So, yeah, we've got a veritable sea of misery to wade through for a few chapters. Just bear with me and trust me when I say good things come to those who wait and review…

Chapter XXI: We All Fall Down

Body armor had prevented a bullet from tearing a hole into his chest. Instead of a hole, all he had to show for the unpleasant meeting with the end of the firearm was a motley colored bruise. It had ached fiercely for a long while afterwards, but the pain had eventually died down to mere twinges.

Hatter's armor could not protect him from this new hole and the pain from this wound was infinitely vast and crushing. It was like someone had taken Charlie's damned, ultimately useless sword and run it right through his heart. An indefinable agony ripped through him, blotting out the pain of his crashing impact with the ground courtesy of the Suits.

"No!" The wail of denial was raw with the barely tapped edge of grief. "God…no…Alice!" His vision grew hazy, all blood-red around the edges. He could hear others screaming, one of them probably that prince. There was another screaming Alice's name as well, but Hatter was too lost in the abyss of his own thunderstruck anguish to register the voice.

He writhed under the weight of the two Suits who held him down, kicking and bucking against them. Consciously, he was aware there was no true reason to continue fighting. They had lost the battle, possibly also the war. He had failed. And the price for that failure had proved to be more than he could bear.

Alice.

She was gone.

Alice was dead because of his foolish urge to be the hero. If he had not busted in on the procession, she would not have tried to fight over a dozen Suits to try to save him. She would have steered clear of the heights she had always been so deathly scared of.

Well, her fears had been justified.

Alice was dead. The words rang through his head with a ringing note of devastating finality. His eyes began to burn.

Even if the Resistance somehow did overthrow the Queen of Hearts, there was nothing more left for Hatter. Whatever potential had been blooming of a life involving the two of them together had been utterly destroyed. A future without even the possibility of Alice…it stretched out before him like a dark, lonely road. He could not even stomach the thought.

So, why was he still fighting? Why was he still struggling to get free? There was no point to it anymore. His death was sure to follow soon anyway. Small mercy, that. At least then he would not have to try to face a hollow, dismal future without her.

Two additional Suits clamped down on his legs. He knew on some level they were ordering him to be still while throwing in more than a few threats of physical repercussions. But he could not make out the words. Just like Alice had fallen, he was falling. Falling into a black pit of emotions from which there was no conceivable way out.

Rage. Failure. Pain. Grief. Sorrow. Guilt. Despair. Desolation. An overwhelming sense of loss. There seemed to be no limit to the darkness impinging on Hatter's bereaved soul. His soul did not even feel whole, if it were possible to even feel like that. It felt like part of it had been cut from him, torn from him much like Alice had been torn from him.

These types of emotions were not marketed. The queen had forbidden any purely negative emotions be extracted from oysters. How could she keep a populace content without lifting a finger if her people could feel deep sorrow or grief? A person in emotional pain was not a pliable, content person. She thrived on the wave of manufactured happiness and bliss. People who were happy, even if the happiness was but a crude veneer, were much easier to control.

Besides, who would actively want to seek out those feelings anyway? People instinctively shunned dark emotions. Over half of the emotions that were siphoned from the oysters and processed into drinkable teas existed for the sole reason of countering and neutralizing negative emotions. Clear Conscience to counter Guilt, Hope to counter Despair, Elation to counter Sorrow…

Somehow Hatter knew all the Elation, Hope, and Clear Conscience in the world could not help him.

Exhaustion, both physical and emotional, eventually slowed his struggles. His breaths came in forced and shallow. There were a multitude of voices swirling around him. Little by little, the words began to seep through. Most of them belonged to the queen's men who had been thoroughly stunned and dismayed by the loss of their oyster captive.

"Shit, we're all gonna lose our noggins now," one of the Suits holding Hatter down mumbled bleakly.

The Minister of Clubs was pitching quite a fit. "You idiots…you incompetent fools! Do you realize what you've done? The queen ordered the girl be brought back to her alive so she could mete out her own punishment…and now…" His sentence stopped there, interrupted by the muffled, incoherent moans of a man. It sounded almost like this man had something covering his mouth, compressing it to keep him from speaking.

"Carpenter, please, be calm…you're just traumatized from the kidnapping...delusional…oh this is fantastic!" Hatter could not see what was happening being pinned to the ground by four Suits as he was. But he could hear the fear and anger in the man's voice. He had been put in charge, and so he would have to shoulder the lion's share of the blame for this tragic mishap.

Carpenter? Isn't he the queen's head scientist? What would he be doing here? Was that the bloke with Alice? In spite of the desolate grief gnawing away at him, his mind was as canny and quick as ever. Like a reflex, he hooked onto that small detail and filed it in his mind to see where it fit with the pattern of events which had gone heart-wrenchingly awry.

"See what else your carelessness has done!" There was more scuffling and grunts until Hatter heard a harsh THWACK! followed by a thud.

"Mad March!"

"What?" the assassin replied, sounding supremely unconcerned. "You didn't want him to get free and start mouthing off orders for me to off you all, did you? Lucky for you the queen's orders take precedence. And the way I see it, the old cow was going to kill that little bitch anyway. Mission accomplished."

Hatter flinched at that remark.

"You murdering bastards!" That was the prince. His normally cultured, prim voice was roughened by the same grief which gripped Hatter. "You will all pay for this, I swear it! I swear it on my life and birthright I will have all your heads for what you've done!"

Though the teashop owner did not want to feel it, a sense of mawkish empathy came over him. It could not be denied now that the prince must have cared for Alice even though he had lied to her and betrayed her. He did not like to have anything in common with that priggish man, but they had both lost Alice today. And they were both equally responsible for her death. Jack had brought her here in the first place, waving the promise of reunion with her long-lost father like a wriggling worm on a hook. Hatter had sealed her fate by trying to save her, ultimately leading to her demise.

The road to hell was indeed paved with good intentions.

"Aw, wouldn't Mommy be so proud to see wittle Jackie demanding beheadings like a regular chip off the old block," cut in Mad March maliciously. "Too bad Mommy Dearest is probably gonna have your head before you get the chance to take anyone else's."

"I suppose someone should go down there and retrieve the body at least," the Minister of Clubs noted in a tone which fully suggested he did not want to be that person.

Unbidden and unwelcome, an image of Alice's body, broken, bloodied, and lifeless as it now surely was, flashed into Hatter's thoughts. He shuddered, and fresh tears spilled over the crest of his cheeks. He was barely clinging to his sanity as it was. Were he to see her body, he felt certain that would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

But, then, that might be a relief to give in to the madness which beckoned him…called to him…

Give in, it seemed to chant. You can forget everything…forget your pain…forget Alice.

But he could not make himself forget her. Memory was all he had left to him now.

"Meh," was Mad March's trademark response of indifference. "Sure, you do that, on top of carrying the rest of these unconscious schmucks back to the casino. I can't touch her, though, remember?"

A pregnant pause reigned for the next few minutes. Hatter's heart fluttered weakly in his chest, as if it no longer had much of a will to continue beating any longer. Her name echoed in his thoughts like a chant.

She didn't even scream when she fell…

"What do we do about this one, Sir?" The question had been posed by one of the Suits holding Hatter to the ground. The teashop owner knew they were referring to him.

"Oh, I have a few ideas," Mad March remarked.

"We will take him to the casino," answered the Minister of Clubs, completely ignoring the assassin's remark. "He's an insider with the Resistance. The queen will no doubt want him to be interrogated."

Interrogated? What bullshit! Interrogation was just a simple way of saying he was going to be sent to the Truth Room so the Tweedles could apply their vicious and unorthodox methods of information extraction. Once that would have frozen his blood with terror. Now, he could not bring himself to care overly much about his fate. His sense of self-preservation had once reigned supreme. It had been downgraded once Alice's life became more important than his own. Now that she was gone, his life seemed to be have been stripped of meaning.

But you can't give up anything, Hatter. His conscience apparently wanted to taunt him in his grief by taking on Alice's sweet voice. You can't let them win…Alice would not have wanted you to give up…

"You and I both know you don't fight for a cause merely on behalf of people you know or care about."

Hatter let out a defeated sigh, his muscles loosening and sagging underneath the weight of the Suits. He could not let the Resistance down now. Even though he was surely going to be executed, the least he could do was muster up his strength and use it to thwart the methods of the Tweedles. Alice had been charged with bringing down the queen, but now that was surely not going to happen by her hands. Hatter could not bring down the queen in her stead, but he could ensure the Resistance would still have a fighting chance.

Besides, whatever torments the Tweedles could devise would surely pale in comparison to what had already happened. The woman he loved was dead. That alone gave him a strange, perverted sense of invulnerability. What more could the mad doctors do to him?

Once it was clear the man was not going to fight them, the Suits eased off of him and lifted him to his feet. It was difficult to stand at first since Hatter's legs had gone somewhat numb from the pressure of the Suits cutting off the circulation to the lower limbs. He instinctively turned his gaze away from that wretched edge where Alice had fallen. The grief inside him was still so fresh and powerful.

In the short time that she had been fighting, Alice had managed to do quite a bit of damage to the Suits. Five of them had been knocked completely out of commission, including the one who had been sent sailing into the narrow alleyway. A few others were awake, but suffered from a range of injuries including one broken arm.

The lab worker who had been escorting Alice was ignominiously slung over Mad March's shoulder, his arms dangling up against the assassin's hips. That must have been Carpenter. Hatter had never really met the man who had created the process of extracting emotions from oysters, making him the ultimate supplier of his shop—former shop. Why was the man here? And why had they had to knock him out?

A brief glimpse of his face, however, answered all those questions. Even through the haze of grief, he realized he had seen that man's face before. Hatter's jaw dropped as recognition overcame him. He had thought the man looked familiar before, but he had been too far away and too distracted by his worry for Alice to really see it.

That man's face had been in the pictures from Alice's memories back in the Truth Room. That man was Alice's father.

Her father was the Carpenter.

Had Alice been in any condition at all to think coherently, she would have been rebuking herself. She had thrown herself into a battle without a second thought—mistake number one. She had allowed herself to be herded to the edge—how had she missed that? She had been sloppy and careless, focusing only on trying to get to Hatter.

Hatter.

That had been the last thing on her mind before that Suit's hand cracked across her face. Under normal circumstances such a blow could have been easily brushed off. Slayers did not have glass jaws, especially in regards to regular human strength. But a series of random mishaps had aligned to put Alice in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. Her sense of equilibrium had already been skewed thanks to Mad March's brutal act of introducing her head with solid concrete. She had been standing on the very edge of the precipice, for once unmindful of how close she was to the thing which she had always feared so much.

Put that equation together and it yields disaster.

Just like when she had been falling through the Looking Glass and from the Scarab, thought and breath were suspended. Luckily for her, Slayer instinct did not exactly require conscious thought.

Something hard and thick smacked into her back, exacerbating the injuries to her much abused posterior ribs. A shockwave of tremors ran through her spine. Whatever it was that she had hit cracked under her weight with the added momentum of gravity behind it. It broke, but it had slowed Alice's descent enough that when she hit the next obstacle, she instinctively maneuvered around so her hands could latch onto it. She flipped over the object, leaving her body to dangle freely. The object buckled severely but, miraculously, it held her weight.

Alice took a few moments to suck in huge breaths of air. A jittery relief hit her like a wave. She had fallen from the very top level of the city. By all rights, she should be dead, a smashed up remnant of a human being on the bottom. But she was alive.

"Holy shit," she gasped, looking around and seeing that she was holding onto a tree branch.

One of those enormous trees which inexplicably jutted out of the side of the buildings or on the very narrow outcroppings had caught her safely in its hold. Though it was not the first time nor would it be the last that she had brushed so closely with death, her head spun from the knowledge of it. A glance downward told her she would have still had quite a distance to fall before hitting the bottom and her stomach clenched.

"Holy shit," she repeated in awe.

Alice swung her legs over to a lower hanging branch and, with another deep breath, pulled the rest of her body over to grasp the thick trunk of the tree. She quickly wrapped her arms around it and rested her head against it. Her heart pounded rapidly in her chest just as her head pounded with the residual effects of being slammed against the ground.

"Okay, you fell off a cliff…a bit of a setback, but you're not dead and you have the ring, so all you've gotta do is get back up there…and…oh Jesus…I fell off a cliff! I fell off a fucking cliff!" She would have beaten her head against the trunk if it had not already suffered enough damage.

But she did not have time to hug this tree trunk and come to terms with the fact that the thing which she had always feared the most nearly killed her. Hatter was up there in the hands of the Suits. He had tried to rescue her. The idiot had come after her! She did not know whether she wanted to smack him or kiss him for such bravado. Probably both. But neither of those things would be possible if he was taken to the casino. Mad March would kill him and the thought sent her heart pumping rapidly again and her blood ran cold.

Oh god…Hatter! Please hang on! I'm coming!

As fate would have it, the tree she landed in happened to be one of the ones with roots ground deep into a grassy outcropping. She shimmied around the trunk as fast as she could manage and then, placing her heel against the trunk, she launched herself off the tree and onto the ground. The relief of standing upon solid ground rather than dangling in the air was short-lived. Panic set her in motion. She had no idea how far she had fallen, but she had to reach the top before the procession left, taking Hatter with them.

Alice did not really know her way around the city levels, but she was able to figure out which paths ascended up to the next level easily enough. She moved swiftly, her blood pulsing in fear with every step. Her body ached all over, but not as much as her heart ached. When she had seen those men pull Hatter from his horse, she had suddenly forgotten about her injuries. Seized by anger, fear, and protectiveness, she had bolted to his defense without any thought for her own health.

I will find a way to rip out that rabbit's spine if he hurts him, I swear to god.

She reached the top level, but the Hospital of Dreams was nowhere in sight. There were several paths and alleys, none of which bore a convenient label denoting where it led.

Goddammit, why wasn't I paying attention when Jack dragged me through here? Oh yeah, cuz of the heights…fucking heights…

Ever aware of the ticking of the proverbial clock, she chose a path at random and ran. All the while she prayed they would still be where she had left them, or, at least close enough. If she took them by surprise she may just be able to free Hatter. Of course, that may have been what he had planned when she had been their captive. In the end, his plan had succeeded, albeit in an unorthodox and extremely terrifying way.

Her pace quickened when she saw the Hospital of Dreams and the narrow walkway extending from the front of it. She was already on the side opposite the hospital, so all she had to do was round the corner into the alleyway and…

See absolutely nothing but an empty clearing.

She slowed to a halt, her stomach dropping with dismay.

"No," she whispered aloud, shaking her head.

They were gone. Her father, Mad March, the bowler hat man, all those Suits…Hatter.

Hatter.

Well, there was one thing still left of him. His brown porkpie hat lay crumpled and unforgotten on the ground. All the world narrowed into tunnel vision, centering on that hat. She slowly approached it. Still as stone, she stared at it in her desolation for a few moments before kneeling to pick it up. Her fingers ran over the brim almost in a loving caress. Her eyes grew wet and she blinked furiously.

An indescribable rage began to take hold of her. Her hand curled around Hatter's hat as she drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Clutching the hat to her, she stood and sent a death glare down the direction the posse of Suits must have gone. She may not have known her way to the casino, but the men who had taken Hatter did. A group that large did not travel without leaving evidence of their passage, although to the untrained eye most evidence would be invisible. Luckily for Alice, her eyes were trained to notice such things.

The Slayer began to follow the trail.

Yeah, I realize I had split the perspectives, which I usually don't do with Hatter and Alice, but I felt it was necessary for this chapter.

All I have to say is hell hath no fury like a Slayer whose man is threatened…Anyone remember Buffy from Season 2: What's My Line: Part 2?

Anyway, reviews would be most welcome!