The Coming of Hatter

Would you like a cup of tea? How Hatter came to be the man he is, and the lives he lives along the way. Includes the original Mad Hatter and the birth of Mad March.

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Part One: March

His first memory, like that of all born of Wonderland, is bursting forth into the light of life, crying his lungs out. He's cold and wet and uncomfortable. It's too bright and too loud and too everything and he hates it. He tries to turn instinctively toward his mother to hide in her arms, but he's too small and weak to do more than scream, hoping someone understands him.

This memory is faded and blurry, like an old photograph, but it is his and he holds onto it with all that he has. All of his memories of the time before he was six are precious and he protects them like his life depends on it….because, in a twisted sort of way….it does.

They named him David. It was an uncommon name, weird and unnatural. It was nothing like a Wonderland name.

He remembers his father was as tall as a mountain, or he was to David's small mind. The man was strong. David remembers he worked for the royal family – the Hearts. He remembers his mother as the person he got his looks from; his dark hair and eyes. She was always laughing.

His brother was named March. He was seven years old the day David was born. He had a sensible Wonderland name. He was tall like their father, with light colored hair and the darkest eyes David had ever seen. He remembers March like he remembers storms: either calming or violent.

He loved his family.

The world ended for the first time when he was six. He returned from a play date to find everything he'd ever known gone in an instant. The fire burned for three days without ceasing, like only some Wonderland fires do. He never saw his parents, but March told him the graves they dug held the bodies. He remembers March giving him juice in the shelter that night and saying things like "It's alright", "This doesn't mean a thing for us", and "We're still brothers. We'll stick together". He doesn't remember crying. He doesn't remember feeling sad at all.

That should've been the first clue something was wrong.

March was thirteen then. He got himself an apartment and took care of David all on his own. David never asked how. They ate breakfast and dinner together every day and March made him lunch before he left. It felt almost like a normal life. And he never worried.

Then he turned seven, and, as it is wont to do, the world shifted. His calm, sheltered life ended the day March crashed through the door holding a knife in his left hand and bleeding from the head and somewhere on his right arm. Or more precisely, everything changed the next morning.

He sat at the kitchen table, eating breakfast alone for the first time ever. March stepped in from the next room and sat down across from him like nothing was wrong. He stared at David until the food was gone from the table. His dark eyes pierced David's soul.

"Did you bandage me?" he asked, his voice cracking a bit with age. David nodded his head without a word, sipping on the juice box he'd pulled from the fridge that morning on his own. March touched his head and ran the fingers of his left hand along his right arm near the elbow. "You did good, brother. Very good."

It wasn't the first compliment he'd ever received, but this one seemed to hold more weight to it: like a secret.

"Come with me to work tomorrow," March half asked, half ordered.

So he did.

March's work was nothing like he'd ever imagined. There were guns involved, and knives, and other weapons David didn't recognize. They were all lined up in neat little rows in drawers with locks on them, or hung on hooks in the walls behind doors with pass codes. Everyone wore dark colored suits or black shirts and pants. No one talked but no one sat still either. David wasn't the only child in the room.

They set him up in the medical room, as March told them to. He was handed a roll of bandages and some antiseptic by a fat man in green shorts.

"You know how to use these," the man said. That was all the talking he did.

For four days, nothing happened in that room. He sat in a chair in the corner counting the bumps on the ceiling and tracing animals in the dirt on the floor from other people's shoes. Then a man came in, the tallest man he'd ever seen, with a knife wound on his shoulder. The fat man scoffed.

"Imbecile. Doesn't deserve to be in the Queen's service if he gets that bad a wound this late in the game."

David took his little roll of bandages, grabbed several medicines from the shelves along the far wall, and a stool so he could reach the wound, and bandaged the man up. With the wound bandaged, the bleeding stopped, and the worst of it over, David thought he'd done a good job. A woman with a diamond on the sleeves of her shirt came in when he was done and poured a blue liquid down the man's throat. He instantly calmed down and fell into a silent slumber.

When he gave her a strange look, the woman had smiled at David and waved the bottle in her hand at him. "Serenity," she said, holding a finger to her lips like it was a secret.

That was his first encounter with the Queen's bottled emotions. As all in Wonderland under the Heart's rule, going back almost a hundred years, David was familiar with the emotions that served as most of the currency in the world. He'd heard of it, but he'd never tasted it, any of it. When he asked March about it that night over dinner, his brother simply said "Why do you think Ma was so happy all the time?" like it was the simplest answer and David should've known that.

It was the last dinner the brothers ate together for eight years. In fact, David hardly saw the apartment once a week, then once a month. He lived at the base where the Queen's assassins and spies held their base of operations. He started out in the medical room and stayed there for a little over a year. But, like most people in Wonderland, he was curious to a fault. He wandered and found himself in the shooting range.

The sound of the bullets startled him, but only for a few moments. The smile that lit March's face when he found David there, hours later, holding a hand gun and shooting targets, was as bright as the moon and as crooked as broken glass.

Three years later and David liked to boast he's mostly self taught, because it's true and he's the only eleven year old who can shoot a fly at thirty meters. He can take apart pretty much any gun in the compound, mix it with the parts from two other guns, and put them all back together at the same time without making a single mistake. His eyes don't close when he shoots, and March told him that was good.

"But I can still get you with a knife any day of the week, brother," March said within the same breath, so David isn't sure how to take it, but nothing really phases him anyway; not the blood on the assassins' weapons or the wounds on a victim. "In fact….I think we should start you on combat training. Enough of this long range, safety zone stuff. You're old enough."

March was eighteen now and everyone called him 'Mad March'. David isn't sure when they started calling him that, but he knows he noticed it about a year ago.

For the record: David is crap at hand to hand combat.

All his knowledge is useless when he's faced with a man triple his size and over twice his age. He's not swift enough to punch or kick a single foe, no matter how many hours of extra training he's put through a day. He was taken off guns completely and set to total fight training at all times. Four months in, he hadn't hit a mouse let alone a man. Only the punching bag knew his fist, and he avoided it because he was tired of explaining to the older men why it was broken or split open or whatever after he used it, when he didn't have the answer. David couldn't explain it to anyone, but in every fight, as soon as he punched and missed and his opponent grabbed his right hand or wrist…he hit the floor.

March was angry at David's failure. David couldn't find the bitterness inside himself.

"Four months, David!" March shouted that night in the medical room, after David had been treated for the latest beating he'd taken in training. "What's the matter with you?"

For once, David felt a stirring deep in his gut. It was nearing midnight and he hadn't eaten or drank anything in twelve hours. He was tired and he hurt and it wasn't his fault he couldn't fight. He was trying his hardest.

"I do my best, March," he contended in a calm voice. "If that's not enough-"

"That is not your best!" March interrupted. They were walking toward David's 'bedroom.' "If that was your best, then we're not brothers anymore!"

The feeling that shot through David was sudden and violent. He didn't know what it was, he didn't have a name for the feeling. It may have been anger, or hurt, or even surprise or excitement. All he knew was that in the next moment, he had flipped around to face March and landed a strong right hook to March's chest, as high as he could reach.

The look of shock across March's face was worth every beating David had received in practice. Then his brother hit the floor fifteen feet away with a nearly blood curdling shout of pain. Panic gripped David and he rushed to kneel by March's side. The medic on duty at the time ran out and over to the two brothers. They tore back March's shirt, revealing the red mark on his chest. Within moments, purples, blues, and yellows were spreading across March's tanned skin, even leaving the left side of his body to take over the right as well.

Horror settled in David's stomach. "I'm so sorry, March!" he gushed, placing his little hands on his brother's right shoulder, so he wouldn't be in the medic's way as he examined the problem.

"The preliminary diagnosis is pretty bad, Mad. It seems you've broken at least three ribs and several of your blood veins are in serious trouble. I'm pretty sure your breast plate is at least cracked, if not worse. An inch further up and your heart may have been damaged," the medic announced in a grave tone.

March began to shake, then chuckle, and then full out chortle. He winced when it moved his broken ribs, but didn't stop his laughter. March lifted a shaking hand and cupped David's face almost tenderly.

"Now that's what I'm talking about," he managed before his eyes rolled back in his head and his hand hit the ground.

It took over a month before March was good to work again, with the help of Wonderland medicine and the Queen's bottled emotions. News traveled fast about how Little David did it, and David found himself in a world of recognition he didn't want.

The first thing March did when he was released from the hospital was take David to lunch. From then on, David did pretty much anything March asked of him. He trained for hand to hand combat and learned that while he could do unthinkable damage with his right fist, the same did not apply for his left and if anyone so much as pinched anything from his right wrist to his fingertips he was just as useless in a fight as a newborn Cheshire cat.

But March gave that broken glass grin every time David won a fight. And he was put back on guns.

He was shot by a rouge member of the team when he was twelve. March visited him once in the hospital, right after it happened. He saw the bandages wrapped around his little brother's waist and left the room. David didn't see him until he was released a week later and March came to pick him up.

That was when he began to notice how March had changed. March used to look out for him, now he didn't. It was one of the older assassins who gave David his first piece of body armor. March used to have a warm laugh, but now it sounded sinister. He was cold, indifferent, and sometimes cruel. He fought weaker men and showed no mercy. He rarely talked to anyone weaker than him, and then not to anyone at all unless he had to, not even David.

On a job when David was thirteen, March tracked a member of the Resistance down and slit the man's throat while he begged for mercy. David was certain his brother did it purposefully in a way that got the man's blood on his hands. He watched March with uncertainty for the first time ever in his life.

"But we were supposed to bring him back alive," another tracker spoke up from behind David.

It was when March killed that teammate without a second glance that David realized the truth.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat…," March muttered as he sat by the body of their former comrade, "How I wonder what you're at."

It wasn't just a code name: March really was Mad.