ThIs mIRoR

bY iNSpIrAtioNaLLy ReD

He stared at himself in the mirror, and wondered, where did the years go? Those fledging mornings of mushroom gatherings, those long lingering winter nights, and happy summer days – his curse to remember, really, as there was no real reason why he should be feeling these things at all these days…

All in all, he supposed, he should be a handsome man. A lot existed between the should-be's nowadays – between the lines, and all those fatal, final promises, hissed like poison between the lips (so blood red and cruel, the way they spat those lies! Oh how deliciously sweet and cruel and vile!) he should have done this, he should have done that, he should not have accepted the Queen's offer in the first place. The memories of it dragged him down, weighed him like the stones the boys from Longbourne used to tie to the birds' wings and watch them flounder and struggle, desperate and helpless. Fragile little things, they never did a'body any harm, but they still used them, they still hit them and beat them and tortured them…

(the Queen! oh, her vile, vile lies, pouring out like the plumpest of juicy red parasites, swarming beneath the glossy black feathers of a bird, he wishes, wishes, wishes he could take them back, turn back the clock, snatch up his hat and go…)

And he was once free, like a bird.

His mouth dragged down in an unhappy pout (like Alice, all those many long years ago), and the Hatter studied himself more closely in the mirror.

Tangled brown hair weeping down into dark eyes once-bright and merry. Lines where there should be crinkles, frowns where there should be smiles. And tears where there should be only laughter, blossoming beneath those eyes (so helpless! so desperate!) like the peal of a jubjub bird, echoing through the cracks in his head, bleeding down cheeks he had tried so hard to blush with, to feel something, anything other than madness.

Complete and utter madness. He still spoke in riddles, and he still had the urge to laugh.

His breath misted on the surface of the mirror (not a looking glass, sadly - it would make everything easier), and he sang to himself. He didn't recognize his voice – it was a harsh voice, a ragged, desperate, keening sort of croon, tapering and ripping where it should have trailed off into a delicate pianissimo of notes. He had been a singer in the Queen of Heart's court (not the Queen, not the dark one with the reddest of lips that spoke the unholiest of lies), that was true. Yet his singing voice deserted him now, fleeing at the sound of this new, uneven croak.

"Twinkle twinkle little baaat…" the notes were coming faster now, along with a giddy rush of exhilaration so fierce it interrupted his song with a bout of mad giggling. Recovering, he continued, still grinning broadly at the sheer idiocy of the song, the scrambled, mixed-up nursery rhyme he used to tell…

No. Not Grace. It was Paige now. It had always been Paige.

Apparently.

"How I wonder what you're aaat…"

He wondered what the Queen of Hearts would think of his new voice.

"Hee hee…" His hands brushed against the mirror in time to his giggling, wanting, hoping for something, anything to hold on to, to forget, to forget the memories that held him sway to the memory of the…

The memory of the memory of the memory of the memory…

It was funny, he reflected, not paying any attention to the heedless cackles that fled his lips, no matter how ungainly they were as they careened and echoed off the corners of the room. How time shattered a person's mind in Wonderland…

"Do you draw, Alice?" the voice chased away the laugh, an abrupt, serious end – a finalis! – to the heady euphoria. "I draw lots of things. The memory, the moon, muchness… have you ever come across something as moony as a much of a muchness?" He gabbled, still smiling, still grinning, a flash of white teeth bared in a maniacal grin at the mirror, the mirror that it would make his job so, so easy…

In a movement beyond the control of his body, his fist shot out, smashing into the mirror with a great careening symphony of shattering glass so high and lovely it made him laugh, although this laughter was forced, angry.

If it only was a LOOKING GLASS, dammit!

He nursed his bleeding hand (RED! like the lips of the Queen, so, so cruel, HE HATED IIIITT), and he looked at the shattered mirror. The waxy, sunken, crazed (distorted, weird, hated, hated, hated, what would GracenoPaigethinkofherfather noshedidn'thaveafatheritwasalladelusio n) remains of his face were warped and distorted, nearly as crooked as the bleak, glib laugh that echoed soundlessly from his lips.

"Ah, if only…"

Jefferson turned away. Hunched beneath the shroud-like blackness of the cavernous room, mind unravelling by the minute, he cursed Regina over and over again.

A snap. A thump. A loud banging, echoing through the lines and echoes of the cavernous house, sending lightning to his brain, and his head snapped upwards, eyes widening, darkness, stretching to breaking point, the wetness seeping down his skin and lighting the nerves with flame…

Click. The muffled click of a latch, and a soundless, loud gasp, scratching and shattering the silence, nails down a chalkboard…

Somebody was here.

"Whowhowhowhoisitwhoisit…" he ran for the corridor.

…the corridor into the light that burned and burned, the window to outside he avoided…

feet pounding against the floor, sending vibrations up the walls and the shadows that pooled and hissed at him with beady eyes and slavering jaws and red red eyes, nearly as red as her, but no, but yes, and he was trapped, trapped, trapped…

"WHO IS IT?!" the roar of the jabberwocky struggled up his throat and exploded into the air, fast and as deadly and as loud as the scissors he hadn't realized where in his hands… and they flew, so bright, so silver, SHINING (_the?), down the hall, shedding echoes like onion skin, thudding into the doorframe with a loud thunk beside the head of a dark, dark figure dressed in a dark, dark suit, with dark, dark eyes and a face that was eerie, eerie, eerie in its not-distortion…

His roar died to a scream, lowering and rising. "YOU!"

He (who?) looked at him and his unfamiliar, smooth face was as blank as a looking glass, set with two dark flames.

He died, slowly, quivering in time with his shoulders. "What happened to your face?"

He (The _ One?) looked shocked, and the mirror shattered, bleeding diamond-hard shards down a face that was suddenly frozen. (frozen in time? Were they all frozen?)

"What happened, what is it, whatisithappened…"

His (who? The Queen's… _ ) voice cut through the shroud, taut and shocked. "Jefferson?

He screams at the name, warning it to go away, a high piercing note that snaps his mouth open and shut like blades of scissors. The silence rings like blows to a gong, resounding and scattering across the shattered space.

Air hacks back up his throat with a splutter. He cough-leers. Grins. Croons. "Nonononono, not me, never me…" he whirls around, bleeding a vast fan of discordant notes, a cackle, rising and falling. "I'm the Hatter…"

A bolt from the blue, a bolt of (what?). It transfixed him, throwing his head back, suspending him, a marionette (who was the puppeteer?). A roar, darker than the jabberwocky, black as the…

…more desperate than the jubjub bird, rumbling through his chest and ripping through his throat…

Hat.

… the hat?

"GET IT TO WORK!"

He lunged for the scissors.

Something against his chest; a cane made of hard, unyielding yew, a bar across his ribcage and a wash of pain, bright and burning.

Push him back.

A high-pitched scream. "Keep him back…!"

"Jefferson, enough!"

The words shiver and crackle through the air; powerful, commanding words. He fell back down to earth with a jolt. A sudden, abrupt clarity descended upon his mind, quenching the dizzying fever. Dark eyes blinked once and then focused, fixating on the man in front of him.

"Rumplestiltskin?" Jefferson gasped.

"Where am I?"

Rumplestiltskin raised an eyebrow, Jefferson's confusion mirrored in his face. "You mean you don't know?"

They were sitting on couches across from each other. The coffee table stretched out before them, a vast rift between the two men as each of them sat, held by the force of their separate delusions.

Jefferson shifted. "No."

"The Queen…" Rumplestilskin blinked at Jefferson's sudden, wild flinch, but continued, "made a curse sending everybody in the Enchanted Forest to this world. This place is called Storybrooke. There is no magic here."

Jefferson twitched in shock. "So that's why I couldn't get the hat to work…" he murmured.

"Yes," Rumplestiltskin's gaze lingered on his face. "What happened to you?" he asked quietly. Jefferson could see he was trying to remain calm, but the unease flickering in the back of his eyes betrayed him.

Jefferson stared down at the mug in his hands, unable to meet his eyes. The dark, murky liquid exhaled a thin finger of steam into the air, coiling and writhing until it eventually dissipated. "What is this?" he asked, more to take his mind of the incident than anything else. He was surprised at how his voice sounded; the low, quiet tone was such a harsh contrast to the shrieking and insane cackling he had grown accustomed to it felt quite eerie: gliding and twanging and sliding through the large house.

Rumplestiltskin's steady gaze said clearly that he wasn't fooled by Jefferson's attempt to change the subject. "It's called coffee. What happened to you?"

Jefferson took a cautionary sniff at the beverage and was pleasantly surprised by the strong, bitter aroma that assailed his nostrils. "I was…" again, the drink diverted him. "What is this called again?"

A flicker of frustration crossed Rumplestiltskin's face and he leant forward over the coffee table, voice turning hard and acidic. "Jefferson."

Jefferson swallowed. The coffee burned down his throat. "I don't know." He lied, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve. The gesture gave him something to do; he felt dreadfully disconnected from his hands otherwise. In the past few minutes that whole world seemed to have turned upside-down; he felt strangely hollow without the constant, seething pull of the madness that had infested him, empty without the perpetual euphoria.

His knuckles were still bleeding. Jefferson observed the trickle of leaking blood with vague interest and Rumplestiltskin followed his gaze. "You mean to tell me you have no idea how you did that?' the sarcasm was plain in his voice.

Jefferson closed his eyes and shuddered briefly. "You wouldn't want to know."

Rumplestiltskin's eyes narrowed. "Try me."

It all came spilling out; Regina, the Queen of Hearts, the hat, Wonderland. As he spoke, Jefferson could feel the tell-tale blurring in the back of his mind, the prelude to the madness that normally held him tight. But something about Rumplestiltskin's presence seemed to push the madness back, so that by the time Jefferson had finished he was only feeling shaky.

Rumplestiltskin's eyes had narrowed and narrowed as the story had gone on; Jefferson was left with a slit-eyed man whose expression was uncompromisingly thoughtful. "So you can remember."

Jefferson grimaced in spite of himself. "Unfortunately."

"Do you know there's someone who will help you? She will be the one to break your curse, and return magic to this place."

Hope grappled with distaste and came out victorious. "Who?"

Rumplestiltskin glanced at him, something alike a warning floating dead and desiccated in the back of his eyes. "Her name is Emma Swan. She arrived here yesterday." A flash of amusement breached his face as he added. "I suppose she might even be able to get your hat working again."

"Emma…" Jefferson murmured, thinking. Already the tell-tale tingling of excitement was vibrating through his head, sending his fingers twitching with the desire to cut and measure, sew and stitch, to make the hat that would reunite him with Grace and then they would be off, free, back to the Forest… The blood was spreading further down his knuckles, producing a dull throbbing. All around him the big house creaked and groaned, waiting. Waiting…

The world seemed very strange to him now; the lines and contours of the house were blurring and shifting like images through a convex mirror (a looking glass?), but at the same time they were also oddly sharp and clear. Jefferson felt relaxed and almost peaceful – the Hatter and Jefferson were fully one now, united with the shared idea of what to do, how to fix the mess…

"How long have I been here?" Jefferson asked. His throat was dry, but the coffee had long since been drunk, shrinking to a dark sludge at the base of the mug.

"Twenty-eight years." Rumplestiltskin answered.

Shock squeezed his heart with icy, iron fingers; he nearly fell off the couch. "What?"

Twenty-eight years trapped inside the house, unable to breathe, unable to fully live because his mind had been ruled by insanity. Twenty-eight years of staring through a window fogged by icy, rattling breaths and tears towards the figure of his daughter, Grace; so close, but still so far. Twenty-eight years of working his fingers to bone trying to make the hat.

Twenty-eight years of trying to get it to work…

Rumplestiltskin stood up. "Jefferson, you must tell nobody about this," he warned, picking up his cane. "Nobody here remembers anything about the past."

"But you remember." Jefferson murmured. "And I remember…" his voice shook and died.

Rumplestiltskin stood up. A bleak coldness glittered in his eyes. "And that, Hatter, is our curse."

The door slammed and the Hatter slowly, slowly smiled.

"Emma Swan…"

Sorry for the rather confusing imagery at the start- it was the only real way I felt I could accurately portray an insane person, having no knowledge of any diagnoses myself. The Hatter in this fic would probably have… I dunno, bipolar disorder? :P What can I say, I never claimed to be a psychiatrist.

One thing that's always really annoyed me about people when talking about Alice in Wonderland is the simple fact of the Hatter's name. If anyone has read the original version by Lewis Carroll, you would know that the Hatter is never, ever referred to as "The Mad Hatter". He is just called 'the Hatter'. It was implied by Cheshire Cat that he is mad, but in fairness, the Cat said everybody in Wonderland was. Riddle me this: if everybody is mad, then nobody really is. In Wonderland, madness is sanity.

Oh, also, my deepest condolences to anyone who might be or is associated with people/a person with a mental disorder of any sort. This is not intended to be negative or insensitive towards anything related with insanity (for lack of a better term).