She is a friend of my mind.
She gather me, man.
The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Alice did not pause for reflection upon opening her eyes and dizzily forcing herself from where she lay in the empty kitchen—instead, she crunched into the remnants of the smashed jar, seized both the spoon and the bottle of Drink-Me and heaved up the stairs two at a time. The upstairs bedroom door was still closed, of course, and she went for the latch with such momentum, Alice up and up the stairs and through, that the door stuttered back against the wall too soon like punctuation mid-sentence.

He was pacing erratically, hands twisted deep into the dark panels of the dressing gown, switching gears and tacking back and forth from the empty fireplace to the bed, apparently trying to claw his way out of the air by the way he was gesturing. The worn brocade sleeves were too long, dangling far past his fingertips. When he realized she was there, he lifted both cuffs to his head as though to rip out his hair starting from the back, and made a horrible sound that was just beyond a groan but not yet a wail: it oscillated between the two. It occurred to Alice that he had been waiting for her, holding it in until now.

"Oh god," she heard him say, stertorous, and he turned, came at her headlong, grabbed her by the arms, and pinned her up against the door, the spoon ringing as it hit the floor. Somewhere in her middle she began to burn so hot that she felt a lick of frigidity, and the intensity frightened her. He consumed Alice's line of sight, laid bare the physical consequences of her decision—the dark smudges under his eyes were now a bulging red, but she could see only a slight red line across the bridge of his nose. His philtrum, though, was what made her shrink against the wood. What had been such a lovely turn in his lip was thick crackled over with dark brown blood from where it had poured out of him, staining the lapels, and there was still a ferrous trickle, almost black but shining.

"Uh—" she started, not quite the word itself but a dry stutter from her throat.

"Oh, yes," he said, the rings of his irises very large, "Yes, do expound."

She began again, patient and even. "I was only trying to—"

"Trying to what," he replied, and it was flat, but full of energy at the same time, he couldn't hold in the slight waver in his voice, positively gleeful with sarcasm. "Trying to fix me?" Alice swallowed; her stomach was rigid with the tension and thick iron stench blooming in the air. Even through the layers of clothing she could feel his thumbs gouging into her arms. "You're always doing this! I'm chaotic and broken, and need order and regimen and discipline to be cured of it, don't I."

"Well, I—" And he actually gave her a pause here, but she hadn't been expecting it, and Alice floundered for something to say before focusing her voice into something soothing. "Why don't you sit down and relax, I'm sure this is all very—"

"Don't," and he let go of her so suddenly that Alice actually dropped an inch to the floor, unaware that there had been a gap under her feet and bumbling for stability, "Patronize me," and she jumped at how hard the syllable came out with a bang.

"I'm not trying to, but you are making this more difficult than it needs to be!" Now she was getting angry, but spread her fingers out in deference and closed her eyes for a moment. His hands went back up to his head as he turned away; the Hatter began to pace once more, then she could hear him gasping, "How could you do this to me?" and she knew exactly what kind of pain it was from the sound of his voice. He wanted so desperately to break something, to force and transfer the agony out, to make the bed, or the stone fireplace, or even Alice, anything other than himself, possess all the misery and spite that were drowning out everything else. She crouched to get the spoon again, watching him carefully, then took a very deep breath and spoke.

"I brought somethin—"

"What is WRONG WITH YOU?" He was standing over by the window where he had when she had yelled at him before, and the repeat did not escape her.

"I'm sorr-" But he cut her off suddenly, shouting something she couldn't translate, it all sounding like word salad to her, thundering through a series of accents and fleeting semi-familiarities until he suddenly slapped her with French and moved on just as quickly. Alice cringed while the words still gritted out of him to drip on the floorboards like blood spatter. He leaned on the rocker, apparently voided of foreign obscenities, and swayed with it for a moment. She took the opportunity and crossed the room to curl both hands above his elbows, steering him gently around to sit.

"I wish you knew how much this hurts, you have no idea," he said, trying and failing at being vicious, the pent-up energy draining out of him—the pain was smothering his anger, and he sagged, hoarse now and sounding mostly sad.

"No, I don't," she said in a muted voice, "But screwing up your face won't help. Stay still and don't move, that's what makes it hurt worse."

"I don't hate you," he said weakly as she finished dosing out a small amount of the tincture and held it up to his lip, "But I hate you; I hate you." He closed his eyes and swallowed, and Alice suddenly felt like crying. Instead she pulled the spoon gingerly from his mouth, rotated it, and set the concave shape back over his tongue for just a moment.

"Come on." He rose, and she caught at his back along the shoulder blade, as he was still reeling in the sharpness. The man needed stability, yes; flailing about dangerously like this, the poor Hatter himself was a broken bone desperately needing a rigid surface to set and heal against, to be wrapped up and to quit struggling so. She adjusted the cushions upright, waited for him to lean against those, and then set his head along the top so he mightn't mash his face into them. And she hovered, half-seated, waiting while he held his breath.

It was slow, and he would not look at her, but eventually his pupils began to constrict down into pin pricks and he relaxed in bits and stages, first his neck, then an arm, and downward, sighing. Watching him progressively let go of the pain, Alice ran her tongue over the scar that was still on her bottom lip, near where her teeth came together. It tasted different there, a small pockmark of the ulcer from a long time ago, one that had lasted longer than usual. Probably it had been made worse by the sugar and lemonade she had drunk all that summer, but she remembered now with specific clarity the day her mother had given her a tin of white powder and told her it would feel better. The agony had been with her for so many days until then, it felt like she was digesting the inside of her own mouth with every word she spoke. It beat along with her, it woke her in the middle of the night when her teeth were dry and it stuck, it stung and pinched with her fork and toothbrush. White medicinal powder would have the blessed answer—all the secrets of relief, and she had stood before her vanity mirror with her lip turned down and a dab of it on her forefinger, then Alice had leaned forward and pressed it onto the canker.

The pain had been searingly unimaginable, worse than the sore itself, and she couldn't believe it was possible. It brought tears to her eyes, and she bent over, hissing and sucking back the saliva that had surged forth in response to such an unexpected thing, setting off a short series of vocalizations she refused to refer to with the word moan, doing her best to not scream and rend her hair from the roots, or bash in the mirror as the mood had so suddenly inspired her.

But it was all abruptly replaced by a complete and utter absence of the torture that had been hounding her, and that was the key. It wasn't so much a rush of pleasure as it was a break in sensation, and her shock had been equal to the person watching the rain suddenly cut off, disappear without a slowing of droplets. She had felt her pulse inside her own cheeks, the effervescent lift of her breath straight up through her head, and leaned into the vanity, gasping and stunned.

Smoothing her fingers against the edges of his hair and letting his head loll, Alice hoped the Hatter had found some genuine relief, but wondered what it cost.

She was careful to move softly and to peek around doorways when it grew close to dusk. Having swept up the glass downstairs and taken a few deep breaths to quell the strange undulating sensation in her middle while bent over the table (she was not ill, Alice knew this much, but it was a curious warmth, like feeling the strip of heat after a first sip of drinking chocolate—though unlike chocolate this remained and she worried what an ulcer might feel like), Alice set the boiler again and went for the bath. It was the first she'd had in some time, and though of course it was a bath in ways and means, the room did not fill with steam and the water was not quite as hot as it had seemed before, when she had sat in the window and relaxed with him just over her shoulder.

Dipping down so that her knees came up and her chin went in, she cracked her toes, listening to the strange shimmering echo.

Alice had no idea what it had meant. She had gone to the cupboard after assuring herself that he'd be all right—eventually—and perhaps forgive her—hopefully—while standing an arm's length away, and leaned forward to ease open the door, which did squeak in an ominous way. One step back, forcing a single eye to open and look upon it, and Alice found nothing inside of it but dishes. The door had gone closed with one push of her finger before the backwards retreat to the sink, only turning on it after a moment's pause. What did babies portend? New beginnings, innocence, that sort of thing? She idly blew a few bubbles on the flat water's edge. There was nothing soft or sentimental there. Something horrible and strange hovered at the darkest part of shadows. She didn't want to think about it lest she picture the writhing little body-

With her damp combed hair over her shoulder and dressed in a clean housefrock and warm shawl, Alice pushed open the door with the flat of her hand. The idea that she perhaps did not belong there and should not have entered didn't strike her until she was already standing over him, bedside, and Alice couldn't quite remember having come into the room, having clicked over like a magnet, the thought of which made her blink. But he was still, with eyes closed, and that was enough for now; Alice moved with straight back to the the door, floating her steps carefully, only to pause.

There was a sound somewhere in the room; it wasn't her, for it didn't stop when she did. Alice turned, pushing against her own muscles, and crossed to the bed silently—it seemed to be coming from him. She listened. Not a snore, exactly, but almost a… methodical, rhythmic sound. He was breathing well enough, but the noise persisted, regulated in ways that the Hatter himself did not ensconce. Alice listened again, and went to the other side of the bed near the wall to stick her hand down at the edge of the mattress and feel along the length of it.

Wedged between the frame and the slats was the pocket watch she had idly fiddled with at the ball. Always in a waistcoat pocket, whether starched white or that swirled blue pattern, always the gold chain threaded through a button hole. She turned it over and held it near the light for inspection. It was an old thing, a vastly old thing—there was a winding key dangling on the chain—just a bit too thick to be manufactured, just a bit too oddly shaped to be anything but an expensive commission.

The signs and swirls handworked on the outside were still quite clear and distinctive; he had looked after it, and the watch was only rubbed smooth near the stem. It was so loud here, resting in the palm of her hand, ticking away like a living thing but for its cool touch. Alice straightened the gold chain with a prrrrrpt, buzzing across the metal, and punched down on the crown to pop open the hunter-case, every sound so solid and crisp and real. There was no inscription inside the ornate case, just faded, old-fashioned numerals on the face. She hadn't looked so closely before; around the outer ring of the bezel was a thin, long-faded stain, a jammy purple that made her press her lips together in secretive smile.

How strange, how charming, this antique. It wasn't like other pocket watches; other pocket watches were flat and white and plain. Serious faces and serious timepieces for serious people. This was rich and complicated and made her think of tables with legs made of carved cherubs holding up horns of plenty, clockwork harpsichords, ancient maps with misshapen continents—of excess and of discovery. A beautiful device, an instrument for measuring time, not for checking and waiting. Not for someone of impulse but of… very strange… patience. The words slowed and Alice pondered that last bit for a terse moment, thinking back once more to the ball, when he had spoken of her being stranded in an awful cottage with a man who might consider pawning off such a thing to get back to civilization. She looked down at the whorled images. He would never do that—this was too dear; she could tell.

The more she listened to its sound, the stranger Alice felt. It was as though she were waiting for the next tick to be the last. It was soothing, and she closed her eyes to hear it, that soft clack, each part having to work in flawless harmony—almost a rocking sound, the ticking so eager to get to the next moment and the next, a pendulumatic back and forth. She cupped it in her open palms, the chain streaming out between her fingers, and looked up at him, wondering how he could sleep on; she was practically breathing in time with the thing. But the Hatter did not awaken, and she pressed her hands together to snap it shut with great delicacy, then slowly hooked it over the sash on the dressing gown and back through the ring to secure it.

He did not seem quite so frightening now as he had before with his marred and broken face so close to her by the door, his anger radiating down in sharp slashes. The Hatter was slid further down into the pillows, having been discharged from his suffering for the moment. Alice took a handkerchief out of her apron pocket and dipped it into a chipped mug of water on the nightstand, carefully dabbed at the rust-brown coating his lip, watching for signs of recrimination. When she had got what she could without pressing into him, the girl sat back and looked him over. The man was quite out, and she wondered what he was thinking about, or dreaming about, if indeed he did.

It was the next day before she ventured upstairs again, and once she was there Alice hesitated. The thought of leaving him to awaken in pain gave her pause, but she was loathe to be confronted with another broadcast of his profound irritation with her, and the lowest part of her back ached and twinged from it all.

To mitigate the whole thing, she sat in the rocker staring at the knitting slumped in her lamp until she heard him stirring, then made pretenses of rising for some errand elsewhere when his voice came from the bed, surprised and a bit naive-sounding, all mashed together.

"Where're you going?"

"… I was—" She didn't know the answer. Alice paused at the foot and peeked round the post to gauge his expression, but stayed her steps and spoke as neutrally as she could muster. "Do you want something to eat? Are you hungry?"

He didn't answer, and she stood feeling a kind of impatience both to go and to stay. Mixed with remembrance of her determination in pressing her fingers around his nose, it grew in weight and gave her spine a sharp pinch of guilt and self-doubt. She was already halfway into a stride.

"Wait," he said in protest, but the Hatter looked like he was on the edge of unconsciousness again, lolling into the pillows and linens. He seemed to have already forgotten that she had paused in his eye line.

"Are you sure?" Alice tried not to sound unsure lest she give him a reason to send her out of the room. "Why?"

She heard him sigh and he motioned as though to sit up but failed at it, and Alice's hand went to the bottle in her pocket before she finally took a step toward him to see better against the shadows encroaching on the head of the bed. She produced it, and the spoon besides, slowly, there being a distinct flavor of awkwardness in the air.

"You don't want anything to eat with this?"

"Hmm, no," she could make out. She made sure the dose was smaller this time, and waited in the doorway for his eyes to close before wandering downstairs to poke at the fireplace.

But Alice could not stay away from the upstairs. There was within her a compounded inability to concentrate; she could put herself to knocking about the kitchen and suddenly come to herself only to realize that she was already standing over him, or that she had dragged a chair over by the nightstand. Attempts to capture her own mystical reappearance in the bedroom were thwarted by a kind of amnesia—she could not remember how she got up there, or why she was so set on it.

For his own part, the Hatter blinked, quiescent and slow, and seemed to be watching the ceiling move overhead. He was still bland, to be sure, but seemed to be fighting it, and she found that this gave her an anxious kind of pause, but Alice had put the bottle in the cupboard to ward off temptation.

"I'm bored," replied the Hatter in a hoarse distant voice to her self-conscious inquiry after him, and he almost sounded as though he were appealing to her for something. "Bored." Alice was at a loss as to how to remedy this until he languidly reached for the hank of yarn she'd been trying to wind and pulled it over his palms in a lazy stretch. She took up the free end of the length and began to loop it back and forth in a figure eight over her thumb and forefinger until she folded it over and started a ball. The cord dipped and pulled in courses, but especially plucked across his smallest finger on one hand. His hands tilted ever so slightly toward her each round of tension, then returned to him; back and then away, back and then away. Alice watched the strand wend over the gloves and wondered when he had put them back on, for surely he hadn't worn them in the bath, as they were looking quite rumpled and for the worse. She turned the ball over in her palm without looking, still staring at the gloves.

"What happened?"

He said it just above a whisper. Alice was trying to manage a certain stitch in her knitting without pitching the entire affair across the room, and her answer came out a bit short at first.

"Yesterday evening you were shouting at me."

It occurred to her that he hadn't been talking about that, and looked at him in something like alarm.

"Was I?" He was trying to remember, but quickly drifted into a muted distraction, privy to which Alice was not. She rolled her shoulders and gently reeled him in.

"You were quite upset."

"How?"

"Hmm?"

"How upset?"

"You, um… rather upset, I imagine."

He pressed his mouth closed in a way that suggested a hint of lucid concern, and said in a low voice,

"Oh."

Alice picked at her nail in response. She was thinking of all the things she was going to have to break to him eventually, a monumental list of things that stuck to her limbs and made it hard to move sometimes.

"I wouldn't blame you," she whispered.

"Are you feeling any better?" Alice finally got up the nerve to say. It was dusk several days later and she had eaten, sat now mildly while the back of her mind contemplated starting a fire in this hearth and abandoning the one in the kitchen. She turned; he was settled among the pillows and covers, somewhat dazed. His head was veering off to the side, and so Alice tried kindly to right him to avoid another demand for information regarding things wrong with her. "Can you hear me?"

His eyes tracked her back and forth, the look of someone watching for a certain car as the train roars past. The Hatter went along with whatever she was talking about, curious to find out if he were actually awake, as he was beginning to suspect. He was really warm, finally, and didn't quite want to move and upset the alignment that was making such a thing possible.

"Can I tell you that I'm sorry?" Alice tilted her head. "Though I don't suppose it would be fair to ask it when you're in a state like this," she went on.

"Hmm," he said dreamily, a placid expression on him.

"You're absolutely livid with me, you know," said Alice with something like boldness. "I broke your nose," that last part quiet.

"Did you? Am I?" trying to recollect something from a century before. He slowly looked down at himself, long over the bed, as though his feet would clue him in to the level of anger he was rumored to possess. "Huh."

If he had been any more certain in this apparent blasé attitude and not left it attributable to medication, Alice might have thought he was far too forgiving far too soon. But she allowed herself the indulgence of thought that he was in a wrong state of mind.

"Well, are you hungry?"

The Hatter appeared to be tentatively having a go at acknowledging his own consciousness.

"I don't—um," said the Hatter. He seemed to shrug, all neutral. She looked at him carefully, expecting a blank absence and finding a passive engagement, a detached observer gauging her and the room she occupied.

"Doubt I ought to give you any more medicine, you're still a bit loopy," said Alice, "But getting better," she added quickly, and then looked surprised at herself for saying it. "Do you want me to leave?"

"Oh, don't let's be silly," she thought she heard him say in an offhand drawl.

"What would you like to do?" Alice couldn't hear his reply. "Sorry?"

"Story, tell me a story."

She said in a lower voice, "I don't think I know any good stories."

There was a long silence during which Alice allowed the stream of her thoughts to flow forward, searching for nothing, merely coming to a point. The Hatter had leaned his head back along the top of the pillow and was gazing up at her expectantly, if a bit dully.

"You sure?"

His slow blink was a nod.

She folded her hands carefully in her lap, swallowed, and said the only thing she could think of.

"This," said Alice, "Is the epic of Gilgamesh, who was two-thirds god and one-third man."

Dusk had gone, and the fire in the kitchen was getting low. With a spitting candle in hand, she mounted the stairs once more to see if he were wanting another spoonful of the drink-me. By the time she reached the night stand and went to move the chair, the candle was in such a noisy fit that she blew it out in irritation. Alice squinted and let her eyes adjust to the dim light through the window; she could just tell that he was out again, and was glad—there was something about tipping her hand to keep him in a drowsy state that seemed worse than everything else she'd done up until now. Bending her knees so they pushed into the side of the bed, Alice listened to the muffled pocket watch somewhere on his person.

It was impulsively and half-dreaming that she leaned forward again to press her palm flat over his chest, feeling the distant throb underneath where her fingers split from her hand. It was better than the watch, and she bit her lip in the dark. There was something reassuring about the steadiness, the constancy, of the watch, but his heartbeat, though not at all as precise or metronomic, was better, and this thought embarrassed the poor girl to several degrees, but she could not remove her hand from the warm shifting pulse, and she swallowed in something akin to a cringing terror, but her hand couldn't quite get up the motion. What possessed her? Alice lifted her hand off him at last and motioned in an arc around her to clench it at the small of her back.

He was still asleep, and she breathed for a few moments. She could still hear the watch if she stood very still, and it was then that Alice realized that one of his hands lay haphazardly over it, still with the rumpled glove.

In one smooth motion Alice looked at the Hatter's closed eyes, and back again.

They had been looking rather wrinkled and very grey—he was so awfully attached to the things to wear them all the time like that. Surely his sense of propriety on dress did not extend quite this far, and even then, these were forgivable circumstances. Still, he was a rather unusual sort of person, but of course the obvious thing was that she had never seen his hands before. He really ought to have it laundered by now—she could wash it, of course. That thought floated like a thin haze, a simple burst of steam that turned invisible before she had really considered it. She could feel the cuffs of her dress scratch against her wrists, and the itch went down into her fingers.

Alice leaned forward and very gently tugged at the tips of his glove before setting the thing aside.

The room was still quite dark, and darker even still with the light coming in over her shoulder, but Alice could see the vague shape of his hand in the greying blacks, had picked him up by the wrist and was inspecting this part of him he'd never revealed and which she'd never seen before. It was strange to think of it now, his hiding something in such plain sight. There were fingers, five of them, she thought, and was just feeling a curious kind of heat along her spine when she felt a sudden and very faint, then quite certain, jolt. His fingers were moving. They twitched, and clenched, coming to life in an odd mechanical way. Alice jerked her head round to look at him so fast that her neck ached, but he was still—except his thumb and index, which were stiffly jerking and curling in on themselves, turning one way and then the other, pulsating. She felt the knuckles bend faster and more surely, stretching and readying, and she was feeling about for the glove when suddenly his entire grip came down hard around her and he was sitting bolt upright for the first time in days, eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at her. She could see the whites of his eyes, and panicked. Alice wrenched herself free, threw shut the door, and went to the sewing room at the end of the hall, slamming that one definitely as well.

Sinking onto the thready gold sofa, Alice put her elbows on her knees and both her hands at either side of her throat, pressing her fingertips inward, tentative, experimental. She could feel herself timing away, lightheaded, and pulled down her arms to look at herself, turning her own hands first up and then down, but they were still.