Hatter

At first everything was still, and I wondered if this was it? If I was dead, and the rest of entirety would be this still cold nothing. But I wasn't dead.

Then everything changed. I was falling. Falling faster than I thought was possible. The air around me stung my skin.

Jack still had hold of my arm. The dagger had slipped from my grip. I feared that I would land on it, if this fall ever ended. If I was lucky Jack would land on. He would deserve that.

We had been falling for to long, then something odd happened. We stopped in midair, it felt like the air around me was shifting. Then we began to fall the other way.

Falling up. It made no seance, but it was happening. It felt almost like Jack was being sucked upward, and he was pulling me along with him. I hated that.

It seemed as if we had been falling for hours, when I saw alight ahead. It hit quicker that I thought it would. Suddenly I was sprawled on a hard ground. I felt a sharp pain in my leg, I seemed to have landed awkwardly on it. It tried to shift my weight, but it was to painful.

I heard a clatter in front me. I looked and saw my dagger inches away from my face. There was a groan from a few feet away from me. Jack. I didn't want to have to deal with the knight right now.

I tried to look around me. I was laying on what seemed to be a path way. It was black, and the were lights around it. It was dark out, I assumed that it was night. This was not how I had expected the world beneath Wonderland to look like.

Then it hit me. I knew where I was. It looked different then it had before, but it was the same place. It was the only place that made any seance.


Jack

Took a moment to look around me. Where was I? One thing was for sure: this wasn't the world beneath Wonderland.

I was lying on a hard, flat surface. My arms were soar, but I didn't seem to be injured. I pulled myself up. Hatter was, face down, a few feet away from me. Her dagger was lying next to her, and from a moment I wondered it I should try to grab it before she picked it up.

I heard something honking sound from behind me. I turned to look and was greeted by to bright lights coming from a medal machine. What was that? It was coming at me fast. I sprang to my feet, and ran out of the way. I looked back at Hatter. She didn't move. She was going to get run over by this machine.

I wanted to leave her, but something inside me told me not to. She was still a person, right? I knew I would regret this.

"Hatter?" I bent down and nudged her. "Hatter, you need to move!" I sounded incredibly stupid, but that didn't matter.

"Hatter, your going to get hit."

"What?" She mumbled, she reached for the knife. If her plan was to stab me she was going to have to try a lot harder. I reached over her, grabbing the knife before her fingers could find it. She sent me a death glare as she tried to pull herself up. She gave a gasp, as she noticed the contraption heading our way.

Hatter tried to get to her feet, but let out a howl in pain. She had hurt her leg, apparently. I offered her my hand, but she just looked at me, obviously confused. I didn't even know why I was helping her myself. She didn't deserve it.

In stead of waiting for her to take my hand, I took hers and pulled her out of the way of the passing contraption. It zoomed by us a second latter. That was too close.

Hatter pulled away from me, but fell the moment that she was standing on her own. She couldn't kill me, so she didn't want anything to do with me. I didn't want anything to do with her, but I felt as if I didn't have a choice. Maybe she knew where we were. I didn't like the thought of leaving her with her leg in that state, no matter how evil she was.

"Where are we?" I asked, not particularly to her, but I was hoping that she would answer.

"The world above Wonderland. That place that Alice came from." She didn't sound like she wanted to be talking to me, but I had just saved her life, so she at least owed me an answer.

"What?" How did get here?"


Hatter

"You heard me", I retorted, as I tried to pull myself up again. I wondered if my leg was broken. Great, I'm stuck in the middle of this strange place, with a broken leg. I almost managed to get to my feet, but my leg screamed in protest.

"Stop", Jack put his hand on my shoulder. "You're going to make it worse."

Was he trying to rub in the fact that I had lost, and was now helpless? He still had my dagger.

"What do you want?" I growled at him.

"Nothing", he said. I gritted my teeth. What were we doing here? Here the two of us weren't real. Alice would wake up anytime now, thinking that her whole adventure was a dream.

Jack probably didn't realized this. Or maybe he did, maybe that was the reason he was trying to help me. No, I wasn't going to let him help. I still had my pride.

"Here, let me see you leg, I can recognize a broken bone."

"No, leave me alone."

"You want to just to lie in the middle of the street, alone, in a world that you've been in for five minutes?" I groaned.

He had a point, and we were both strangers to this world. I might as well let him help me. I could always find away of disposing of him if anything went wrong.

"Fine", I sighed, trying to pull myself to a sitting position. "Is it broken?"

Jack knelt beside me. "Can you straiten it?" I did. He waited a moment before saying: "No, it's sprained badly, but not broken."

"Good."

"But you still shouldn't put that much weight on it. So", he clasped his hands together. "You know where we are?"

"I already told you."

"So, you've been here before."

"Yes, idiot, I have been here before." Then it dawned on me, and I said, more to myself than to him: "I think I know how to get back."

"Back?"

"To Wonderland."

"No. You're not going back."

"What?"

"I won't let you. You can't go back."

"And you think you can stop me?" I let out a laugh, that I imminently regretted. I was siting on the ground, not even able to stand up, and while he was on his feet, as strong as ever, with my knife in his hand.

"Yes. I can definitely stop you", Jack said. "Besides, what would you even do if you could get back. After what just happened, you have no chance of ever overthrowing The Queen." He was right, I hated it, but he was right.

"Fine, but do you want to spend the rest of your live here?" He swallowed, but didn't answer. "Here, where you're not even a real person. You're just an illusion of Alice's husband."

"You're not real either", was all that he said. That wasn't possible, though. We were real, just not here. We were story book characters. But he was right, I couldn't go back to Wonderland. There I would face certain death, but I couldn't stay here.

Jack wouldn't go back, he was to determined to stop me from going. He wouldn't last a day in this world. He knew nothing about this world, but then again I didn't know much either.

"We should find a place to stay." I said, hating the fact that I had acknowledged that we were in this together. "That might be hard, considering the fact that we don't have any money." I smiled to myself, wondering if I could blackmail Alice and get enough money to start a life here. Start a life here, that sounded terrible, even in my head.

"Wait!" He reached in his pocket, and pulled out a small coin purse. "Alice dropped this when we went through the looking glass."

"Is there any money is there?" Jack opened it and peered inside.

"Is this what money looks like here?" He held up some green pieces of paper. I examined one, it had the number twenty on each side.

"Yes, I think this is money."

"So you want to just walk around until we find so sort of place to stay?" I sighed.

"Do you have a better idea?"


Jack

"No", I admitted, but I didn't think that Hatter was in the best state for a walk. I considered leaving her while I found a place, and then coming back for her. I put that out of my head, we didn't know if the place that we were right now was dangerous, I shouldn't leave her alone while she was hurt. Even if she was who she was, had enough knowledge of this world to survive.

I put her knife in my jacket pocket. Then I offered her my hand to help her stand up, she stood very shakily. She had to cling to my arm for support, I didn't think that she was too happy about that. I looked around.

"Which way should we go?" I asked.

"I don't know, does it matter?"

"Let's go this way then."