Hi everyone! I hope I haven't kept you too long... college has been a complete drag, and I've been swamped with paper after paper. Who knew Film Studies would be so many essays?

I hope this chapter doesn't come as too much of a surprise to you... it's been rearing it's ugly head ever since Chapter 2, really. This chapter was particularly hard to write. I didn't know what I wanted to do with it -- I knew I wanted to go somewhere with it, so here it is! This is somewhere, and I hope you adore Reggi as much as I do.

And yes, the name is taken out of the countless other fics who have named him Reginald. It fits well, so who am I to fix what isn't broken?

Enjoy!


Chapter 5
The Two Instances of Reginald Hatter

That evening, the rain was black.

The sky was a pallid blue, clogged with pores of dark gluttonous clouds that stretched across the horizon like black tape. Lightning skipped across the clouds like pebbles, rumbles of thunder shaking the earth beneath the sodden carriage like the splashes of a puddle. It was a damp night, with inky black raindrops splattering against the small carriage windows.

The carriage was buried in the mud, strewn sideways like a toy. The wheels were splintered, the door waving open in ominous abandonment.

Wife and Husband lay tossed into the dark mud, their limbs bent like ragdolls, their hands intertwined like lovers. A golden locket hung around the woman's tiny neck, and opened to a picture of golden afternoons.

--

The Mad Hatter gazed unseeing sooty ceiling, his fingers curled around a soft cotton blanket. "Alice?" he muttered, and furrowed his eyebrows. "Alice imagined?"

Take it easy, my friend, came the Hare's voice.

The figment couldn't tell if it was nighttime or day by the looks of the ceiling, but he made a good guesstimation that it was close to morning by the weary, lead feeling settled into his bones. Which was funny because never remembered being tired -- with the exception of that one time he and the March Hare had a little too much to drink. But it was a genuine birthday, and they felt the need to celebrate Alice's fourteenth year with a round of gin that would put hair on the girliest man's chest.

He closed his eyes again and wanted to go back to sleep. His mind was so foggy and full, like a soggy cloth that had been sitting by the river a bit too long. Then came the Hare's gasp, which caused him some alarm.

Go to sleep.

Oh Lords, Hatter! What has she done?!

Who has done what?

He rolled over onto his side, and felt every muscle inside him ache as if he had been squeezed down a particularly nasty chimney and smoked back out of it again. He vaguely remembered something of the sort, but he knew he didn't clean chimneys, and the only smoking he'd done was to a particularly unhealthy Cuban cigar.

Don't move, the March Hare advised cautiously. I think it'd be better if you just went back to sleep, maybe...

Sleep? scoffed another voice -- the Dormouse? What was she doing in his head? Hatter, get up!

So the poor Mad Hatter cracked one eyelid open, and became quickly confused.

Hatter--

"Where the bloody hell am I?" he sputtered, wrenching up in his bed.

The room was mostly dark, with the shallow cast of a stormy bourbon-colored sky and the white-hot flitter of lightning crashing and melting into the damp night. Well, he was wrong about the time, although he still felt sure he had been smoked out of something -- and God forbid it be a chimney! There were only two windows in the room, and close to ten beds scrunched together like sardines. Pants and shoes and shirts and hats, grimy and black with soot, lay stranded across the room. Even the walls were sooty with hand prints and feet prints and a particularly big body print on one wall, and everything smell liked smoke. He smelt like smoke.

Like a chimney, actually.

Only the White Rabbit smokes us out of chimneys, my friend, came the dear voice of his best friend, trying to thrust calm into the situation. Alice has…something's wrong, old chap.

"Wrong?" he whispered.

Boldly, he tried to sit up, but his stomach muscles convulsed and he flopped back into his hard pillow, and gave a low moan. Whatever happened to his feather pillow? He had just fluffed it the night befo -- wait.

The night before what, exactly? came the hare's wry reply.

Black rain jogged his memory and filled him with rampant fear.

"We told you not to go down that chimney," sniffed a young tenor.

The Mad Hatter jumped in fright. "Holy bloody Hell!"

Language, Mr. Mad Hatter, tutted the Dormouse motherly, but the Hatter paid no heed to the dimming voices inside his head.

Slowly, he faced the tangible voice with a wide, unscrupulous stare. He was quite sure he wasn't harboring children in his small little cottage, and was quite sure this wasn't his cottage at all. It was all very confusing, and yet at the same time he understood all of it as if…

…As if he were imagining it.

There was a young boy beside him with earthy eyes and brown hair, and he twitched ever-so-often as if he was wound up so tight that the law of physics refused him to sit still. His knee bounced with his heel that made a soft thump-thump-thump staccato on the wooden floor. "You're getting too big for this job, you know."

"…Job?" the Mad Hatter asked himself hoarsely. The last he remembered, he didn't have a job.

"Um, you o'right there?"

"I… job?" he tried to sit up again, and failed miserably. He flopped into his pillow face-first with a wince. "I don't remember any excessive labor…" he mouthed around the pillow.

The young boy just sighed and rolled his eyes. "O'right, well when you stop pretending do give me a ring. Miss Pross's got some warm soup-stuff for you and some tea."

"Tea?" asked the Mad Hatter eagerly, popping up having forgotten about his pain.

"Yeah, tea."

"Oh, that would be delightful!" He gave a sunny smile to the young boy, who quirked an eyebrow. The little lad was quite sooty, and suddenly the Mad Hatter didn't like the idea of him bringing tea at all

The boy sighed, "Whatever. I'll be right back, OK?"

"Um -- wait. Sorry, old chap… but a question for a fool?"

The boy spun around and gave him a level look. "What?"

"Your name?"

"God," he sighed. "The things I play along with." He stood and scuffed the foot of his shoe on the dirty floor. He couldn't have been any older than Alice, but his face wasn't nearly as innocent. The Mad Hatter found himself feeling sorry for the lad. "Name's Neil. You know it. I know it. You're my best pal. I'm yours. We painted Professor Loveless' roses together before you had to get stuck down a chimney. Jog that mutton of a brain yet? 'Member? Bert smoked you out."

Bert? Neil?

Why do they sound familiar, Hare?

But the March Hare was so dim in the back of his mind that he couldn't understand the reply. That felt wrong, somehow. This whole dream felt wrong -- as if it wasn't a dream at all, and he really was smoked out of a chimney. "Um, and old chap…"

Neil rolled his eyes. "Do you want tea or not?"

"I do!"

"Then, Reginald, SHUT UP." Then Neil turned, gave a prissy flip of his hair, and slammed the door on his way out.

The name threw a punch into the Mad Hatter's stomach and made him gasp as if he'd just been hit with a ten-pound bag of flour. Oh, that's how I know those names! Scrambling to sit up, he clawed at the sooty blankets and looked around for a mirror. One reflected London in the far corner of the room, opposite of a lonely window. Body complaining, he rustled to the mirror, unable to realize how he hadn't before noticed that his hands weren't his, and that his voice was younger, and that no amount of exercise would ever hinder him in Wonderland.

In the mirror, the Mad Hatter did not stare back. Only a boy -- a young man about a year or two older than Alice -- with a light streak of messy straw-colored hair, and slight bristle on his chin. He was sooty like Neil, and had a good-sized chunk of his left ear missing, as if something had been shot through it. Due respects, his mind quoted without reason, the defining sound of a gunshot suddenly fresh in his memory although it had been ages ago. The boy was rather tall, and he wore an expression of utter disbelief. One the Hatter would have worn at that exact isntant too. And when the Hatter frowned, so did this alienated reflection.

"Me?" the Hatter mumbled, and the reflection mumbled too.

There was no familiar nose. No bushy eyebrows or laughter lines. Only his eyes reassured him that he was still he -- familiar and glowing and quite cornflower blue. His eyes.

Eyes that also belonged to this young man.

"Oh Alice…" his voice quivered, "what have you done?"

In his ears rang Alice's lithe laughter, innocent and sweet and soon to sour. It buzzed in his head like a drug, and he clutched his head as the world spun. His stomach heaved. For a moment, there was a hazy smattering of a carriage strewn to the side of the road, and two pale corpses, one with dark marble eyes, the other with hair as golden as the summer afternoon.

Then poor, poor Alice, sitting at a table for three, her head bent into her lap. Alone.

Oh no. He trembled.

You have to find Alice -- quickly!

But I --

"Oi! Reggi! Tea's here!" the young boy barged in with a chipped floral teacup balanced in a sooty hand.

The world twisted, and filled with soot, and the Mad Hatter imagined no more.

Who's Alice?

Reginald gave a start and spun to his friend. "Neil?" Confused, he looked around. Last he remembered, he had been stuck in a chimney and Bert had tried to smoke him out. His lungs felt like they had two pounds of soot in them, and they hurt when he breathed. "Um, say… how did I get here?"

"You walked, Reggi."

"I know… but why am I standing here?"

"Jesus," Neil rolled his eyes again, "just come drink your tea and shut up. I'm going to go buy me a piece of candy with the loot we earned." The short boy spun around on his sooty heels and marched out the door.

For a moment, Reginald stood silently. His eyes slowly gazed at the steaming cup of honey-colored tea. It looked good, and made the room smell like sweet fair things he might have once known, once upon a time.

Once Upon a Golden Afternoon, my friend.

"I don't even like tea," he protested finally.

Somewhere in the faintest part of his mind, a little part of him gave an anguished cry of despair.


So why did Bert try to SMOKE him out of all things? Well, he might not be the brightest bulb in the light fixture, but he has his reason. Old habit maybe?

Continue or No?