A/N: So. Alice in Wonderland, the Burton Movie. To be honest, with all the hype and ridiculous Hot Topic costumes and gobs and gushes Johnny Depp, I figured I'd probably hate it. In fact, I walked into the theater expecting to be disappointed. I was a huge fan of the Lewis Carroll novels, had done multiple research projects about him and his work in school, and just from the trailers I could see inconsistencies with even the biggest parts of the books. Still, even I couldn't help but be swayed by the CGI prettiness, the charming twist on the characters (I absolutely love how Burton gave Alice a real hero's journey), and the way the more episodic children's book became a coming of age story. It really came to life for me, and because my shipper goggles refuse to come off, I wrote this little drabble thing. I blame Bri-Chan's "When Curious Met Insanity" on Deviantart and Johnny Depp's ability to have chemistry with everyone and everything.

Now that this is out of my system, I hope to go back and stop neglecting my other ships. Hope you guys enjoy!

Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from this piece of fiction. Title credit goes to Sylvia Plath's Mad Girl's Love Song, which is incidentally my favorite poem.

A Thunderbird Instead

"I fancied you'd return the way you said, but I grow old and I forget your name (I think I made you up inside my head)."

-x-

The Hatter presses a pin into the gap between his teeth, pursing his lips around the slim, sharp needle to hold it in place while he artfully arranges a flurry of scratchy chiffon ribbon and cloth flowers around the short, curved brim of an oversized cloche. His hands are steady and his movements are calm as he twists and folds and pinches the mess of fabric into an indiscernible shape, deliberate with none of the senseless flair he's shown in the past—his brain is working at a more normal speed today, his thoughts moving in a linear pattern more closely resembling sanity. When spoken to, he answers in a low, heavy voice with crisp, rolling R's, hardly a trace of a lisp as air rushes through his teeth (he's the Scotsman today, composed and more lucid than he's been since he can remember).

He's had more days as the Scotsman since she'd left, but he tries not to notice, immersing the brain that's no longer malfunctioning into his work, into the construction of frippery and finery and cloth and colors and breakthrough asymmetrical designs (he's comfortable with this, this is familiar, and it allows him the rare freedom to focus on one thing for an extended period of time). He supposes he likes these more and more common spells of sanity better than the long stretch of time when his mind was a mess of random, looping thoughts and distractions. While he's never found it problematic being completely barmy (in fact, the short attention span and wandering ponderings proved quite entertaining most days), he appreciates the control sanity gives him over his mercurial emotions.

When he's the Scotsman, he can find ways around thinking about her.

Hats help. They keep his mind busy, his imagination occupied with complex basting stitches, the texture of lace and the malleability of crinoline. In his newly reinstated position as royal haberdasher, he can make a hundred hats a day, fine bonnets and dashing caps in a riot of color for the White Queen's court—his fingers, once elegantly tapered, are a blur despite the hindrance of his slapdash bandaging, old rags wrapped around his mangled fingers, hiding disfiguring burns from the Bloody Big Head's mean little pet.

The Hatter, in his element, is a marvel, and within a few hours his sewing room is overcrowded with bowlers and porkpies and pillboxes of all shape and size. The hats are good company, quiet and unassuming, surrounding him with a mercury-cured fume that sends his already fragile mind to all sorts of strange places (his eyes change color when he thinks absently of how well a periwinkle blue ribbon would flatter her, wound around a length of that unruly blonde hair—on his better days he can push the thought away, disguise it as an objective observation, but his good sense has always been fickle and even a madman can't lie to himself forever).

With fluid ease, he plucks the pin from between his lips and stabs the cloth between his fingers, piercing the stiffened felt and attaching a peacock plume to its side. The eye of the feather winks up at him in a haze of vibrant blue and green, and impulsively he winks back, a toothy smile stretching across his pale face. This hat would best compliment Queen Mirana's regrettably narrow head, he decides, holding the cloche up to the light and admiring his work. Regardless of the strange, disquieting feelings all muddled up inside of him, it does a man good to be practicing his craft for someone worthy of it (had he the time, he would have made her a beautiful hat for her perfect, blonde head, only his best work for the Alice).

The Scotsman's mental control allows him to suppress the flood of words that start with the letter L (listless, lonely, longing…) that rise unbidden like foam in his tea cup whenever his mind wanders.

Time moves slower here than in the Aboveland, but their strange little world has recovered admirably from the devastation left in the wake of the Red Queen's coup d'état. The ravaged land has regained some of its color and lost the stagnant sallowness of fear, no longer a surreal wasteland and regaining some of the natural beauty that had been so distorted by Iracebeth's tyranny. Crops are growing back, the sky looking less dreary and the sounds of laughter once again bouncing through the greenery in the Tulgey Wood (this is more like home, more like how things should be, and even through the haze of his madness he understands why she had called this place Wonderland). Its splendor is strange and dreamlike once again, soft and wondrous where it had once been turned hard and gray as stone.

They have anniversary balls at the palace in Marmoreal, throw huge celebrations with fanciful clothing and festive music while they toast flutes of champagne to their new Queen, to the Underland, to the slayer of the Jabberwocky. When his mind sputters to partial-functionality and his eyes once again glaze over with the vestiges of insanity, he futterwackens with the rest of them, his feet a flurry of joyous movement as he charms the young ladies at court with his absentminded sweetness and unanswerable riddles. He tries not to think of how many times he's raised his glass to a portrait on the Queen's wall instead of flesh and bone, painted brown eyes staring lifelessly back at him. The Underland has been restored thanks to the efforts of a champion who's not around to see the improvement, and when his mind clears he finds how little he cares for the noblewomen's mindless tittering, how stale the champagne tastes, how little he feels like a celebratory futterwacken (the Red Queen is gone and the war has been won but this still doesn't feel much like a victory).

The March Hare worries—well, as much worry as quivering, off-in-the-head Thackary is capable of with the clutter of nonsense in his fragmented brain—the Hatter knows and understands. Thackary had become accustomed to his illogical tangents and scattered thought processes, grown used to his glib demeanor and easy ramblings, and with the Scotsman so prevalent these days (the Scotsman, with his sharp annunciation and unreadable expressions and his uncanny somberness) he knows his old friend wonders if this newfound sanity is really an improvement. Every once in a while he catches the hare's watery gaze, glassy and unfocused and tempered with something close to sadness, and he knows that Alice or no Alice he is not the man he was before the fall of the Jabberwocky (things are different now, in the Underland and in his addled brain, and unlike the hats that pour from the sewing room in waves of colored fabric, he cannot seem to put them together correctly).

They all have hopes that she'll return someday, when she's done doing whatever it was that needed to be done in her world. She'd found her way to them twice, fallen into the Underland's dreamy embrace with hardly any provoking (the White Rabbit seems perpetually caught somewhere between the need to fetch her and the propriety of respecting her wishes by letting her go), and it seems only fitting that fate would drag her back again when the time is right. Hope taunts them with possibility. Time drags on.

They all hope, but the Hatter's once-unwavering faith has started to fray around the edges—occasionally, on his off-color days, he ponders how much time has passed in the realm above theirs, how many days or weeks or years she has been given to forget about them (she's forgotten them once, wrote every one of them off as a scrap of a nightmare, and while the softness in her eyes had assured him otherwise, he cannot be certain she won't dream them all away again).

Every day that passes without sign of her seems to spin by in a blur, his broken mind unable to hold onto details as time flows by him like water. Even the Scotsman loses touch with things, until the only certain reality he can measure is in stitches sewn and cups of tea drank, but both are sharp and bitter (the thought of her absence pierces him, burns the roof of his mouth, and all at once he's on his feet and his hands are clawing at cloche he's finished, shredding chiffon and ripping ribbon with his angry little fingers).

He's not content destroying one hat. The Scotsman has a temper, and despite his normal range of control his anger has always brewed close to the surface—the sewing room is dismantled in less than a minute, a flurry of ragged feathers torn from their anchors floating like dust through the air as he turns his workspace into more a comfortable disarray, delighting in the sound of sewing shears tearing jaggedly through the floppy brim of a garbo hat. This time there's no chains to restrain him, no giant girl to calm his tantrum, and with a strangled shout he clears off his table with a vengeful sweep of his arm, sending his tools clattering noisily to the floor. He attacks the brightly colored garments littering his room with his hands and his teeth, savage as an animal until every hat he's assembled has been viciously disassembled and there's nothing left to break.

It takes only a moment for his rage to deflate, leaving him winded and slightly confused in the epicenter of a hat massacre, blinking down at the shreds of fabric still clutched tightly between his fingers (he can hardly recall how they'd gotten there, or how his office had become such a mess, or how some of his best work found itself in such disrepair, torn to pieces and scattered around the room. It's a shame really. All those hats gone to waste without ever gracing a head). He blinks once at the chaos around him, his breathing even and the color draining from his eyes as something inside him shifts and clicks into place.

With an unsettling ease he calmly disentangles himself from the shredded remains of an Easter bonnet, dusting loose feathers from his jacket and cheerfully humming a Scottish roundelay under his breath. He doesn't bother to tidy the mess he'd made, merely sits down at his work bench—never mind the half-finished homburg he's crushing beneath his posterior—and dives straight into assembling a fascinator from a few torn feathers he'd found on the ground.

Wordlessly, he goes to work rebuilding all that he'd so carelessly broken, feeling more like his old self again, the taste of Scottish brogue tart on his tongue and memories of another life dancing like ghosts in his fragmented brain. Lace edging clings to the millinery, held in place by a bandaged thumb as he pushes away unwanted thoughts with a control he doesn't remember having, letting the image of her smile linger and stagnate somewhere at the back of his brain because even the Scotsman can't keep her at bay forever. She is a figment, she is not real, and she haunts him like so many lost thoughts gone missing in his twisted mind.

The Hatter presses a pin between the gap in his teeth, pricks his tongue on the sharp end and forgets all words that start with the letter A (all but one-- she may have forgotten, but even in the depths of his madness he finds he simply cannot).