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The World is different to the world you once called home in so many ways, but the one you notice most is how little it changes. This is a World that does not revolve or move from its fixed position, no day or night to distinguish the slow drag of time, just your ever-fading memory of what sleep and waking felt like. Nothing changes, including you. You are altered only by the absence of growth, so stuck in your ways that you might as well sprout roots to match the branches. A fixed point in time and space. Landmark and guide, unyielding and unbothered by the horror which surrounds you.
Quickly, you learn that if you want to survive working with Cheshire, it serves you well to remain detached. There's only so many times you can attempt to claw his remaining eye out, and he remains agile and cunning long after you resign yourself to immobility. He calls you Atlas once or twice in jest, though both of you know the place you hold up is certainly not the heavens.
There is a hunger inside you. You can't remember the last time you felt sated, when you could look at the damned souls who pass through this place and not feel the urge to sink your teeth in instead of muttering explanations for what's long past the thousandth time. While you can tell yourself that you're fond of children as much as you wish, it won't change the fact that people can only ever be a meal to you now. Being a rabbit isn't as bad as some of the others you have been; blunt teeth, soft ears - ear, now - a face that doesn't scare children too badly, even if you no longer remember how to smile at them. You would like to keep this form for a little bit, just to pretend you could be soft and gentle again for a while.
You think you used to be someone who cared. Funny, how things work out.
Alices come and Alices go and before long, you can't recall a time when you could tell their faces apart. Names and tragedies blur together into one mournful song, and when Cheshire begins to call all the myriad of individuals simply Alice, your complaints soon grow as dull as the rest of you. It's just easier, not to remember, not to think. If there is anything you do well, it is doing what aches the least.
But the newest Alice seems... Different. Younger than many, though certainly not the youngest. Quick-witted, more adept at figuring out how the Worlds tick than you'd expected, but no more clever than you've seen on occasion before. He should not be special.
But he is, this Alice changes things; tiptoes through the Worlds and holds their hearts with cautious hands, even knowing they'll shatter regardless, again and again he passes you scraps of paper to mend together, and handles them with care. What weary eyes in that young soul, what grief for humans he's only just met. You don't think you've ever seen an Alice who tries so hard to forge their path against the current of fate. Maybe you're just tired of smiles with nothing but fangs, glad to see someone who looks as desolate as this place leaves you.
You can't rightfully call it kindness which urges you to do what you do next; something almost like mercy perhaps, a lesser cruelty, but nothing so selfless as kindness. You aren't sure you remember the meaning of that word.
So when Alice hands you the final key, you do not give him his final piece of suffering right away, instead, you offer him the closest thing you have to freedom. A choice. He can make a doorway out of a doomed friend, or he can let you eat him alive. One Alice or another. There is nothing in this place caring or fair enough to give them all a happy ending, you and he both know that well by now.
You are not surprised when he picks his own fate. Exhausted and afraid and not quite broken, but never a coward like you. What must it be like, to love even when the knowledge of that feeling has been stolen from you? So much light in such a little shell.
It's not something you do often; helping, leading children back home, instead of ruining what that place means for them. It would be so easy to lie to him, take a page from Cheshire's book and snatch away that spark of hope you see welling up inside him now. He'll never know if you upheld your end of the bargain. And yet you already know you're going to, the cold weight of certainty in your chest somehow lighter than the endless force of the World bearing down on you. Inch by inch of pushing against the grain, stretching out your arm towards him. You are going to do something for once in your existence. For the maybe-person you used to be, for Allen and every Alice you've watched turn to food or foam, for the memory of kindness.
When he takes your hand, you could swear that you feel yourself smile.