Just a Little Mad 1/9

Apr 08, 2015 00:43

Title: Just a Little Mad
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own Alice 2009 and I don't own Primeval, and if there's anything else anyone recognises, well, I don't own that either.
Rating: PG
Summary: Luckily for Stephen, Connor is more than what he seems.
Notes: I don't know how long this will be, but I doubt it will be very long. As Babe Bennett would say, I'm just goofin' around. Also, I intend to play fast and loose with PoV. Also, I have now tried several times to get the cut text to have an apostrophe, not quotation marks. For some reason it's not taking. I'm unpleased.

*******************************

He still couldn't believe it. His twin, his other half, gone. Not just missing, but . . . he couldn't think the word. Their parents were gone too, taken by that damn bitch, and that hurt only a little less than losing his brother. Just one moment more and he'd shove it all away inside where no one else could see it.

Connor Hatter squared his shoulders and walked into the Oyster school in front of him.

David Hatter took a deep breath and walked into the tea shop.

**************************

Connor ran down the hall, hoping to catch up to Stephen and Cutter, hoping he might be able to help with whatever it was that Helen and Leek had done. Suddenly he could hear Cutter shouting, voice wracked with emotion and desperate. "Stephen! Open the door! Get out of there! Stephen!"

The last turn and it was a long hallway. He could see Cutter pounding on the door.

Faintly he heard Stephen's voice, still confident and calm, through the door. "Tell Connor and Abby to stay out of trouble."

Connor redoubled his speed. That sounded like a goodbye. He wasn't going to let anyone else go. Not if he could help it.

"Stephen!" Cutter's voice was agonised.

One of the reasons Connor had fled to the Oyster world was that his gift was rabbit holes. What could the queen have done with a constant and ready source of rabbit holes? He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know what she'd have done to him, either. On Earth, the Oyster world, they were a bit wonky, but for something fast and short, say, taking him through a door, that he could do without trouble.

Between one pound on the door and the next, Connor slapped a portal onto the door in front of him, dashing through and letting it close up behind him. He barely checked at the sight of all the predators Leek had shown them, instead running at Stephen, whose eyes went wide in shock. Oysters did things to his rabbit holes, and on Earth it was even worse. He might've got Stephen through a quick, door's width sort of rabbit hole, but they weren't close enough to reach the door, not with the animals.

Connor saw his options in a second, he didn't know how thick the wall was, and more than six centimetres was asking for trouble up there. But there was a different route he could take. It would be a risk, but at least he could maneouvre there and probably get Stephen home again safe. Most of all, they couldn't stay. It was like being in a cage of jabberwocky.

He hit Stephen, a picture-perfect tackle, and opened the rabbit hole behind the tracker. They toppled through, Connor clinging to Stephen like a limpet, feeling his own portal, really wonky at the Earth end of things, trying to rip Stephen away from him. If he wasn't careful, didn't hold on tightly, he might lose Stephen, and he couldn't risk that. The usual clocks and teacups, hats and random assortment of letters and numbers, playing cards and all sorts of weird, random things spun past. Connor had suspected for years that the reason you saw those things in the rabbit hole was because the human mind couldn't properly see the warping of space-time, and like the anomalies that presented as a glow and shattered glass, a rabbit hole meant your mind filled in the blanks with random bits of things.

The further they got from Earth, the more the rabbit hole seemed like a Tim Burton film gone wrong, and the less it seemed a chaotic skirl of energy in a vaguely tube-like shape.

With a sudden thump they were clear and dropped off on the City's streets.

"What the hell just happened?" Stephen asked, staring around at the dilapidated buildings before slamming himself to a wall away from the edge of the sidewalk. "Where are we?"

Connor sighed, then said, "It'd take a bit to explain, but as it's not safe out here, can we try to get someplace safe-ish and then I'll explain everything?"

"What do you-" Stephen was cut off as the teahead in the nearby doorway lurched out at them, mumbling something about a shot of serenity and ecstasy. Habits long-unused came roaring back, and Connor pulled Stephen aside, letting the ragged addict stumble past, then cracked a rabbit hole open in a wall in front of the man, sending him off to a spot a few flights up and east from there.

"Come on," Connor said, grabbing Stephen's arm and towing him away. "I shouldn'ta done that, it'll probably bring March down on us, and we don't want to be here when he gets here. We're all a little mad, but he's madder'n most and not in the good way either."

They hurried down the stairs, heading for the lakeshore in record time while Connor kept an eye out for a good bolthole. If he was to get them home, at all, he needed the time and space to concentrate on opening up the rabbit hole just right. The Mirror was too much of a risk, after all. It belonged to the Queen. Before they got there, though, he saw it. A tea shop, the door cracked, windows shattered and what looked like the contents had been tossed in search of something. The LED sign over the door still flashed that it was a teashop, but no one in their right minds would look this one over for anything, not after it'd been raided by the Queen's suits.

But that suited Connor just fine. No one would be back through in the near future, so it'd offer up a safe place to stay. He led Stephen inside, well aware that Stephen clearly thought he'd run mad going into a place like this, but they needed someplace they wouldn't get bothered at. Slipping along, he started at the sight of a familiar dozing face. "Dormie?"

"Wha . . . Hatter? That you?" Dormie started awake, blinking muzzily. "Thought March'd maybe got you."

Snorting, Connor told him, "That'd be the day. March get me, get any of us? Right."

"Looks like you had to do more'n usual to give him the slip," Dormie said, a pointed eye running over the clothes that were only a little like what he'd once worn when the Hatter family had all lived together.

Connor gave him a wry smile. "Needs must, Dormie. The upstairs still in one piece?"

"They wrecked the grass, Hatter, and all the tea's been lost, but it's not much worse than the first time we fixed it up."

Nodding, Connor just turned and trotted up the stairs. He wondered who Dormie's partner was, but decided that, ultimately, it didn't matter. Once upstairs he found an office, Wonderland style. A once-gorgeous green lawn was there, an office chair and desk, and Connor made a beeline for the wardrobe at the back. There it was. Hats and a few jackets. Something enough to camouflage Stephen's far less flamboyant style. "I assume we're 'safe-ish' here?" Stephen asked. "Because I think you owe me an explanation."

*****

It had been a supremely weird day and it was just getting weirder. Not half an hour ago Stephen had been about to die at the claws and teeth of a bunch of predators from across the millennia, and now he was in a wrecked tea shop of some kind, after hurtling through an anomaly unlike any other he'd seen before. An anomaly that Connor seemed to have some sort of control over. He looked expectantly at his teammate, but Connor shook his head. "You're right. I'm just . . . I'm not sure you'll believe me, and if you go runnin' off around here the suits'll catch you, and I can't even begin to figure out how I'd get you out of the Queen's casino."

"Connor," Stephen said warningly. "That's not clearing anything up."

"Right. Erm . . . so . . . this is going to sound like a non sequitur, but you know how Cutter'd never have believed it was time travel that put the anomalous animals into the fossil record if he hadn't seen the anomalies?"

"Yes," Stephen said slowly. "Are you saying this is a similar sort of unbelievability?" He had already suspected it would be something completely insane, Connor's hesitant beginnings of an explanation confirmed it.

"Pretty much," Connor said. "You see . . . the books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, they're not real, but they're based on something real."

"Here," Stephen said, eyes narrowed. "This place is . . . what? The place Wonderland is based on?"

Nodding, Connor told him, "I mean, it, here, it's called Wonderland, but it's not some kid's story. Not to mention that it's been a hundred and fifty years since Alice came in through the rabbit hole and the looking glass." Connor had a wistful smile was on his face as he said, "My great-great granddad helped her bring the whole deck of cards down at the time."

"The man downstairs, he called you, Hatter," Stephen said, frowning. "As in the Mad Hatter?"

Connor laughed. "We're all a little mad here, it's sort of the Wonderland motto, really, but he was a bit of a strange one, it's true." He shook his head before plopping into the chair. "But Hatter's a family name. It had some prominence for the association with Alice and all." His amusement faded. "That . . . that got us all into trouble in the end."

"How come?" Stephen asked.

The geek flinched, then seemed to shove whatever it was that was upsetting him away, and said, "Doesn't really matter." He shook it off, giving a good try at pretending he was unaffected. "Anyhow, Wonderland has a queen. The Queen of Hearts. That's the family name, Heart. Like Windsor, yeah?"

Stephen let it go. "Alright. What does that have to do with anything?"

"She's a bit of a despot, you see," Connor explained. "More than that, she's really against letting the populace be. So, she brought in something. They call it tea, but it's not, really. Because real tea, proper tea is leaves and water and strainers. Tea like the Queen has made, that's a drug. There's a way to . . . to suck the emotions out of people. Out of Oysters, rather."

"Oysters?" Stephen asked with foreboding. A poem drifted through his mind. Now if you're ready, Oysters dear, we can begin to feed.

"That's what we, they, call people from Earth," Connor said, confirming Stephen's worst fear. "I don't know how it works, just that there's a lot of machinery up at the casino to do it."

"But, how does . . ." Stephen's mind raced, putting together pieces. "Do you mean they make . . . condensed . . . I don't know . . . happiness?" he asked.

He was dismayed when Connor nodded. "That's exactly what they do. They have some way to steal Oyster emotions and turn them into a liquid. Think about it. Having a bad day? You can take a shot of Serenity. Having trouble getting it up for your girl? A dose of Lust."

"It's a drug," Stephen said in horror. "She's drugging her people?"

"Exactly," Connor said. "Most people are addicted. You can see why. Who wants to feel sad or angry or any sort of bad thing? But more than that, regular happiness or what-all doesn't cut it anymore. Because Tea is perfectly undiluted Happiness in a bottle. After all, even the best time in the world has some bits that make it less than perfect. Best Guy Fawkes Day fireworks display and you still might be cold or have work the next day, yeah?" Then Connor frowned. "You're taking this awfully well."

"I just saw you run through a door, fell through an anomaly filled with playing cards, teacups and clock faces and have spent most of the last year chasing after dinosaurs," Stephen said. "I think the regular bounds of credulity have been pushed further with me."

"Ah," Connor said. "Well, then I'll tell you a little more. See, all Wonderlanders have a sort of magic skill. Some are born able to speed read, my brother, David, if he hit you with his right hand, it was like being clocked with a sledgehammer. Me, I can make Rabbit Holes."

"Rabbit holes?" Stephen asked. He could make a guess from context, but this was all weird enough it was worth checking. "What is a Rabbit Hole?"

"Sort of a wormhole," Connor explained. "Fast trip from one place or another."

"That's how you got through the door," Stephen said, thinking hard. "And how you got us here."

"Yup." Connor popped the 'p'. "But there's a bit of a problem."

"You can't get us back?" Stephen hazarded.

Connor winced. "Well . . . it's more like the bigger, longer the Rabbit Hole, the harder it is to control. And the further I get from Wonderland, the harder they are to control. Pulling an Oyster . . . human . . . nonWonderlander through also messes with the things."

"Getting us home involves all three," Stephen said. "So, do you need something? Some sort of . . . mystical widget?"

"Cheshire knows I wish it were that easy," Connor said. "Mostly I just need to have a lot of time to really concentrate, be well-rested and not be interrupted. Even then we'll be lucky to wind up in the London environs and not in France or Ireland."

Stephen winced himself. "I assume this means we're not going anywhere until tomorrow morning?"

"Not unless you want to risk landing in Tulgey Wood or a firefight in Afghanistan," Connor said wryly. "And it could go either way. Oysters queer my aim enough to wind up anywhere. As it is I'll have to cling to you the whole way to make sure we come out at the same place."

That was potentially embarrassing, but Stephen had lived through enough dangerous situations to know that he'd rather be humiliated and alive, than dead but reputation intact. "So, do you suppose there's something we could find to eat?" he asked.

Connor frowned, then said, "What've you got in your pockets? 'Cause it looks like the owner of this Tea Shop's not going to be back a while." He started digging through cupboards, producing fruits and vegetables, taking some things out of what seemed to be a fridge from the early '50s. "I figure we can leave a few things here and he can trade 'em for some good stuff. Because this'll all go bad if it's left, but it's rare enough, well, he's probably pretty good at wheeling and dealing to have stuff as fancy as this."

When he held up a bag of apples, Stephen winced. You knew it was bad in an area when common foodstuffs like apples were treated as some sort of delicacy. "Let me see," he temporised. He had a lighter, because you never knew when you'd need to start a fire. Some change, a swiss army knife and a handful of bullets. Connor pursed his lips and seemed to be thinking. "The bullets, definitely. Ammunition can be pretty dear. The knife . . . oo! It's one of the ones with a sawblade? That could get talked up really nice. And a lighter? Stephen? Do you have some seer in your family? Because it's like you packed ready to trade for this trip."

Connor was digging through things and came up with a revolver. "Hmm. Forget the bullets," he said. Then carefully loaded the six into the gun. "You'd probably better keep-" He stopped dead, staring at the gun in his hands, flipping it around and looking it over. "Dad," he said softly as he fingered a nick in the handle. "Take care of this," he said as he handed the gun to Stephen. "I know Dormie woulda taken all our stuff. I can't really begrudge him doing it, but this was my dad's."

Not bothering to try to get Connor to carry it, Stephen just slipped the gun into his waistband, safety on, and nodded. Connor was getting to be a better shot, but between the two of them, it made more sense for Stephen to have it. They settled to splitting up the food, Connor nipping downstairs to share with the man he'd called 'Dormie', then they settled in for the night.

**************************

David had been having a very bad couple of days. Being shot by Dodo, chased by Mad March, going on the run, running all over Wonderland to avoid being killed, Charlie the White Knight, way more time at the Casino than anyone sane'd want and that Bloody Jack Heart.

Cheshire knew it was all Alice's fault. Bloody Alice with her bloody blue eyes and brown hair and fighting skills that had to be like a Wonderlander's Gift and that sexy short blue dress she made look effing amazing when she was all wet.

Cat curse the girl!

Chapter Two
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crossover, mad, has a plot, primeval, alice 2009, fanfic

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