A great black pit, like a scar. It was all that was left of her home. There was the room where wssc members had camped out. Another room Where Alice housed the street children she had so adored, making them fat on tea and cookies. The seldom used kitchen, because she seldom ate either forgetting to in the midst of her work or simply being to busy. The frame of the stairs just barely hung together above it would have been a small room just big enough to house a tea table. A table that she had stained three years ago during a tea party where the little Radoe girl had fed Sweet rabbit things that made her cough up blood. Pins and needles and little broken razors. There had also been three doors off to the side, three rooms where the rulers of her wonderland had been kept. The first door had housed first the Cheshire cat, and then Scarecrow, the visitor from Oz. the second door was a slightly bigger room, for the king and queen of hearts and the white rabbit. The third door had been her room. The place where she had built her kingdom, planning for nights and days. And where it had all fallen down, because she had been blinded by hubris and confidence.
And of course the chasm below it all that had never been visible before, but could now bee seen clearly for what it was. Hell. But wasn't it absolutely ludicrous? Frabjous day calloh callay wasn't it? For in the end she kept her promise of four years to burn Sweet rabbit to death. The mask was in her hands, it had lived through what its owner hadn't, perfect black and red porcelain. The mask may be complete, unscathed, oh but Rabbit had cracked finally and forever. Couldn't there be relief in know humpty dumpty couldn't be put back together again?
All of this raced through Hatter's mind as she looked at the remains of her home. It had been home, closer to it than she and Alice had gotten in a long time. Hatter couldn't remember when there had been a real home except from feeding on Alice's memories, and even then it was only a few years. Here they had been safe for a time, happy, sheltered, powerful. For that one year before they had been locked up in Arkham to rot, they had the world in their palm. Now Hatter was tired, she didn't want to run and search and hide anymore. But like they say, there isn't any rest for the wicked, and no solace would ever be found till she had Gotham, then the world and the universe. There would never be rest.
Hatter turned away from the wreck refusing to look back at it again. She knew all of this and she knew that someday she would look back and she would see everything she had razed to the ground to make her life. And she didn't think she would care.
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Laine turned off the tv, her only baby girl had been released from Arkham. Why did it make her sick, to know she was out? Why couldn't she feel happy that maybe she would get to hold her again without the cameras and the guards? Laine, the hell was that even her name? Why was it that every one in her family was so good at running away? March, and Alice, now Dodge who never came home anymore. She had been the first of course, and she had ran faster and harder than any of them. She had ignored little things that she should have paid attention to in her haste. The bruises, the trips to the hospital, the time March had gutted a bird looking for it's eggs, Alice talking to herself in class. Things that she would have noticed if she had stayed Alice. Too little to late, it was time to move on, she would live for a while yet and it was time to do something. Maybe her mind was going, it was about time.
