AN: I'm SO sorry for the long time you had to wait for this. I have so much work to do and when my head is full of texts and diagrams and working plans, it is hard to think of anything creative although the chapter sits in your brain and nags around.

You can thank Avril Lavigne for this update. Usually I don't like her music as she screams her songs, but the Alice in Wonderland OST-song brought me into the right mood to write this. While we are at mood – this will be an important topic for the following chapter 12.

I also want to say to Inubaki: THANK YOU for the review. It made me so happy I really do try to finish this, although updates may be less regularly than before. It just depends on my workload per week.

I hope you all enjoy the following chapter, please review! Critic, comments, thoughts – everything is welcome!

Tossed and Turned

Blades collided with sharp noises; dirt was thrown through the air which had become dusty and yellow. She panted and wiped the sweat from her forehead, it was annoying as it soaked through her eyebrows and made its way down into the eyes, making them burn and sore – the dust sure wasn't helping, too – and the sun was shining nonetheless. It was warm, her body ached with pain. She was very tired and the muscles of her back, shoulders and arms were worn out, she had tried a last blow but now she was sure that lifting the sword again would be an impossible task.

Alice stood buckled in her dust-coated summer-dress, letting the blade rest with its tip on the ground. Her eyes closed for a moment and she didn't feel like opening them again, she was that tired, yet didn't have this option.

"I think this is enough," her opponent said, shaking his head in an unpromising manner, the 'this girl will never put off a fight' look was written straight on his face. Her trainer came towards her to free her from the sword, which he lifted effortlessly.

Lystrat was a very tall and lean man, although she wasn't sure 'man' was the right word. Actually, Lystrat was a kind of lizard, through walking uprightly like a human and featuring some anatomic adjustments to this style of moving. He spotted a slender, whip-like tail which caused him wearing a special armor that accounted for it. His skin was a yellowish-green and covered with very small and glittering scales, the hairless head was like a monitor lizards – face elongated, cold eyes, no ears and very, very sharp looking teeth. However fear-inducing his outward opinion was, for an experienced fighter he had proven in the past days to be an all-right fellow with a polite attitude.

Not many had jumped on the Queens call for a trainer for Alice. Everyone counted on her as a champion but not many were experienced as warriors at all not to speak of teaching it and the members of guard and army were hesitant to offer their help, as their head members were not amused about the 'amateurs' hindering their work. Of course, Queen Mirana could have ordered anyone as trainer but she considered the lessons as more fruitful if the teacher was aiming for Alice to succeed.

That way, they found Lystrat who lived not near the castle and was once a member of the guard of Nijb-Godia, the still existing neighbor-state of ancient Godia. He had taught Alice for three days now, giving his best to teach her the basics and most important know-how.

Alice took a deep, freeing breath – then had to cough from the dust. She was feeling very unfit right now, for the training and her role as savior-again, too. Lystrat observed how she straightened her clothes and slowly, with aching feet, staggered towards a tree, resting against it. He followed and looked at her sternly "I know that you will never become a warrior," he said with despair in his voice "but you have to put more energy into the training. Stay concentrated. You won't become a fighter in the very short amount of time we have, but the least I can do is to teach you how to NOT die in the first two minutes of combat. On the first day you were so motivated, what happened? You really have to shove aside everything else – your LIFE will depend on how well you remember the training I give you and I'm sorry to give you this speech but you HAVE to be able to HOLD your sword and USE it the way it's intended – it won't help you if you give it away like a bunch of flowers!"

Alice winced, she knew he was right – her life –would- depend on it and yet she wasn't concentrating because of the past days and she couldn't hold the heavy blade. She had never done things that exhausting, there were no muscles in her arms, she wasn't a man and for the first time wished to say 'I can't do that, I'm a woman', at the same time she wanted to slap herself for even thinking that. She never was one of the usual Victorian women, she was special and it was good that way!

Alice looked up to Lystrat "I'm sorry, my hands are shaking, I don't know how I could hold a sword just a second longer."

Lystrat sighed; it wasn't like he couldn't understand this girl at all. Normal training would look very different and under normal circumstances he would have told this girl to put some weight on first. Yet these weren't normal circumstances and so he couldn't offer a normal training. He had to help her as much as he could to make a passable fighter of her in not much more than a week. Realistically thinking, something he was very fond of, this couldn't work but they had no choice. He knew about the problems near the borders, he had had family there – past tense. So he taught Alice tricks she could use to defend herself or make it hard for her opponent to get into an advantageous position. That was what he could give her, but to save her neck she would need a weapon and she would need to HOLD that weapon. She needed strength she didn't have, that was a big problem and he couldn't make out a solution for it now, other than gianting her with some cake. Yet a giant would be a different tactical problem.

"Rest for today, we will start again tomorrow at the usual hour. Please read the book I gave you as far as you can." It was a book about sword- and dagger fighting, a book containing dirty tricks. Every sword-fighter knew that the only way one would be able to survive a fight was having trained to exhaustion before, theory didn't make a good combatant – yet they didn't have the time so it was a last resort thing to do.

Alice nodded "Thank you for your patience," and stumbled slowly away, trying not to show how much she was hurting. She was well aware of the impossible task in front of her, well, what other chance did she have? She still remembered the situation in the Queens Oval Room, the tension between the Hatter and Boldpunch was so thick it could have been cut through. She was needed, someone had to hold them together and as champion it was obvious she would be involved in battle – this time without a magical sword that would tell her what to do and how, that would move her limbs in ways she had never thought of.

She couldn't risk scarring the Hatter forever by dying and leaving Underland to its fate. Also, she was quite fond of living to old age.

Aside from her physical wornness and political sorrows, there was something else deliberately disturbing her concentration. In the past days she hadn't talked more than a word to the Hatter or even Mallymkun. Both were very busy making plans with the General and his men, just as busy they were doing some research but didn't care to involve her in it or just tell her about it. At the utmost she got a response about 'not thinking about it' and better taking care of her training. They had a point, of course, on the one side, but on the other hand they really should know she didn't like to be surrounded by mysteries.

Yet the Hatter was so distant, it was just not like him. He wasn't like himself at all and that was quite frightening for Alice. She thought she knew him and could make out his personality-turns on his mood-coded eyes, but they were green all the time no matter how strange he acted. When they happened to meet, he almost jumped and took the next-best excuse to vanish again and if that wasn't possible he evaded her questions, he was obviously avoiding her. She felt a dark, wet feeling in her chest; it made her… just sad. Really, she couldn't be angry at him, she just felt bad.

It wasn't the only worry, through, every time they talked or she heard him talk to somebody else, he had a very strict and brooding, threatening tone in his voice. She didn't like it, it remembered her of someone, she just wasn't sure who it could be, but whoever it was she was sure to not being able to stand him. He was acting so not-himself, all personality-changes aside, she had never witnessed him so distant, brooding and downright menacing at times. He surely was in a kind of working-frenzy leading to the border situation, what ever could the puppets they had seen have caused him to be that way?

Alice had tried to get her hands on these puppets or find out what they were, but first she wasn't allowed to inspect them – it seemed that no-one except for the General was - and then she hadn't the capabilities to find out more about them than the army already knew – which was almost nothing. They had to do something with witchcraft and they were dangerous, that was all. What did they have to do with the Hatter? She was sure that he must have recognized them; it was the only way to explain his upsetting behavior.

She wished she could talk to him and solve it all, but that wasn't possible if he ran away every time. Before, he had never tried to 'protect' her by leaving her clueless – to the contrary, he trusted her much in everything. Was there, maybe, another reason for avoiding her? Something she couldn't think of right now? Whatever could it be?

Alice had aimed for her quarters to wash herself and get changed; on the way there from the training field she passed the forecourt with fenced-in trees and the fountain. The forecourt was surprisingly empty in the otherwise quite crowded castle but soon she made out the possible reason for it – the Mad Hatter was here and his mood for the past days had caused most temporary inhabitants of the castle to move away when he neared.

She laid her eyes upon him to judge if his mood was still the horrible one of the past days – one could never know – and indeed: It was not.

He looked exactly different from before, which meant that he looked more like himself than before and just like a moody version of himself from her time in Underland before. Now that was Wonderland-logic. She shook her head quickly. No she was sure, his composure had changed completely. In the past days he had walked straight with strengthened shoulders and raised chin, like he wanted to appear taller – an impression that had worked perfectly – more fierce.

Now he looked like a wet sac of laundry. His slim legs spread far away from him, sitting on the broad margin of the fountain. His shoulders hung, his chin hung, the brim of his hat hung, his clothing and him looked inherently depressed.

In his hands, there lay a small brown puppet like the ones Faux Boldpunch had shown them. Yet it wasn't one of them, Alice would have recognized it. This rag doll was scorched by half and had lost an eye, also, the hair looked more like… real black hair than any substitute. She hoped it was horse hair.

When she approached him she heard him mutter "Why must it always be fire?"

It was quite and soft like a lowering wind, "It's always fire, why must it be? Burn, burn, burn, burn everything to ashes. Nothing's left, nothing's living. Black ash rises through the air to the sky."

Alice gulped, she knew what she just heard wasn't intended for her ears and she felt like she had deeply intruded the Hatters privacy, penetrated it.

"Hatter?" she asked softly, hardly daring to disturb him, at the same time feeling the need to.

Tarrant looked up to her with glittering, big green eyes "Do you have any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?"

Alice knew he didn't know the answer more than her, she also knew that he always asked this question when he felt emotions too strong to convey and it was obvious that these strong emotions were sad right now. She sat down beside him.

"Alice?" Only now he seemed to realize that there was someone else in this place. He slowly turned his head towards her, his eyes seemed to fill up with tears, through they didn't really, trembling he took Alice hands into his:

"Alice, please… could you please just stop… dreaming?"

It broke her heart.

Only now she realized how horribly she must have hurt him in the moment they parted, maybe even the moments before. She had hurt him so badly and now she felt all this pain, too. He had always trusted her and so he had finally believed her that everything was a dream, being oblivious to the concept she had drawn out about the nature of Wonderland. She knew she had been wrong for a long time, she was never really sure – until now.

If this had been her dream, she would have never inflicted so much pain on somebody, if this was a dream of her, he wouldn't be suffering.

She sharply drew in some air, biting her lip at the same time and almost making a hissing sound. She felt tears in her eyes and took one hand to gently caress his cheek.

"I can't." This is no dream; there is no way to wake us up.

He just stared at her with no further reaction, but she broke into a sob. She lay her arms around his shoulders and embraced him, then she felt him laying the rag doll by side and his arms around her, too. He also squeezed her a little, that was more emotion than she had expected. So she squeezed him a little bit, too. He stroke over her back and she did so over his while being careful not to knock against his head.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He just held her, and that way they held each other for quite an undisturbed time.

TBC