Work Text:
It began as someone’s idea of a joke.
Though Stephanie swore up and down her field of study was child development, the kitchen table in the Manor had resembled nothing more than the mutant spawn of a craft shop and a toy store disemboweled upon its worn wooden surface since she had gone back to school. Textbooks and scrawled class notes made stacked mountains amid felled forests of crayons and colored pencils and fields of pogs with emoticons stamped on their faces.
It wasn’t clear to anyone why, exactly, her classwork required so much glue. Or maybe it was less her classwork and more her credit-stacking additional work as her professor’s research assistant, another term for unpaid labor and all-around gopher. Like sewage flowing downhill, demands from on high cascaded down from the professor to the TA, the TA to Steph as RA, and from Steph to anyone who had the misfortune of of passing through the Manor when she was there, stressed and swearing furtively under her breath as she tried to glue popsicle sticks together instead of her fingertips. Secretly, a few of them wondered if her actual assignment was to study them as they drew pictures of houses, glued yarn hair on hand puppets, and cut and pasted faces to discs.
The task that day had been to paint tiny wooden peg dolls, round and edgeless like Fisher-Price Little People.
“Just make them look like people,” was all the instruction Steph had given, waving a paintbrush around vaguely, only to add, “Or I guess animals are fine, too, but like. They’ve got to be something identifiable, you know?”
“And these are for… kids?” Tim had asked, doubtful, as he lifted a tiny peg up to his face for inspection.
Steph had nodded without looking up from her own work. “Yeah, for like, play therapy. Pick the one that represents how you’re feeling and act out what’s on your mind, that type of thing. So they can’t all be exactly the same. Diversity, variety.” She had waved a little too hard and flung a light spatter of paint across the tabletop.
No one really minded helping, though they complained good-naturedly any time they were wrenched from their original plans by Steph’s tractor beam of stress. Bruce was so obnoxiously proud of her for continuing her education, but Steph was inconsistent and squirrelly about any kind of financial help, so she stacked an assortment of low-paying shift work atop schoolwork and RA work. If sitting for a half hour and hot-glueing sequins onto paper crowns made the semester a little easier for her, no one would begrudge her the time. It was nice, too, to spend time together, with Steph on field leave and Spoiler’s purple cape temporarily (they said the word with heavy quotations out of earshot—only Steph herself and maybe Bruce believed she would be back) hung up.
Also, there was something relaxing about crafting. There was no pressure to be artistically impressive, though there would always be a mildly competitive air to the communal creation, especially with Damian at the table. It was nice to focus on something other than casework or capework or the demands of adult life. They might not be able to rid Gotham of the ghost guns filtering into its streets or the poverty corroding its foundations, but by george, they could paint eyes on little chunks of wood.
No one could remember (or would confess to) who painted which peg doll afterward—not that it should have mattered, except maybe for Stephanie’s suspected growing case study of all of them, because the dolls were all supposed to be packed up and carted off to… wherever they were supposed to be used. Some professor’s office or a classroom or a therapist’s practice or something. Except one got left behind.
“Look at him, isn’t he precious?” Stephanie cooed a few days later, her voice reaching a pitch that made Titus sit up and tilt his head. She lifted from the ever-morphing chaos on the table a tiny peg doll with dot eyes, a crisp black bow tie, and a pleased u of a smile.
“Is that… Alfred?” Dick’s head had also tilted in an unconscious mimic of Titus as he squinted at the figure pinched between Stephanie’s fingertips.
Stephanie caught movement in the doorway and pivoted on heel with a cry of, “Tim, look!” only for her glittery-eyed glee to sour into a frown at Tim’s grimace. “Migraine?”
“Mm,” Tim replied noncommittally. He had smoothed out his expression and looked almost normal, except for a tightening around his eyes and mouth.
Stephanie’s glare narrowed further. She looked like Babs when she did that, which everyone else found both alarming and effective, so they never told her. “Did you take your meds?”
“Um,” Tim hedged.
“Tim!” Both Dick and Stephanie exclaimed in varying level of exasperation, but only Stephanie then marched forward, doll held in front of her like a cross before a vampire. “Look at him. You don’t want to disappoint him, do you?”
Tim’s eyes nearly crossed in an effort to focus on the tiny figure, then widened. “Uhh.”
“Take your meds,” Steph urged. “For Tiny Alfred.”
Tim took a step back, to escape or to obey, it wasn’t clear. Steph advanced, grabbed his hand, and shoved the little doll into his palm. “No, no, take him with you. He’ll know if you did or not.”
She waved her hand, not in a crossed benediction but in the vague shape of an A. “Go. For Tiny Alfred.”
Tim retreated fully, still clutching the tiny doll.
Dick raised an eyebrow. “Do you think that will work?”
Steph shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”
So began the benevolent dictatorship of Tiny Alfred. He began to appear in odd places, as if by magic—on a shelf, in a drawer, on a windowsill, in a cupboard. No one would own up to moving him, but he seemed to travel the Manor with ease. And then he appeared further afield. Dick found him perched on an unpeeled clementine on his dashboard. Damian found him nestled amid his colored pencils next to the project he had grown frustrated with and given up. Jason found him in his apartment, sitting comfortably atop his night class reading assignment. Cass found him on her bedside table, placed carefully next to the unused tube of medication lotion meant for her hands.
Alfred himself might have fallen under suspicion, but when Tiny Alfred finally made an appearance in his presence (Stephanie; unopened water bottle), he had seemed outwardly bemused but, underneath it all, a little miffed. Frustration that his mini homage worked more effectively than his own pointed glances seemed to disqualify him as a suspect. Bruce, of course, was next on the suspect list, though no one could prove it.
Whoever was deploying Tiny Alfred did so judiciously. He was mostly used as encouragement, perched on or in or near an item to be used, a small, beatific cheerleader in painted tails. He still also made neutral appearances like in his first days, hidden in unexpected places to elicit a startled smile from whoever found him. On rare occasions, he was a gentle warning, forcing the recipient to look into his unblinking ink eyes or—worst of all—physically lift him off the video game controller, the pack of cigarettes, the caffeine pills, the battered boxing gloves, in order to use them. Soon enough, even his presence wasn’t required. A murmured He wouldn’t like that or Not in front of Tiny Alf! was enough to influence behavior. Texts of “WWTAD” (What Would Tiny Alfred Do) became common. When objection was made to names in the field, Tiny Alfred appeared in the Cave, spotlit on the main work bench, an even tinier felt mask tied to his face, Tiny Agent A ready to see to his duty incognito.
It was only a matter of time before, like all heroes before him, Tiny Alfred’s stakes grew. Mundane foes gave way to sharp moments of crisis. Stress. Exhaustion. Injury. Defeat. Heartbreak. A nudge from Tiny Alfred was fine for eating well or taking meds, but when the teeth of obsession refused to release or despair beckoned, Tiny Alfred was a challenge and reminder and invitation to listen all in one, placed openly by whoever needed to next to whoever needed him.
WWTAD.
Tiny Alfred’s most daring battle yet came on a wet, dreary, and miserable November evening, as Bruce sat red-eyed and shivering in front of the Batcomputer. His cheeks were red with fever, his lips pale, his forehead clammy. His eyes weren’t focusing on the screen as he scrolled, instead glassy and drifting, but he refused to go upstairs. No passive-aggressive asides, no pointed looks, no huffs or grumbles or even outright comments seemed to penetrate.
At last, Damian, freshly washed from his post-patrol shower, cowlick askew, awkward in rapidly growing limbs despite his trained control, stomped forward and placed the tiny wooden doll next to his father’s hand.
“Go to bed,” he said, then turned and stomped back up the stairs to the Manor.
The others, still milling about the Cave with pretend tasks, froze.
Bruce pinched Tiny Alfred between his fingertips, the doll impossibly small in such large hands, and brought it up before watery eyes. He stared. He sniffed. Tiny Alfred waited.
Bruce placed the doll carefully down on the desk next to his keyboard, pushed himself to his feet, and mumbled a mucous-heavy, “Goodnight.”
From the desk, Tiny Alfred smiled his tiny smile, pleased.