Title: Wild Cards & Gambits
Rating: R in general.
Author's Note: I wasn't about to let this one out yet. I kept tinkering and tinkering but my beta gave me a pretty hard push.
Poetry and rhyming in this one often comes from either TTLG or AiW
Chapter Twenty Five: Breaking the Unnatural Child
One week had passed, then another half.
No rest, no water or food,... no mercy in their unrelenting torture.
And not even the slightest hint of surrender.
It was immensely trying and their impatience was growing by the minute.
Dee watched his twin dance around Hatter's still form, doing a rather worthy jig considering how tired he must be. Now and again he'd pause mid-step and forcefully prod the young man with an electrical rod. Dee, while amused by his brother's enthusiastic antics, also felt a small bit of disgust for it. While they shared a collective conscience in their motivations and ideals, they had their different styles of extracting information and Dee couldn't help but think that his way was much more... civilized.
Dum preferred physical tortures, the kind of superficial ones that could utterly destroy a body if they went on too long. Considering the state of some of their victims, there often wasn't much left to identify their corpses when Dum was finished. Dee, however, enjoyed the mental anguish that could pull apart a person, mind and soul. He could plan a route out into a mind that would tear fact from fiction and blend them all into an insane mixture that caused even the strongest to cave. Together, operating with a singular focus that their work must be finished, they had made a more than formidable team throughout the history of Wonderland. They had been respected and feared; their names often used by mothers to frighten their children into obedience.
But still, only two minds had ever been able to resist their torture and one of them was sitting before them, staring stonily ahead. Not giving an inch and taking their torture without much aplomb.
Now where was the satisfaction in that?
Standing outside of the carefully constructed illusion of the mirrors, Dee glanced at his pocket-watch curiously and marked the time before putting it back in his leather waistcoat. He could sense, more than see, the Snake lingering somewhere near by. Though he didn't like to admit it, not even to his brother, that particular woman... creature bothered him. She was single-minded to the point of self-destruction, so immensely loyal to a purpose that it bordered on rabid fanaticism. Not that it frightened him. Not really; over the course of his long extended life she was just another in a sea of loyalists in his opinion. But it did disturb him that rather than leave them to their jobs, she constantly appeared to watch and be certain their job was being done. Always ready with a sharp word or order and when those didn't work she threatened.
Even the old Queen of Hearts had not dared to interfere with them whenever they had hit their stride with a victim.
But, to be fair, Dee thought to himself, they had yet to hit that with the Hatter.
Long ago and on orders from whichever Royal they served at the time, they had broken apart his grandfather and then his father, systematically tearing into parts of them but never permanently. Somehow, that family line managed to rebuild from even the most devastating of invasions. They presented a challenge that neither twin could resist and they used them as case studies in how to proceed properly with torture. The only niggling problem was that they had never figured out just how the Hatter family managed to resist them and then rebuild after such mind-destroying interrogation.
When they had first been given Hatter to torture at the Heart Casino, he had been a gift to them from the Queen for their loyal services. She had known they had longed to get their hands on him but Hatter's false allegiance and usefulness to her had kept him from their grip until his inevitable betrayal. That had been a glorious triumph for them, with both of them eagerly planning what they could do. The ripping apart of the Alice had just been an appetizer to them; Oysters were far less complex to them, their motivations easier to discern for their skilful manipulations. Wonderlanders took a certain finesse; the masked layers and the constant word games some of them used was tricky to uncover.
They had revelled in the possibility of ripping apart another of the Hatter family until they realized just what they had come up against.
Torture after inventive torture, physical and mental, had yielded nothing in the few hours that he was theirs. Back then he had just sat there, much like he was now, and as Dee watched Dum shock the Hatter again, he flashed back to a moment that they had been at a loss over a year ago.
Hatter sat, bound in the chair, and the room around him began to warp to the state of his mind. Without their order, the walls became green and gloopy instead of hypnotizing monochrome swirls. The change in the room had shocked them and each had to look away to make sure they hid that shock well. It was when they finally had made a mutual decision to proceed with a more physical torture that they noticed he was shivering; each convulsion seemed to carry through his wiry frame. Thinking that they had finally broken through, Dee had bent over close.
"What secrets do you hold, boy? Something you can reveal?" he had asked. Hatter's body did one last shudder, his eyes closed as he took in a deep breath, and then he lifted his head. His eyes had seemed to be lively with amusement.
"You're going to have to do a lot better than that, boys," Hatter had croaked.
In a way, his constant resistance and lack of capitulation had only increased their obsession with breaking him. It was why their involvement in the recent events of Wonderland had partially revolved around him. They were motivated to destroy him but Dee prided himself on being patient. Instead of kidnapping him outright when they had been brought into the plans, the twins had simply bided their time. Each event, each moment, could serve to break the Hatter further.
In waiting, the passing events had eventually helped them so that they could capture him and have the opportunity to break him to the smallest fraction. They were being well-paid to find what their employer wanted from him, but they were just as challenged to do it for themselves.
No one had escaped their tortures so intact before.
No one had exhausted their options before.
They had elected to go by this differently. Dum was to break Hatter's body, while Dee was to break his mind once the body was weak. But the process was long and they were beginning to tire after so many days straight with no rest. Hatter actually fell asleep once or twice while stuck in the hypnotized state that they had placed him in, and it had so infuriated the doctors that they had resorted to shocking him whenever he slipped away.
Dee was not to admit to his brother that for the first time he was having doubts as to their abilities.
Suddenly, Dum shoved the prod deep into Hatter's armpit and it crackled loudly, a bright blue charge exploding between his shirt and the end of the rod. Hatter grunted, his body shifting away from the pain of the charge. Instead of relenting, Dum merely moved the end of the rod until it rested just under Hatter's ribcage and stabbed upward. There was the faint screech of bone breaking under the pressure and Dee noticed the fresh open wound where Dum had struck. He had broken a rib just slightly by Dee's estimation; enough to cause considerable pain but not enough to warrant much concern on their part. Hatter's face tightened but he didn't scream as expected.
The Mirrored Tunnel he was standing in was dark, so when Dee turned his head and saw a small woman just to his left he jumped. He hadn't been expecting to see the Snake, though he had known she was around.
"How much longer?" Selena asked as she handed Dee a canteen of water. The old man shrugged and sipped delicately.
"Depends on the strength of the mind as you know. His..."
"Is stronger than most. I know that; who doesn't? Same old speech and you have yet to win any sympathy for it. You have four more days." Selena reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny glass globe with three blue lights in it. She calculated something in her head before slipping it back into her pocket. "I've sent my men to find a conduit vat and we'll wait for you all in the Changing Hall for now."
She reached out and grabbed him by his leather lapel, causing him to gape in amazement at her audacity. "You may think that you will not be held responsible if you don't break him. But you spent years in the Queen's service, so there are certain... expectations as to your abilities." Selena leaned closer, black eyes like two bottomless pools. "And I will not be brought down with you if you fail. We destroyed so much to get such a small slice of information. Do not make that go to waste."
Dee stared after her as she moved down the hall and with a grunt of distaste he turned back to the mirrored walls. He did not like being threatened by one so unrefined as her and he filed away in his mind to use for a later purpose. He wouldn't forget it.
Still, her words had helped goad him a little.
Dee walked to the mirrors and slipped through the silvered glass to where his brother still tortured Hatter.
"No room! No Room! MOVE DOWN!" a voice screamed in his head and Hatter kept his chin lowered. The voices and the tinges of madness had become more insistent and harder to shake off.
With each hour that passed Hatter felt like he was losing more and more of himself. Not just his sanity and his control but his actual self. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw his nightmares, his fears, his memories, and it was a struggle to hide this from the Doctors. He clung to the less painful memories and found some relief in picturing Alice in happier times. It bought him valuable time and kept the darkness from swamping and drowning him. By doing so, Hatter could only hope to exhaust the Doctors, to make them no longer able to think of new ways to torture him.
But his body was beginning to scream at him to stop the pain it was being forced to endure.
His mind had been so safely locked away while he used a blind hope as a guard for it and now it now fought even his control. It felt like his mind was starting to crumble now that he had so little to fight for. A hopeless that was building with each passing moment of pain and threatening madness.
"All's piece in a pie and without a quarter to fill," Hatter mumbled and heard the click of boot heels nearby. Dum's unrelenting electric prod suddenly lifted from his side and Hatter opened in his eyes in a daze to see Dee staring at him. The only way he could tell the difference was the cracked tooth Dee had and the fact that the one twin seemed to prefer to break bones over breaking minds.
"We can end this for you," Dee said lowly. "All's fair in partial and nothing can be impartial."
"Contrariwise, if you were to be impartial than we would have no reason to be fair."
Hatter's head ached. They would do this ever so often to him; make him listen to their prattle. Instead of listening, he began to recite the rhymes his mother had taught him whenever he had been afraid of the dark.
"The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown..."
Dee leaned closer. "You can see her in your head, can't you? Her and the others who felt pain because of you?" he asked and Hatter stared blankly at the floor before him, still mumbling.
"The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town."
"You know what you caused. What your family is responsible for," Dum continued for his brother and they both began to circle him again.
"Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown," Hatter whispered, his voice hoarse from his earlier screaming. Dum slammed the butt of his rod against the back of his head with a loud thump. To fight off the flash of pain that threatened to send him into a mad anger, Hatter squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his hands against the arms of the chair. "Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town."
Ending the rhyme, he began to hum an off-key melody that caused the room around them to tremble in reaction. Dum raised the rod to strike again but Dee restrained him with one hand.
"Four times around is enough for one dance," he scolded his twin, inferring that they should try something else.
"Five times though can sometimes bring in a brilliant piece," Dum countered. He reached into his leather suit and pulled out a tiny mirror. Dum grabbed a fistful of Hatter's dark hair and wrenched his head back painfully hard. He held the face of it before Hatter and flexed his fingers to cause a fresh spark of pain in the man's scalp. Hatter's eyes opened in reflex and he found himself staring into the hand mirror.
Staring at the shimmering surface, he was transfixed with the sight of a dark haired girl standing lost in a dark apartment.
"I don't want to go in there..."
Hatter whimpered at the sight of Alice being interrogated by the Twins. The images rewound, showing him the floor crumbling beneath her, the fragility of her mind when faced with the agonizing disappearance of her father. A fragility he knew had existed, had tried to protect her from, but at the sound her lost voice he groaned in despair.
"Her mind was rather tragic, wasn't it?"
"The Lion and the Unicorn," Hatter started but he broke off as the image in the mirror changed to that of his mother, a face he remembered with nothing but pain. It was the day she had gone to find his father at the White Manor, the last day he had seen her before she had been declared dead.
"You unnatural child," Dee said from where he stood before him. "You have a very bad habit of causing death and destruction in your wake, don't you?"
"His whole family does. An unnatural family," Dum agreed. Hatter couldn't look away from the sight of his mother, toying with her chain necklace and watching a younger version of himself play. All the time she wore that secretly amused look that he himself had inherited from her. Just beside her he could make out his father measuring something out in cups with a glazed expression and he trembled in memory.
"Which one are you more like? The fragile yet strong mother, or the powerful yet certainly mad father?" Dee asked and he cast Hatter a look he reserved for insects he ripped the wings from. "Which did you try to be for your Oyster?"
"Your attempts at credibility, at honesty...and you still destroyed people you love."
"No," Hatter whispered, eyes closing against the sight of his mother as she waved good bye to him.
"You cannot change what you are. A failed experiment by Wonderland to create a bank of knowledge," Dum said from behind him. "You are a mad creature that should have been drowned at birth. Likely your father took it into consideration. The inferior mutt puppies tend to be thrown into a sack once they are whelped."
"No!" Hatter said, louder but his voice shook. Like wolves on prey, the twins had figured out a weakness in him and they grinned maliciously at one another. Dum let go of his hair and clasped his fingers tightly around his neck, before he began to slowly slice a thin red line down Hatter's cheek with the sharp edge of the hand-mirror. Finding some hidden reserves of strength, Hatter tried to struggle and felt Dum's fingers dig deeply into his windpipe.
"You caused your mother to bleed and, being the unnatural child you are, you helped bring about her death. With your ridiculous attempts at living a different and honest life, you caused the situations that brought about your lover's death. You lived a lie denying what you are, boy, and look at what it caused."
Hatter strained to focus on his inner vision of Alice to try to calm himself and Dum seemed to sense it. His fingers clenched so hard around Hatter's throat that he began to choke and his eyes fluttered in pain while he struggled to breathe.
Dee leaned forward. "Can you imagine what it was like for your Alice to die? Down in the dark abyss, torn apart by gravity and pressure? What would that have been like, hmm? A different perspective on death, I suppose. Plummeting and never seeing what kills you."
"Her death... because you and your mad habit of hiding things. That endless fountain of knowledge that you keep stoppered and you likely knew the trap you were walking into. But oh, you knew best, didn't you? You knew best and kept it from her," Dum continued for his twin, speaking in Hatter's other ear. Unable to do otherwise, Hatter stared at Dee. His blank mask crumbled to show a faint twinge of pain in his expression, a look that revealed just how deeply the words had cut. They were a play on his own deep insecurities, his own grief, and he was weaker now than he had been before. Weaker and easier to control.
They were not as deeply in his mind as Archibades had been during his invasion, and so he couldn't just propel them out. The illusion they had pulled him into with the help of the Snake's paralysing hallucinogen had snared him more effectively than any noose. Almost all of the traps in his mind were sprung, leaking out a disorientating sensation of constantly falling, and he felt such pressure in his head. Pressure that made him almost lose more control in the effort it took to subdue it.
It was a clever plan, some dark voice in his mind whispered. By simply scratching away at the already crumbling pieces of his mind, by destroying what he loved and cared about in the weeks leading to this torture, they had made him vulnerable.
And he wasn't sure if he cared anymore.
He felt it lingering, a warm darkness that invited him to fall into it and take comfort from it. All in exchange for releasing that slice of genetic insanity to protect him, to let a darker madness take over. The very thing his father had made him swear to never resort to if he had a choice. But with nothing else for him but pain and despair, what choice did he have?
With a sigh, he let his eyes roll back in his head as the roaring in his ears became so overwhelming that unconsciousness was bliss.
The twins sensed the change in Hatter immediately; both the physical and mental changes that seemed to thicken the air around them. Curious, Dum released the metal bands that bound Hatter and put his prod on standby. He was glad of it when Hatter's body did a violent jerk that made him click it to full strength in case.
With equal apprehension, they backed away as Hatter went from a slouch to stiff as a board, his head lolling back on his shoulders. His body was rigid and his hands clenched tightly on the arms of the chair. After a moment of immobility his head came back down, tipping on the side as if he was listening to something. Slowly, his eyes opened and Dum backed away from the sight of those dark and pitiless eyes.
Dee was made of sterner stuff though and waited, watching as Hatter's head fell back. Something was going on beneath the surface and he waited for the silence to break.
It didn't take long for something to happen but what it was that caused it they didn't know.
Hatter's scream startled them both as his hands clenched tightly onto the arms of the chair. His throat bulged and strained as the scream began to increase in volume and pitch, multiplying until it seem that a multitude of voices came from his mouth. The echo was deafening and the chorus of voices were out of harmony and contrasting one another violently. The veins and muscle in his throat seemed almost ready to leap from beneath his paling skin, as if the screams were being pulled from him.
The screams faded slowly and he closed his mouth though his head remained back on his shoulders. The veins and muscles relaxed but his skin remained grey in tone. He rocked forward in his chair, leaning far over until he collapsed out of the chair and onto his knees.
"'Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare, "You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair." As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose. Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes," Hatter whispered, his voice almost sing-song and breaking now and then. His eyes stared at nothing at all, the vacant expression making his eyes dilate wildly. "Toes stuck in grey...burns away."
"He's just going to recite. Worthless," Dum muttered. This was the pattern they had noticed before with him. The rhymes had changed though and he glanced at his twin.
"Copy it down anyway. Who knows, we may have it," Dee ordered.
Hatter gave an odd high-pitched laugh. "When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark. And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark. But, when the tide rises and sharks are around. His voice has a timid and tremulous sound."
The colour of Hatter's eyes changed, becoming warm amber in shade and the vacant look became unnaturally focussed. His laugh morphed into an insane giggle and he drew a circle on the ground. "Dip to go back, go forth, curled in the centre, dead in the centre. Takes a soul to make a soul, to make a path. Some souls worth more than others. Makes no sense but nonsense, of course it makes sense. Perfect sense."
Dee crouched low before Hatter, his bright eyes intent on the stricken face in front of him. Just over Hatter's babbling he could hear Dum scribbling furiously away on his pad of paper all that Hatter said.
"Mirrors," Dee prompted to try to coach Hatter and he watched as some force in Hatter twisted him violently in the air. His body began to convulse as he fell to his back, and each spasm that tore through him produced a whimper of agony.
The twins glanced at one another curiously. Nothing they had done could have produced such a reaction.
"Keys to Wonderland and no keyhole to fit 'em. How angry the old Queen will be," Hatter whispered while he lifted his right hand in the air. He whimpered again and brought the hand close to his face to inspect it.
Dee could see that the angry red wound on the back of it was now pulsing. Slowly, with each throb, a small shard of blackened glass began to emerge from beneath the skin. Dee rocked back on his heels in recognition when he saw the shimmering of its bloodied surface.
A piece of the Looking Glass.
Hatter had finally stopped convulsing and was now starting to speak in a hurried voice, "Lovely garden party but no one's invited. Lummoxes and lacklustre fools."
He stopped and his hand turned this way and that as he studied it. Sitting up, he licked at the blood curiously.
"All this needs," he whispered and he suddenly wrenched the glass shard from the wound, " all it needs is a soul. Dip it in the gyre and the grey and you control time itself."
His voice changed and became modulated and angry.
"Stupid Time! Steals everything because of an Oyster's mistake, an Oyster's deception!"
"Tell us about the rites for Conduits," Dee insisted and Hatter closed up, his dark eyes flickering over the doctor's face dispassionately. Dum, frustrated with waiting and overly eager with the information they had already gleaned, grabbed at Hatter's shoulder and raised the electric prod once again.
"Pain could be your last..."
He didn't get to finish his sentence when his eyes locked with Hatter's now open eyes. Managing only a squeak of fear, Dum wasn't able to dodge when Hatter lashed out with the glass shard. He caught Dum on the left side of his face and dragged the sharp shard down hard and fast, grinning while Dum screamed as the glass split his eye-socket and cheek open cleanly. It was done with an almost surgical precision and with enough force that the flesh opened easily. The doctor shrieked and Hatter twisted the shard hard into his cheek, cutting into muscle and bone. He continued to twist until Dum dropped the prod in his agony. Clutching at his face, the wounded Doctor raced away before Dee could stop him, disappearing from the illusion.
Dee remained, feeling for the first time both a phantom pain for his brother and deep, instinctive fear for his own life. But he was determined to finish this somehow.
Hatter had resumed speaking to himself and Dee stepped around him gingerly, kicking the prod away incase Hatter thought to use it on him. Listening to the rapid words and half-formed phrases, Dee tried to piece together the information Hatter shared as his mind began to trap itself. It was as if he couldn't hold it all in anymore and the Doctor was determined to wait it all out.
Hatter's voice changed between tones and accents, so that he appeared to be mimicking a jumble of people. Instead of just listening to what was in his head, he began to repeat it out loud
"Wrong tea. Death to find a way to travel."
"Made a mistake in travel. Could go back, could go forward. Change it all to be like it was."
Hatter clutched at his dark hair and pulled hard, speaking in his own voice, "Stop it! All of you!"
The jumble became worse as the voices overlapped, and he continued to pull at his hair.
"Can't see a forest through the Jabberwocks."
"Alice won't like this. Caused her to die. Can you imagine how mad she'll be that we got her killed?"
"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"
"Could kill her. Stop the pain before it starts. Might be a way to solve the problems. Kill the oyster."
"I won't. I will. Will, won't. All the same to a corpse."
He rambled and raved, lost without a direction in his thoughts, for several minutes that felt like hours. When Hatter finally spoke in his own natural voice, it was monotone and low, "Kill an Oyster. Find a way back out to go forward. Just leverage and emotion."
Dee stopped his pacing before Hatter and backed away a few more steps. So it was done using an Oyster's glow and choosing a moment, in a selective way. There was something that had to be done with taking the soul, a process perhaps. It would take additional probing to find out how...
Before he could think on it further, Hatter suddenly leapt to his feet and stood with his posture erect and stiff. He stared at Dee flatly and the doctor felt a trail of ice go up his spine in reaction to the look. The cocky young Wonderlander was nowhere to be seen in this man. All that was left was a physical embodiment of the very madness that had made his family infamous. Not a giggling madness but the sort of dark insanity that was far more terrifying. In all his years, Dee had never meet one from this family that made him feel such terror.
The flat look was there still, making Hatter's face blank without a hint of emotion or expression.
What have we done? Dee thought as Hatter continued to stare at him.
With a voice perfectly pitched and without the hint of an accent or inflection of emotion, Hatter ordered lowly, "Let me out."
Swallowing down his fear, Dee could do nothing else but that.
Selena had been uncharacteristically shocked when Dr. Dum had appeared, screaming, from the Mirrored Halls. She had only just returned from giving her own men orders and the sight of the stout man bloody and battered had made even her pause in shock. The few men that remained caught him before he could fall but several had to turn away from the ghastly sight of his face. Ruined flesh, a dripping eye socket now empty except for a sliced bit of eye, and a shard of glass twisted deep into his cheekbone made for a terrifying sight for anyone close enough to see it in detail.
Tearing her eyes away, she looked back up at the mouth of the Mirrored Hall to see Dee walking down the path. He was nervously toying with the leather buckles of his suit, eyes darting this way and that.
When he paused and seemed to want to go back, she quickly shoved her way through her own men and went to him. Turning harassed eyes to hers, he let go of the buckles.
"What happened?" she demanded.
He took his time answering, as if even he wasn't sure what had happened. Something that made her uneasy. "There are times when we wind a spindle too tightly... that when it unravels it does so too quickly and there is no control of the mess that it makes when the fragile strings lie in tangles."
She stared at him stupidly. "What?"
"We did as ordered but..."
"You broke him?" Selena asked incredulously, barely able to keep the excitement from her voice.
"Well, in a way but..."
"Did he tell you what we need to know?" she interrupted.
"Well, in a way," Dee conceded in a distracted way. He was disturbed by the sight of his screaming, wounded twin.
"But this is good news." She smiled. "It means I don't have to kill you just yet."
Her words seemed to pass over his head as he simply nodded in agreement, eyes on his brother. Her threats meant nothing to her when he saw the sheer agony his other half was experiencing.
Once Dum's shrieks became quieter, Selena was aware of the sound of footsteps snicking on the ground behind them. The unhurried pace of someone taking their time in joining them.
"We succeeded," Dee finally said. "But at what cost, I don't know."
She looked over at him, ready to question him, but he was ignoring her. He turned and walked away to help Dum, but there was no hiding the troubled look on his face. Thinking him merely the usual temperamental, psychotic sort, Selena glanced over her shoulder as the footsteps slowed.
Like looking at a hypnotizing swirl, Selena was unable to look away though Dr. Dum was still whimpering like a child. Selena could only stare as Hatter slowly came from the shadows back into the Changing Hall. He was bloodied and dirty, his hair lank and ropey and his pale skin seemed to shimmer in the swirling lights of the Hall's walls. Frowning, he touched his side, which Selena could tell even from a distance was bloody from a deep wound. He lifted his hand to check it and gave a dismissive snort.
Wiping his hand on his shirt, Hatter raised his head and took everything in with a sweeping look. He then tipped his head on the side, dismissing the sight of everything without a hint of emotion. He leaned against the last section of the wall and looked down at the ground.
Wiping suddenly clammy hands on her coat, Selena approached him carefully. She could hear him still muttering away, though his voice was somehow foreign to her.
But it was when he looked up and snared her with eyes that glinted with a foggy green light, that Selena realized he was not the same Hatter. Not one she had known or the one that he had become over the course of time. That Hatter was not actually in this shell anymore; at least, not that she could tell. Mad March as a man had looked like this, as had the Doctors in some way, and she had glimpsed this in the past when Hatter had once killed without compunction for the sake of the Resistance. Only there was no trace of anything of his former self this time to be seen just in his face, not even a hint that there was anything deeper to him that was still kind.
He held no signs of acknowledging her though while she stepped closer to him. It seemed that whatever was going on inside him was absorbing his attention. She heard him growl at something to shut up and then his eyes closed, his face twitching between expressions.
Selena came closer and reached out, wondering if he felt as cold as he looked.
"If you touch me," Hatter said without opening his eyes, "I will kill you and in such ways you may beg for me to make it quick."
She stared, shocked. Not by the threat or by the violence she could almost feel oozing out of him. It was his voice.
The voice was different; cultured and refined. He sounded like he had had a Royal upbringing and not the rough and bare street education he had had with the rest of the younger Resistance members. It was silkier too and each word held a deep threat; the tone of a killer so adept at their game that they did not need to frighten with loud words or actions. A tone Selena had heard once before: when she had drugged him that first time, a drugging that had led to him killing his own estranged brother. March had not stood a chance then though he had been older and by all accounts stronger; something had been stronger in Hatter at that moment, more cunning and darker. They had been stunned when the Queen's dreaded assassin had been taken care of so easily by the smaller and less experienced Hatter. And, skilled and heavily armed as she was, Selena knew instinctively that she would not stand a chance either. A painful admission for her to make but she stepped back.
He did mean it with every word and twitch of his face. He would kill her.
This other side to Hatter did not warn lightly.
He was looking away now, eyes open and staring blankly around him as he held one hand to his temple.
Dee came up beside Selena silently to whisper in her ear. He warned her — the foolish man, did he think her that stupid not to realize the threat that Hatter posed? Then he began to tell her of Hatter's slight reveal. Of what was required and the way it needed to be done to create what she had been ordered to create. They needed the formula for the conduits though, and Hatter would not have the ingredients to fulfil it.
Not yet anyway. There was still that one Oyster wandering around Wonderland.
A plan came to mind for her then, a deliciously deadly one. She knew of only one place, one person, who could hold the saps of the Soultrees, the endangered plants that the Queen had almost wiped out... and have access to finding an Oyster glow. A man who had humiliated the Resistance as much as King Jack had. A man who had run his own rebellion and who up till now she had feared to go after for his knowledge.
Who had, in her opinion, been in control for far too long.
Eyes glinting, she crept closer by a foot towards the silent man before her. "Hatter," she whispered, pitching her voice low so that she didn't startle him. He looked over at her and she almost recoiled at the desperately pained look in his eyes. It wasn't clear if he actually saw her though. "We can have your revenge for the death of your Alice."
A spasm went through his face, revealing that even in madness the Oyster remained his weak spot. Whatever was going inside his head was hidden from her but she could tell that this could be a possible control.
"Give me a name. Make it end."
Selena smiled. "The old Governor and cousin to the old King... the Drawling Master. Who else would dare to go this far? His family has been in power in the South, second to only the Hearts, and who is to say he didn't list for power. After all, his family was responsible for giving the formula to create the conduits. He would have been trying to destroy the conduits to regain power for himself from the Hearts. He would go to any means necessary to put himself into power. Including making it possible for your Alice to die," she explained and carefully she stepped back. She watched him process this information, no longer seeing reality from the fabric of his own imagination. The killer in him was thrilling at the prospect of death while the remaining fragments of the old Hatter were desperate for revenge. He needed something to absolve his own guilt about Alice's death. He accepted it with a visible smile. This madness blended perfectly with his grief and that deadly combination would need an outlet.
Then, as if he had been struck, Hatter crumbled to his knees and clutched at his head. Confused, Selena watched as he ranted and raved in a low voice, while silent tears slipped from his eyes. But even weeping he was dangerous and Selena wisely stepped away.
Dee was at her side again in a heartbeat, smelling of blood and sweat.
"You should kill him."
She blinked as if her eyes had to adjust to the sight of him. "We can control him. Have you ever seen a member of the Hatter family kill?" she asked and saw him swallow. Apparently he had. "Aye, it is poetry in motion. The Drawling family has long deserved a bit of trouble for their own harms to the Resistance and they do have what we need, I'm sure of it. Didn't the old legends say it was because of the Drawling Master's one time loyalty to the White Queen that the Oysters were led to their demise in Wonderland? We can continue to probe Hatter's mind to learn more and more of the secrets his family buried in him."
She looked at Hatter, still deaf to the world around him, and smiled. "I will enjoy letting a wild card like this loose into the South; there is much to... regain for us all here and no one told me exactly how I could go about it. I'm allowed to choose and I want to see that old man beg for death after giving us what we need to complete our little adventure."
Dee glanced at Hatter. "But you can't control him with just words! His mind will continue to crack and the more it does the more likely it is that he will kill anyone in his way to relieve that madness."
Her smile faded, not liking that he had pointed it out. "No, I can't."
The doctor sighed in relief.
"Which is why you and your brother shall come with us." Dee stared at her in shock, having thought his role done. She snapped her fingers at the nearby Tot and the thin man immediately handed her a tiny holo-orb. Selena rolled it between her fingers. "I had managed to record the moments of Alice's death. Use this and the memory-distort pills I know you have on you to keep him leashed. We'll have our fun using that darker side to him but we'll need him controllable. I want you to use her death to bring him to heel and I know I don't need to tell you how. Use it until he learns to hate the very memory of her for causing him such pain. I want him to rage."
She threw the orb at him and Dee caught it with obvious disgust. "He loved her deeply. I am not sure it is wise to think her memory will weaken him. The very things we feel strongly about can make us resist even the worst pain."
Selena merely smiled. "I don't want him weak, Dr. Dee. I want him so infested with madness and agony that eventually, when we no longer need him, it will only take a small push for him to kill himself with his own insanity."
She glanced at the still crouched and mumbling Hatter.
"It is just a pity that his lover wasn't here to see this."
So filled with a malevolent sense of satisfaction and pride, she laughed long and low. Her men turned at the foreign sound and they all missed the sight of the shard of glass that had been pulled from Dum's face changing colour. It went a bright blue, and a thin woman's face appeared in the reflection, staring in the direction of Selena. Opening her mouth, she let out a silent scream of rage that attracted no attention.
No one heard the scream but they immediately felt the tunnels begin to shake violently. Hatter, who twitched and mumbled to himself, heard a woman shouting in his head for him to come out of the darkness and back to Wonderland, to her. But he only thought that the voice belonged to the mad crowd within him and he bowed his head at the pressure of the urgent screams.
Author's Note: I personally liked the thought that the madness in Hatter was different than mad giggling and general loopy-ness. That it effectively changes so much about him that the character becomes, in some ways, so unrecognisable that he is even more of a threat to those around him because he is the wild card. Something deeper has to run in there that it makes him dangerous to not only his enemies but to his friends. I was going for it being like cutting a taut elastic and having it snap back so harshly that there is no chance of finding where the wire went. Tricky allusion/idea to go for, really.
So Hatter is the Wild Card in the story title. Who could the gambit be?