Prompt: "some sort of chain fusion thingy lik e over time, mad hatter's qualities start blending in with break's own?" (from Fluffy)
Rating: K+
Warnings: Nah. Maybe a little bit of mental shenanigans.
This is kind of a running headcanon I have anyway, so it was fun to write about.
He's felt this sensation before, this fuzzy feeling of something rotting away inside him—it's flavored a bit like madness, a bit like steel, creeping up silently into his head while he couldn't possibly have noticed it.
It's different, though, because last time it was a bloody obsession—last time it was a fixation on her and on devouring, laying waste in order to consume. This time, the fixation is colored differently; it's not an undying, loving devotion, or maybe it is, but if it is it's a frozen and cruel one. And it doesn't wish to devour—it has no desire to consume—but it wishes to destroy, to break its own kind, and he knows what it is as he's gripping at and cracking already-rotten clay.
It's slow, subtle and dreadfully sinister in that way—he didn't even notice it, after all, filtered through that mirror. The Knight's mind was so close to his, their bodies bound so tightly by that awful Seal of blood—but the Hatter is distant, cold; even if the bond is forged in the same way it isn't attached to his body and soul. That's what he thought, anyway—but he's starting to understand it, starting to see what it was made for.
Maybe the subtly of it all isn't just the distance between them, on top of the years they've spent together. Maybe it's the fact that it was made for him that makes these feelings so natural, even though he's beginning to realize they're not his own at all. It was born to destroy its own kind—he's already done plenty of that.
Maybe the connection is just an illusion—maybe he just understands it, after all.
( if that's the case, he almost pities it. )