Chapter Text
The first time he sees the little Miss she is eight, bordering on nine, and her hair is as black as the wing of a raven, as black as Thomas’ and her eyes are just as blue as Thomas’ eyes once were.
Everything else in her is pure, unadulterated Martha: her delicate bones, her nose, her chin, her forehead, the shape of her eyes complete with the infinite melancholy inside them.
The little Miss looks like Martha, but she has Thomas’ black hair and his blue eyes.
Alfred doesn't know if he should be glad for it.
There is little in her that didn't come from the Waynes', but her tanned skin and the shape of her mouth make him uncomfortable. They are too similar to her mother's, Talia, the despicable woman she is (a woman as old as Alfred himself, a woman who beckoned his sixteen years old charge, his SON, in her bed). He hopes the little Miss has not inherited anything else from the woman that bore her, but he can't be sure, and the girl, Bruce's daughter, his own granddaughter, in a way, makes him feel queasy.
He and Bruce and Mr Dent take turns teaching the little Miss English, and the way her tongue rolls over the unfamiliar vowels doesn't remind him of anyone but her. He is glad for small mercies.
With time he discovers that there are other things she inherited from Martha and Thomas beside her appearance (and it's pain and pleasure wrapped into one, to see them both in her, still alive so long after he buried them).
The little Miss has Thomas’ shyness and Martha's freespiritness and yet… yet, when she talks, the now familiar cadence of her voice mimics his own, and so do her mannerisms.
It's strange seeing so much of himself in her, when he can't see the same in Bruce (it's strange, seeing her acting that way when she looks so much like Thomas and Martha it hurts). It's even more strange to see Martha and Thomas lurking just behind her eyes or in the gentle curl of her mouth when she smiles, when she never met them at all.
The little Miss asks about them, about her grandparents, about Thomas and Martha, sometimes. It's normal, he guesses, for her to want to know more about the two people whose loss shaped so much of her father's life, about the two people whose loss paved the way to her own life too.
But Alfred never knows what to tell her, because how does one explain to a nine year old (even one as intelligent, as mature, as she is) the pang of loss, of long-buried longing, moving in his chest everytime she mentions them (how does one explain that he loved Thomas and Martha truly and completely, with all his heart, and yet he hated them both with his whole being)? He simply can't, so his mouth moves in automatic and only tells her trivial things, and the little Miss, who is as perceptive (if not more perceptive) than his dear Bruce, stops asking altogether, after a while. She is like Thomas in that regard, he guesses, always gentle with the kind truths that hurt, always sweet even when she is being everything but that.
The little Miss is like Bruce, he discovers at some point after her ninth birthday, sharp, intelligent and slippery, so much so that neither him or Bruce himself are able to keep her away from the truth of her parent's murder, from the Batcave and then, later, from dishing out vigilante justice in a spandex suit.
He must say that, even if the thought of her out in the streets, at night, scares him, her need for justice (albeit fueled by revenge) makes him extremely proud.
The little Miss has rage inside her, so much rage he sometimes struggles to understand how such fury can be held back by her tiny frame. Bruce isn’t scared of her rage (how can he be, when her outburst mirrors his own) but he does fret about the way she seems to be unable to let her rage go.
And yet…yet Bruce is seemingly blind to the fact that the little Miss's rage isn't only made of violent outbursts, not at all. The little Miss has a way of carrying herself, like there are thousands of years worth of rage, passed down through her bloodline, slowly piled up, generation after generation, thrumming in every cell in her body, but laid dormant under her paper-like skin. A casual, freezing kind of calm, something carefully crafted and carefully maintained, but only surface level. Bruce doesn’t have that kind of rage inside him. His fury burns fiery hot, but Martha’s? Martha’s rage could have frozen hell over, and the little Miss is her grandmother’s carbon copy at heart.
The little Miss looks like Martha when she cries, her sobs not out of pain or sadness but out of frustration, out of rage.
She looks like Martha when she was bawling her eyes out, when Thomas was at work, when she confessed to him she believed her husband was having an affair and that SHE should have been the one to cheat on him, not her spineless husband. The little Miss isn’t that cruel, her rage not as vicious, not as cold, not as calculated, but just as endless as her grandmother’s, and her tears, on the collar of his shirt, feel like the ones Martha's tear-stained cheeks smeared on his own, while her lipstick left stains on his lips and on his mustache.
The little Miss is rage-fueled and rage-driven and yet...yet, when she is eleven, she willingly lets (most of) her rage lay dormant, because the little kid she has picked up and elected as her brother doesn't deserve it.
The little Miss walks through life (even after everything life took away from her), skinless, with her arms and heart wide open to the world. The little Miss, his granddaughter, has every reason (far more reasons that Martha ever had) to hate the world and to want to watch it burn, but she chooses to love instead.
It hurts. It hurts because, as much as she looks like Martha (her delicate bones, her nose, her chin, her forehead, the shape of her eyes complete with the infinite melancholy inside them), for as much her rage is the same as her grandmother’s too, their similarities are only so deep.
It hurts because his granddaughter's hair is as black as a raven's wing and she goes through life skinless and, when she laughs, she does so with her body thrown back, her face open and so radiant with joy it seems the sun shines only on her face.
It hurts because her eyes are electric blue and she has the penchant of saving anyone slightly pathetic who comes her way (and who was more pathetic than him, once upon a time, when he was a freshly discharged MI6 agent alone in the world and directionless?), and to make those people love her, like Bruce, Mr Dent and the little Master Jason already do (and it's a crazy thought to entertain, and yet Alfred knows they are just the first three names added to a long, long list of people that will make the world burn in her stead, if she ever wishes for it).
She is so similar to Thomas it scares him, sometimes.
And yes, Bruce is almost identical to Thomas, appearance-wise, but the little Miss? The little Miss IS Thomas. And Alfred will have to learn how to see him behind her eyes, and to love her anyway (without the baggage, without the hate he still carries towards Thomas himself) even if he doesn't want to.
Thomas was able to bewitch the world and Martha was full of rage and Alfred doesn't know which one of those characteristics drew the Terminator to the little Miss, he only knows that, if he'll ever have the occasion, not even his accelerated healing factor will be able to save the mercenary.
The little Miss is a people hoarder. People fall into her horbit and they are unable to leave it (like him, like Bruce, like Mr Dent, like the little master, like the Justice League and the Teen Titans and Deathstroke the Terminator too). That, like almost everything else, she inherited from her grandfather.
There are other things the little Miss has taken from Thomas, things that he would like to forget, like the man's softness and his sweetness and his unintentional cruelty.
He wonders how he managed to go on for all those years without him. He wonders how he can keep going on, always carrying Thomas inside himself.
It's in the little things, really.
The little Miss laughs, her head thrown back, and all he sees is Thomas.
He sees Thomas as he was in the lazy mornings when Martha was half-way through the world for one of her charity events.
He is glad when the little Miss fights with Bruce. When she is so much like Bruce he can forget, for a few, fleeting istants, that she is Thomas.
He is less glad for the way it hurts the little Master who looks at them and, every time without fail, cites the incipit of Anna Karenina (all happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way) as if begging him to disagree. Alfred never does.
There are some calls, the ones for the Manor and not the Batcave, that ring in the middle of the night. Those calls are only forwarded to his rooms. And, when he has almost forgotten that she is all Thomas even under her Martha and Bruce's facade, Roy Harper-Queen calls start to happen. And the young man rants time and time again, in the middle of the night, about how much he loves “his” Robbie (as if anyone could ever have his granddaughter, as if anyone could ever be foolish enough to hope to have Thomas) about how wrong they were together even if he wants them to be “them” still and then there are only the sounds of him barfing and almost gagging on his own vomit. For a mad moment Alfred wonders if he is in withdrawal or closer to overdose than ever before (because, like most of high society's secrets, Roy-Harper Queen's addiction is no secret at all, just a known truth whispered with disdain at galas). And Alfred doesn't know Roy Harper-Queen, and doesn't care for him, but he is barely older than his granddaughter and so he ends up calling Mrs Lance-Queen, because he knows the boy doesn’t have a good relationship with his father, Oliver Queen, and he hopes that the one with his step-mother is a little better. The calls stop. He hopes the young man is okay.
And Alfred loves his granddaughter, but she is Thomas, and it hurts him. She is Thomas, and Alfred suddenly is back in the Master bedroom of the Manor, the silk sheets pooled around his ankles, Thomas’ naked body against his keeping him warm (he is back when love was so, so wrong).
His granddaughter is Thomas and her mouth (Talia’s mouth) tells him secrets and half-truths and begs him for them to never reach Bruce's ears and he is back in the study, back when Thomas still sat behind the desk. And Thomas is smiling that public-relationship smile of his, that same smile that broke his heart every time Thomas reminded him that knowing the truth would break poor poor Martha's heart. Alfred wonders how some instants manage to stay there forever.
Alfred wonders about the nature itself of guilt, but he was a spy, once upon a time, and back then, just like now, one more secret can't hurt him.
The weights of all the secrets he carries sits heavily on his stomach. He wonders if, one day, they'll manage to tear him open from the inside. But he loves his granddaughter (and, once upon a time, he loved Thomas too) and so he swears he won't tell and she smiles, her smile different from Thomas’ and yet the same.
And then, then his little Miss, his granddaughter, comes back home, her eyes broken and void and utterly hers and hers alone. Wonder Girl flakes her side, almost looming, a kind of protectiveness in her eyes that scares him. His granddaughter doesn't say a thing, simply collapses in his arms, her sobbs powerful enough to shake her whole body. And he holds her and he calls her his little Miss and his precious girl (because she is) and he discovers that he has always been so, so wrong, so unfair to her, because his granddaughter may resemble Thomas in a myriad of different ways, but she isn't him, she'll never be. His granddaughter is fragile and scared and sweet and he keeps holding her hand long after she has calmed down. His granddaughter is fifteen, and she shouldn't know pain and violence at all and yet both those things are an integral part of who she is. His granddaughter is fifteen, and Alfred should have been better at protecting her, but he wasn't.
When he actually discovers what happened, from Bruce’s short, clipped, pained, retelling he only feels rage. A rage so deep and so true he knows Martha would be proud of him. The only reason for which Bruce doesn't have to stop him from reaching for his shotgun and marching to Bludhaven to have a little "chat” with Carlos Flores is because Talia already did it for him. For the first time he doesn't completely despise the woman.
He observes the little Miss, after.
And for the first time he manages to really see what lays behind her mask (behind all of her masks). His granddaughter is a being of wonder and rage and, above everything else, love. And that love ends up taking the form of Kid Flash, Wallace Rudolph West. She loves him, truly and completely, without reservations (she loves him in all the ways Thomas wasn't able to love him or Martha). And the young boy loves her too (as if there was any doubt about that, as if there could be any universe, any kind of alternate reality in which the Thomas in her would have allowed for her to not be loved).
He thinks about Thomas, about the way he could never reach for him, about the way he could never really have him. He thinks about Martha and how her rage, her pain, was the only reason she wanted him in her bed (in her and Thomas’ bed, that same bed he visited so often when she was away).
He looks at the little Miss and at her young man, at the way they can't seem to bear to ever be apart, at the way they aren't afraid to be in love.
He had Martha and he had Thomas, for some years. He loved them. He resented them. He adored them. He hated them for the lies and the subterfuges and the fact they made him their mistress.
Once upon a time Alfred was loved and he was used and abused too. Looking at his granddaughter and her boy he understands it like he never did before.
And then, then the little Master dies and the little Miss mask gets thorn to pieces once more, just in a different place. And under it all, she is like him, revenge in her heart and not afraid to take a life for those she loves.
Around that time the little Miss gets Crowned as the most beautiful woman in the world (a foregone conclusion, really, one already set in stone when she was much, much younger, one they could formalize only when she came of age).
He doesn't think she is all that happy with her new title. He doesn't think she is all that happy about a lot of things (bar her young man, Wallace, who seems to be the only one able to teether her, nowadays). She reminds him of Martha. On top of the world and yet always dwelling in the might-have-beens, always broken hearted (but, in stark contrast with Martha, the little Miss knows pain in a tangible way, and he can't begrounge her for her sadness, for her infinite unhappiness).
And in all the pain, in all the rage that follows her shattered mask and her coronation, little Timmy Drake comes to them, so eager to help them all. And Alfred only hears Janet Drake's calculative mind in his words and looking in his eyes (that are an exact replica of Martha's) only reminds him how he failed Bruce when he was twenty-two and more kid than man, when he was unable to steer him away from the woman's claws. Alfred looks at Timothy Drake and only sees Janet and Martha, but he already made this kind of mistake once, with the Little Miss, and so he keeps his mouth shut and watches all the ways in which the new little Master manages to dull some of his granddaughter's pain.
And then little Master Jason comes back, and his eyes are as green as Talia's. And Alfred hates Talia, but he loves his (first) grandson, so he simply hugs the boy and helps him avoid Bruce and gives him all the love he won't accept again from his own father. It hurts Bruce, he knows, the fact that he and Rikki and Jason are so close and that he is an outsider, but Alfred won't stop, because stopping would mean losing his two oldest grandkids, forever, and he can't. Little Master Tim engranes himself in their menage, after a while.
And their family isn't perfect or ever truly fairy-tale happy, but they are happy, in their own way, and Alfred almost manages to kid himself into thinking that Lev Tolstoj was wrong.
But their lives are written by some particularly capricious god, and Talia (once again) disrupts their tentative happiness.
Little Master Damian is a gremlin, so similar to the little Miss it hurts. And yes, little Master Damian is a carbon copy of Bruce and Thomas, physically wise, but he is Rikki, he is Rikki with her own brand of pain and suffering and eternal struggle for love.
He and little Master Tim don't get along (which is honestly baffling considering Timothy's more than close relationship with Rikki). He and little Master Jason got along, he discovers, once upon a time, when they both were in the League, but ever since little Master Damian appeared and tried to spear the little Miss they can't be in the same room without snarling at each other. But the little Miss? The little Miss adores him (how can she not, when he is an exact replica of herself, how can she not, when she understands him so intimately well?). She adores him in all the ways a child can be adored and she manages to steadfastly erode even the boy's barriers.
After all, for all his girl isn't Thomas, she still carries pieces of him inside herself (like Alfred himself does) and the world is never gonna stop loving her.
Things once again stabilize themselves, even if it feels like his grandsons are all fighting for their sister's attention. And his granddaughter gives, gives always gives, her heart content and full as it never was before.
His granddaughter helps little Master Damian acclimate to their world and he ends up following her like a little duckling, like her personal, bening shadow. It's strange seeing them, in the dim lights of the boy's room, and seeing the ghosts of Martha and a young Bruce. It's strange, but he brushes it off, at least up until someone first expresses what he only barely entertained in the confines of his own mind. Someone says mom, and little Master Damian looks into the little Miss eyes first, always, because her eyes are the only one he knows how to see in a motherly fashion (and Alfred feels so, so much hate towards Talia, their mother, the one who forsake them both). Someone says mom and, when little Master Damian is injured, he too says mama, his eyes and his arms always searching for Rikki as if in a prayer for comfort.
Little Master Damian says mama, and Alfred recalls some old words little Master Jason quoted him, once upon a time, when his eyes were still teal colored and full of wonder. He recalls his tone, his eyes brimming with tears, while his hands smoothed the yellowed pages of Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”, his tone full of emotion while reading “Mom is the name for god in the lips and hearts of little children.” and he knows, with a devastating certainty, that’s his youngest grandson’s truth.
His granddaughter talks to little Master Tim about his idea of dropping out of school, and her tone is void of any kind of condescending and the boy agrees to keep working on his diploma, if only to make her happy. Sometimes Alfred has the impression that his middle grandson only aspiration in life is to make his sister happy, and that thought would scare him if his devotion was towards anyone else bar Rikki, who loves him with her whole heart and who will always steer him towards the best path available.
His granddaughter convinces little Master Jason to be somewhat pacific with Bruce and to actually use his trust fund. She is the one who helps him file his college applications and who brings him text book shopping and who drives him to college on the first day of the semester. She is the one who teethers him during his episodes, the only one who always makes the cursed green in his eyes retrocede a bit.
And Alfred thought he and Bruce were doing a good job at raising the boys and it's like a slap to the face to see the way they never did it at all. That it was Rikki, always Rikki, only Rikki, who always treated them as the kids (more or less grown) they actually are.
It hurts. It hurts to see the way his granddaughter had to grow up so fast, the same way in which she prevented her brothers from doing so. He is so proud of her. Of the girl who he and Bruce tried to raise and who ended up raising herself.
And, in a day like any other, Mr West graces their threshold for the first time, and asks for the little Miss’ hand.
Alfred is proud of Bruce and of his easy acceptance.
Alfred is even more proud of his grandsons and their willingness to protect their sister with any means necessary.
He polishes his rifle in front of Mr West, who is a fine, well mannered young man, intelligent enough to understand his silent threat for what it is.
And yes, the young man makes the little Miss happy, but if he'll ever hurt his granddaughter Alfred will make sure he won't see another sunrise.
It's strange, alien, seeing Martha's ring on the little Miss’ finger (it's strange seeing her looking at it like a gift, when Martha herself looked at it like a shackle). But the little Miss is happy, and so are her brothers and Bruce, and so Alfred is happy too.
And yes, they are all a little broken, and their family dynamic is messed up beyond words, but they are happy and Lev Tolstoj was wrong.
Someone has to leave first, that's the inevitable tragedy of life (that's the inevitable tragedy of being in love). It is an old story, one he knows well and that he taught to his son and to all his grandchildren.
And yet…yet it doesn't spare his granddaughter from pain, not when her boy, not when her love, is slowly wasting away.
And yet…yet Alfred knows in the deep of his heart, that he did the right thing, telling them (because otherwise little Master Jason wouldn't have thrown his body over his sister's, wouldn't have had the heart to kill her trust in him, if not for the fact that otherwise, the one who would have left first would have been her, hand in hand with her dear Wallace). After…after he hugs his oldest grandson close and thanks him for what he did.
Someone has to leave first even in their family. He is glad that someone wasn't his granddaughter, even if now her eyes are empty. But Alfred is old, while the little Miss is young, and he will make sure that his brilliant, brilliant girl won't take that place from him, he will make sure to be that kind of first.
But his granddaughter's eyes never become full again. Wallace died and Rikki…Rikki simply stopped, for a while.
He offers to help her pack away Wallace's things, like he already did once before, with Martha and Thomas’ room, while trying to forget the way they both sounded when they came. She refuses, a gentle smile on her lips, her eyes sunken and so similar to voids they scare him.
The tabloids go crazy over her, over their beauty queen turned in mourning widow without even the grace of a wedding ring on her finger. Alfred hates them. He hates them like he hated the paps that once described Martha and Thomas as a perfect couple in love gone too soon.
And then, after a while, the little Miss’ eyes are bright once again, and so fake they may as well be made of plastic. The little Miss is like him, he understands at once. Alfred is a being of duality (the servant of two masters in his very being), he knows that intimally well. The little Miss, for as much she tries to hide it, is a being of duality too (he guesses that's what she took from him), Thomas and Martha eternally at war inside her, a perennial struggle between rage and love and pain and deception. In the end, all of those things win, and they do it in the worst way possible. The little Miss pushes her rage and despair and her love into a tiny place inside her, to fester like a wound, or grow like a baby. And she goes on, her crown of beauty firmly put on her head, her eyes already void of any kind of light at the ripe old age of twenty-three. A widow without the right to call herself so, a mere shadow of the girl she was before.
And Alfred saw her card movements. Both him and Bruce did. She wasn't trying to hide them. She was waiting for a baby in her belly (a last gift from her young man, a last anchor for her heart) and instead, she gave birth to her own grief.
She perseveres nonetheless.
The little Miss gets a promotion a work, a big one, becoming the youngest district attorney the USA has ever had. And Alfred's son and his graddaughter never knew how to talk to each other. They always fought instead, growls and snarls and shouts and fists their primarily means of comunication. This time it isn't all that different. Bruce puts his mother's infamous pearls neacklace on his daughter's troath and Alfred knows, he KNOWS, that his son views it as a nice gesture, as a toughtful congratulatory gift, as a proof of his love for his firstborn, even. But all Alfred (and his graddaughter too, he thinks) see is an omen if grief. He is still glad that, in the moment Bruce put that damnedd necklace on Rikki, he didn't see the ghosts of Thomas and Martha in their stead.
The little Miss is Thomas, and she is Martha and she is Bruce (she is also him, but that isn't all that important) the three people Alfred loved the most wrapped into one, so deeply intertwined that it's almost impossible to see where she ends and they begin. The little Miss is a wonderful, wonderful human being and he is proud of calling her his granddaughter, just like he is proud of being called her grandad. He would like to be a better grandad, sure, and he would like to be able to soothe her pain, but he can't, and it destroys him.
The first thing he feels when little Master Tim tells him what happened isn’t grief. As horrible as it may seem, the first thing he feels for his granddaughter's death is a terrible sense of dejavu.
Rikki was Thomas. She has always been Thomas.
Rikki was Martha too, even if in some more subdued ways.
Rikki was Thomas and she was Martha and they both died young.
Rikki was Thomas and she was Martha, and Thomas and Martha died a long, long time ago, their blood dirtying another man's hands.
His granddaughter has been dead since the beginning, he realizes in a somewhat detached way.
It was always gonna happen that way.
He was just trying to kid himself, he realizes, seeing the same old story unfold again, knowing how it ended, and still hoping for a happy ending, still hoping for his wonderful, wonderful girl to live the life she always deserved (but her heart died in the Arctic together with Mr West and his hopes have always been hollow).
He realizes all at once that Lev Tolstoj was right, that he was always gonna be right.
He doesn't watch the video. He can't. Not when he knows the Clown destroyed his little Miss, his granddaughter.
He doesn't watch the video. He can't. Not when she looks like Martha and she talks like Bruce and her eyes are the same as Thomas because she is Thomas. Not when she is his granddaughter and the mirror image of everything he loved and lost.
Not for the first time he wonders how nice it would be living life the other way around, to reverse the direction of time and become, perhaps, a little wiser, a little less rule abiding, a little more ruthless.
He wonders how it would be better to browse back the calendar days, with the experience of an old man, the body of a young man, erase all his mistakes.
But, for the first time, he knows for sure what his mistake was. His mistake was to leave the Clown alive, alive after he hurted young master Jason.
He is the one who has to beautify her corpse. He didn't need to do it for Thomas and Martha, who were both taken away by a state coroner. He didn't need to do it (thankfully) for young master Jason, whose body was still warm when he was thrown in the pits. But he has to do it for the little Miss, because she never liked much for strangers to touch her (and Leslie is a good doctor, a great doctor, really, but a stranger nonetheless), so he is the one who has to peel back her blood encrusted tailleur and to wash her and to re-dress her into her favorite dress, the blue piece Vera Wang custom made for her.
Under the blood and the bruises she looks livid, her veins almost black on her too-pale complexion.
He is the one who has to put the blush on her cheekbones and the lipstick on her lips and the eyeshadow on her lids. He is the one who has to put the concealer on her face and her collarbones and her arms and her shins and to make sure that the scars she earned in her long, long life as a vigilante stay hidden.
And his granddaughter was twenty-five, and she fought for sixteen years.
He doesn’t even know if she could picture life any other way. He doesn't think any of his grandkids can think of life in any other way, because no ten years old should know how to use a katana, just like no thirteen years old should know how to take down entire governative agencies with a couple of clicks, just like no eight years old should carry a switchblade in their pocket and another one hidden in his sock, just like no nine years old should know one hundred and nineteen seven styles of martial arts (seventeen of which unknown to humankind before). In the end, his granddaughter is dead, their family in shambles, because she was their glue. In the end, the world doesn't stop, but they do, because Rikki simply was that kind of person, the kind with a gravitational pull around everyone else around her. And they all abused that peculiarity of hers.
Everyone expected something from the little Miss.
Bruce expected her to be a light in the family, because he still saw her as the nine year old Robin who gave HIM hope.
Her brothers expected her to be the pillar of the family, the one who always had a kind smile, the one who could heal everything broken in the world with a warm hug (the smile was fake and her hugs were cold).
The League saw her as the perfect foil, as the paragon to which shape an entire new generation of heroes.
And Alfred himself, he expected Rikki to be Martha and Thomas and Bruce and him.
Rikki was there from almost the very beginning, and saw every shatter and break in their family, and she had to see how they came back together again, only to fight, and argue, and scream, and blame, and she had to remember. She had to remember a time before it all, a time when she had a mom and a dad both and nobody expected her to be anything at all and she was still whole. He doesn't think their family ever gave her anything but burdens and pain. For a mad, mad moment he wonders if she accepted death, welcomed it even, as a relief. But the thought is too horrific to bear, and so he helps his grandsons in their quest to the impossible, in their quest to make their family whole again.
He even accepts to work against Bruce that, in his grief-aided state, decided that being buried In an ice-casket, eternally asleep, eternally just out of the grasps of reality, was something the little Miss would have wanted for herself, even when there are ways to bring her back (even if the means to bring her back would entertain put her in the nest of shadows that birthed her).
He even accepts working with Talia and Deathstroke, which are the worst of the worst humanity can offer, if it means making sure that his granddaughter will be alive once again.
The hop doesn’t go as planned. The shadows dear to Ra's attack them just when dear, dear young Master Jason has finished digging the little Miss out of her grave.
Then it's just a blur, a blur in which he shoots and he fights and he hopes that his oldest grandson will manage to do everything as planned, carrying his sister's corpse to the Zetas and to put the coordinates to the closest pit available.
But the shadows are too many, and they have almost surrounded them, and he has just enough time to see Jason dragging Rikki (dragging her, not carrying her, his granddaughter walking on her own two feet, even if unsteadly, a little miracle in his own right) to the Zetas and to go to the last destination put there.
He watches the security videos, a few hours later. He sees her waking up, her eyes golden instead of blue (they aren't similar to Thomas’ anymore and it's hard, but not as hard as he thought it would be) and so confused and afraid they make him ache. He sees Jason, the sweet, sweet boy he is, helping her trembling form out of her grave, his hands steady (but just because hers aren't) while guiding her away, to safety.
He sees them, hand in hand, half-running, half-scrambling to safety. He sees them, his oldest grandkids, the ones whose blood dirties the same hands (the ones whose murders weren't avenged by him, weren't avenged by Bruce, but by God-damned Harvey Dent), the ones who both walked out of their graves (the ones who gave Alfred his two, little, enormous, miracles).
He sees them, taking the Zetas, the last destination on the pad displaying the codes for the Watchtower.
He can't wait to see his family whole again.