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When she comes back up, the green is gone from her eyes.
Blue again.
The blue of spring.
Of rebirth without miracle.
Her skin isn’t gray anymore, it glows with color, fevered and human.
Her lungs ache for air.
Her chest hurts from rhythm.
She presses her fingers to her pulse and feels it kick against her skin like a wild thing.
Her proof.
Her defiance.
Her resurrection earned, not given.
And yet…Dixie feels…she feels…she doesn’t know what she feels.
Not exactly. Not in any way that has a name.
Her thoughts come slow, dragging like chains through water, and her body feels like something borrowed. Like clothing she put on in a rush and never took off.
She tries to feel something.
Anything.
But the truth comes to her like fog, not fire.
She is not angry.
That much, at least, she knows.
There is no molten fury chewing her up from the inside, no blistering hate clawing beneath her skin, no phantom fire licking at her bones.
None of that wild, uncontrollable madness Jason once screamed about when he came back, raw and consuming, a wildfire crawling through his veins.
None of that shaking, too-fast rage that felt like acid poured in the bloodstream that Damian whispered about at night, voice cracked down the middle.
Even Talia, once, told her of it in hushed tones: the Pit’s rage, the madness, the breaking.
But there is no heat behind her eyes, no fire crackling through her marrow.
No howling, no screaming, no pulse pounding against her skull.
There is no rupture in her. No unraveling.
Just a stillness. A strange, hollow stillness.
Like the silence after an explosion.
Like the quiet of a room that used to be full.
And that’s strange.
It should terrify her.
But it doesn’t.
Because maybe…maybe the Pits can’t break what’s already been broken.
Maybe they can't distort a shape that never had a clean outline to begin with.
And maybe that’s because the fire has always been there.
And maybe, that’s because she has always been angry.
Rage is not new to her.
It’s not a side effect. It's not a symptom. It’s not an infection.
It is the ground she walks on. The sky she breathes.
It’s her baseline.
She’s carried rage for so long she doesn't remember when it started, because it was already there in her earliest memories, before she had language, before she had rules.
She was born with it, maybe.
Her inheritance. Her birthright. Her first and most faithful companion.
Rage was her lullaby.
A mother tongue she never had to learn.
She was raised with it coiled around her ribs like barbed wire.
It always lived inside her like a second heartbeat.
It told her she was alive.
It told her she could survive.
So this, whatever the Pit gave her, whatever it wanted to birth into her soul, it isn’t new.
Because even the pit cannot twist what is already bent.
It cannot ignite what has always burned.
It cannot own what has already been stolen.
It has nothing new to offer her.
It’s just another current in the ocean she’s always been drowning in.
So what she feels is…emptiness.
Maybe that’s all that’s left.
A stillness so complete it feels holy. Or maybe obscene.
No righteous rage to guide her steps.
No horror to flinch from.
No fear left in her body to tremble with.
Nothing.
She is the alpha and the omega of herself, the beginning and the end, the birth and the burial of everything she has ever been.
She is empty.
And the world around her is too loud.
Too bright. Too alive. Too colorful.
She doesn't think she ever saw the world to be that colorful. Or maybe she did. Maybe she just managed to forget (maybe all she thought to be just a beautified version of reality her kid mind created was the truth. Maybe whatever festered inside her for years and brought her back from death also stole the color from her eyes).
And she is a dull echo in a vibrant world.
She thinks she is still Rikki (still Rania, still Rabi'a), maybe.
But it’s a distant thought, as if spoken through a closed door.
She is herself, and yet, so far removed from the girl she was, it almost feels like wearing a stranger’s skin.
Because that name (HER name) feels like a costume too.
A label that belongs to someone else, someone bright and sharp and laughing.
Someone smaller.
Someone who bled, once.
Someone who died.
Because make no mistake Dixie DIED (and maybe…maybe she is still dead, even now, with her heart beating in her ribcage like a frantic bird trying to escape it's confinement).
She didn’t die on the fair's grounds, not really.
That was just the final act. The closing breath.
She died quietly, in a thousand moments before that final one, when the Joker's hands found her throat.
In beds where she wasn’t safe.
In glances that treated her like a tool.
In battles she fought alone and in victories no one cheered.
In two sets of lips that promised her forever and kissed her goodbye anyways.
(It's unfair, she knows it. Wally had wanted that forever, maybe even more desperately than she did. He didn’t want to say goodbye. But he did. He did and she was left alone to pick up the pieces of their missed happily ever after.)
Piece by piece, year by year, until there was barely anything left to kill.
And now she stands again.
When she drags herself out of the pit, her skin steaming, her body shaking, her lungs gulping air like a creature starving for it, Ra’s is kneeling beside her, hands trembling with reverence.
His touch on her face makes her recoil, not physically, but somewhere deeper, somewhere she can’t quite name.
His touch feels foreign, like a wrong note in a familiar melody.
His voice, crooning praise in her ear, naming her 'heir', makes her feel less like a child reclaimed, and more like a relic unearthed.
She has just re-awakened, her pulse barely renowned, and he is already whispering about legacy, about 'being a proper Al-Ghul'.
As if she belongs to him.
As if the blood in her veins grants him ownership of her soul.
But she is not his.
Not his daughter.
She is Talia’s daughter.
Bruce’s daughter.
(Above all she is John's daughter. Mary's daughter. And Ra's killed them both.)
Born of war and choice, of sorrow and longing.
The firstborn of their blood.
The only child of their line he did not groom, did not own, did not name.
He broke Talia, tried to mold her into a weapon (and robbed Dixie of the mother she always wanted).
He whispered in Bruce’s ear and poisoned everything he touched.
He taught Damian. Watched over him like a vulture over a promising corpse. Trained him like a wolf on a leash. He whispered orders into his ears and called it destiny.
He gave life back to Jason with the sole objective of destroying their family.
He coveted Tim's mind to the point of obsession.
He tried to shape them all, Talia, her brothers, even Bruce.
He tried to own them.
But Dixie?
She slipped through his fingers.
She was the one he couldn’t get his claws into.
The one who grew up without his hand to guide her.
And yet, impossibly, she became the very thing he always wanted.
Disciplined. Sharp. Ruthless. Brilliant. Loyal.
A force of will carved out of pain and purpose. In his image, but in spite of him.
And that’s what makes her so valuable to him now.
She is his greatest success precisely because she was never his.
A perfect product of his philosophy without his (direct) interference.
Proof that his blood, his legacy, needs no gardener to bloom into power.
And he wants to claim her now.
Now that she has bled and burned and risen.
Now that she fits the mold he always imagined.
Now she’s back from the Pit.
Now she’s supposed to be changed.
Twisted. Corrupted. Broken open.
Except she isn’t.
He calls her ‘granddaughter’ and ‘his’ like it's sacred.
Like it erases what he’s done (like it erases how he drove her mother to abandon her. Like it erases her parents' blood in the sand).
But blood isn’t love.
Blood is a story someone else wrote for her, and love is the part where she burns it.
She wants to tear his cold hands away.
She wants to spit in his face.
So she does.
It isn’t rage that drives her. Rage is cheap. Rage is for the young and the reckless. Dixie Wayne died once already, clawed her way back, and left her fury in the grave. What moves through her now is something colder. Something rooted. Something with memory.
Her hand snaps across his throat fast as thought. No ceremony. No speech. His body crumples at her feet before the echo finishes ringing, folding like silk, like memory, like an empire. The Pit bubbles behind her, green and hungry, laughing in the dark.
For a second, she just stares at him, at the face that made and unmade her bloodline.
The man who stole her mother’s motherhood, who broke her brother before he was born, who taught her father how to build worlds out of loss.
Her grandfather.
Her inheritance.
Her curse.
The pit quiets, as if holding its breath.
Steam rises, thin and ghostly, curling around her fingers like smoke from a sanctified pyre.
“You don’t get to own me,” she says softly.
Maybe to him.
Maybe to God.
Her hands are shaking, but not from weakness.
From life.
From everything surging back at once: pulse, hunger, blood, rage, relief.
He will raise again.
Maybe.
If his shadows manage to find him quickly enough.
If what will be left of him after she is done will be enough to be brought back.
Because there is a secret.
One none outside the original Titans (and her little Jaybird) knows.
Jason was always fond of explosives. Everyone knows that. The waiting, the planning, the noise, the thrill of watching things come apart.
But fascination isn’t enough to build a bomb.
It takes chemistry (and Dixie spent half her life rubbing elbows with a good damn chemist, because her fiancé is a genius, even if he is shy to admit it.)
It takes math (and the world was always quick to forget math has always been Dixie's true academic vocation, because people preferred to think of her as something prettier and simpler.)
It takes a good containment plan (and what better back up than an indestructible Amazon and an exceptionally skilled in water manipulation Atlantean.)
And someone who knows how to hit exactly what they’re aiming at (Roy always did. So did she. And Jason…Jason learned it too, with time.)
Bombs also require money.
Freedom.
Time.
The rest was logistics.
Because Bruce Wayne always was many things, but present was rarely one of them.
There were long afternoons in the Manor where silence stretched through the halls like a held breath. Alfred did what he could, God knows he did, but Alfred had his days off, and Bruce was somewhere else saving the world, and Jason was bored in that dangerous, restless way of his.
Those were the afternoons Dixie brought him to the Tower.
Because the Tower had everything (because Dixie too was just a kid, back then).
The brains.
The resources.
The equipment.
And five kids (because, back then, there were just five of them, the Original Titans. Because, back then, they were all just stupid kids) with too much power, too much curiosity, and absolutely no supervision.
In the end it only ever takes one spark.
One match.
When she leaves the chamber, her footsteps echo against the stone.
Human.
Alive.
And somewhere far below the mountain, something is already burning.
When she reaches the mountainside, she falls to her knees in the snow and laughs until she sobs, not because she’s happy, but because she’s finally hurting.
Because hurt means alive.
Nanda Parbat smokes slightly behind her.
(And maybe, maybe only an Al-Ghul could destroy an Al-Ghul, maybe she was always meant to be the bane of her own blood).
Later, when she returns to Gotham, Bruce will see her eyes first and think she’s cured.
Wally will touch her face and know she’s not.
Because she didn’t come back from that kind of fire unchanged.
She just learnt how to keep burning without turning to ash.