Meanwhile, inside the Mad Hatter's theater.
He came in humming.
Platform shoes clicking against the lobby floor, a new hat clutched to his chest, the Mad Hatter skipped and hopped his way through the main doors with the particular energy of someone who has decided today is going to be different. He was humming a nursery rhyme from Alice in Wonderland — one of the gentler ones, the kind that doesn't end with someone losing their head.
Today felt significant. He couldn't entirely explain why. Not because of the controlled supervillain — that had been last night's work, already filed away. Just a feeling, the same feeling he chased every time he stood in the wings before a performance and thought: maybe today. Maybe today is the perfect day.
He'd had this feeling before. The last time he'd prepared this thoroughly for a performance, it hadn't gone quite the way he'd hoped. He didn't dwell on that.
He changed into a new suit, had a new hat blocked and fitted, put on the thicker-soled shoes. Everything replaceable was replaced. He checked himself in the mirror and felt, for the first time in a while, genuinely refreshed.
The stage looked beautiful. The bloodstains from yesterday had been cleaned completely, the set refurbished, every prop returned to its mark. The hat-wearing cast was assembled and in position. Lights tested, checked, adjusted. The Mad Hatter walked the stage once, running his hands along the set pieces — the giant rabbit hole, the prop table with its Drink Me bottles, the Queen of Hearts at her station — and felt a cautious, fragile hope take root.
Today.
"Boss. She's here."
The man in the black suit appeared at the stage steps, a woman at his side.
She was blonde, genuinely blonde, with long hair that caught the stage lighting and a face that carried a scattering of freckles across the cheeks. Not striking in the way of magazine covers, but warm — a quality that lived in the way she held herself, the easy openness of her expression. A gentle aura. Familiar, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with having met her before.
The Mad Hatter stared.
"Oh." His voice had gone quiet. "She's beautiful."
He stared long enough that the present began to blur at the edges, and something older began to fill in the space behind his eyes.
The hat shop smelled like felt and linseed oil and the particular dry warmth of a building that ran the heat too high in winter.
His father was bent over the workbench, a half-finished brim pinned flat, his hands moving with the automatic precision of a man who had done this ten thousand times. Jervis sat on his stool in the corner, legs swinging, turning a green felt hat over in his hands — smooth, exquisitely smooth, the weave tight as skin.
"So you mean there's a girl—"
"She's not an ordinary girl!"
"Oh, of course."
"Alice Dee. She's—she's a really incredible girl, Dad."
"Yes, yes." His father didn't look up from the brim. "Put the super cool girl aside for a moment and help me hold these materials."
"But Dad, it's too tall."
"We just need to take it in. As long as the shape holds, the felt won't be damaged." He pressed the crease firmly, running his thumb along the fold. "Nobody buys a damaged hat. And we certainly don't sell one."
Jervis stroked the green felt and said nothing for a while.
"Did you know," his father said, not looking up, "what they used to use to treat felt? Years ago?"
Jervis shook his head.
"Mercury nitrate. A poison. The workers didn't know — nobody told them. They breathed the vapors year after year, in those factories, and they developed all sorts of things. Dementia. Tremors. Hallucinations. That's where the saying comes from."
"Like a hatter," Jervis said.
"Like a hatter." His father smiled slightly. "Thankfully we don't need that anymore. And we can still make the best ones."
The shop was quiet except for the workbench sounds. Jervis loved these conversations — the ones where the topic found its groove and neither of them wanted to stop.
"Making a hat is like building a character," his father said. "You need a steady hand. Patience. Consistency. You can't cheat the process, or you end up with something defective. Perfection is probably out of reach. But working toward it — that's always worth something."
Jervis looked at the green felt hat and said, without quite meaning to, "Alice is perfect."
His father paused. Set down his tool. Looked at his son with the particular expression parents deploy when they are choosing their words carefully.
"She may seem that way to you right now. But son — we shouldn't place people up too high. Put someone on a pedestal, and the slightest wind can knock them off. For both of you."
Jervis's face fell. His father watched it fall, and relented.
"That said. I might have an idea. About Alice."
The next morning, Jervis went to school.
She was standing at the window in the hallway, blonde hair down, a book open in her hands, looking at something outside that was apparently more interesting than whatever was on the page. In Jervis's careful, private estimation, Alice herself was part of the scenery — not separate from it, but continuous with it, the way certain things just belong in certain places.
He crossed the hallway. His father had given him a suggestion, and he was going to follow it.
"Alice, there's a — there's a new park. My parents said they'd take me. My dad said — I mean, uh, if you haven't been yet, maybe—"
She turned from the window.
Her smile was the kind that makes a person momentarily forget what they were saying.
"I said, 'Sure,'" she told him, even though he hadn't quite finished asking. "I'd love to go with you."
"Alice." The Mad Hatter took the blonde woman's hand, and the touch was as soft as memory. "Would you like to come to Wonderland with me?"
She smiled at him — open, easy, warm — and said, "I'd love to go with you."
"Boss, she hasn't put it on yet—"
The gunshot was reflex.
The warm light and the gentle shop and the hallway window — all of it vanished. The theater resolved back into sharp, cold focus: the stage, the props, the rows of hat-wearing extras standing at their marks, completely still. The blonde woman standing beside him, a full head taller, her expression unreadable.
He was back.
The gunman who'd spoken was already clutching his stomach, bent at the waist. A colleague grabbed his arm immediately and began pulling him toward the door, not waiting to be told, moving with the focused urgency of someone who understood that finding a doctor in the next ten minutes was the only relevant priority.
"Get out!" The Mad Hatter's voice cracked with fury, the dream's warmth already curdling into the familiar heat of being interrupted, of almost having it and then not having it, again, always. "And don't come back!"
The doors swung closed.
The theater was quiet.
The Mad Hatter turned back. Took the blonde woman's hand again. The stage lights were perfectly set. The cast was in position. Everything was ready.
"Alice." He looked up at her. "Would you like to come to Wonderland with me?"