A/N I'm still not happy with it but it has been sitting around for months now so I thought I better toss it out there. There is a quote I've borrowed from 'Sherlock Holmes' in there as well because I thought it suited and would have been around at about the same time. Enjoy.

Smallness

When they had met for the first time he had remarked on it immediately. Striding across the table, knocking cutlery flying, he had jumped down in front of her and crouched on the same level.

"I was not expecting the Alice to be so small."

She had looked at him a little sadly and sighed.

"I know I am quite small for my age but Daddy says I will grow, just like he did." Her face lit up at the thought of her Daddy. "Besides, Daddy says that it is the little things that are infinitely the most important." The look she gave him was so fiery and defiant that he laughed. He knew this was the Alice.

"How right your Father is!" he smiled and tilted his head. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" and before she could answer he interrupted. "Come have tea with us!"

Yes, she had been only a small child when they first met but he had liked her immediately. She was quick-minded and light-hearted and so curious. There had been no laughing children in Underland for so long that the joy of a child's delight sent off lightbeams. He had laughed for the first time in a long while.

They had tea together. Such a simple thing, and she sat there politely and asked for things with please's and thankyou's as he offered, and yet was not so very surprised when the March Hare threw a teacup at her head and she ducked.

"What a funny way you do tea parties here," she had remarked and giggled.

Alice had seemed like she had always lived in Underland, and he knew that she was the one, the Alice, because this Alice brought something with her into Underland that she did not know she carried but was so vital to the despairing world. Hope. She was their salvation and she didn't even know it yet. She was still too small. So they said goodbye to her for the first time and life fell back into its dank desolation and all Underland waited for her to return.

It was a long wait. He forgot how to laugh and how to cry. He only knew how to feel bitterness and anger. Hope was a rapidly extinguishing light merely kept alive by her memory.

When she returned, the Alice, his Alice, he knew her immediately. He could sense her; hope and life increasing every step closer she got. He wanted to squeeze her in greeting or spin her in delight but she was still too small! It would have crushed her. Her muchness was suffocated by the layers and layers of expectations her world had piled on top of her but he could still see the flicker. She was not the Alice she had been but she was still her. He'd know her anywhere. He had faith she would become who he knew she really was; a faith that meant he would even surrender to the Red Queen to protect her.

When he saw her in the throne room something happened to him he could not explain. It was the Alice sitting there, the one with the muchness, the Alice he met when she was a child…but so much more. She was grown up. She was beautiful. Such odd feelings he had never felt before. A different form of madness. She found him and reminded him who he was, caught his face in her hands to calm him and he wanted her not to let go. As he looked up into her eyes he felt the madness die to embers and the strangest thoughts invaded his mind. Thoughts of her catching his face when he lost his temper, but future thoughts. Together thoughts. He wanted only her to calm him. He wanted the madness to die because it was her eyes that stopped him. He wanted no one else and no other way. Some other gesture to indicate these strange thoughts seemed to fit in this situation but he didn't know what.

He watched her gather up all her bravery to go find the sword. She searched in every corner, dug through herself and dusted off every scrap she found, adding them to her growing pile until she had just enough. At that moment she shone like he had never seen her shine and it overwhelmed him. He wished she was the right-proper-Alice-size because only the right-proper-Alice-size was the right size to hold.

"Why is it," he whispered with the tiniest slice of longing, "that you are either too small or too tall?"