A/N: Chapter titles are taken from the lyrics in "Alice's Theme" on the soundtrack.
When Alice had woken up that morning, she certainly did not plan to spend the entire day with Tarrant Hightopp. But that was, in fact, exactly what she did. They had spent the morning on their Memory Cliff, and just after the sun had risen, their stomachs rumbled simultaneously. He showed her a nice place to have lunch, and as it had often come up in their morning discussion, she requested to see his hats. And so after lunch, they toured his workshop, which of course brought up the subject of trade again, and so he introduced her to several other of the townsfolk who would be interested in exporting their wares to London. Walker had given her and Ascot a tour of the town yesterday, but Tarrant gave her another one, including some funny, personal anecdotes about each place. He introduced her to everyone they passed by, and when it started to rain, he brought her back to his house to wait it out. Since it was nearing tea-time, they took tea in his kitchen, and Alice could have sworn that the particular tea he gave her was quite familiar, and it bordered on the edge of the Important Thing that Must be Remembered. She mentioned so to him, and he smiled.
"I hope you don't mind my monopolizing your company this way, but the way you feel about my tea must be the way I feel about you."
"Pardon?" she asked, confused.
"You help me remember. Or, not remember per se, but at least feel as if it's not so bad that I forgot," he explained.
She nodded. "I had thought I was mad. That I hadn't actually forgotten anything, and was just being silly."
"Well," he grinned. "I would hazard to say that you are quite mad. But I doubt the forgetting has anything to do with it."
And when they discussed madness, something began to pull at Alice's heartstrings. It was so familiar… Why on earth couldn't she place it?
She stood up to help the hatter – the hatter? Why was there something she needed to… - clean up after tea, when he shook his head sharply.
"Leave it."
"Don't think I'm leaving this mess for you to clean all by yourself!" she exclaimed. "I wanted you to come with me to go see old Ascot off, and we'll never make it if I sit here idle."
"No, no, it's just I…Er, I rather like dirty tea things lying around," he explained awkwardly. "I'll clean it eventually, but isn't it so nice, that someone cared enough about the cups to use them?"
"Yes, I suppose," she said, thinking on it. "I should very much hate to be an un-used tea cup, gathering dust in a cabinet."
"If you'd like, we can have dinner here later, and you can help me clean then, if you insist," he offered.
She smiled. "I'd like that very much."
"Now, don't we have a ship to be seeing off?" he asked, offering his arm.
"Indeed we do," she replied, taking it and walking out the door toward the docks.
Ascot didn't worry that much. In fact, in his youth, he was rather carefree. But somehow the aging process seems to have added worries as it took away his hair.
And his primary worry was Alice.
When she came striding up to the Wonder arm-in-arm with the hatter, he did a double take. That was his Alice, alright, but there was something different about her. She looked…happy.
Not that she usually looked sad, but there was an unadulterated joy on her face that Ascot hadn't seen since their first trip to China.
"Alice!" he called, waving down to her.
"Hello!" she waved back.
"Mr. Hightopp," he acknowledged.
"Lord Ascot," the hatter bowed his head.
"Take good care of her," Ascot found himself saying, and as soon as he realized it, waited for the harsh rebuttal from Alice. 'I can take care of myself!' she told him time and time again, and he closed his eyes, waiting to hear it.
"If the lady will allow me, I'll escort her home to London myself," the hatter promised.
And when Ascot opened his eyes, and Alice still wasn't protesting, he really started to worry. Instead she looked at the hatter rather peculiarly, and a slight blush tinged her cheeks when she looked back up at Ascot. He had seen that look before, but he had never, ever in all his years, seen it on Alice.
Helen would kill him if he let her daughter elope with some hatter from the Scottish backwaters.
He had a brief, flighty impulse to insist she get on the ship right now, cut off all trade with this town, and never come here again. But she was a grown woman, he had to remind himself, able to make her own choices.
"I'll see you in no time, then?" he managed to get out.
"We'll probably head out in a few days," Alice replied, unsure as to how she wound up agreeing to an escort.
"Very well," Ascot replied, seeing that he could do nothing else. Hightopp seemed like a decent enough fellow, at least. Very strange, no doubt, but decent.
Alice blew him a kiss from the shore, and he laughed, waving back.
"Goodbye!" he called.
"Goodbye!" they called back, and the blue butterfly that seemed to follow the ship to the ends of the world suddenly flew up in front of him. He stared at it for a minute, positive that it was trying to tell him something, but then it left, flying back down towards the shore, ultimately to land on Alice's shoulder.
Tarrant looked pleasantly surprised, and asked Alice something that Ascot couldn't quite catch. She giggled – Alice giggle? – and whispered something back to him. They turned around, and began to head back towards the town, butterfly never leaving her shoulder.
That was when he understood that it had never followed the ship to the ends of the earth. It had followed Alice.
Tarrant even came with Alice back to her room at the inn to be a reference while she worked on her paperwork. He gave her all the official facts and figures she needed to add the town into their winter route, along with estimates of the quantities not only of what they would need for imports, but also what the company could expect to export from there. They worked so well together that Alice had actually finished all of the work that she expected to take the week doing that night. When she mentioned her surprise to Tarrant, he suggested that she use the extra time to have dinner with several of the officials and see if they had any more ideas than what the tailor and the hatter, and a jeweler and blacksmith that they had talked to the day before had.
Alice mentioned that she would be having tea with them tomorrow, and asked for Tarrant to accompany her. This of course brought the dirty tea things, and so they returned to his house for dinner.
Tarrant Hightopp could not only make some amazing tea, but he also made a mean stew.
"Mm," she moaned in appreciation after they had cleaned up and sat down for dinner. "This is incredible."
He frowned. "I wish I could have made something better, but I didn't have time to get - "
"Are you mad?" she asked. "This is perfect. Don't change a thing. You have to teach me. I'm afraid I'm a horrible cook."
"I hardly see that being a problem. You usually eat on board the ship and in foreign countries where you wouldn't even begin to know how to ask for the right ingredients, anyway," he pointed out.
"I do go home sometimes, you know."
"I thought you stayed with your mother when you went to London?" he asked, drawing on some of their earlier conversations.
"Yes, of course I do. There's no sense in keeping my own residence for five months every other year when I'd just be with my family all the time anyway," she said sensibly.
"Then you don't have to cook for anyone, now do you?"
She frowned. "I suppose not. Although," she paused and laughed slightly at the memory. "Lord Ascot's son – Hamish – apparently has some nasty indigestion problems. Lady Ascot kept trying to tell me what I was supposed to be feeding him when we thought I was going to marry him."
"You-you were going to get married?" he spluttered, completely missing the point of the story.
"Well, yes. Most girls do tend to, you know," she laughed. "Or is no one married where you come from?"
"But you're…You're Alice," he said. "I can't even picture you with another…"
"I obviously decided against it," she told him, unsure what the problem was. "I can't picture myself married, either. But most women do get married, Tarrant."
"Most men, too," he reminded her.
"Then why aren't you married?" she teased.
"I might be," he said solemnly, and she instantly felt terrible.
"Oh, I'm so sorry. I - "
"No, don't be. I'm probably not. You think I'd remember something as important as a wife," he said, almost logically.
"Or a child," she mentioned, thought coming to her suddenly.
"I definitely don't have a child," he insisted. "There's no way you can forget something like that, even if you are mad."
"What if you never remember?" she asked. "Would you continue with your life here? Marry and have children in this town?"
"Maybe," he smiled. "I like the idea of children. They're so much fun, aren't they?"
"I still feel like a child sometimes," she laughed.
"Maybe you are," he said. "Maybe that's why you forget. Because you're actually only a child; you're just stuck in a woman's body."
"And are you still a child too?" she taunted.
"We're all children!" he decided suddenly. "Who wants to grow up, anyway? It's too boring."
"Full of stuffy old snobs," she agreed.
"You're not a stuffy old snob," he informed her quite seriously.
"I should hope not!" she exclaimed.
"Am I a stuffy old snob?" he asked, horrified at the prospect.
"Never," she assured him."Some people are, though."
"Tell me about them," he said. "And I will strive to be their opposite in every possible way."
"Well," Alice found herself giggling again, thinking of several of her business associates in London. "There's different degrees of stuffiness you know…"
And they spent the rest of dinner talking about how to be the opposite of a proper London businessman, and conjured a rather pleasing image that took them through the night happily.
The dream was evolving.
"I found him!" Alice cried, running through the dark halls. "What do I do now?"
She slowed, looking around her, unable to see anything.
"Mally?" She walked to her right, trying to remember where the voices had come from.
"Mirana?" Where did everyone go? Why was it so dark?
"McTwisp?"
"MURDER!" screamed a voice suddenly from behind her. Alice jumped, taken off her guard, and quickly turned around to see what it was.
"You murderer!" the voice repeated.
"I didn't kill anyone!" Alice argued, but a deeper, more masculine voice spoke over her.
"Shut up, you moron. She's not dead yet."
"Stayne?" she asked.
"What did you do to her?" the voice asked, sounding incredibly shaking.
"You saw very well what I did to her, and what I'll to do you if you don't shut up," Stayne replied, and the lack of light was causing Alice increasing frustration.
"Where are you going? Get back here! Where is she? Come back, you coward!" the voice screamed as Stayne's footsteps.
"Calm yourself, Uilleam. The Dormouse is alive, but barely," the Cheshire Cat said, appearing suddenly as soon as the door slammed behind Stayne.
"Chess?" Alice asked, as he was the only one she could see.
"Alice?" the cat said, turning around in disbelief.
"Are you mad, Chess?" Uilleam asked.
"Is it really you?" Chessur asked, amazement.
"I'm the right Alice," she confirmed. "What happened? Where is everyone? Why can't they all see me?"
"Where's Tarrant?" he asked. "Why isn't he with you?"
"Don't tell me you've gone off the deep end, too," the Dodo sighed. "Mally was hallucinating earlier, too."
"He was just here," Alice said, confused. She turned around to look for him. "Tarrant?"
"You must hurry," he said. "The Red Queen…"
"The Re Queen?" she repeated. "What happened? Isn't she in the Outlands?"
Chess's mouth was still moving, but Alice couldn't hear anything that was coming out of it.
"Chess?" she asked. "I can't hear you, Chess. What's wrong? What happened? You have to tell me! Chessur…"
But it was too late. She woke up crying again, and flew off to the cliff as soon as she realized that she couldn't remember.