Fall was not a particularly pleasant season in Gotham City. Dismal grey clouds blanketed the sky, sending a steady drizzle of acidic rain dripping down on the commuters and joggers. The leaves from the few surviving trees built up in piles in the gutters, turning into semiliquid brown sludge as rainwater slowly dissolved them. The icy muck smelled terrible.

So when Jervis Tetch unthinkingly put a foot down in the middle of it on his way home from work, his swearing seemed like a perfectly normal reaction. That is, unless you listened closely to what he was saying.

"Mimsy slithy mome-raths! Gyring, gimbling borogroves!" he hissed as he flicked decaying leaves off of his cracked and worn secondhand shoes. He flopped down heavily on the curb and scraped disgustedly at the mess with a piece of trash.

"Mimsy, huh?" a deep voice growled from behind him.

Jervis froze, liquid mulch dripping from his shoe. "Uh...yes," he muttered. "No! I meant miserable, not mimsy..." Backsliding in front of the Batman. Could the night get any worse? He turned to face the Bat.

Instead of a single caped figure, there were four rather large, burly men. Jervis leapt to his feet as if he'd been sitting on a cattle prod. It meant he was now standing ankle-deep in leafwater, but he didn't care about that. He was more concerned with the quartet of thugs that were now slipping various weapons out of their pockets.

Jervis reflexively fumbled in his own pockets for mind-control devices and found none. "I warn you," he lied nervously, not removing his hands from his pockets, "I'm armed."

"We heard from the boss that you aren't the Hatter any more," the head thug purred, "so you can drop the act."

"And yer wallet," a thug beside him said in a voice rich with amused menace.

"Now, listen," Jervis stammered, splashing back a few inches in the rancid puddle, "your boss was right, I'm not the Mad Hatter anymore, so you can go back and tell him-"

"Her," a thug corrected. "And she ain't happy with you."

He could have guessed that with both eyes shut. "I'm sure I can make it up to her," he suggested hopefully. After all, in Gotham's underworld you had to be a little flexible. If you were going to refuse to associate with someone simply because he had a little skin disorder or a touch of psychosis, you were liable to find yourself on the wrong end of an appropriately theme-colored revolver one day. Surely anyone who would hire him would have to be a little understanding...whoever they were.

The leader of the group extracted a well-worn newspaper from his pocket. "The boss went to a lot of trouble," he explained, slowly unfolding it. "A lot of trouble. She even paid you in advance an entire year ago! And just look what happened." The headline - oddly familiar - screamed the message RICHARDSON ELECTED FOR CITY COUNCIL.

Jervis felt his heart plummet directly into his socks. Criminals in Gotham didn't have to be flexible if they were, say, the kind of trust-funded well-armed sadistic manipulator that only the finest of educations could produce. If you were Tara Moretti, you didn't need to worry about making anyone angry. When trouble arose, she and her well-trained cadre of henchmen could take care of it - and if they couldn't handle it, she could always bat her eyes and ask for the help of her loving cousins, the Falcones.

"Ms. Moretti is very disappointed in you," the leader continued, throwing the paper onto the ground. "You promised to help her win that election." He affected a look of shock. "You didn't forget, did you?"

"I...I..." Jervis stammered, knowing that no excuse he came up with would ever satisfy them. "I could still do it!" he chattered nervously. "I'd just have to hat Richardson and make him forfeit - "

"It's too late for that. He won," the leader said, shaking his head as if Jervis was a top student who had just said that one and one made five. "Everyone would think that Ms. Moretti was second best, and we can't have that, now can we?"

The trio of thugs at the leader's back shifted ever so slightly toward him as he eyed a nearby alley. If he ran, they were certain to chase him. But if he stayed - well, his odds of survival were looking pretty bleak either way.

He dug his hands into his pockets and yanked out the only things he had - a little bible that someone had forced on him at a street corner and a stack of business cards - and flung them in the faces of the thugs. They instinctively dropped back. Anyone who ignored what a rogue threw at them tended not to survive the experience.

By the time they realized they'd been attacked with a relatively harmless selection of paper, Jervis had scuttled madly down the nearest alley. Oh please let me get away, he prayed to the open air. Oh please oh please oh please he chanted in time with his running feet as he thudded wildly down the twisty alleys.

He'd only managed to get two blocks away before they caught up with him. A heavy hand smacked down hard on his shoulder and pulled, twisting him so that he ran directly into a brick wall. He staggered back, stunned, and found himself in the arms of one of the thugs.

"I'll repay her!" he stammered, watching the other three close in. "Double!"

The head thug cracked his knuckles meaningfully. "It's too late for that."

The honorable thing for him to do would have been to close his mouth and accept his beating. Rogues didn't cower, rogues didn't beg. Rogues had pride.

Unfortunately, he wasn't a rogue anymore, and pride wasn't going to keep him out of the hospital. "Let me alone," he gibbered, uselessly struggling in the big man's grip as the other three readied their weapons. "Please-"

A fist cracked hard into his mouth. "Shut up," the thug advised him as blood trickled down his chin.

They'd left him alive. He could hardly believe it.

Of course, they'd left him alive in a noxious puddle, bleeding copiously out of his many new wounds. He groaned as the wind whipped filthy water into the cut on his forehead. Oh, naturally they'd left him alive. Dead men couldn't repay the vast amounts of money he owed to the ever-so-persuasive Ms. Moretti.

Which meant that they'd be back, sooner or later, and he had no hope of repaying them. Well, just because they'd left him alive for now didn't mean he'd stay alive if he laid in this alleyway all night. He had to get back to the halfway house.

But the halfway house was so far away...and he didn't have any medical supplies there. He'd foolishly reasoned that he wouldn't have any need for them, since lab rat breeders tended not to attract much interest. What an idiot he'd been. He could possibly ask the house manager for medical help...but how could he explain his injuries without bringing up their connection to his past? If she suspected him of backsliding, she could send him right back to Arkham, and nothing said 'criminal' like late-night meetings with thugs in alleys. The fact that they were ambushing him at the time wouldn't matter to her.

Slowly, carefully, he uncurled himself from the fetal position he'd been in for the last two hours. They hadn't left a square inch of him untouched. Everything, everything hurt. At least when Batman had been the one doling out the beatings, he had dropped him off at the hospital afterward...

Jervis dragged himself to the mouth of the alley and squinted up at the street sign. Oh. He had a lair around here somewhere, didn't he? Yeah, a few blocks away. He could make it there. Probably. And if he didn't, if he died on the street, it wouldn't really matter, would it? At least he wouldn't have to worry about paying Tara Moretti back.

With this and other cheery thoughts in his mind, he slowly crawled to his old hideout. They hadn't broken anything - much, he amended as several cracked ribs flared with pain. At least he could still crawl. The concrete sidewalks rasped through his pants as he forced himself along, leaving the last block or so of his path dotted with blood spots.

The door to the lair danced tantalizingly in front of him. With one exhausted hand he turned the knob and pushed it open.

No one had found it. No Bat had trashed it, no homeless guy had camped in his kitchen. It was just as he'd left it a few miserable months ago.

With a sigh, he pulled himself up onto the couch and collapsed. The room went fuzzy at the edges as his battered body screamed at him. He was starting to develop a severe hatred of the world and everything in it.

This wasn't fair. This wasn't right. He'd reformed, hadn't he? He was one of the good guys now, or at least as close as most people got to being good. Why had he bothered with it when he still ended up bruised, battered, and broken?

Something was stabbing him in the neck. He fumbled beneath his head and drew out his old, battered copy of The Complete Lewis Carroll.

It was all coming back to him. Now he was remembering what had drawn him to Alice's world in the first place, her Wonderland where nothing was fair and nothing was right but it was supposed to be that way. Babies turned into pigs and that was okay. The Mock Turtle wept and the Jabberwock was dead and it was okay.

This dirty, concrete-filled world of pain, this was not what he'd wanted at all. He'd wanted...what? A friendly word now and again? A relationship with someone that didn't involve his mind-control chips? He'd wanted to live in the world that everyone else got to live in, the world where nice things really did happen and where savage beatings were a thing of myth.

He let the book fall open in his lap. "I have a fairy by my side which says I must not sleep, When once in pain I loudly cried it said 'You must not weep'."

Mustn't. Now there was a word he'd heard too often recently. Mustn't go to his old lairs. Mustn't talk to the Dormouse. Mustn't touch electronics, mustn't drink tea, mustn't read Lewis Carroll.

"'What may I do?' at length I cried, tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied, and said 'You must not ask.'"

He stared down at the simple poem, gently touching it with bloodied fingers. How could a man living a hundred years before he was born know exactly what he was feeling? How could it be that a short passage of words could glow in his mind and make him feel understood - something that no one had ever made him feel in his entire life?

It had been a bad day. Slowly, without really thinking about it, Jervis turned the pages back to the familiar beginning of the story. As Alice tumbled down the rabbit-hole, a smile began to creep onto his bruised and swelling face. The key was on the table, there was a beautiful garden behind the door, and everything was going to be all right in the end.

Alone, curled on the tattered couch, Jervis sank into Wonderland with the White Rabbit beaming out from between his dirty, bloodstained fingers.

(to be continued)