If you are familiar with my writings, you likely know the content warnings this might require. If you are not, or if you would like to review them before reading further, you can find them here. In the scene written below, the adults depicted are fully consenting to and have extensively discussed the kind of thing they are doing and the potentials to their own risk profiles.
Alice asks the Hatter which vial to drink and then he tells her. This is how it starts, and she knows — she knows because she asked the question — but she doesn’t know, not really. Not yet. But sure enough, a few hours later, Alice feels herself falling, and her mistake is she lets him see. Alice falls, and he catches her. Alice falls, and everything echoes. Soon he’s walking her down the hall, helping her onto the bed, and she knows.
But she doesn’t.
Somehow she ends up without clothing. Somehow she ends up lying down. She laughs. She laughs like mad. He makes it so. She laughs until her eyes water, laughs like she once wanted, laughs until she’s desperate not to, a helpless way she never thought she really would because normally, she can think her way out of it. Or moans her way out of it.
But this is no longer her story. So she laughs, and — sweet almost-reprieve — he places his lips on her neck. And it’s too much. Of course it’s too much. And she asks if she may, and he doesn’t answer, only stops. And then, it all starts.
The laughter swept most of her away. Too breathless, heart beating too fast already, thoughts too electrified, everything too something. She manages to think it was genius, really — letting her get just weak enough, the point where she can’t remember a thought once it has finished and then making every thought the laughter; giving her an experience of real not-wanting where she couldn’t breathe from her own doing (or was it?) — and wasn’t she up there for an hour, or a day, and wasn’t he relentless, and isn’t he tired? He gets her more fully onto bed, gets her head to the pillow. He gets her there and she starts to sink immediately. So he starts to sink into her, even her hips struggling with the strength to push up. And she asks and he denies and he asks and she says no, I don’t like it, it doesn’t feel good, and he tells her she’s wrong so she believes him.
She swears she sees the letters of the words appear on the wall as he says them, quiver like her vision, morph and threaten. Each level she falls, lower and deeper; she sees the pit he’s digging even as she is already in it. Yes, that’s your favorite way to come. Your body is telling me I’m right; your body thinks that’s your favorite way to come. Go ahead, come your favorite way, and then Don’t you want to come your favorite way? and then Say it, and then Ask.
Strange respect becomes fear: this seems too crafted, even as she suspects it’s not. The last bit of critical thinking she has held onto tells her he’s smarter than she is, far more than one step ahead. Wrapped in the sentence of her realization, the world opens in that moment. Gravity shifts. Alice falls up, away from her body. She can see how her own eyes must look. Real fear. She sees him clearly for the very first time, it occurs to her, thinks, I had no idea… No, it turns out I have no idea what, exactly, you are capable of.
He doesn’t stop. He hasn’t stopped. Constant words that she can barely hear, breathing quieted, shifting halted, all her focus on trying to seperate the consonants she isn’t even sure are real.
Come however you want. You know how you want to. You know how you want to. You know how you want to.
The thing is that she sees his tricks as they’re happening but it doesn’t stop them. Or… well, she thinks she does. There’s this word he keeps saying. Or there isn’t. There’s this thing that happens when they lock eyes. Maybe not. There’s this way he is tracking when she’s present and when she isn’t. He always knows before she does. It seems that way, seems right now like he knows everything, so she doesn’t speak up if she doesn’t hear him or if he says she feels good when she doesn’t — because what she does believe is when he says she’s a liar. What she does believe is when he says she’s wrong. What she does believe is when he says she’s mad.
Are you going to make your old self disappointed in you, or are you going to make me? Are you going to be selfish, or are you going to be a hypocrite?
He gives her impossible choice. He gives her illusion of control.
Alice falls into a body. Anymore, it is not her body. The falling stays, the sinking, but this body moves as if touched when it hasn’t been; it feels words inside it and it hurts. It hurts.
*Come your favorite way.*
“I can’t—”
*Shut the fuck up.*
She obeys and she obeys and she obeys.
Alice becomes one, the broken bits of her, and everything she feels is everywhere, and she isn’t sure, she isn’t sure anymore, how long he would fuck her and how and where; she isn’t sure anymore of any horror he could inflict. Yes, he might do it. He might already have done it. Any of them. All of them. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. Would he? But after all, hatters are mad, and sadists are—
I’m going to rape the consent out of you.
Alice whimpers. Or Alice is silent. It isn’t clear anymore what all she is or isn’t. She comes how he says she will, how he has always said she likes when she doesn’t, this nothing, this release that feels like nothing (that feels like her). She’s allowing this thing that she hates, she thinks. Or it doesn’t matter if she is.
In the hole, the fog now separates over months of wondering if the Hatter really somehow thought she liked this thing that she doesn’t. And in through the haze, she sees the truth: it never mattered if she did or she didn’t. That’s what it means to be here. That’s what happens when you ask which bottle to drink. So there he is. Everywhere she opens or closes her eyes. And it’s all Alice’s fault.
And what she does believe is everything.
Please note: being “mad” and “madness” are terms that are generally considered pejorative to those with mental illness, though have more and more been among those reclaimed by the community they affect. I am in this community. Please do not use these terms without being asked to by those with mental illness, and then only to those specific people. To that end, please also do not use them for *me* without permission.
also, Lewis Carroll was not a good dude.