Disclaimer: Things I own: a six-pack of coke, a fountain pen with no ink, and new black shoes. Things I don't: SyFy's Alice. Or Hatter, unfortunately.
There's an ache in her chest. She thinks it's where her heart should be. It doesn't seem to be there anymore.
Where could it have gone?
She opens her eyes. The walls are white and the bed is unfamiliar and something is beeping. She's in a hospital bed. Her eyes search the room and land on her mother. She says the first thing that comes to her mind.
"He's gone."
"Who's gone?" her mother asks, confused. She wonders how her mother can not know.
Hatter, she thinks. "Dad," she says.
Her mother wraps her arms around her and she knows she should cry, but the tears won't come. Her body is shaking and she can't understand why.
Her mother is whispering soothing words in her ear, but they are the last thing she wants to hear.
She pulls away and her mother rubs her arms.
"You gave me such a fright."
She remembers Wonderland. She had been there for days. With Hatter. She feels bad for scaring her mother. After losing Dad like that, it wasn't fair to have her daughter just disappear too.
"How long was I there?" she asks.
"Almost an hour," her mother tells her.
She can't believe this. She had been in Wonderland for days. But only an hour had passed? That wasn't right, that couldn't be right. If it was true then that would mean that it was all –
Just a dream.
Her mother was talking, but she wasn't listening.
It had all been a dream. The Queen of Hearts was a dream. Jack's engagement was a dream. Charlie was a dream.
Hatter was a dream.
"Are you alright, sweetie?" Her mother's voice breaks through her thoughts.
She nods. "Yeah, I'm just…"
"The doctor's said you would be a little woozy when you woke up. Would you like the nurse to come give you something to help?"
"I – yes. Thank you."
Her mother stands off the side as a pleasant looking woman in baby pink scrubs injects something into her IV.
"She should sleep the rest of the day," the nurse says to her mother. "Dr. Liu wants to keep her overnight for observation. But you should be able to take her home tomorrow."
"Thank you," her mother says. She is drifting off to sleep and so she must be dreaming when she thinks she hears Hatter's voice say, "May I come in?"
----
She wakes up the next morning just as confused and sad as when she went to sleep.
Hatter was just a dream.
She wonders what happened to Jack. Had seeing him be pushed into that van been part of the dream too? She wonders if she cares.
Even if she does care, he left, she tells herself. He didn't care enough to stay.
Hatter had stayed.
She pushes this thought away. She can't think about Hatter now. After all, he doesn't exist.
The nurse comes into the room and opens the curtain. The bright light hurts her eyes a little.
"Sorry, dear," the nurse says. Her scrubs are green today. Alice thinks they look a bit like baby puke. "How are you feeling this morning?"
"I'm okay."
The nurse takes her temperature and looks at her vitals and her readouts from during the night. Then the nurse takes out the IV and disconnects the wires that seem to be attached to every part of her body.
"Your mother will be here soon to check you out," the nurse says. She sets a pile of clothes on the bed. "She left these here for you to change into. There's a bathroom right there." She points at the corner of the room.
Alice thanks her with a nod and a small smile and gets out of the bed.
Her muscles are stiff as she stretches. She wonders how long she's been in the bed. She takes the pile of clothes and hopes that her mother remembered a bra and clean underwear.
As she takes off the flimsy paper hospital gown – stupid thing, she thinks, kicking it into a corner – she turns to the mirror to inspect her body. Nothing is different, and she doesn't know why this disappoints her. She turns, looks over her shoulder at her back. There had been a small scrape there, from sleeping against a tree one night. The scrape is gone.
It's as though Wonderland had truly been nothing more than a dream.
She looks down at her forearm, the last hope she allows herself that Wonderland was real.
All she sees is the faint green lines of her veins beneath her skin.
She dresses and pushes her mind away from Wonderland. She forces it to settle on her dad. She can still feel the way his arms had constricted around her in the first real hug she'd gotten since she was ten years old. She remembers the smell of his blood and the way her smiled at her just before he died.
Even if it wasn't real, it's time to move on, she tells herself.
Her mother is in the room, purse in hand, looking ready to go, when Alice steps out of the bathroom.
"Ready to go home, sweetheart?" she asks.
"Yeah. Let's go."
Her mother has called a cab for them and as they drive, Alice looks out the window at the buildings. They were tall, but not as tall as the ones in Wonderland had been. She wonders when she will stop comparing this world to her dream world.
Aren't you supposed to forget your dreams when you wake up? She wishes she could.
They arrive at their apartment and her mother unlocks the door and they step inside. Alice looks around as her mother bustles off to take care of something. It's almost as though she doesn't know what to do with Alice now, though before they had always had plenty to talk about.
Alice makes her way to her room. It is the same. She is not surprised. Merely…sad. Yes, that was what she was. She had opened the door, half-hoping to see a green grass carpet and white furniture and a man in an old, tilted top hat, smiling at her from under heavily lined eyes.
But there was no grass carpet, her furniture was the same polished nickel and wood that it had always been, and Hatter wasn't there.
Her eyes fall on her map. All the places Dad could be and isn't. Now the tears will come and she falls onto her bed and sobs.
----
Later, when the tears stop, she gets up and gets herself some water. She looks at her map. She remembers the hospital and her strange dream and wonders if she'll ever know what really happened.
It's time to move on.
One by one, she begins to take the pins out, placing them carefully in their box. She removes the map and lays it on her bed. She pulls out an old hat box of her mother's that she kept little trinkets in. She puts things, one by one, into the box. All the things that remind her of her father.
Someday, she thinks, she'll pull this box out again, remember all the reasons why she loved him, and truly accept what had happened. But for today, she needs to not be reminded anymore. She needs to not think about the smell of blood and death, and the way his arms felt around her.
So she boxes it all up and puts it away.
"What's this about?" her mother asks when she comes to see how she's doing.
"I don't need to look for Dad anymore," Alice tells her, pushing the box under the bed. "It's time to move on." She begins to roll up her map.
Her mother stands in the doorway, at a loss for words. Alice knows she wants to ask what prompted this, but she also knows that she is too relieved and too afraid to form the words.
The doorbell rings.
"Oh, I almost forgot," her mother says. "The construction worker who found you, he wanted to stop by and see how you were. Very sweet."
Her mother leaves to answer the door and Alice thinks to herself that it's already begun. After a breakup, her mother always tries to get her to date various guys she knows, not content until Alice has gone out once or twice.
Alice wonders how she can politely tell him she's not interested.
Sorry, but I've recently woken up from the craziest dream where my father is a mad scientist and I fell in love with a crazy hatter who used to own a teashop.
That'd go over well.
She picks up Alice in Wonderland where it lies on her bed. Strange, how a book that she hadn't even liked as a child had influenced her so much. And strange that she should find in a dream the one man that had never left her, not even when she asked him to.
Even dreaming, how could you have ever let him go? she asks herself.
"Alice!" her mother calls. "Come meet David."
As she walks down the hall, she thinks of all the things that she would tell Hatter if he were here.
Thanks for saving me so many times.
Thank you for never leaving me.
I love you. Let me stay with you?
But now she was awake, and the dream was over, and it was time to meet David.
She looks up and she can't believe her eyes.
Hatter.
She thinks she has cried out his name but she isn't sure because all that matters is that she has somehow gotten across the room and is in his arms.
He breathes what sounds like a sigh of relief and whispers something that sounds like "finally" in her ear and holds her tighter.
"You have no idea how happy I am to see you," she says.
Hatter. He was real and he was here and once again, he hadn't let her leave.
Gently, he puts her down and looks at her. The look in his eyes makes her never want to look away.
And then he's moved and his lips are moving against hers and she's kissing him back and she can't remember when she felt so happy.
He pulls back and leans his forehead against hers. "I missed you," he whispers. And then they are kissing again and Alice thinks that in that moment, she has finally found her soul mate.
"I love you," she whispers against his lips and she feels him smile.
"You have no idea how long I've wanted to hear you say that."
A/N: Thanks for reading! Reviewers get Hatter all to themselves for an hour! Constructive criticism is appreciated! I'll do my best to reply to all reviews.