Hatter suddenly felt very depressed. Why did he think she felt the same way for him? She didn't want him, she just wanted to go home. But she had kissed him, or was she just humoring him, or playing with him because he was convenient. He had fallen for girls before and they always used him and threw him away for the next pretty boy they saw, or flirted with him but wouldn't give him a chance, or worst of all didn't even remember his name the next morning. He really wanted someone who would appreciate him, love him. All he ever wanted was to be in love with someone who loved him back but he felt anymore love was a one way street and he kept getting run down.
But he liked her, almost loved her, but was she worth it? He had done more for her than he ever had anyone. Cared for her more than he thought he ever could, yet this was beginning to feel familiar. He was starting to feel the cold sting of rejection and he didn't think he could bear it. He had told himself to walk the other way, to let Jack have her, she deserved better than him, she had better than him, why would she want him? But then things changed. She didn't want Jack anymore, she had let him kiss her, more than once. She even looked like she was going to kiss him again but he had turned away. Why had he done that? He didn't know other than he felt hurt, deep down and he didn't know why. She didn't belong to him yet he felt very attached to her.
He wanted her to be his but she wanted to go home. Even if she did feel the same about him this was the clincher. She was going to leave him, no matter her feelings for him, for home. He couldn't blame her. He didn't think he could leave his home for her and he didn't even think he could ask her to stay for him. He wanted to be selfish. He wanted to have her all to himself but he couldn't not let her go home, and he had promised to do everything in his power to get her there, and no matter how much it killed him he would do it. For her.
They had a plan, a relatively good plan if he did say so himself and if luck was on their side Alice would go home tonight. It was what she wanted and he wanted her to have whatever she wanted but a small part of him still hoped their plan would fail. He didn't know what he would do if she fell back through the looking glass. All he wanted was more time with her. He wanted to figure out his feelings and why it hurt him to look at her and most importantly how she felt about him because he refused to feel if there was nothing he could have in return.
No matter what he wanted he didn't have a choice now, it was in fate's hands now. Alice and Charlie were squatted down in the grass next to him peering at the Casino over a small hill on the edge of the forest. They decided the best way to see what happened to the ring was to watch the entrance to the Casino because he knew where the mirror was at was too heavily guarded and that there was no where there to hide and wait.
The ride here was nothing but awkward. Alice and him hadn't said much to each other since the forest but he could feel the tension between them and he wasn't sure if it the good or bad kind. Dusk was upon them with the last shreds of light quickly fading. The lights were already all on in the Casino, which made everything in the area still relatively lit despite the growing darkness in the forest.
He bet Jack had somehow convinced his mother it was all just a big misunderstanding and had just finished having yet another lavish filling meal. He didn't think he had ever had a filling meal in his life. Life had been tough on him and it was hard to imagine what the good life felt like but it was nice to imagine. He envied Jack a lot of things and it upset him how the rich always got everything. Jack probably had a great childhood. Jack still had both his parents. Jack had a home. Jack had a warm bed. Jack had a filling meal at the end of each day. Jack never did a hard days work in his life yet he had the trust of the highest members of the Resistance just because of who he was. Jack had had Alice's love. Did he appreciate any of it? Probably not. What did he have? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He worked so hard, tired to be the good guy, but nothing mattered. Oh well, he was used to it.
"How long do we have to wait?" Alice asked quietly beside him.
"I'm not sure. If the queen still has the ring then she's going to want to start up the mirror as soon as possible so the ring should go out any moment. If the ring has already left we might have to wait all night before we learn anything. Either way we just have to wait."
"I hate waiting." Alice said lying herself flatter against the ground next to him.
"I have a feeling it's going to be a long night."
"That's okay, at least we're in good company." She said as he looked over the grounds of the Casino looking for any sign of movement. He almost jumped when he felt her hand caress his gently. He looked down at their hands and saw her gently rubbing the back of his hand with her fingertips in a comforting way. He then looked over at her and she smiled warmly at him. All of a sudden he had an urge to hold her hand, and he was about to overturn his hand to see if she would accept when Charlie spoke.
Charlie was lying on the other side of Alice and was using one of his inventions to see further across the lawn of the Casino. "I think I see something."
"Really where?!" Alice said excitedly and her hand fell away from his and his heart sank.
At least he had a distraction from his heartache and began searching the grounds for whatever Charlie had seen. It took him a moment but then he saw a large group of people approaching the Casino. They had to get a little bit closer before he could distinguish who they were but when they did there was no mistaking them.
Flanked by armed Suits at least 50 Oysters were being led into the Casino. He heard Alice have an intake of breath at seeing this and he couldn't deny he felt his body tense as well. Not only had they failed, the Queen was upping the anti as well. The Queen had only ever brought in handfuls of Oysters at a time before. Twenty at the worst of times, but fifty. This was just sick and it made his stomach turn seeing them all being herded like sheep. He almost hated himself for working for this terrible system of torture and murder. He was never ignorant of how terrible things were, but he did it anyway. He did it to help but now he wished he had just worked for the resistance alone because knowing what he was really working for wasn't worth any of it.
They watched silently as the Oysters were marched up to the Casino and once they were close enough they could see that they were being followed by a group of even more heavily armed suits with one in the middle carrying a little black box. As soon as soon as he saw it he knew what was inside and his heart sank. They were too late.
"What's that the Suits are carrying?" Alice whispered to him through an already clearly distressed voice.
"It's the ring." He said even though he didn't want to because he knew it was going to break her heart even though they all knew it was already too late.
His words struck her like a whip. He heard her sobs catch in her throat as she tried to both not cry and not make any noise at the same time. "Oh Alice." He said scooting towards her on the hill and wrapping his arm over her shoulder as she covered her mouth to muffle her sobs.
He noticed she started moving trying to sit up but he put pressure on her back, holding her to the ground because some of the Suits were looking around and the last thing they needed was to get spotted. She stayed still until the last of them were in the Casino and then he let go of her and he sat up with her. As soon as she was upright she flung herself into his arms and began to silently cry. He held onto her tightly and even though he had gotten what he had wanted, it wasn't worth her tears and he wished he hadn't wanted it at all.
"Shhh… It's okay." He whispered to her.
"What are we going to do?" She cried.
"I promise I'll think of something else. It's going to be okay." He held onto her even tighter as she buried her face into his neck as she continued to cry. He looked up and saw Charlie watching them looking concerned and like he wanted to do something for Alice but he didn't know what. He suddenly felt awkward at realizing someone was watching this intimate moment, but also realized it was only intimate to them because of the things that had happened over the past day. Still, having Charlie unknowingly look on felt like he also knew every thought inside his head.
So he looked away from Charlie and focused on Alice whom he knew was trying hard to pull herself together, and in only a few moments she pulled away from him having halted her tears completely. She took a moment to wipe the tears from her cheeks before looking from him to Charlie.
"Are you alright?" Charlie asked her still looking worried.
"I'm alright." She said with a soft smile to reassure him.
"We should get back to the fortress. We can talk about what to do next there. Yeah?" He asked and Alice just nodded.
He really had no idea what they were possibly going to do next and it bothered him that it seemed like it was all on him to figure out. For some reason he was unreasonably tired and he didn't want to think anymore, although he worried about their situation the entire journey back to the fortress.
Once there he was fed up with his brain. He always knew what to do. Always had a plan, something to do. Now he was plum out of ideas and didn't want to face Alice empty handed. Again they hadn't talked at all on the way and he really didn't want to talk once they had arrived, but he knew the big questions were about to start coming.
He helped Alice down before tying up the horse, taking extra care not to make eye contact with her. Maybe if he didn't look at her the conversation would never get started. This plan was working well enough until they made it back to camp where Charlie was starting to make a fire.
"Hatter!" She called to him as he was walking away.
"Alice…" He said exasperated as he turned. She looked at him hopefully and he felt a pain in his chest. "Look, I really don't know what we're going to do, okay. I can't think right now. Ask me in the morning. I'll think of a plan by then, yeah? In the morning." He hoped this was enough for her for now. At least he was being honest and more than anything that's what she seemed to want from him.
He had began to turn away but she called him back again with his name. "I can't think of a plan right now okay! I'm too tired. Just leave me alone until morning alright." He didn't mean to snap at her and he immediately regretted it but he just felt so stretched, like a dollop of butter scraped over too much bread. He was wearing thin.
"That wasn't what I was going to say." She said sounding a little hurt and he felt bad. "I actually came up with an idea on the way here, and I was going to tell you about it."
He looked at her in surprise. "You came up with a plan?"
She nodded and smiled slightly almost like she was begging for his praise. "I've been thinking a lot lately about all those stories you told me," he raised his eyebrow in question waiting for her to go on, "and I thought that maybe we should try looking for the White Queen. Maybe if she's still alive she could help. Maybe she would know what to do."
"Are you joking?"
"No." She said surprised.
"How are we meant to find her? She disappeared over two hundred years ago and no one knows where she is."
"But you said she was banished to Winterland."
"Yes, but no one has ever gone up there and lived to tell the tale. It is a very dangerous place."
"There could still be a chance she's alive."
"No, no there isn't."
"Why not? Charlie's managed to stay alive all this time, why not her?"
"She'd be over 300 hundred years old if she were still alive. She wasn't exactly young when she left in the first place. Besides it's Winterland. People are sent there to die. And Winterland is vast, there would be no way to find her. No one even knows where her castle is anymore let alone where she is in that damn cold wasteland."
"If I might interject," Charlie said nervously because Hatter had begun to raise his voice and Charlie never liked to see them fight. "It's been a long time now, and I've never been there, but, I think I know the way to her castle."
"That's great Charlie." Alice said smiling at this glimmer of hope.
"What do you hope to find their Alice! Hum? What!?"
"I don't know but don't you think it's worth a look?" She said trying to remain clam while he was yelling at her.
"No I don't."
"Maybe someone left something behind. A clue to where she went."
"Even if they did, why does it matter? She's dead."
"I don't believe that."
"Why!"
"All those stories about magic." He scoffed and turned his back on her. She was unbelievable. "She doesn't sound like the kind of women who would just give up. She wouldn't just lay down and die, she loved Wonderland. Yes she left, but I think she only left to gather her strength and wits, maybe in hopes that one day someone would come looking for her. Maybe she knows how to take down the Red Queen. Maybe…" He swiftly turned back to her.
"Why are you so fixated with this? She didn't have any magic. She couldn't talk to animals or trees or change the whether. She couldn't do any of that. She was just our Queen and now we just want to think of her as more because those were good times but she wasn't anything special. She was just a kind woman. That's all the magic she had."
"Why are you so quick to doubt?"
"Why should we spend our time tracking down some dead woman when we could be doing something real."
"What else can we do? Really? The Resistance is against us, we don't have the ring anymore, Jack's probably imprisoned and my dad can't remember anything and the Queen has a lock down on the Casino and the ring not to mention the hit man that's tailing us. What else can we do here?!"
She had backed him into a corner and he didn't know what to say. "I don't know yet but if you would just let me think."
"There is nothing else we can do here, and we can't hide out in the fortress forever when there is someone tracking us. They're going to find us here eventually and then we'll be captured as well."
"If you would just give me time to think!"
"Charlie knows where her castle is. Let's just go there for the time being and look for clues. If we don't find anything that's okay, we could hide out there for a while. It would probably be a better place to hide than this, especially since no one but Charlie knows where it even is."
He growled in frustration and Charlie who had been looking away from them awkwardly while they were fighting now began to shuffle away into the woods trying to look like he just remembered something very important he had to do.
"Hatter please," she begged in a soft voice now that they were alone. He felt the headiness in her voice pull at his heartstrings but he wasn't going to give up just yet.
"If you would just give me time I could think of something to do."
"I don't want to wait!"
"Well maybe if you ever did things wouldn't be as bad as they are now!"
"What do you mean?" His brain told him to shut up and just back away now but his mouth was already going before he could stop himself.
"Maybe if you hadn't run away to the Casino that time like I told you not to, if you had just waited… or thought before you ran away with Jack we might still have the ring, we might still have connections to the resistance, we might not be as fucked as we are right now!" He really shouldn't have said that. She took a step back from him and he saw tears brimming in her eyes. "I didn't mean that, I'm sorry, I'm just angry."
"Well maybe if you ever helped me in the first place when I had an idea maybe things wouldn't go as badly! If you were ever there from the beginning instead of just coming in at the last minute!" He opened his mouth to retort but she was quicker. "And Charlie and I are leaving tomorrow morning to go find the White Queens castle. You don't have to come if you don't want to, but I'm leaving… with or without you." With that she turned on her heels and left him feeling worse than ever before.