie. We're not deaf. Well. We weren't."

But the old knight isn't paying him the slightest heed. Once embarked on a particular line of thought, Charlie is not easily distracted.

"The time has come," he says again, and if his shoulders get any more straightened and boxlike he will likely dent his armor from the inside, "to speak of many things. The Alice of Legend— and, er, you, of course— verily hath returned from her journey. It has been a fortnight." He eyes Hatter sidelong, as though he has imparted some secret, little-known yet long-suspected.

Hatter's suddenly struck by an unwelcome suspicion.

"I didn't leave the door unlocked," he says, slowly, "I know I didn't, not after last time, with the mime, and the— so how did you— Charlie. No, tell me you didn't do that again, Charlie."

"A friend in need is a friend indeed," says Charlie, stoutly, and it's unclear if he's replying to Hatter or merely continuing on his own topic of conversation, which remains unspecified as yet. Hatter's moving away from him, now, already preparing to be aghast as he goes to look out the window. Sure enough, as he expects, he finds a rackety sort of scaffolding clinging to the brick wall.

"So that was a hammer I heard last night." He digs his fingers deep into his messy brown hair, and tugs."And here I thought I was dreaming."

"You refuse to give me a latchkey," sniffs Charlie, affronted. "What is a man to do? A knight, no less, and an inventing knight, no more. If Fate will not open the door, I must needs come in through the window."

"Knocking, Charlie. Knocking. Have you tried knocking? Maybe you should give knocking a try. Just once or twice. 'Stead of constructing whatever that is on the wall out there." Hatter shakes his head. It's just a little too early to be dealing with this. "Look, let's just— skip past that, alright?" He stands still for a moment, hands out, and gives that topic a pause in which to be decently buried. "Alright. What are you here for?"

"The time," says Charlie, drawing the word out dramatically.

"Has come. Yes. I know. You said."

"Haaaaaaasssss," hisses Charlie regardless. "Come."

"Yes. Yes. I know. I get it. For what?"

Charlie lowers his chin and looks darkly at Hatter. "To speak of many things."

Hatter considers this, giving a brief longing glance in the direction of the bedroom, where Alice still lies sleeping. Then he sighs. "Alright. Let me get some tea, and we'll talk about whatever you like. Leave Alice out of it, for the moment. She had a long day, yesterday."

"Every day is long," says Charlie, "but the nights are longer still." He thinks about this, then grins a little goofily and nudges the much-shorter Hatter. "Good, eh? The knights are much longer still."

"Fantastic," says Hatter.

"I've got a million of 'em," says Charlie gleefully.

"Please don't. Not before breakfast. Look, what is it you were wanting to talk about, exactly?"

"Ah, yes." Charlie returns to himself, not without effort. He seats himself at the kitchen table as Hatter measures out the tea. Loose leaf. Darjeeling. He's learned to appreciate this, the steps one takes to prepare the beverage, the warmth once it's done, the mug cupped in both hands and steaming gently. It's like waking up on his own time, with Alice curled around him. It makes up, almost, for having to get out of bed at all.

"A fortnight has passed," starts Charlie, and waylays himself almost immediately with, "and a knight's in the fort. Good, eh? Eh?" He chuckles to himself. Hatter pours the boiling water, and hums. The tune in his head is familiar, but swamped in the now. He learned it at his mother's knee, and he sings it now to Alice's stove. The words are altered.

Beautiful Tea, Beautiful Tea:
Tea of a morning, Beau-ti-ful Tea!

An old song, he reckons, but a good one.

"Attend!" bellows Charlie, as much to himself as to Hatter. They both obey. "Now. It has been, as I said, a full fortnight since Alice of Legend came back to her world. You came with her." He eyes Hatter balefully. Hatter shrugs.

"You told me to, didn't you?"

"That's not important."

"You even stole my hat, if I recall correctly." And he does, of course, because it's not the sort of thing he's likely to forget. "I liked that hat."

"Useless drivel!" snorts Charlie, pounding lightly on the table. "The point here, as I was trying to say before I was so rudely interrupted, is that in the time that Alice has been away, I haven't recieved a single communique from her, or even from you, not even to ask after my rheumatism."

"I didn't know you had rheumatism," objects Hatter.

"It is to be inferred," says Charlie, a bit coldly. "I await a diagnosis any day now."

Hatter thinks on this, while he sets the tea things on the table, pushing a mug in front of the knight.

"Let me get this straight. Are you feeling neglected, Charlie? A bit lonely, perhaps?"

"I hardly ever see her," Charlie tells his tea, mournfully.

"You've been here nearly every day," Hatter points out. "Eating your way progressively through the cupboards and getting a good head-start on the icebox, too, I might add."

"I have never-" Charlie starts, indignantly.

"Not that we mind having you around the place, Charlie, it's just— I really don't see how you can possibly say that you never see Alice. You see her all the time."

"It's not the same," Charlie tells him, petulantly. His lower lip is sticking out and he looks like a child. An aged and unusual child with odd follical patterns, it's true, but a child nonetheless. Hatter relents.

"I know," he says. "It's not exciting for you. Not like it was. That adventure must have been the most action you've seen in decades, right?" Charlie doesn't reply, but his silence seems a little less obstinate, and Hatter continues. "And now there you are stuck in Wonderland, while we're over here. Not that it's any great shakes, Alice's world, mind you. Though— " He considers. "There is pizza. And these things called bumper cars. Which are like flamingos, except you're slightly less likely to be killed."

Charlie perks up a little at that. Hatter smiles.
"I reckon," he says, "that if we tried, we could find a few adventures of our own, here in Alice's world. Maybe not the life-threatening kind— but then again," he amends, "there's always what Alice calls 'rush hour.'"

"Splendid," says Charlie, warming to the idea. "It sounds absolutely glorious."

"And if you like," Hatter goes on, finding a burst of generosity in the aftermath of the tea-warmth, "we could even call you, of an evening. Just to check up, like. If you weren't able to make it, for instance, and had to stay in Wonderland. I wonder if there's a way to get a signal through the Mirror..."

Charlie has little to no idea what Hatter's talking about, of course, being only very recently introduced to telephones. But the gist gets through, and he slaps a hand on the table, in great excitement, and bellows, "Semaphore! Of course!"

"Well," says Hatter, "not exactly what I had in mind."

"No, but I've been working on the problem for years! I have, in days of yore, been able to construct a sort of Electric Semaphore System, through which one can send messages and, if there's a very slight north-easterly wind, perhaps even photographs! Well, theoretically," he adds, but even this qualifier does not dampen his enthusiasm. "And, allowing for gravitational pull and the essential time differences, if one makes certain to have a Particle Inflation Device, or even a simple hair dryer, I see no reason why it should not work through the Mirror."

"Well, there you go," says Hatter, smiling despite himself. "You wouldn't feel neglected, would you, Charlie, if we called you."

"Of course, of course," says Charlie, no longer paying attention to Hatter at all, but drawing plans and equations on Alice's tablecloth. "Naturally, naturally, of course."

"We could even make sure to call you nightly," Hatter carries on, just for the fun of it, and then has to reach across the table and nudge Charlie to awareness of the pun. "Get it? We could call you nightly?"

Charlie's deep in thought; it takes another two times of repetition before he responds with a quickly choked-off guffaw and a, "Now, really, I must concentrate."

Hatter doesn't mind, though. He's smiling gently at the sketches rapidly growing on the once-pristine tablecloth, and thinking of something quite different. And perhaps it's the general feeling of benevolence that darjeeling always bestows on him, or perhaps it's the knowledge that Alice still lies sleeping down the hallway, or perhaps it's the fact that he's managed to make Charlie happy again, single-handedly, with remarkably little effort; whatever it is, Hatter feels abruptly suffused with a sensation of well-being, a surge of contentment, and a double handful of optimism. Who's to say that they won't find adventure here, after all? You never know till you go looking for it. If Adventure won't open the door, they can always borrow Charlie's scaffolding and climb in at the window.

He nudges Charlie again, gently.

"You never did give me my hat back," he says, sternly.

"What hat?" says Charlie.

The ensuing discussion succeeds in waking Alice up at last, and she wanders into the kitchen, trailing a sheet and eyeing the two Wonderlanders balefully.

"Some people," she suggests, "were trying to sleep."

"Bosh!" says Charlie.

"Boring," says Hatter, grinning at her. "How could anyone sleep through this?"

"This?" Alice repeats. "This what?"

"Life," says Hatter, with joy, and goes to make some more tea.