So, after writing 'Dirty Little Secrets' and getting through a string of variously depressing and heavy chapters in that long chaptered fic I keep talking about (which, by the way, still doesn't have a name—and that's all that stops me from posting it, really), I felt like setting it all aside for a while to write something cute, fluffy, and funny. This little germ of an idea started as an unintentional entry to a quarterly challenge in one of the LiveJournal 'Alice' communities. And then it exploded into a full-blown story of its own. I never meant to write a story like this, I swear.
Disclaimer: I do not own Alice or Hatter, or Carol, or the scary sci-fi version of Wonderland.
o…o
The wind blew at just the right angle that it went up her pants legs and chilled her all the way up to her butt, and Alice squirmed and walked faster. She couldn't get home fast enough.
The sky was a solid grey slab overhead, the wind bit, and every few hours it rained or sleeted. It was a perfectly dreary winter day—at least in December winter seemed a little more cheerful because people were looking forward to Christmas and there were trees decorated and lampposts wrapped in garlands. By the end of January, everything was grey and sodden and everyone looked forward to the warmer weather.
Perhaps the person who looked forward to the warm weather the most was Hatter.
They reached her apartment from opposite directions at the same time and Alice had to stop walking so she could laugh at him.
He was wrapped up in a heavy wool coat that he said was called a Duffel coat, which was completely shapeless and looked bulletproof and smelled funky whenever it got wet; he had the hood up and a long purple scarf wrapped about half a dozen times around his neck and over his mouth and nose, heavy boots, and two pairs of gloves. Even though she couldn't see, she was pretty sure he was wearing several pairs of socks and probably long johns, too. He had an ever-present travel-mug of tea in one hand and the other was jammed in his pocket.
"What's so funny?" He demanded as she laughed, his voice muffled through the scarf.
"Hatter, are you in there somewhere?" She stood on her toes and pulled his scarf down with her fingers.
"It's not funny, you know," he grumbled. "I'm cold. It's freezing here! How do you stand it?"
She shrugged. "I'm cold, too, but I don't complain about it. Complaining won't make it spring any faster, you know. Didn't you have winter in Wonderland?"
"Well, yes, but it was just cold, not vaporizing-hot-water freezing," he whined.
Alice rolled her eyes. In an effort to show him exactly how cold 'below zero' was, she took a cup of boiling water outside and threw it in the air—it turned to ice before it hit the ground, and Hatter thought it was terrifying. The man who lived in the same world as the Jabberwocky and the Queen of Hearts was afraid of the cold.
"That's just what happens when it gets cold enough—like when you can see your breath and stick your tongue to a pole. Just a fact of nature."
"Can we go inside, please?" He asked. "It's awful out here."
"You really are a sissy."
"I'm not a sissy, I'm freezing! I'm wearing so many pairs of shorts my thighs don't know each other anymore!"
She laughed again. She couldn't help it. But she let him in because he was totally pathetic.
The inside stairway of the apartment was only a fraction of a degree warmer than outside.
"Will your tongue really stick to a pole?" He asked, leaning casually on one of the metal poles.
"Yeah, why?"
"I just can't see how that would work. Surely your body temperature is enough to keep it from freezing."
"Just trust me, it's not."
She went up the next flight of stairs but became aware he wasn't behind her anymore. She looked over to the next landing down.
He was looking at one of the poles.
"Hohmygod, don't!" She called down. "Never mind how stupid it is, d'you have any idea how dirty those poles are? You could get syphilis off of that thing if you go tongue-kissing it!"
"I just wanna see if it'll stick."
"It will stick, and it'll be painful, and that pole is filthy!"
But there was no convincing Hatter when the prospect of doing his own little experiment was at hand. He had an insatiable urge to figure out everything, and for all that he was extremely cautious in Wonderland—she was the reckless one then—sometimes he did stupid things here when he went into some impromptu hands-on experiment that could end in any number of horrible ways. Like when he spent a few days in his new apartment—Jack's old apartment—trying to see what he could put down the garbage disposal. (He stopped after he destroyed a pair of chopsticks leftover from Chinese takeout.)
And now he was in the stairwell outside her apartment, tentatively pressing the tip of his tongue to a metal pole just to see if it would stick.
Which it did.
"Oh my god, that's disgusting," she groaned.
"Thtuk," he slurred.
"Of course you're stuck. I told you you'd get stuck. I should just leave you here."
He gave a quick tug, thinking he could get free that way, and his eyes went wide when he was still stuck quite firm to the pole.
"Uh-oh…"
"Satisfied?" Alice asked, leaning against the adjacent wall.
He nodded, trying to look at her with what she knew was his best big-puppy-eyes look.
Part of her just wanted to leave him stuck there for doing something so stupid, but she wasn't that cruel. She took his teacup and unscrewed the lid.
"Here, move your body back as much as you can," she said. Then she dribbled a bit of the hot tea on the icy pole to melt the seal.
She gave him his cup back and continued on her way up to her apartment.
Once inside, it took Hatter several minutes to unwrap himself from his heavy coat and the jacket under it and the scarf that was longer than he was tall.
"I can't believe you did that!" Alice laughed. "It's so stupid! Everybody here knows not to do that."
"Yeh, weh… I didn' fink ih' would work like tha'," he said, his tongue still hanging out of his mouth.
"Well, now you know."
He made a little whining noise.
Goodness, he was piteous.
She cupped his cold cheeks in her hands and brought him down to kiss him.
"You'll survive the winter, I'm sure," she murmured.
Instead of answering, he followed her and kissed her.
o…o
I don't know what it is, but people are always driven to stick their tongues to metal poles in winter, especially if they've never been somewhere that it's cold enough for it to actually stick. The result it always the same: their tongue sticks, and they're shocked. I swear this story has a plot, I just wanted to use this very short chapter to set the stage—it's winter and no one is happy about it.
This story will be updated weekly; that's my usual routine. Feedback, should you choose to leave it, would be greatly appreciate. I hope you enjoyed the read!