#why not put it in the tags! most of this is dickbabs anyway lmao

[thychesters]

best of 2020

Rules: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (ish) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

i was tagged a while ago by @lookforanewangle!

i’m tagging, @clearbluewaters, @beck-a-leck, @codenamed-queenie, & @the-imaginative-fox !

2020 was the year i started various projects; some i finished, some i made some progress on, and some i jotted down vague notes for. under the cut are links and snippets!

1. the bigger dickbabs fic.

He’s going to keep messing up her hair if he carries on like he is, one hand framing the line of her jaw and the other serving as an anchor to keep him upright. She leans up into the kiss regardless, following him as he moves and pulls him closer.

“Don’t you have some place to be?” she says against the curve of his lip when he pulls away to breathe. His nose nudges hers.

“Kicking me out already?” His fingers trail along her neck. “Frankly I’d be kind of insulted if I wasn’t on a time crunch.”

“I have work to do, and you aren’t helping,” Barbara murmurs, fingers curling into the collar of his suit. Her other hand skims the length of his bicep. “You can’t really call it a time crunch if you’re making it a point to actively hang around here.”

He hums as he leans in to kiss her again, and she reciprocates in kind. The hand on his arm shifts, tracing along down past his elbow to his wrist, and then her hair comes tumbling back over her shoulder when Dick’s hand moves to embrace hers. The ring catches in the barely there natural light from the window kitty corner to her workstation, and she can almost feel his eyelashes against her cheek when he rests his forehead against hers.

“I like this,” he says, almost to no one in particular, and Barbara interlaces her fingers with his gloved ones with a small huff of a laugh.

“I should hope so, otherwise you asking me just got really awkward.”

so this one i started back in january of 2020! i do have a working title, but that like bits of the plot aren’t totally finalized, lmao. it originally started out following the ric arc and me inserting even more bits of angst in it, but then it morphed into something that totally disregarded ric and was primarily going to be a character piece. the intention was to focus on dick’s recovery after being shot, but the more i read it instead shifted to something with more of a plot.

dick and barbara were engaged prior to him being shot, and while it’s ported as dickbabs, there’s a cast of characters and a number of easter eggs.

this fic has turned out a lot longer than i thought and features a small handful of rebirth events but is set preboot. the current wip sits at almost 50k, hence “the bigger fic”

2. a song of sea glass.

The sun reflects off the water in a way that’s almost blinding, even with her back turned to it. Her skin has been darkening in the weeks since she began making her daily visits, reddening and burning, and he’d run his fingers along her forearm in a manner that left her skin cool and goosebumps rising along her arms. Color had crept up her neck and blossomed across her chest for a different reason entirely. If he’d noticed, he had said nothing about it.

“You all have remarkably human names,” she says, chin resting on her sunburnt arm. “It’s a bit strange.”

“Aren’t all names strange?” he muses, still on his back and eyes toward the sky. She can see where his torso meets his tail, tanned skin melding into gold at his sides, an array of blues beneath his navel, the same color as the sky; the sea as it transitions from midday to evening; the color of poppies and morning glories; the color of his eyes as they look back at her. “Words have no meanings until we attribute ones to them, and the same can be said for names. My name is Richard, and you wouldn’t find it strange to meet a man in town with the same, would you?”

“You’ve also told me to call you Dick,” she says into her sleeve, and Richard rolls onto his side, moving toward her.

“And yet you don’t,” he says and grasps the edge of the rock.

She considers flicking his knuckles.

the dickbabs mermay au! i wrote this over the span of a weekend, and then took another week to rewrite the ending twice, lmao. it was just a fun story that started on a whim. “i could never see myself writing a mermay au,” i’d said right before drafting the first 1k on my phone.

i do have another mermay au in the works, or one that i’m poking at, at least. maybe i’ll have that read in time for this may!

3. the fields of mourning.

“You’re familiar with Limbo, aren’t you? Purgatory?”

The thought doesn’t come as a shock, though little surprises Bruce at this point in his life, what with a life of men who can fly and lost children returning from the dead on more than one occasion, though he and Dick still exchange a look. A collection of Dante’s Divine Comedy lies in the bowels of his growing library, the worn pages once glossed over with reverence the first time he’d taken Jason there. The irony is not lost on him, and Jason watches them both with what he only assumes is trepidation.

“Why are you here then, Jason? You’re…” Bruce starts, trailing off as the words catch in his throat again; despite having Jason back, alive , there still exists a chasm between them, still exists his inability to say his son died. His son died and he wasn’t there, not until he held his cooling body in his arms.

“Alive?” Jason provides, leaning on his staff. “Yeah, kinda. The one you have back home, maybe. I’m like… the trace amounts left behind, you know? Part of you dies, part of you stays. The Lazarus Pit doesn’t do any favors for free, either.” He squints at the both of them in turn. “I’m like eight percent sure I’ve probably seen one of you guys running around here too, but after a while all the shadows start to look the same.”

one of my personal favorites, actually! i started this on a whim in april 2020 on the anniversary of jason’s death totally unintentionally! i woke up at 1 am to jot down a couple lines and then went back to sleep. LMAO

the story started on a whim and to see if i could tell a story with more ... poetic language than what i usually write with. i had fun! the goal is to someday make this part of a 3 part arc, but there are other stories i want to write first

4. something like a sunburst.

Barbara watches every contour of his body, line in his face, the scars catching in the light leaking through the blinds as he leans, and something inside of her trembles, threatening to burst into fragments she can never hope to piece back together before it stills.

“It could ruin everything,” she says, and his fingers twitch against the knee of his sweatpants; she imagines them reaching toward her, the way they feel against hers, cradling her arm, the back of her head. Her face burns and his pupils are wide and his eyes dark with something she’s never seen in them before, never aimed at her.

“I’m okay with that,” he whispers, and she says it’s a risk, one they have to be willing to take and can’t take back, and she hardly hears his assent.

And then she leans in to kiss him.

yeaaaaah, there’s the smut fic i wrote this summer, lmao. it was something else i had fun with because it wasn’t just smut and had some story to it, too! granted, the first 2k was dick and barbara chilling and drinking wine, and the next 6k was them, uh, making out. still, i’m happy with how it turned out!

5. the dickbabs baby au.

She doesn’t say anything back, and she can all but feel Dick’s apprehension growing.

“Barbara?” he asks, and it’s the same voice he used the last time she broke up with him. She can remember that in excruciating and vivid detail: the fresh bandage on his shoulder, thanks to Alfred; the tarragon in her hair; and the look on his face she’d been too afraid to turn around and see as she left him. His thumb smooths across her knuckle. “Babs, talk to me.”

“I’m pregnant.”

Dick filters through maybe five different emotions before his expression shifts into something more unreadable. If she isn’t mistaken, something like hope flickers through his eyes. He watches her like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a gotcha moment and for her to laugh.

He doesn’t speak for a minute, but he never lets go of her hand.

someday there will be a title, but for now no there won’t. like the mermay fic, one i started writing on a whim. originally it was a bunch of misc. tumblr posts, but eventually i decided to bite the bullet and just write the fic since i knew i was going to end up doing it anyway, LMAO. because of that, i already have like 20k of it, and it’s a balance of angst, humor, and making you feel every damn emotion i can.