A/N – A headcanon I constructed for myself the other night while I was having trouble sleeping. Quick, and a little bit disjointed, but hopefully, you'll get the point.

I desperately need more Jefferson in the show. Why are all the best characters so poorly featured? :(

[the only strings that hold me here]

The first time he met her, she was a child. A little girl lost in a world of wonders.

"How did you get into this realm," he asked her.

"I imagined it and it was there," she answered in a dreamy voice, with all the seriousness of a child.

Wherever she was from, it seemed time passed differently there. The next time they met, she was on the threshold of womanhood, lovely in her unawareness of her loveliness.

He started to come to that realm more frequently, in hopes of meeting her more often.

Because whenever he came, she seemed to be there as well. And even if she wasn't there immediately, she always seemed to find him sooner or later. She would follow him around until he did his business, sometimes keep watch, if occasion called for it, and later they would sit around an abandoned table in the middle of the woods and chat over tea.

"I don't really think it's a good idea to eat or drink anything from around here. I've seen what those crazy mushrooms do to a person."

"Oh, the tea's alright," she assured him. "I drink it all the time."

Her deep, dark eyes bore into him with such intensity, he was unable not to trust her.

No matter how hard he tried to find the gateway to her world, he never succeeded. He spent hours, days, weeks trying every door, window, curtain, every nook and cranny, but to no avail. Eventually, he learned to suffice with the sporadic meetings in their land of madness.

"I don't have many friends," she confided into him once. "I'm not really a people person. People are corrupted and two-faced and they make my world a place I don't want to live in."

"I'm people too."

"You're different. I like you."

"How come?" he asked, head cocked to the side, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

"I imagined you, remember?" she grinned. "You're just the way people are supposed to be."

"You've stopped aging," he noticed on their seventh encounter.

"I've stopped going back," she replied, now a young woman at the peak of her youth and beauty.

"To your world? Why?"

"I can't. There's nothing left for me there."

And when she kissed him under the fluorescent skies, the kaleidoscope of colors exploded behind his lids and it was so wonderful this mad land seemed to justify its name and he wished never to return to his own world either.

It was the first time he killed a man. Well, not quite killed – rather, left stranded in a strange land without warning or hope to ever return. It was a greedy merchant, a foul man who exploited other people for his own personal gain and liked to pillage other realms and overprice rarities he found there. He was heavily addicted to opium as well and was quite high the day he took him for his due trip, so it wasn't particularly hard to lose him with vague promises of meeting by the portal in a short while. He waited until he stumbled out of sight and ran to find her. Before they both knew what happened, he had his Alice in the Enchanted Forest with him and they laughed and chased each other through the woods and floated on the clouds of their own personal bliss, so that the realization someone was left behind for them to be this happy kicked in only the next morning. But gazing at her sleeping from in the bed next to him, watching the shadow of her eyelashes flutter across her cheek and listening to her steady breathing sent his heart into a mad frenzy and pushed that stab of guilt to the back of his mind.

They lived comfortably for many months. He had several well paying customers and jumped realms in search for valuable artifacts. Sometimes, she went along with him. Other times he'd ask questions about her world and she would tell him about that strange place he could never find, a place of exotic music and fantastic magic he had never even dreamed could exist.

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see, he heard her sing softly once and she explained it was a religious song she rather liked, though she did not believe in the god they worshiped back there. He grew fond of the song and often prompted her to sing it and she'd oblige, though it made her smile go dark. Singing those strange tunes was the only habit she'd kept from her original realm, though it brought back memories she'd rather not recall.

Her words never showed any desire for her to return there, and that pleased him even more than the feeling of satisfied curiosity.

One day, she asked him to take her back to her world of wonders, the imaginary world she designed with her dreams. She would always love that world the most, she said, because it was the world that brought her to him. He obliged against his better judgment. He could never deny anything to her. By then, she was heavy with pregnancy, yet no less active and vivacious than before.

He should have turned them back the moment he realized something was wrong. The world was far from what they remembered. The eccentricity was violent instead of amusing, the nature even more unnatural than usual. Everything was in shambles, the Queen was just in the process of smothering a rebellion and re-establishing her autocracy with violence and blood.

The stress from seeing her precious land like this and all the running and hiding from the guards pushed her into early labor.

Their child was born in a patch of abnormally green grass between two gigantic mushrooms. The thunder of passing footsteps sent shivers down their spines and urged them to leave this temporary hiding place as quickly as possible.

Two people in – two people out. No more, no less. That is the rule of the Hat. A huge caterpillar sprawled by the portal puffed at its opium pipe and seemed to mock him with its drunken tranquility, its fat, misshapen face strangely resembling to the unfortunate merchant he had once so cruelly abandoned. She ordered him to take the baby and go. She was too weak to walk and he could not carry them both through the portal. She would manage somehow, she assured him as tears streamed down her face; and she will find him again, like she always did before, she promised pressing one fierce, urgent kiss to his lips. He was weak as well, too weak to refuse anything she asked of him. Their last kiss was under fluorescent skies as well, only this time there was no wonder, no colors – only a dark abyss spreading through his soul.

He had no recollection how long he had been wandering through the woods, a wailing newborn wrapped tightly in his scarf. A woman from the outskirts of their village, a kind milkmaid who sometimes brought them fresh goods from her little farm, found him and brought him to her home. She cleaned the child and clothed her. He sat by her fire and cried and she cried along with him, rocking the baby in her arms and saying something about the stillborn child she had a couple of weeks ago. He didn't care about the woman's damned child, he didn't care about anything anymore. He had lost the only thing that was worth having in his superficial, meaningless life. He had left his heart and soul in that wretched, faraway land, left it all with the woman who sacrificed herself so that he could return here. He was crushed and he wished for the entire world to crumble down along with him. The farmer's wife offered to nurse his daughter with the milk her dead son never opened his eyes to taste. He just stared at the fire and wept.

For weeks he searched for her, scoured every inch of that damned realm, yet to no avail. She went up the rabbit hole, the land said, and the looking glass had gone solid. The walls have closed, everything around him seemed to whisper. Her land. The one she had imagined in her dreams.

In his desperation he went to find the imp. He called upon all the favors he had done for him, all those trips and powerful magical items, offered to return all the gold he had received in return, offered he'd do anything, anything at all, only if he found him a way to bring her back. The imp was oddly sympathetic. Her world was the one no magic could reach. There was no way to find her again.

That evening, he locked his hat in a box and swore never to use it again.

He left the house they shared, unable to spend a moment more in the rooms she used to occupy, the rooms she left her mark upon as firmly as she had gripped his heart from their earliest encounters. Feeling her presence oozing from every corner drove him mad with pain. With the remaining gold he had, he purchased a tiny cottage in the outskirts of the village, close to the farmer and his wife. For the first time in weeks, he went to see his child.

The hypothermic, tiny infant was coming along nicely, now chubby and glowing with health. She gazed calmly up at him with Her eyes. The pain that still coursed through him was searing and acute, yet he found he had trouble letting this small creature out of his arms. It was a part of Her so he had to love her, yet holding his daughter while seeing in her the mother he will never hold again destroyed him more than he thought possible. But as the child reached up with her tiny fist and grabbed his finger in such a fierce grip, as if she understood everything, as if she were desperately begging him not to leave her again, his heart bled and the droplets of red illuminated the darkness that took reign in his soul. And for the first time since that wretched day, he wept again, pulling the baby tightly to his chest and spurting incoherent promises that he would never abandon her. And in that moment, this child became the center of his world, the only thing he lived for, a painful reminder of his love that he clung to desperately. The child was his salvation, his mercy, his spark of hope. Somewhere, in the dark recesses of his mind, a hypnotic melody repeated itself, the words he didn't even know he memorized came to his lips.

Through many dangers, toils and snares we have already come, t'was Grace that brought us safe thus far and Grace will lead us home.

He named his daughter Grace.

…and so a secret kiss brings madness with the bliss

and I will think of this when I'm dead in my grave

set me adrift and I'm lost over there

and I must be insane to go skating on your name

and by tracing it twice I fell through the ice

of Alice…

Tom Waits - Alice