A/N: Once again, this has been written for my great friend, Random Battlecry. Ran, I love you dearly for reading this, for liking this, and for being my brilliant beta. Also, I do not own Alice in Wonderland or the characters or Tim Burtons amazing manipulation of the characters or… well. Let us get on with the story.

The quarter moon sat above the horizon, grinning across the sea beneath clouds moving rapidly across the sky above. Water lapped aggressively against the side of the ship and a strong salty wind blew across the choppy waters, bringing a sudden spray of water into the face of a young woman standing on the deck of the Wonder.

The moon grinned at Alice like an old friend. It might have been laughing at the antics of the water, if the moon could laugh. If the moon were a cat, however, it could have been grinning about anything. It could have been laughing at her, for instance, for being on the deck of a ship that was about to be tossed on the sea in the swiftly approaching storm. Instead of, for example, walking through the Tulgey Wood with an eccentric hatter at her side, yelling at her for not slaying.

Or staying…

"Oh, Hatter," she sighed, and wiped with her coat sleeve at the salty water running down her face. "How you could imagine that I would forget you, when everything within an inch of my nose reminds me of Underland…"

Had she really been gone for two years?

She believed in six impossible things before breakfast, she did; but the events of the last two years were hard to add to the list, because they were quite possible and, in fact, did happen. The death of her mother, first. It had happened suddenly, just over a year ago; a weakness of the heart sustained long ago, when she'd contracted Scarlet Fever in her teens. In his kind letter, Lord Ascot had informed her that it was quite miraculous that her mother had lived as long as she had, not to mention successfully bearing two healthy children.

Of course, her mother had believed in impossible things as well. With her impossible husband and equally impossible youngest daughter, she would have had to. Lord Ascot made the arrangements for her mother's burial and the Kingsleigh Estate went to her sister Margaret. Another bit of news that was possible to the point of impossibility was that her sister and husband were expecting their second child. Alice had missed it all of course, following her father's dream all the way to China. She knew Margaret the maiden but not Margaret the mother and she most certainly did not know Margaret's children. In fact, everything she did know in London seemed to have been buried with her dear mother.

And yet, she did not regret going to China. Nor did she regret leaving it. Another associate was taking over the China office, and Lord Ascot had requested that Alice come home to London. He'd made the plea that he was getting on in years, but she knew that he wanted her to come back and marry. She firmly believed her mother had put him up to it as a last request… let her play in China until she became bored of the game, and then marry her off!

Well, she had accomplished what she had come back to accomplish and her life was so full of dreams that she didn't have the time or inclination for regrets… well, not many. She regretted the look in gold-green eyes when she had tilted the jabberwocky's blood to her lips. But she had seen her father's dream through, now she could see to her own; and how Alice Kingsleigh could dream! Why, the previous night she had a dream that would not leave her thoughts for more than a moment. It certainly wasn't a memory. After that fateful and frabjous day, she knew the difference between dreams, and dreams that were memories, and dreams that had a foundation in memory but were still just dreams.

It was that dream that had her gazing across the sea at a moon that grinned familiarly at her; grinned as if it knew the darkest area of her mind and was dying to tell someone the secrets that lay there. It was the dream that had her mind turning over so vigorously that she was pacing restlessly across the deck, rather than going to dinner.

In the dream, she had been looking down at the flat surface of the most splendid top hat she had ever seen. It was singed around the edges but was covered in fine cloth; several hat pins were sticking into the side. Protruding from beneath the hat was a wild tangle of hair the color of the ocean sky at sunset; and frombelow that a quiet and serious voice was speaking up to her with a slight lisp.

"You're always too tall or too small…"

She distantly heard herself reply, "Too small or too tall for what?"

And then she was looking up into glowing eyes and her breath caught in her throat. His eyes were the same bright color as the ocean when the sun shines down on it at midday, alternately golden and then vibrant green, depending on the angle from which you looked at them.

"For this," he replied, and his hands gently cupped her face on each side. His voice had startled her out of the serious contemplation of his eyes. She felt on her cheek the scratchy texture of the bandage on his finger from where he had pricked himself with a sewing needle or cut himself on a pair of scissors… or a broken tea cup. His voice had suddenly sounded slightly Scottish (she paused in her remembering to congratulate herself on the alliteration) and slightly rough, like the bandage, and though it no longer contained its familiar lisp, it was still so heartbreakingly familiar. She felt herself trembling as she stared up at him; into those glowing eyes filled with curiosity, compassion, madness, admiration, and something else that she couldn't name.

"For what?" she whispered, staring up at him, heart full of the sensations of his hands on her face and his eyes locked on hers.

And then she felt his lips on hers, soft and wet and full of the something else that had been in his eyes that she couldn't name. His long sweeping eyebrows tickled against her temples and if she closed her eyes tight enough and thought hard enough, she could still feel all of it as though it were happening right then, on the deck of the Wonder, beneath the grinning moon.

In the dream, when she had still been dreaming--- and this reminded her again of the difference between dreams which are only dreams and memories of dreams (or was it the other way around?)--- Alice had squeaked like a dormouse and jumped back, quickly reaching over and pinching herself on the arm. The fact that the pinch had awoken her caused her to lie in bed weeping until it was time for breakfast, and she had quite forgotten about six impossible things. Her poor confused mind had been focused on only one.

"Alice," she said to herself now, on the deck,suddenly weary of dreams and memories, "I believe you're more than a little half mad."

"You would have to be…." A voice, seemingly carried on the wind, drifted off unfinished.

"To dream you up," she supplied to the night, to the moon, to the voices in her head. "Except I didn't dream you up… but you couldn't be more perfect for me if I had."

The statement that escaped her lips caused her to gasp and glare threateningly at the moon.

"If you say one word," she addressed the sickle of light, wagging a finger… but she never got a chance to finish what she was going to say. A bright fork of lightening shot across the sky at the same moment that the ship pitched violently sideways. She lost her balance and fell with a sharp and dismayed cry over the side.