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He’s falling.
He’s not sure how he ended up here, falling. He’s not sure he knows who he is either, but he’s falling and it seems to him that he’s been falling a long time, because above him he sees nothing but black—there’s no pinprick of light where the start of the fall was. He twists to see below him, and there is light down there, way down, so far down he’s sure he won’t survive the impact.
There’s not much to do during the fall but try to remember what got him here. How did he start to fall? He seems to remember passing cupboards. Tea trays. Doors.
And before that….
Oh.
The rabbit hole. He’d been chasing the Rabbit. Funny thing, wearing a sleek silver metal chest plate and a helmet with holes at the top for his ears. He’d had exhaust pipes on each side of his back, like extended shoulder blades, and he’d been fast. He’d been late—he kept saying so. Shouta had chased him, and fallen down the rabbit hole.
Shouta! That’s his name. Aizawa Shouta.
And now, Shouta is falling.
The ground comes up to meet him. He braces for it, turning in the air to catch himself feet first. He maps it out in his head. He’ll take it at a roll, and he’ll keep rolling until all the momentum is gone. He’ll die, but at least he’ll die trying.
The ground isn’t coming up as fast as it should. Shouta knows how fast a fall should be—how he knows this, he isn’t sure, but he knows it like he knows anything else. He can visualize the speed he should be at, and this isn’t it. He’s going too slow.
The fall, in the end, climaxes into nothing. He lands on his toes, easy, soft, and rocks back onto his heels. It was an impossible fall and an impossible landing.
Shouta is now standing in a hall of doors. Doors of all sizes and colors. Doors shaped like triangles, doors shaped like tesseracts. Doors in stripes. Doors twice his size.
All the doors are locked, and the rabbit is nowhere to be found.
There’s a glass table with a key on it. A tiny key. Shouta scans the doors, tries the key in lock after lock, until he finds the one it fits. The door is tiny—he could put his head through it maybe, but nothing more than that. He crouches down and peers through the door. A beautiful garden tumbles out on the other end, lush grass and bushes and trees an impossible shade of green. On the trees are huge white roses, in full bloom. Between the shrubs are wide brick paths.
White roses.
The roses are white.
This concerns Shouta for some reason he can’t place. He puzzles over it for a long time, trying to remember what’s bothering him about this. Roses can be white, he knows. They don’t have to be red. So why…
something
something is
It’s the only door with a key and the rest of them are locked. Shouta stands back with his hands on his hips and looks around again. The fact of the matter is his fool of a past self chucked himself down a rabbit hole and now he’s stuck down here with a door that doesn’t open.
It comes to him as if through a dream, as if it was whispered: There should be something on the table that will make him smaller.
He turns, and there is something on the table, something that was not there before, and it is a little green vial with a disproportionately long tag that says DRINK ME. How had he known that would be there?
He checks the bottle. If it is poison, it should say so, he reasons. But the bottle has nothing on it that says poison, so it can’t be poison, or it would say so. But then again, things aren’t always what they seem.
He checks the bottle again. Nowhere does it say poison. None of the ingredients are poison. And the tag says to drink it—clear instructions, meant to be followed. He’d known it would be on the table.
It doesn’t say poison. He pulls the cork off the bottle and sips.
The effect is instantaneous. He plummets to the ground. He shrinks so fast it’s almost painful, and he has to hold the doorframe to steady himself as nausea hits him. It passes after a moment. He walks through the open tiny door into the garden. The grass is close cropped and smells like summer. He can hear a
listen
please listen
something is
It doesn’t say poison. He pulls the cork off the bottle and sips.
The effect is instantaneous. He plummets to the ground. He’s small enough to fit through the tiny door now, but the door is shut and locked. He could have sworn it was just open, the gardens waiting for him on the other side. He looks for the key, which he must have left somewhere. After a moment, he finds it. It’s on top of the glass table.
Shouta is too small now to reach it. It’s way up there and he’s way down here. The defeat is crushing.
What’s he doing here? he asks himself as he tries and fails to scale one of the table legs to get to the key. What’s so important in that garden? He knows he has to get into that garden, knows it as surely as he knows his own name, which is to say not well at all. He came here because…because he was chasing the rabbit.
Where’s the rabbit?
At the base of the table, there’s a little cake. It’s a neat little thing on a plate with a strawberry on top. Shouta picks it up, examines it. There’s a tag that says EAT ME.
Well, Shouta drank the other thing and came out fine but smaller, so reason would suggest that if he eats this thing, he’ll come out fine but taller. He nibbles at it, determines if it’s poison, it’s at least delicious poison, and he quickly eats the rest of it.
This change is much more uncomfortable than the shrinking was. It feels out of proportion—his legs sprout much too long and his torso not much at all, turning him into a sort of large, humanesque flamingo. In the cake’s defense, he is now big enough to get the key, and he takes it up, pinching it between his fingers. Sadly, he is too big now to fit through the door, and the DRINK ME potion is all used up.
He sits miserably for a long time, head ducked to avoid scraping the ceiling, and tries to think his way out of this. He feels distinctly like he should be doing something, like, in fact, there’s something he’s supposed to be doing, but he doesn’t know what it is and he’s not going to sit here guessing.
Something niggles at him, sort of like déjà vu. There’s a way this goes. The hall floods and everyone inside it gets gets swept out by the waves.
But Shouta’s the only one in here. And where’s the flood supposed to come from?
“Hello?” he asks the empty hall.
As if on cue, the Rabbit appears. He speeds through the hallway, muttering about the Duchess and croquet, holding, for no apparent reason, a fan. This feels right to Shouta, and it feels important that it continues to feel right. But then the Rabbit stops. He looks around. He says, in a dreaming, bewildered sort of tone, “Isn’t this supposed to be full of tears?”
Then he sees Shouta. He jumps at how large Shouta is and backs up a few steps.
“Sir!” he says, dropping the fan he’s holding.
This does not feel right to Shouta. “Aren’t you going somewhere?” Shouta asks.
The Rabbit jumps again, having forgotten, and says, “The Duchess! I mustn’t be late!” And promptly he runs off again.
Shouta’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with the fan. He picks it up out of curiosity and looks it over. It’s not anything special—plain white and cheaply made. Why the rabbit had it at all, he’s not sure.
He notices some movement and looks up, only to realize he’s shrinking again! He celebrates this for a moment before it occurs to him that if he doesn’t know how he started shrinking, then it’s going to be difficult to stop shrinking. The only thing that’s different is the fan, so he flings it away and fortunately does stop shrinking, and just in time, too—any more and he might have completely disappeared.
The door, of course, is still closed. And the floor is dry, which strikes Shouta as strange, although it shouldn’t because the floor was dry earlier, too. But now, it’s supposed to be wet.
“Why hasn’t it flooded?” an irritated voice says. Shouta turns to look and finds a mouse—a purple mouse with absurdly long ears—slipping out of the shadows. “I’m going to have to walk,” she mutters.
She notices Shouta and gives him a wide berth.
Shouta thinks about his cat at home and how much he misses her. She would like this place, he thinks, because this place doesn’t make much sense and cats also don’t make much sense. His cat’s name is…Dinah.
But that doesn’t seem right. It is right, he knows, because it feels right, but it doesn’t seem right, and there is a difference between feeling and seeming, and it’s a difference Shouta knows well. His cat’s name is…is…
listen
you don’t belong here
you need to
Dinah. That’s her name, because that’s her name. He follows the Mouse along the hallway. “Where are you going?” he asks.
“Out,” the mouse says sourly.
“I have a cat who would love to meet you,” Shouta tells her, and then immediately regrets it when the Mouse shoots him a terribly offended look and speeds up. If you’ve ever seen a mouse speed up, you’d know that it makes them quite fast, and Shouta has to run to keep up, apologizing along the way. Eventually, the Mouse seems to forgive him and slows again, and Shouta refrains from mentioning his cat again, even though he feels weirdly drawn to saying something else.
As they go, they’re joined by other animals, who also all complain about the lack of flooding. Most of these animals don’t strike Shouta as particularly strange, but there is a black bird with two heads, and he finds himself staring longer than he should.
They come out onto a dry beach.
“Now what?” says the Two-Headed Bird.
“I was supposed to recite boring historical facts to dry us off,” the Mouse says, long ears twitching, “but there’s no point to that now.”
“I was supposed to start a caucus-race,” says the Two-Headed Bird. “And then as a prize, he’s supposed to give us crackers.” The Bird and the Mouse and all the other animals look at Shouta.
“Well, there can’t be a prize if we haven’t done anything prize-worthy,” the Mouse says, which is good because Shouta checked his pockets and he doesn’t have any crackers, just jelly packets.
“Excuse me,” Shouta says, “but how do I get to the gardens?”
“Through the smothering darkness,” the Two-Headed Bird says, gesturing at the woods beyond the beach, “and into the light.”
This seems like an overly dramatic description of the woods, but Shouta thanks him and heads in that direction. He feels a bit too small for his liking, so he keeps his eye out for anything that might make him bigger, but there aren’t any convenient cakes or drinks in the woods, and after a while of walking he begins to fear he’s going to be stuck like this forever.
It’s as he’s walking that he remembers, as if in a vision, what’s in that garden. The Queen of Hearts is in the garden. She’s going to play croquet and threaten to chop off a bunch of people’s heads.
He’s not sure how he knows this, having never been to the garden before, and he turns it over and over in his mind, trying to decipher it. It’s like he has been here before, but he knows he hasn’t. But something about this is familiar, in more ways than one.
He stops short when he comes into a clearing and finds a caterpillar smoking a pipe on top of a mushroom. The Caterpillar looks at him. He looks at the caterpillar.
It’s striped orange and black and has weirdly spiky fuzz. This, too, is familiar, but not in the way the hall of doors was familiar. This is familiar like the Mouse was familiar, the Two-Headed Bird, the Rabbit. Shouta has met this caterpillar before. He feels certain of it.
But surely he would remember meeting a caterpillar like this?
“Who are you?” the Caterpillar asks, and sounds extremely grouchy about it.
“I’m not sure at the moment,” Shouta admits.
“You don’t know?” The Caterpillar seems put out and puffs harder at his pipe. Shouta sniffs the air and he’s pretty sure there’s nothing actually in the pipe, which feels like a relief for a reason he isn’t sure of.
“Well, I’m sure I knew who I was this morning,” Shouta says, “but I’ve changed several times since then. Who are you?”
This question seems to offend the Caterpillar even more than Shouta’s answer, and he puffs away wrathfully. “Rude,” the Caterpillar says finally, which Shouta doesn’t think is completely fair.
“You asked me,” he says.
The Caterpillar ignores this. “What do you mean, you changed?”
“Well, I was a normal size,” Shouta says. “And then I was too small, and then I was too big, and now I’m too small again.”
The Caterpillar scoffs.
“And I can’t remember anything right anymore,” Shouta adds. “But mostly I’d like to be the right size again. Do you know of something that will do that?”
The Caterpillar thinks about this for so long and so grumpily that Shouta almost leaves mid-conversation. But then: “What is the right size?”
This conversation is more irritating than it’s worth. “My normal size,” Shouta says.
Once again, the Caterpillar has to think. “What is the normal size?”
“Not this,” Shouta says, irritated. “Four inches is much too small.”
“Too small!” This is the breaking point for the Caterpillar, who Shouta realizes suddenly is probably around four inches himself. He puffs wrathfully as he slides off the mushroom and away. He’s almost out of sight when he pauses and turns back to Shouta. “One side will make you larger, and the other side will make you smaller. But you knew that already.”
With that, he vanishes into the woods.
The first phrase echoes in Shouta’s mind as achingly familiar. If it is déjà vu, it’s a weird type. It’s like he’s supposed to be remembering something, but he’s forgetting. Or it’s like he’s supposed to be forgetting, but he’s remembering. But he feels strongly that he’s heard those words before, that, in fact, he should have known this already.
you know it of
course you know it
something is
He puzzles over the mushroom, trying to figure out which side is which. In the end, he decides not to worry about it too much and takes a little nibble of one side, and then the other, to test it. Once he’s figured out which side is which, he takes a little of both sides and uses them to adjust his height until it feels like he’s back where he’s supposed to be. He puts the remaining mushroom pieces in his pockets and heads off again in search of the garden.
Soon enough he comes upon a house in a little clearing in the woods. It’s a two-story house and oddly the windows are smoking. He’s debating whether or not to enter when a strange footman comes running up to the house. He has three extra arms on each side and long bangs that cover his face. As he runs up, the door opens and a frog footman comes out. They bow to each other, accidentally bumping heads, and the six-armed footman passes a letter to the frog footman with the announcement, “An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet!”
Then he hurries off. The frog footman sits on the steps outside the house and looks up at the sky.
Shouta ventures up to the house, curious, and knocks on the door.
“You can’t get in, ribbit,” the frog footman tells him. “I’m out here, so there’s no one to open the door.”
This is such a nonsense argument that it takes Shouta a minute to figure out how to respond. Finally he says, “You could open it. From the outside.”
“I’m a footman,” she says. “People can’t get in unless I open the door from inside, ribbit, and I can’t open the door from inside if I’m outside, and I can’t get inside unless someone opens the door, and no one can open the door because I’m the footman and I’m outside, and….”
She continues on this dialogue dreamily until her voice fades into mumbles and she goes back to staring at the sky, and Shouta, who is almost 100 percent certain this is absurdity, opens the door himself and walks in.
The overwhelming scent of pepper assaults him as he enters and his eyes begin to sting. He follows the burning to the kitchen, where he finds a brown-haired, square-jawed cook making something in a cauldron—the source of the smell—and sitting in a rocking chair within a cloud of the peppery smoke is a tall girl with black hair in a ponytail. The Duchess, Shouta presumes. Clinging to her leg is…a purple baby with balls for hair.
Shouta nearly backs right out of the room, but something stops him, and that something is a cat colored a bit like a prism, all greens and yellows and purples. The cat is smiling at him. It’s very disconcerting.
“Why is your cat smiling?” Shouta asks.
“It’s the Cheshire Cat,” the Duchess says, as if this explains it.
“My cat…” Shouta hesitates again, “Dinah never smiles.”
His cat can’t be named Dinah. Shouta would never name a cat Dinah. He knows this, suddenly, as real as fact, and the room tilts slightly. It fractures around the edges. Shouta blinks and suddenly the Duchess is right next to him, gripping his elbow so tight her nails sink a bit into his arm. She looks at him for a very long time, and her eyes are dark and endless. She says, “Something is wrong,” and it doesn’t sound like her and yet, it does.
Shouta can’t think straight.
something is
something is wrong
But what? What is wrong? He’s been four sizes today and he’s missed the flood and he’s offended a caterpillar. All of this, he knows, is out of the ordinary. He doesn’t think, for some reason, that these occurrences are what the Duchess is referring to. She’s referring to his cat, and how its name is not in fact Dinah.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” the Duchess says. Something twists in Shouta’s stomach and he has to look away. As he does, her grip suddenly disappears. He gathers himself to look at her again and she’s back to normal.
“I have to get ready for croquet,” she says. “Would you watch the baby?”
With that, she hurries off upstairs. The cook has vanished, and when Shouta looks for the baby, that too is gone, and so is the cat. He’s alone in a house full of pepper, and his vision is blurry around the edges.
He isn’t sure what’s causing his vision to go sideways, so coughing, he runs outside. The frog footman is gone. Even in the clear air outside, there’s something wrong with his eyes. He can’t quite explain it, but it’s like the world has gone wavy around him. It’s harder for him to walk in a straight line than before. He stumbles into the forest and quickly gets lost.
He’s about to fall to despair when he hears a weird laugh. He looks up and finds the Cheshire Cat staring at him from atop a low tree branch.
“Do you know which direction I should go?” Shouta asks.
“Well that depends entirely on where you're trying to get to,” the Cat says.
“Yes, well,” Shouta says, “I don’t quite know where that is.”
The Cat’s smile widens. She really is a strange thing, vaguely translucent at the edges, and refusing to stay any one color at a time. “Then any direction will get you there just fine. But if you need help choosing, the Hatter is that way.” The Cat points with her tail. “And the March Hare is that way.” She points the exact opposite direction. “They’re both quite mad.”
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Shouta remarks.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” says the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” says Shouta.
“You must be,” says the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Shouta thinks this is a good point and doesn’t have much to say to refute it. Again, there’s something familiar about this, as if it’s a dream Shouta has had before. And the Cat is as good a thing to ask as anyone else. He hesitates and says, “Have you noticed anything strange?”
The Cat just smiles and says, “I have noticed everything strange.”
“Right.”
“Farewell,” the Cat says, and starts to fade away, slowly so her body disappears, and then her head, and then, last, her smile.
Shouta turns toward the Hatter’s house, and then the March Hare’s, trying to decide.
“By the way,” the Cat says suddenly, and when Shouta looks, just her head is back, floating in the air over the branch. It’s eerie. “Are you going to play croquet with the Queen?”
“I would like to,” Shouta says, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”
The Cat smiles, all teeth. “See you there,” she says, and vanishes.
Shouta waits for her to say something else, but she seems to be truly done now. He decides it doesn’t matter much which direction he chooses, as long as he chooses a direction, so he heads off toward the March Hare’s at random.
It isn’t long before he comes upon a house. The house is shaped like a rabbit, with ears for chimneys and a door where the mouth is, and it’s been painted all green. In front of the house is a tea party at a long table. The party has three attendants, and although there are plenty of place settings, all three of them are bunched up at the end—a Hare, a Hatter, and a Dormouse.
“May I join you?” Shouta asks.
They don’t answer, so he sits down at the other end of the table.
“You weren’t invited!” shouts the Hatter immediarely. The Hatter is wearing all pink, including her very tall top-hat, and her cheeks are round and rosy.
“There’s no room!” the Hare agrees—or Shouta supposes it’s the Hare, since it matches its house perfectly, down to the green fur.
“There’s plenty of room,” Shouta says, already irritated. No one in this place makes any sense. “You’re all down there.”
They don’t seem to have a good argument for that, and he’s allowed to stay. “Would you like some tea?” the Hatter asks him, much more politely, and the Hare pours a new cup and passes it to the Hatter, who pushes it gently through the air. It bobs and floats along until it lands perfectly on the table in front of Shouta, who takes a sip. It tastes like nothing.
“Is it teatime?” the Hare asks.
The Hatter checks her pocket watch and confirms it. They fill their own cups and drink.
Shouta, who is fairly certain it is not in fact teatime based on nothing but the position of the sun frowns at them as he sips his own tea. He’s not certain whether he should point this out or not—everyone has been rude to him so far, and he’s beginning to realize no one is going to respond well to him pointing out discrepancies.
But he can’t help himself. “It’s only noon,” he says.
“Noon!” says the Hatter. “Noonsense!”
“You see,” says the Hare, “the Hatter offended Time—nearly got Time beheaded by the Queen of Hearts, actually—and Time has never forgiven the Hatter.”
“It was teatime then,” the Hatter says. “And so it is teatime now.”
Shouta has no idea what’s going on.
The Dormouse emerges blearily from the teapot it was sleeping in. Its fur is perfectly divided down the middle, white on one side, red on the other. Something tingles in Shouta’s brain. This reminds him of something. Of what?
“For the Hatter,” the Dormouse says, “it is always teatime, because Time set the Hatter’s time to teatime and won’t unset it until he’s done feeling offended.”
“Which,” the Hare agrees, “will likely be a long time, as he is Time.”
“Yes,” says the Dormouse.
“Todoroki,” Shouta says.
you see it then don’t you see it
something is wrong
you are not supposed to be here
They all look at him with varying expressions of confusion.
“Well, don’t just make up words,” says the Hatter. “That’s rude.”
Shouta doesn’t know what Todoroki means or where it came from—it’s a name, he knows that. But it feels relevant. He stares at the Dormouse, trying to understand, until the Dormouse squirms under his gaze and disappears back into the teapot to fall back asleep.
“More tea,” the Hare declares and refills Shouta’s cup. “It’s the Hatter’s unbirthday party, you know.”
“It’s our unbirthday party,” the Hatter says. “Yours, too,” she tells Shouta, and then adds doubtfully, “unless it’s your actual birthday, in which case you are uninvited.”
Shouta is busy staring at the Hare, who seems just as familiar as the Dormouse. They all seem familiar, but the Hare particularly so. Shouta feels a little weary just looking at him—similar to how he’d felt around the Caterpillar, actually. He digs around in his brain for answers.
“Midoriya,” is what comes out of his mouth.
“Making up more words!” the Hatter shrieks. “Isn’t that what I just said not to do?”
“You can’t stay in the tea party if you don’t follow the rules of the tea party,” the Hare says. “We’re all out of sorts now. Weren’t you supposed to ask a riddle?” he asks the Hatter. “Everything’s out of order.”
“The raven,” Shouta says, remembering. This is all so familiar. It’s like he’s read this script before. “Why is a raven the same as a writing desk?”
The Hatter frowns. “That’s my riddle. You shouldn’t steal other people’s riddles,” she says unhappily.
“What’s the answer?” Shouta asks.
“How should I know?”
something
something is wrong
I know.
you are not supposed to be here
But then where is he supposed to be? He remembers the rabbit hole, he remembers falling and falling and falling. There must have been a before. There must have been something before he saw the rabbit.
His head hurts. Why can’t he remember?
“Why did I go down the rabbit hole?” he asks himself.
“That is a good riddle,” says the Hatter, and sets about shooting off guesses with the Hare. They get increasingly ridiculous and far fetched until the Dormouse pokes his head out of the teapot and suggests, “To get cold soba,” and everyone at once agrees that must have been the reason.
“There’s no cold soba down here,” the Dormouse tells Shouta gravely.
“I have to go to play croquet with the Queen,” Shouta says, getting up. He isn’t sure why, but he’s been trying to get there this whole time, and there must be a reason. Maybe his subconscious is leading him to the garden.
“Keep a hold of your head,” the Hare warns him, and the Hatter falls over herself laughing.
Shouta heads off into the forest, leaving the tea party behind. The Hare was right—it didn’t go the way it was supposed to. Shouta knows they missed some parts, did some parts out of order. How he knows this, he still isn’t sure, but he knows it as clearly as anything.
He hasn’t gone far into the forest when he finds a door in a tree. He opens it and goes through, and from there he finds himself inside the hall of doors. He looks up, as if he can see out of the rabbit hole, but wherever it was, it’s not there now. There’s no way back up.
He finds the tiny door to the garden, uses the mushroom pieces to make himself small enough to go through, and enters.
From there, he finds himself on one of the wide pathways. He doesn’t have to walk far along the path, with all its sun and its grass and its shrubbery, before he comes across a tree with white roses on it, and three playing cards, gardeners, painting the roses red.
This he knows, too. This he remembers, and the cards he recognizes by name. Shinsou, Ojirou, Aoyama. He doesn’t know how he knows them.
“Why are you painting the roses red?” he asks them, although he thinks he knows the answer.
“The Queen asked us to grow red roses,” Aoyama, Two, explains. “But Seven planted white ones instead. If we don’t paint the roses red, the Queen will take all our heads.”
Shouta could do without the rhyming, but that answer was about what he expected. He did know this story. He’d read it somewhere, once. He couldn’t remember the title.
A trumpet blared and suddenly all the gardeners threw themselves to the ground into a low bow. Along came a royal procession—the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts, the Knave of Hearts, and a bunch of other playing cards. Shouta recognized the royalty: Ashido, Kirishima, Kaminari.
The Queen, predictably, gets angry about the roses not being red and orders the cards to all lose their heads. In the ensuing chaos of finding the executioner, Shouta hides all the cards in a nearby pot.
The Queen, Ashido, notices him then. She looks him up and down. “Do you play croquet?” she asks.
Shouta has never played croquet in his life—of this he is certain. “Yes,” he says. “Not well.”
“Come play croquet with us,” the Queen says, and on the procession goes. The Executioner, Sero, doesn’t find the cards and gives up, hurrying along after them. Shouta helps them back out of the pot before joining the procession.
The game of croquet turns out to be very confusing. Shouta had been expecting to find answers here in this garden in this game of croquet, but all he finds is bafflement. The balls, for one thing, are live hedgehogs, and the mallets are live flamingos. The arches are made of card soldiers, two of them standing to make the sides and one laying across the top of the others to make the top. The hedgehogs keep running off before anyone can hit them, and the flamingos keep twisting around to avoid being used to hit anything, and the arches keep running off to somewhere else. It’s pure chaos.
It’s both wrong and right simultaneously. This is how it’s supposed to be, but it isn’t how one plays croquet.
Shouta’s headache is ever growing.
He turns to find his hedgehog and instead finds the Cheshire Cat watching him. The Cat has chosen to only present as a head, and she is floating in the air close by. “And how do you like the Queen?” the Cat asks.
Shouta is about to respond shortly in a burst of irritation, but he notices suddenly the Queen is within earshot and clearly listening, and so instead he says, “I think she’s going to beat everyone at croquet.”
Clearly satisfied, the Queen flounces off.
“Have you found your destination?” the Cat asks him once she’s gone.
“I thought this was it,” Shouta says, frustrated. “But here is just as confusing as there.”
“We are neither here nor there,” the Cat disagrees.
Shouta squints at the Cat. “Hagakure,” he says.
The Cat blinks, slow. “What does that mean?”
The King of Hearts unfortunately takes notice of them at this moment and comes over. “What a strange cat!” he says, examining her.
“Thank you,” says the Cat.
However, the King didn’t seem to mean this in a good way. “Not manly at all,” he mutters, and he goes off to find the Executioner, which isn’t a good sign. The Cheshire Cat seems to find this unconcerning, so Shouta goes off to play more croquet, as if the answers to this puzzle will be found by scoring just one.
He doesn’t manage to score any because his flamingo escapes him.
When he comes back, it’s to find the King and the Executioner arguing over how to behead a cat that is only a head. The Executioner argues it’s not possible. The King argues it’s more than possible. The Queen argues it should be done as soon as possible.
“Why don’t you ask the Duchess?” Shouta suggests. “She’s her cat.”
This is agreed upon as a very good solution and the Duchess is procured. By the time she’s found, the Cat has disappeared, and everyone has moved on.
The Duchess hurries up to Shouta. “Would you like to take a stroll around the gardens?” she asks, grabbing his arm and clutching it just as tightly as she had before.
He looks at her closely. “Yaoyorozu,” he says.
“Shh,” she hisses. “And the moral of that,” she says much louder, “is that you should never eat crackers before dinner.”
“What?” Shouta says.
“I can’t talk to you long,” she says in a normal tone. “But something is wrong here. Something’s very wrong.”
“I know,” Shouta says. “But I can’t tell just what yet.”
“We’re not supposed to be here,” Yaoyorozu says.
Shouta has already heard all of this. “I know.”
“And the moral of that,” the Duchess adds loudly, “is that the smallest spoon should always be the the furthest from the plate.”
“Spoon…” Shouta says, and just like that he remembers something else. “Japan!”
“Shh!” Yaoyorozu insists. “She can’t figure out we’re on to her.”
“Who? The Queen?”
Yaoyorozu looks at him with more than a little concern. “You don’t remember? We got attacked, remember? This is all someone’s—”
“You there!” The Queen shouts, storming over. “You there, Duchess! Get out!”
“But I was just—”
“Get out,” The Queen shrieks, “or I’ll chop off your head!”
this is all someone’s
this is all someone’s
What happened before the rabbit hole? Shouta can’t remember. He was in Japan? And now he’s in…and now….
Alice in Wonderland.
It comes to him, all in a rush.
He’s in Alice in Wonderland. He knows this story because it is a book, a book he’s read before, a book he read to—to—
Eri. He read it to Eri.
Everything plows into him like a wave. He stands there, unmoving, as more and more people get ordered to lose their heads. He remembers the school, and his students, and Mic and.... How did they all end up here, though? Are they trapped in the book?
this is all someone’s
this is all someone’s
“Alice,” the Queen says, approaching Shouta. Everyone else at the party has been scheduled for execution, except him, the Queen, the King, and the Executioner himself. Something is wrong. “Have you ever seen the Mock Turtle?”
“No,” Shouta says, because it’s what he’s supposed to say. He can see the script now, the path he’s supposed to follow. But the book ends not long after the Mock Turtle. It’s the Mock Turtle, and then the trial of the Knave, and then the Hatter, and then the end….
Shouta doesn’t know what’s going to happen if they stay in the book past the end. Maybe they just all wake up, as if from a dream. Maybe they all die.
He remembers his students now. He is not letting them get hurt.
His head is aching. How did he get in here?
He finds himself trailing along after the Queen. Behind them, he can hear the King pardoning everyone. None of them will lose their heads. They never do. It’s circular—it has happened before; it will happen again.
Why did he go down the rabbit hole?
“You there,” the Queen shouts to the Gryphon—to Koda, that’s Koda. “Gryphon. You must take Alice to the Mock Turtle.”
With that, she hurries off to oversee her executions.
“She never actually takes anyone’s heads,” the Gryphon tells Shouta.
This is all someone’s….
Oh.
The rest of it snaps into place. He knows what this is. He knows how they got here.
This is all someone’s quirk.
And Shouta has one of those, too. He has a very useful one of those, actually, which he had forgotten about until just now. He grabs Koda by the shoulder. He looks all around him, focusing on everything he sees, and he activates his quirk.
And just like an eraser across a whiteboard, it all gets swept away.