AN: Geez, I think it's safe to say an update for this story is long overdue. Sorry for the delay, peoples. Sometimes it slips my mind to work on this story since I don't have nearly as much people waiting on an update on this story as I do with my main story.

RECENTLY RE-EDITED (2/7/16)

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians or Alice: Madness Returns.

~June, 1861~

In retrospect, Bunny should have known Sandy wasn't going to be any help, whatsoever.

Not that he didn't value his friend's input, of course. It was just that the little dreamsand spirit had a certain way of answering someone's question without really answering them. Interpretation was closer to the truth. Or at least, that's how it was in Bunny's experience, but that was probably because Sandy was mute and Bunny sucked at charades.

North was only slightly better than he was at understanding Sandy because they had been friends longer, but it was really Tooth who always knew what the golden spirit was saying, even when he was frantically trying to communicate with them. In those cases, he would opt to using sign language, which Tooth understood fluently, as she did all languages, both verbal and non.

Unfortunately, Bunny didn't have the heart, nor the patience, to drag both Sandy and Tooth from their all-consuming jobs just to help him shed a little light on the oddities surrounding a certain little girl, who has refused to leave Bunny's head for almost three months now. So he only sought out the Sandman, under the guise that he simply wanted to "catch up" with his old friend. That in itself wasn't much cause for suspicion. It had been a while since the two had any one-on-one interaction with each other. It wasn't until the duo reached Oxford and Bunny had to stop and remember where the girl lived, that Sandy started to suspect the gray pooka had an ulterior motive for paying him a visit, especially since it was rather spontaneous and out of character for him. His fluffy friend could be quite reclusive if given the chance and random visits just weren't his style.

So when Bunny flagged him down when he was spreading dreams over St. Petersburg, it threw Sandy off guard, but regardless, he had been delighted to accompany his friend. Unlike Tooth, Sandy didn't really have a fixed schedule that always had him on the go. Every child on earth didn't need to have a good dream every night, so he had more than enough leniency in his job for unexpected field trips.

Sandy couldn't understand why the pooka was being so vague about where they were going, though. They were obviously going somewhere, and not just on a pleasant stroll across an entire continent like Bunny wanted him to believe. Bunny was on a mission, there was no doubt about that. It was evident in the way his tall ears were pressed flat on his head and his furry face was curled up in fierce concentration.

"Alright, here it is," Bunny murmured to himself as they stopped behind a large cluster of bushes in the middle of a heavily wooded housing area, somewhere in Oxford, England. Sandy tried to float up and take a peek over the bushes, but Bunny grabbed his little foot and pulled him back down like a balloon on a string. Sandy only managed to catch a glimpse of a two-story home.

He looked up at the pooka as a dreamsand question mark appeared above his head.

"Well, by now you've probably figured out that I didn't bring you all the way out here just to chat," He said, crouching down and reaching out to pull back the branches of the bush so he could look through to the other side. Sandy moved to get another peek, but again Bunny blocked his view. "Hey, keep your sand on. I'll show you why we're here in a second. Just give me a chance to explain so you don't get the wrong idea."

Sandy let out a silent sigh and crossed his arms before giving Bunny a sweeping gesture with his hand. Get on with it then.

"So pushy," He muttered, rolling his eyes.

He launched into the story of the weird little girl he had met three months back, on Easter Sunday. While he spoke, Sandy listened patiently, his eyes widening every now and again whenever Bunny would talked about the strange things the girl would do, like successfully sneaking out of her two-story window in the middle of night and walking nearly two miles to an empty park so she could wait for the Easter Bunny to return, which luckily for her, he did. And how she was able to see him even though she didn't believe.

By the time Bunny finished with his story, both were crouching low to the ground as they poked their faces discreetly out of the bushes.

Alice was outside that day, sitting next to a small patch of white daisies growing in her backyard. She was wearing another grey dress with sleeves too long for her arms and a matching ribbon in her hair. It looked as if she tied it herself with the way one loop was wider than the other and one tail end kept falling into her face, only to be blown away by a puff of breath. She sat next to the flower patch with several picked daisies nestled in her lap. Her face was curled up into that same expression of cute concentration Bunny saw when he gave her his Easter eggs. The pooka couldn't get a good look at what she was doing exactly, but it looked as if she was weaving together the stems of the picked flowers.

He pointed in her direction. "That's her."

Sandy rolled his eyes as Bunny, literally, pointed out the obvious, but instead of commenting on the pooka's redundancy, the Sandman watched the girl. He smiled warmly as she worked diligently on whatever it was she held in her hands. A gentle breeze blew a loose flower petal into her face, causing her nose to scrunched up as it tickled her skin. The girl pulled an annoyed expression and waved away the petal, not appreciating the interruption. The golden spirit found the girl utterly adorable with her tiny body and green eyes that seemed far too big for her face.

"So, what do you think?" Bunny looked down at the other spirit expectantly.

Confused, Sandy blinked up at the pooka before shrugging his shoulders with a look on his face that said "I got nothing".

Bunny frowned, now annoyed by the lack of a more promising response. "Are ya kiddin' me? You're one of the most ancient beings on the planet and you're tellin' me you have no clue?"

Sandy crossed his arms across his chest again and narrowed his eyes irritably at the pooka before shaking his head.

Bunny wanted an explanation for the girl's odd behavior, that much was obvious, but he really didn't know what Bunny expected to hear. If the pooka couldn't figure out any reason behind a child's ability to see him without believing beforehand, what made him think Sandy could? Despite his job being nearly a twenty-four hour one, Sandy didn't directly interact with the children. His job entitled dealing with sleeping children. He never worked face-to-face with them, mainly because he didn't have to. Sandy interacted with them through their dreams.

It confused him though, that Bunny didn't just brush the girl off completely. The pooka wasn't one to overthink things like this. He was a straightforward spirit and looked more towards the future than the past, hence him being a Spring spirit; the season of rebirth and new life. So Sandy really didn't know why he was still dwelling on it, especially if it was something that happened months ago. Children could be weird sometimes, even more so at Alice's age. Simple as that. There wasn't always a logical explanation behind a child's actions. Depending on the state of their cognitive and speech development, sometimes children that age couldn't always convey what they're thinking into words so they opted to using the only other option they have to express themselves. Their actions make sense from the child's point of view, but mean absolutely nothing to an adult. Or in this case, a pooka.

"Sorry for snappin', Sandy," Bunny sighed, his ears drooping down. "I'm just tryin' to get the dots to connect here. You really don't have anythin' you can tell me?"

Sandy dropped his arms and his unimpressed frown turned into a sympathetic one. He gently kicked off the grassy ground and floated up closer to Bunny's height like a half-deflated beach ball. He rested a reassuring hand on the soft, bushy fur of Bunny's shoulder. A series of symbols flashed above his head.

Go talk to her.

The face Bunny pulled made the golden spirit laugh. He looked as if Sandy just told him to go clean his room. He ignored the contempt look the pooka was giving him and waved cheerfully at his friend as he slowly floated upwards.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Bunny protested when he realized Sandy was ascending back up into the sky, probably returning to his work in Russia. "I'm not done with you yet, Sandman!"

Bunny crouched down low and pushed up forcefully into a high jump to try and snag one of Sandy's tiny feet, but the sand spirit pulled up higher at the last second, leaving Bunny's paw to swipe at air before gravity dragged him back on to solid ground again. He cursed under his breath and stared up at the Sandman with his arms crossed and a displeased glare on his furry mug. Sandy only waved again and playfully stuck his tongue out at his friend before disappearing into the clouds.

Ever the sore loser, Bunny scowled at the sky as he gave the clouds a dismissive brush off. "Oi, I see how it is! Fine! Who needs you anyways?"

With one final huff, the Easter Bunny turned back around and marched over to the bush he was hiding behind. (No, not hiding. E. Aster Bunnymund doesn't hide from anyone, least of all a mere child. He was simply just observing the child from a comfortable distance, behind something that would keep him completely from view and away from the risk of attracting any unwanted attention. He wasn't hiding.)

Bunny crouched down towards the ground again before reaching both paws out to pull back the bush's leaves and branches.

Everything was the same as it was when he looked through the bush with Sandy except the small patch of flowers where Alice used to be sitting was now vacant and the girl was nowhere in sight. Bunny's ears perked up curiously before falling back against his head again as his eyes quickly searched the girl's backyard.

'Where'd you go?' Bunny mused to himself as he looked towards the house, unsure if she went back inside or not. 'Ya gotta be around here somewhere ya weird little-'

"Australia."

At the sudden voice that came from right next to him, Bunny sucked in a breath and choked out a surprised yelp. He jumped backwards violently and immediately reached behind his shoulder to wrap one paw firmly around the boomerang strapped to his back. The dangerously alert pooka stood with his legs apart, a majority of his weight resting on the tips of his large rabbit feet, ready to bolt should he need to. His furry face curled into a determined glower and he turned to face his possible adversary.

It took him a few seconds of scanning the area for threats before he realized the voice came from somewhere way below his eye level. The pooka looked down towards the ground where a pair of big, green eyes stared up at him. His own green eyes widened as he released the breath he was holding and his arms fell back at his sides in shock. He eyed the girl standing in front of him warily, trying to make sense of what just happened and how she was able to catch him unaware. Had he really been that distracted? Alice couldn't have been more than two feet away from him now, but she had somehow managed to walk right up to him, undetected.

"Alice!" Bunny gasped as he placed a paw against his pounding heart, trying to force the fur on his back to flatten again. "What- How did you- How?" Oh his poor pooka heart.

Alice stood with her hands held neatly behind her back as she waited for the Easter Bunny to decide on which question he wanted to ask, instead of trying to ask several at one time. She felt a little bad for making him jump. She occasionally did the same thing to her family. Unintentionally, of course - and her mother was quick to chastise her for it on more than one occasion, but maybe the Easter Bunny shouldn't have been hiding in her bushes. It seemed quite rude for someone to watch someone else without their knowledge.

He was a rather curious fellow though, and the way he panted heavily as if he just ran a great distance was funny, but Alice held back her laughter. Mother said it wasn't polite to laugh at other's misfortune.

"What did you say?" Bunny asked once he was able to. Did she really just say what he thought she said, or had he misheard her? Because for a second there, he thought he heard her say-

"Australia," She repeated in a high, accented voice. "That's where my papa said you were from. Australia. I showed him the way you spoke and he told me people from Australia speak like that."

Bunny didn't respond, just continued to blink dumbly at the girl. He was still trying to comprehend the fact that she was speaking. Once he managed to do that, he would focus on what she was actually saying.

When he didn't say anything back, Alice began to think that maybe she said something wrong and her shyness slowly started to creep over her again. She wrung her small hands nervously and gnawed on her bottom lip. She forced herself to continue speaking though, very unlike her, but she promised herself she would say something to the Easter Bunny if she was ever lucky enough to see him again. There were so many important questions she wanted to ask him.

"Can I touch your nose, Mr. Easter Bunny?" It was small and pink and she wondered if it would twitch and wiggle like Dinah's did when she poked it.

"Afraid not, Half-pint," Bunny shook his head after he finally snapped out of his stupor.

"Oh," The disappointment was written clear across her face and it made Bunny feel little guilty for putting it there. "Can I touch your ears then?"

He huffed in annoyance and shook his head again, his guilt now gone. "No, you can't touch my ears neither."

"Oh," She repeated with the same amount of disappointment on her face. "Why not?"

"Because I don't wanna be touched, it's annoyin'," He replied, trying to keep himself from sounding standoffish. "How would you like it if someone asked to touch your nose or ears?"

"Why would someone want to touch my nose and ears?"

"Well, why would someone want to touch mine?"

"Because they look big and soft."

"They are," Bunny deadpanned. "But that's not the point."

"Why are you here, Mr. Easter Bunny?" She asked curiously, changing the subject on a dime like all children tended to do. "It's not Easter. Nanny says you only come out when it's Easter."

"I only hide eggs during Easter, but I come and go as I please," He replied after crossing his arms and scoffing at the "Mr. Easter Bunny" thing. "And my name isn't the Easter Bunny."

Well technically, yeah it was, but the pooka had gotten used to being called Bunny by his friends. His nickname had been Bunny ever since he became a guardian and it felt a little weird to be called anything else, even if it was his first name, Aster (he briefly wondered if North felt the same way. The only person who ever called him Nicholas was Tooth and that wasn't very often).

As for being called his official title, that was even rarer since only the children called him that and Bunny hasn't exactly been the prime example of a socialite spirit in recent years. In fact, Alice was the first child he had spoken to in at least a couple of decades, as sad as that might sound, but not everybody could have a bubbly personality like the well-loved Tooth Fairy.

Alice cocked her head to the side curiously in a way that would have made any guardian, except Bunny, swoon over and coddle the little girl. "What's your name then?"

"Bunnymund," He deadpanned again. "But...you can call me Bunny if that's easier for you to remember."

"Alright, Mr. Bunnymund."

He let out a groan before pinching the bridge of his muzzle.

~O~

Alice was smart. Really smart, as Bunny soon learned after he reluctantly agreed to sit and talk with her for a little while when she went back to weaving daisies into a flower crown. Something, she told Bunny, she learned from her older sister.

Her vocabulary was way beyond what Bunny expected it to be. Occasionally, she would say a word wrong and Bunny would need to correct her pronunciation, but even though she said them wrong, they were quite impressive words for a five-year old to know. She also used the words in the correct context which implied she actually knew what the words meant and that she wasn't just regurgitating something she heard in passing.

She was also very strange, something Bunny was already well aware, but it only became more apparent the longer they talked. Usually, children were prone to talk about what was familiar to them; their family, their friends, their interests, but in the past hour they had been talking, Alice had to have only mentioned maybe, five facts total about herself; her age and last name being two of them. She mostly just asked a lot of questions, and not even simple questions. She asked a lot of "What if's" and "why do you think this and that?" type of questions. Some of them even made Bunny (who was well over two hundred years at that point) think.

Most were easy enough for him to answer, while others...

"What are you, Mr. Bunnymund?"

Not so much.

"Whaddya mean?" Bunny mumbled as he picked another daisy for the small patch they were sitting in front of and handed it to Alice. When they first sat down, there had been only four flowers left for her to use for her crown so Bunny used his Spring spiritual sway over all things floral and pulled up about a dozen more daisies from the grass with a few taps of his big rabbit foot. He couldn't stop himself from smirking when Alice jumped after more daisies popped up out of nowhere but his smirk immediately fell back into an unimpressed frown when her shock wore off and all she did was pick one of the flowers with an "Oh, thank you, Mr. Bunnymund."

Seriously, did nothing impress this kid? He wasn't looking for her to stare up at him with blinding reverence, or anything like that, but would an occasional small gasp of awe be too much to ask for?

"I've never seen a bunny as big as you before, not in the real world."

Real world?

"So I went into our library and looked through all of papa's zooligy books-"

"I think you mean "zoology", Half-pint."

"Yes, thank you," She nodded without looking up from her flower crown and motioned for him to hand her another flower. "I looked in his zoo-lo-gy books and I couldn't find anything but normal sized rabbits."

He handed her the next flower. "No surprise there, kiddo. I'm a special kind of rabbit, a kind you wouldn't find in any science books. A lot of people don't think my type of rabbit exists."

"How come?" Alice asked as she looked up at him. Even when he was sitting on the ground, Bunny still towered over her. "Can't you and your kind go out and just show people you exist?"

Suddenly the large, spacious yard felt beyond claustrophobic and Bunny's throat became cotton dry.

His kind...

"No...we can't, not anymore," His voice was thick with buried emotion as his ears slowly dipped down against the back of his head. "I'm the only one of my kind."

Alice's green eyes flickered back up at him. "Really?"

"Yeah..."

He doubted Alice understood the implied meaning when he said "not anymore", but she seemed to pick up on that he was upset about something because she frowned and her eyes slowly trailed down to look at her nearly done flower crown. She had been working so hard on it all afternoon and she was looking forward to showing it to Lizzie, but now, she wasn't feeling so excited anymore.

Things got real quiet after that as Alice eventually started working on her crown again while Bunny picked absentmindedly at the green grass.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one of my kind."

Bunny's ears twitched when Alice spoke and the gray pooka picked up his head and stared at the girl with wide eyes. She didn't look back at him though, she just continued with her stem weaving as her head bowed slightly and her dark hair blocked her face from Bunny's view.

It grew silent again as Bunny stared at the little girl, trying to figure out how and why someone Alice's age could possibly think in such a way.

"You don't have any friends, do ya, Alice?"

Alice shook her head, her hair still covering the sides of her face. "Other children don't seem to enjoy my company very much. They find me to be very mad because I talk to creatures that only I can see."

Bunny let out a heavy sigh at her sad confession and watched as she weaved in the last flower into her crown. When she finally put the flower into place, there was no triumphant jump for joy or any gleeful giggles, not even a smile. She just sat next to the remaining daisies in the flower patch with her head still bowed, her crown laying limply in her lap.

Very hesitantly, Bunny slowly reached out a paw, aiming to gently rest it on the top of her head, but he stopped inches away from the dark strands of her hair when a voice sounded from somewhere behind them. He looked back towards Alice's house to see a young woman standing near the open backdoor.

"Alice!" She called in a soft voice. "Time to come inside!"

From what he could tell, the girl looked a lot like Alice but he didn't think she was her mother. She was a little too young-looking to be anyone's mother, hopefully. It was most likely Alice's sister, Elizabeth, if he recalled correctly the name plate he saw on the other bedroom door when he brought Alice back home from the park.

Alice let out a small whine before pulling herself up on to her feet. It was then that Bunny realized it was almost sundown. He couldn't believe he had stayed as long as he did.

"I have to go now, Mr. Bunnymund," Alice said with a slight pout as she brushed of the skirt of her gray dress. When she looked up at him, he only nodded in understanding. A shy silence followed afterwards as she bit her bottom lip and stared at her feet. Her sister called for her again but she didn't give the older girl any acknowledgement that she had heard her. Instead, she looked back up at Bunny again through a few loose strands of hair. "Will you visit me again?"

The red flags going off in his head told Bunny to say no but he made the mistake of looking into those wide, green eyes of hers, and as soon as he did, he found leaning down closer to her level and his mouth started moving of its own accord.

"Yeah, I'll visit you again, Half-pint."

"Sometime soon?"

"Sometime soon," He nodded before jutting his muzzle in the direction of her home. "Now go inside and show your sister what you made. It'll be gettin' dark out soon."

"Alright," She murmured. "Goodbye, Mr. Bunnymund."

Alice bent over and picked up her forgotten crown from the ground and turned to leave, but just before she did, the little sneak stepped up to Bunny and quickly reached up and poked him in the nose with her pointer finger. The pooka reared back on to his feet as he curled up his nose, snorting and sniffing before reaching up a paw to grip his assaulted nose. Alice giggled cutely when Bunny snorted and she quickly turned around and ran away when he glared displeasingly at her from behind a grey paw.

He mumbled irritably under his breath as he watched Alice run across her yard, laughing gleefully at getting the drop on the Easter Bunny before retreating into her sister's arms.

"My, aren't we in a good mood this evening." Lizzie smiled as Alice's contagious laughter got to her. She laughed along with the little girl while she hoisted her on to her hip and turned towards their home. "What are you laughing at, you silly goose?"

For a moment, Alice thought about telling Lizzie about Mr. Bunnymund but she didn't think her sister could see him. She would've said something about it when she came to call Alice inside. He was sitting right next to her after all, and he was a rather large object to overlook, but even if she did manage to somehow miss the oversized rabbit sitting in their backyard, there wouldn't be much point in trying to show her, Mr. Bunnymund was already gone. Alice watched him hop back into the bushes.

Alice sighed wistfully as her sister carried her inside. Nobody ever seemed to be able to see the things she did. Lizzie pretend to sometimes, just to make her feel better about being different but Alice knew she couldn't really see. Only Alice could see the long streams of glowing, golden sand that floated throughout the night sky, or the tiny hummingbird creature she spotted leaving her room the night she lost her first tooth, or hear the sounds of jingling bells somewhere outside her home on Christmas eve. She was also the only one who saw the white-haired boy who flew around high in the sky sometimes when it snowed on cold, Winter nights.

AN: Again, sorry for the delay but I guess you can consider this a belated Valentine's present. I hope I did alright with Alice. I always pictured her to be one of those insanely smart little kids that practically know how to read before they could even walk. Alice's parents seem like they would be those type of parents that started really early with their daughters' education since her father was a dean at the Oxford University and her mother sounds like a very well-educated woman.

Sorry for any mistakes! If you come across one, just leave me a review and I'll fix it.

Don't forget to review!

~Scorpiofreak~