Disclaimer: I don't own it.
A/N: I needed another fandom like I needed a hole in the head...but so it goes. This is my first foray into Alice fic, but methinks it shan't be my last. Reviews are adored and enormously appreciated and I do solemnly swear that I shall try to respond to any I get.
The problem wasn't that she didn't trust him.
As he steered the boat back toward the city, head high and shoulders squared and utterly, utterly resolute for once in his life, Hatter found he could acknowledge that truth without hesitation.
Despite the show he had put on for Alice when she'd stood in his office, dripping water all over his floors and looking like something out of the sort of dreams he'd never dared dream, he had no illusions. He wasn't—hadn't ever been—what someone like her would consider a good man.
A good liar? Absolutely.
A good conman? The best.
He could talk a miser out of his money, sell water to a fish and charm the knickers off a nun—had done, to be honest. Often. That last, especially.
His entire life had been spent living ever more determinedly down to every expectation (because everyone, even his sad, tea-mad mum, had only ever imagined the worst for him…of him…about him) and avoiding all but the quickest, easiest and most personally profitable—and, inevitably, morally reprehensible—opportunities presented him.
Alice was…none of those things.
Alice was honest. She had morals, scruples, and even, he suspected, principles.
She was everything that was good; everything that he had so often been assured that he wasn't. That she still didn't trust him, despite his best efforts to prove himself to her…well, it was only to be expected, wasn't it?
The Right Thing was a foreign language to him; a book he'd never read and a song he'd never sung. Of course he'd gotten it wrong.
So yeah, the problem—the thing sitting like a lump of lead in his stomach and burning his throat like bile—wasn't that she didn't trust him.
It was that he wanted her to trust him. And it terrified him.
He wanted her to trust him. And it went against every instinct he'd honed and every habit he'd cultivated.
Not a profit in sight, no gain to be made and abso-bloody-lutely everything to lose (up to and including his head) and it didn't matter in the slightest. He still wanted it and he didn't even care that he was scared sick because of it.
He wanted to be worthy like he'd never wanted anything before. He wanted to be good.
And since he knew very well that he could never actually be either of those things, he thought maybe he could get by with just being good enough. It, at the very least, sounded more attainable—he may have been in the throes of an emotional reformation, but he was still him and no more inclined to believe in miracles than he had been before a wayward Oyster in a very wet dress had turned his entire existence on its head.
But good enough…
As he steered the boat into one of the lesser used canals on the outskirts of the city, working through the last few details of his admittedly miserable excuse for a plan (stupid, risky, dangerous and almost guaranteed to get him caught and executed by one side or another since he'd done a bang up job of pissing them all right the fuck off of late, hadn't he?), Hatter began to believe that he could do it.
That he could manage good enough.
That he could be good enough.
Good enough for Alice to trust. Good enough for Alice to believe in.
Good enough. For Alice.