Not-so-Wonderland
A/N: I've recently decided that Syfy's Alice is my favorite movie, thus trumping The Last Unicorn's place. (Yes, I write crime dramas and my favorite movie was The Last Unicorn. Deal with it.) Anyway, I decided in my haze of obsession and looking up actors that I would try my hand at both a first-person and an Alice fic. So here is a dark Hatter story… because, I love Andrew Lee Potts in all the (granted, only two) things I have seen him in.
Disclaimer: I don't own Alice. Or Hatter. Really wish I did. Also, I am mildly changing plots, because the timeline confused me a bit so to make sense of it: Hatter's grandfather met Alice of Legend, to fit with Charlie being a child around that time and being about a hundred and fifty. (Though the change won't really come in till next chapter...)
Chapter One
They told me it was better. That we should be… happy, or ecstatic, or lusting, but never sad. Never the bad, because then we should become upset, and being upset meant we would turn our upset onto the Queen of Hearts, and she would become angry as well. They told me it was better to pump the people of Wonderland full of, not tea, but these "pearls" of emotion gleaned from "oysters", people just like us but from the other side of the Looking-glass. And thus my tea shop became what it is.
I never tried it, the strong, passionate emotions of the oysters; I did not want to feel the rush of my blood boiling in fake lust or fascination. I wanted my emotions to be my own… I suppose that's how I became to be who I am.
Instead, I just sold it to the high and hoity of my world. Yeah, I know, how disgusting? Selling these fake, über-powerful emotions to the highest bidder? Emotions that could crash our systems? I always envied the oysters that, a power they didn't know they had, the power to kill us with their feeling. I always wanted to feel that powerfully, always wanted to be able to express myself so fully and completely. It doesn't come naturally to us.
Eventually, it took its toll, selling these "teas" to my people, my family, my friends. If friends they could be called. Anyway, I had known- being in the business that I was, catering to the addictions and every need of those who could pay- for some time about the Resistance, people that knew what this instant gratification system was doing to us. I figured, with the information I can gather from people looking for a fix of Love or Ecstasy, why not join this Resistance and fight the very trade that made my livelihood?
Well… Maybe just one- no, never a sip. I fought against the urge to feel, when the world came crashing down over my ears day after day as I watched the world fall apart in a cycle of rush and rise and rush and crash. Now look, I'm responsible for holding up a universe at the same time as I crash it down.
I can appreciate the irony of it, as can Dodo.
As can the others whose backs, I scratch on the Resistance side; of course, those who I scratch on the Heart side only are looking for their next fix.
Which I provide.
Hah! How easy is it to fall into that circle? How easy to slip down and away? How hard to fight? But I do, day after day. Day after day after day of watching Dormouse selling tea to those lazy addicts, until the one day that the fisher came in and said he had someone I would like to meet. Someone legendary.
Alice.
And I am Hatter.