AN: Sorry that this chapter is a little short. An all honesty, all these chapters shouldn't be very long, and yet...

I think I'm going to try and stick to an updating routine that goes a little like, Winter Wonderland, this story, Winter Wonderland, this story, and blah blah blah, so on and so forth.

I'm going to try.

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

April, 1862

It was around his tenth or so visit that Bunny finally decided he should tell Alice a little bit about the other guardians.

Ever since Tooth had ratted the pooka out about having a favorite child, his overbearing friends refused to let the issue drop, and Bunny knew it was only matter of time before their patience wore thin and they attempted to approach Alice themselves.

They knew where she lived too. They knew just about everything there was to know about the five-year old girl thanks to North's Christmas lists. They could easily do it at anytime without Bunny's knowledge, or approval, but out of respect for Bunnymund, they steeled themselves and kept their distance, only interacting with Alice through the same ways they interacted with all the children. Indirectly.

Bunny appreciated the sentiment, but he knew it wouldn't be long until their resolves weakened. More so with North and Tooth than the Sandman. What an absolute godsend that little, round spirit had been for Bunny the past handful of months. It was mostly Sandy who kept the other guardians at bay for the Easter Bunny.

As an extra precaution though, Bunny decided to fill Alice in on the bare basics of each guardian. Just in case one of the other guardians had a brief lapse in judgment.

Most of it was information she already knew; their titles, their jobs, and in North's case, where they lived, but Bunny also took the initiative and told her other things, more personal information about the famous childhood icons that she wouldn't be able to find in any typical mythology and folklore books, such as their real names and nicknames, their appearances, their personalities, and even went a little more in-depth on how their jobs worked.

"I saw a Tooth Fairy once."

Bunny looked up from the egg he was painting and trailed his green gaze up the tree trunk he was leaning on until it landed on the little girl perched on top of one of the tree's lower branches.

"Didya now?"

He hadn't even realized he had moved on from talking about North. Talking about the other guardians felt almost second nature to him. He had talked almost nonstop about them for the past hour while he sat back against a large oak tree in the shade, painting one of his eggs for Easter, while Alice sat on the tree branch above his head with her cat, Lucifer, or whatever the heck she called it. (Bunny wasn't going to waste time memorizing a bloody cat's name. All he needed to know about the furball was that it hated him, and he hated it. Everything beyond that was just circumstantial.)

"When did ya see a Tooth Fairy?" The pooka asked listlessly as he went back to painting his egg.

"A long time ago," The girl replied in the same tone as she idly twisted a dark blue hair ribbon around her small fingers, having pulled it out of her hair as soon as she was released from her deeply dreaded piano lessons. She wasn't very fond of the ribbons her nanny tied into her hair each morning, but her mother always insisted she wear them to keep her hair out of her face and the woman rarely asked for her daughter's opinion on such things.

"Was it collecting one of your teeth?"

"No," She shook her head, allowing strands of dark hair to fall in front of her eyes. "It was one of Lizzie's. My oil lamp went out one night and I went to ask her to light it once more so I could go back to Wonderland. When I opened her door, the little fairy was buzzing above Lizzie's head like a bumblebee."

There was that word again. Wonderland.

Alice mentioned it often in their many conversations over the past few months, but she had yet to tell Bunny what it actually was, even during the few times he asked. Knowing the strange girl though, it was probably some figment of her overactive imagination.

That was one of the more...notable things about Alice. Her constantly wandering mind.

When she wasn't talking to Bunny, she was talking to herself. He once stumbled across her having a tea party with a few of her toys and he had to stop for a moment and watch as she held actual, long-standing conversations with herself, asking casual and sometimes even complex questions before pausing and waiting until whatever imaginary companion she was chatting with answered her questions.

Any normal person would've seen the sight as unfortunate and sad because children should have friends to play and talk to, not empty spaces on a picnic blanket, but Bunny had to admire the girl's ability to, basically, make do with what she had, which just so happened to be a couple of dolls, a chipped tea set, and her imagination.

It didn't take a genius to figure out Alice wasn't a very social kid. In fact, she probably had more trouble interacting with children than Bunny did. She just didn't have the type of personality that other children gravitated to. Bunny didn't particularly see anything wrong with that though, but then again, he wasn't the girl's parents.

Yes, growing up socially isolated can have a few unfavorable side effects on the girl, but undoubtedly, it'll help her become a more independent individual, which in hindsight, seemed like more of an important quality for a person to have, and from what little Bunny could gather up on Alice's parents, her father seemed to think along the same lines as him.

Bunny wasn't very fond of adults. Even if at some point, every one of them used to be a child he and his friends once protected. He usually didn't like them once they hit their twenties. Teenagers were a bit of a gray area, but adults were just too damn unpredictable to him, fully capable of doing all sorts of terrible things to all sorts of different people. Granted though, there were a few of them that Bunny found himself developing an honest respect for - Alice's father being one of them, and not just because the hearty man vaguely reminded Bunny of North. He seemed filled to the brim with pride and joy over the little intellectuals that were his two daughters.

Alice's father was a benevolent and highly respected man of science and knowledge. He always treated the few servants they had in the Liddell household (Bunny finally got around to learning Alice's last name) with courtesy. He also lived along side his wife, who he saw as his equal, with nothing but love and kindness as they raised their daughters together. He was acutely aware of how the society around him worked, so much in fact, he had his daughters home-schooled because he found the educational system inadequate. The same educational system that he was employed under as a Dean at Oxford University. That was incredibly ballsy if you asked the Easter Bunny.

Alice's mother was very similar to her husband in many of those same ways; a truly brilliant and kind woman, but she worried a lot about Alice's withdrawn personality and did all she could think of to help the little girl break away from that.

Normally, Bunny wouldn't pay much attention to parents, but she had noticed the recent change in Alice's behavior. And she had noticed Bunnymund's presence.

Of course, the woman didn't know it was the Easter Bunny her daughter's been talking to for the past few months, but she did know that something had changed. Her mother couldn't see him, but Bunny knew that she knew something was amiss, just by the way he could always see the woman lingering in the windows of Alice's home whenever he was around, watching Alice like a hawk with her dark brown eyes.

She was used to seeing Alice talk and play with her endless amount of imaginary friends, but it seemed that whenever one particular imaginary friend stopped by, the one Alice only referred to as "Mr. Bunnymund", there was a significant lift in her attitude and mood.

The woman had sensed the change in her child as only a mother could. She couldn't see the pooka because she didn't really believe he was there, but on some level, she notices whenever he comes around to visit, and because of that, Bunny had become rather wary of Lorina Liddell.

It made him wonder though sometimes, when he occasionally spotted the figure watching from a window. Had the woman ever once, at any point in the past few months, stopped to think that maybe the creature her daughter was talking to, wasn't imaginary?

No, of course not. Adults didn't believe.

"Does Ms. Tooth have a lot of fairies?" Alice asked curiously as she looked over the side of her tree branch.

"Yeah, tons of them," Bunny replied after he shook himself out of his thoughts when he realized he was on his ninth coat of rose-pink.

"How many?"

"Too many to count."

"Have you ever tried?"

"Nope," Bunny answered simply as he switched his paint to a raspberry color and proceeded to paint intricate line patterns on the small egg in his paw. "And I don't ever plan to."

"Oh, I see," Alice said almost to herself. There was a short silence then for a few minutes as Alice carelessly let go of her hair ribbon and watched it blow away in the breeze, never to be seen again, before she leaned forward on her tree branch until her stomach rested against the bark. "Is the Winter boy one of your friends?"

Bunny didn't even look up from his egg. "What Winter boy?"

"The boy I see around my house during the Winter," She clarified. "He only comes during Winter and no one in my home sees him except for me. So I thought, perhaps he was one of your conpanions."

"It's companions, half-pint, with an 'M'," Bunny corrected flawlessly while, once again, not looking up from his egg. "And I'm afraid I have no idea who you're talkin' about. Are you sure he isn't one of your weird creations?"

"I don't believe so," Alice said, somewhat dubiously. "Otherwise, he would've stopped by for tea a long time ago. My friends always stop by for tea."

"Well then, if he's a real boy, maybe he's one of your sister's friends," He suggested distractedly as he switched paint colors again.

It was the first thing that came to mind when he thought about boys coming around the girl's house, but he wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be true -not that the eldest Liddell daughter had a reputation for being promiscuous, of course. Elizabeth was just a very pretty girl (by human standards, not his), along with smart and talented, a real treasure. Bunny could only imagine the number of suitors the older girl will have when she reached marrying age.

"No, no, no," Alice protested with a few shakes of her head. "He never comes to my house like normal guests. He just flies past it sometimes."

Bunny looked up from his egg. "Did you just say he flies past your house?"

"Mmhm," Alice hummed almost wistfully while slowly petting her cat's back. "He flew right past my window once, didn't he, Dinah?"

Alice picked up her cat from around its middle and lowered the feline down towards Bunny until it was practically inches from his furry muzzle. As if the cat was actually going to vouch for her. All it did was hiss hatefully in his face and try to swat his nose with its paw. Bunny barely resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at the little beast when it missed.

"What's he look like?"

"He has white hair and he wears brown."

"That's it?"

"Well, of course. He's always too high up in the air for me to see anything else," She replied matter-of-factly as if it should've been obvious.

Bunny bit back a snort and rolled his eyes. "Oh right, silly me."

"I tried to call out to him once but he didn't hear me."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, there was a bell of familiarity ringing about the short description Alice just gave him, and maybe if he had taken the time to listen to that bell, he might've realized why that was, but as it were, the pooka was more focused on finishing his egg.

He really shouldn't even be there right now. Easter was just a little over a week away. There was plenty of work Bunny needed to still do back at his warren to prepare for his holiday, but that wouldn't be the first time he found himself opening a tunnel to Oxford when he promised himself he wouldn't.

"Well, keep trying, never give up, the world is your oyster, and all that other stuff," Bunny replied flippantly, his mind clearly preoccupied with other things.

Another long silence fell over the two as Bunny placed the finishing touches on his egg. It wasn't until he had finished and was holding the egg up for better inspection that he noticed his companion was no longer conscious. Sometime within the past twenty minutes or so, Alice must've nodded off because she was leaning back against the tree trunk with her eyes shut and her tiny mouth slightly open as slow, steady breaths puffed out against the loose strands of hair in her face.

Resisting the emasculating urge to coo over the adorable sight, Bunny wordlessly cleaned off his paintbrush before tucking it away neatly in his boomerang holster. He then waited under the tree until he saw the back door of Alice's house open to reveal her older sister. She called for the little girl a few times, but Bunny ignored her. After she realizes that Alice wasn't going to answer her calls, Elizabeth would come looking for her and the tree will be one of the first places she'll check.

Bunny pulled himself back on to his big feet again and rolled his shoulders to get the kinks out before turning to the tree branch that was now at chest-level. The curled up cat in Alice's lap gave Bunny a distasteful glare with its piercing yellow eyes, but did nothing else when the larger mammal reached over to tuck the freshly dried egg into the small pocket of the girl's dress. He knew was probably only going to increase her mother's suspicions by giving her an Easter egg a week before Easter, but he didn't really care. It wasn't like the woman could do anything to him anyways. He didn't even exist in her eyes.

"See ya on Sunday, shrimp," Bunny smiled softly at the sleeping girl as he reached over and gently pulled the strands of hair away from her face and tucking them behind her ears.

Without another word, Bunny quietly moved around the large oak tree when his sensitive ears picked up the approaching sound of shoes crunching against fresh grass. He slid effortlessly into the nearby bushes without a sound and watched from a safe distance as Elizabeth finally spotted Alice sleeping in the tree.

Bunny's whiskers twitched in amusement at the older girl's bewildered expression when she noticed the Easter egg he had left behind, but didn't stick around much longer after that before opening up one of his tunnels and jumping inside.

There was still a lot of working waiting for him back at the warren.

AN: So as you can see, I put in a little material on Alice's parents since they obviously have a bigger role in this story than they do in Winter Wonderland. I know I haven't done much with Lizzie yet, but don't worry, I'll include her too soon.

Headcanon - Bunny doesn't officially meet Jack until the the Blizzard of '68 (whether that's 1868, or 1968, that's up to you). He's heard a lot about him from spirits like North and Sandy, but they haven't been formally introduced yet, which is why Bunny doesn't immediately realize Alice is talking about Jack Frost.

Hope you enjoyed!

~Scorpiofreak~