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Tarrant Hightopp, though full of words when thoughtful or angry or sad, tended to express happiness through
motion.
Alice cataloged this fact a bit dazedly as she was spun around and around the Bandersnatch's stall, propelled by a frenetically jubilant Hatter. Her feet touched ground only incidentally. Her nose was full of dust and her watering eyes were full of his blurry, grinning face. He had her forearms clasped in his hands, and she clung to his elbows for dear life. Someone was laughing and shrieking and humming tunelessly. It might have been him - but then, it might also have been her. Alice wasn't entirely sure; the entire world felt a bit blurry and dizzy and spinning - but it was a joyful, dizzy spinning.
The Bandersnatch had taken one look at these goings-on, snorted, and lumbered out the swinging door at the back of the stall into the pasture beyond.
Perhaps because Alice had spent the first part of her life dancing only such sedate dances at the quadrille (hardly worth calling a dance at all, as compared to this), it didn't take long for her feet to tangle. She lurched backward, the sudden force of the fall pulling her out of Tarrant's grasp. Alice landed on her rear directly in the middle of the Bandersnatch's abandoned bed, sending yet more dust and hay into the air. Her skirts settled somewhere above her knees. Alice could neither stop laughing long enough to sneeze nor stop sneezing long enough to laugh, with the end result that she had a bit of difficulty fitting breathing in between the two. Her eyes ran, her nose ran, and it was several long, blinking-and-sniffling moments before she could focus properly.
When she could, she found Tarrant staring down at her with a very interesting expression on his face.
"I'm afraid I'm not much of a dancer," Alice offered, still smiling in a way she suspected looked not quite sane. There was probably hay in her hair.
Tarrant didn't look like he cared. He giggled. His hands fisted in the hem of his coat. "Alice," he began, his voice strained. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Alice, perhaps you are unaware, but you seem to have forgotten your stockings."
Alice looked down at her legs, bare and exposed to well past her knee and clad only in a pair of rather dowdy houseslippers below that. She hadn't even put on socks. She flushed, but raised her chin and said only, "So it seems." She didn't rearrange her skirts, despite the the scandalized voice at the back of her mind (it sounded a great deal like Margaret) that demanded she cover herself this instant!
"You also seem to be laying in a pile of hats," Tarrant pointed out, voice dropping momentarily low on the word 'hats'. He cleared his throat again. "My hats. Without stockings."
Alice blinked at him, looked down to either side of her - she was indeed entirely surrounded by hats - then back up to Tarrant. She had little experience of expressions like the one presently on his face - it was generally frowned upon for gentlemen to look at ladies in such a way, in polite company - but she still thought she had a fair idea what he was thinking. She raised an incredulous brow. "You're aware there's nearly as much hair mixed in among these hats as there is hay. These hats all smell very, very much like Bandersnatch."
"You're sprawled in a pile of hats," Tarrant repeated, sounding distinctly strangled. "Right there, and really there, too. Pile of hats, with Alice, real Alice. Without stockings. In a pile of hats."
Which rather seemed to indicate that there had been other incidences of less real, stockingless Alices in less real piles of hats and . . oh my.
There were, Alice thought, two things she could do at that moment. The first and likely wisest option was to get to her feet, perhaps with some blushing and stammering involved, and take the two of them somewhere very public, very quickly.
The second option was so horribly forward and imprudent and frankly terrifying as to seem nearly impossible.
So that, of course, was what Alice chose. She held out one hand, skirts still askew, and said, "So what are you doing all the way up there?"
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