The gun was in his hand, but he wasn't pointing it at anyone.
He was stroking it. Running his thumb along the barrel, feeling the temperature of the metal, the precise weight of the cylinder. As if the cold was a confirmation — I am here, this is real, this is now.
Alice stood beside him and waited. She'd become accustomed to the soliloquies.
"After the tea," the Mad Hatter said, to her or to the air, "those memories feel like I'm inside them. Not remembering them. Inside them. Sweet. Completely real."
His gaze moved to the cake table — the Eat Me cake, the Drink Me bottle, both props his people had built to his specifications, both slightly wrong in ways he couldn't stop seeing. He looked at them as though he could see through them to a different table, a different afternoon.
"Imagine it as a world you can live in. One where you can run. Where you can jump."
His eyes drifted to the caterpillar room, but unfocused now, settled on something that wasn't there — two children crossing a trampoline, moving fast, laughing at the sound of it.
"Imagine you're a knight. Tall, strong, in full armor. A white horse. And the whole world arranges itself around you, and every detail of that moment is exactly right."
He looked at the dessert cart. "The sweetness dissolves on your tongue."
He looked at the pool of tears, the stage lights catching its surface. "Sunlight on water. Gold."
He looked at Alice beside him.
Her voice came back to him, the real voice, from the real day — You know what, Jervis, I wasn't sure if I'd have any fun, but I'm so glad I came with you today — and the soft pressure of her fingers tightening in his palm, and the afternoon going on and on, neither of them wanting it to end.
"What a perfect day," he murmured. "You never want it to end."
He was talking to himself. His eyes were aimed at the woman beside him and looking straight through her.
"And then the fairy tale ended."
"Alice, do you want — do you want to go to the ball with me?"
She'd looked at him with the same warmth as always, and a smile that had started to mean something slightly different than it used to. She was half a head taller now. More, maybe.
"I think we'll all go," she said. "A group of us, you know? We'll have fun."
"Jervis." His father's voice, earlier, lower. "The doctor doesn't recommend this compound. The side effects are serious — mental instability, heightened aggression, obsessive patterns, paranoid thinking. These are not small things, son."
"But I want to grow taller." The words came out very small. "Everyone at school is taller than me. I look like a little kid."
Junior high graduation. A dance.
Alice Dee was wearing green — a dress the precise shade of a certain felt hat — and she was laughing with a cluster of friends when Jervis came over and, exactly as he had done years before in the hallway, reached for her hand.
This time she pulled away.
"I'm sorry, Jervis." Polite. Correct. The apology present in the words and absent from the face, which held, under its careful surface, something that looked like disdain. "I like you. I really do. Just — not like that."
If her expression had matched the words. If the apology had been real. Would he still have taken the compound?
He didn't know. He had stopped asking.
"The fairy tale ended," the Mad Hatter said, "and Alice grew up. She left me there." He looked at the blonde woman beside him. "But the real Alice would never have done that. She would never have cared about my height."
"Of course not," the blonde Alice said gently. "I don't mind—"
"You are not my Alice."
The roar came up from somewhere below language. He turned on her fully, gun rising, something that had been barely contained for the duration of the entire tour now simply not contained.
"You are not as beautiful as she is. Not as kind. Not as gentle, not as generous, not as — you're nothing like her. You're a copy. An imitation. You are not her."
The more she resembled Alice, he understood now, standing here with the gun in his hand, the worse it was. Every moment she was in front of him and wasn't wrong, she was right enough to remind him of the original, and the original was gone, and she had been gone for a long time, and he was the one who had —
The real Alice will never come back.
He had made certain of that himself. He knew this. He lived inside this knowledge the way he lived inside the tea, and the drugs, and the stage — not to escape the fact, but because escaping the fact was the only thing that made the fact survivable.
"Get rid of her." His voice had gone ragged, stripped. "Get rid of all of them. New ones. New batch. Now."
He raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
The gunshot rang through the theater.
Nobody fell.
"You're a pathetic wretch."
Alice's voice had changed. The warmth was gone — not gradually, but all at once, like a lamp switched off. What replaced it was calm, measured, carrying a faint edge of contempt. She seemed to have aged several years in the space of a sentence, the girl-shape dissolving and something altogether more composed standing in its place.
"You'll spend the rest of your life looking, Mad Hatter. And even if you found her — even if she came back to you — all she'd find is an ugly man who lost his mind."
A vine came out of nowhere.
It moved fast and solid, hardened in an instant, intercepting the bullet between them. Then more vines followed, erupting from beneath the blonde woman's dress, tearing through the Alice costume from the inside until the fabric hung in shreds and what was underneath was revealed — soft green armor, woven from living plant material, worn by someone who had clearly not come here expecting a pleasant evening.
Pamela Isley pulled off her wig. The blonde came away in one piece.
"I dyed my hair for this," Poison Ivy said, with the particular tone of someone who has wasted a significant amount of time. "Full disguise. Hours of preparation." She looked around the theater. "I could have sent a potted plant and gotten the same result."
"You." The Mad Hatter's voice had gone somewhere beyond fury — a register that didn't have a clean name. The gun was still up, hammer cocked, hand shaking. "You impersonated her. You stood there and used her face and you said those things while you were using her face—"
"Face reality." Poison Ivy's voice didn't rise to meet his. It stayed level, which was somehow worse. "She's never coming back. And even after everything — all of this—" a gesture at the theater, the stage, the rows of hat-wearing extras, the years of it — "you're still the lowest of the low."
He emptied the cylinder at her.
Six shots. All of them caught by the vine barrier, each one hitting with a dull, fibrous impact that left no mark she intended to carry.
"Kill her! Kill her! Kill all of them!"
The echo of his voice moved through the theater and then settled into something that felt wrong.
Silence.
Not the silence of people holding still. The silence of people who had stopped. The actors on their marks. The lighting crew at their boards. The prop masters. The hat-wearing extras in their patrol patterns. The Falcone gunmen at the exits.
All of them, motionless.
"Don't count on it," Poison Ivy said.
She looked at him across the vine barrier with the flat, steady expression of someone who has already finished the work.
"You've been checked."
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