#jaydickdonna

tagged by my loves @bitterleafs and @epistemologys

"Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2021. Tag as many creators as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!"

I wrote more than I thought this year tbh, so this will be a bit hard because a lot of my works were brain infestation passion projects that consumed me until I released them.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/30202626/chapters/74419272

Here’s the summary:

There’s a saying, an excerpt from a story written on tea-stained pages, written in an old journal scented with the musk of age: you don’t fall in love, you shatter. You break parts and bits of yourself to fit that person in, make a mosaic from the old and the new, make a teacup lined with gold out of porcelain fragments. You don’t jump from a cliff of not love to land in it; love isn’t a journey, it’s an immersion, it’s a drowning, it’s a break in logic and a break in person and an opportunity for rebuilding and a new form of beauty in place of the loveliness of solitude. Dick doesn’t fall with love at Jason’s feet, with Jason’s bruise like a fingerprint on his skin, like a kiss or caress or marking. Dick shatters.

(Everyone who would care, every person who would grieve and cry and write eulogies and miss him and carry him like a physical burden in their grief, already has done all that. They carry his memory like a torch or a mantle, they speak his name in past tense and feel pain whenever they see reminders that he’d existed. He is dead to them, in the most literal sense possible, and his own state of existence is only relevant by the frame of reference through which he is viewed. Isn’t that what Einstein had said? Everything is relative?

Or maybe it’s more of a Quantum thing. Maybe he’s Schrödinger’s spy, dead and alive until someone opens the box and looks, really looks and sees him.

“He’s really dead,” Donna Troy says over a vodka bottle they pass between them every sip or so softly, blue eyes staring off at something in the distance, glittering with unshed tears. “Isn’t he?”

It hadn’t really sunk in before now. Not even at the funeral with the speeches and with Bruce acting like a real human being with real tears being shed. It hadn’t sunk in when they’d watched Dick’s coffin being lowered into a six-foot deep hole made out of dirt, or when they’d gone home apart and met today. It sinks in now, in a quiet moment over Gotham city watching the sun set on a world where Dick Grayson isn’t going to fly across the skies ever again.

Because he’s dead.

Jason pries it from her ironclad grip and sits himself next to her, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the way her chest heaves, the way she shudders when he dips the bottle back.

It’s the loneliness, the isolation of everyone you’ve ever loved thinking you’re dead because you’d died but not stayed dead. It’s the grief, the agony still cracking his ribs with every heartbeat, every reminder that his Robin is no longer in existence. It’s the pain, the hatred he feels for Bruce, the hatred he feels for every godforsaken member of this organization, the hatred he feels for himself for not fighting harder. It’s the fact that he knows he’s left his loved ones in a world of suffering thinking he’s dead when he’s anything but, not that Bruce cares any.

“He always did love his games,” Jason snarls, standing up and staring down at his past in some other kid’s skin. His death on some other kid’s head. “I’ll contact the others. Keep a patrol ‘round the Narrows. Last four kids frequented that area, so he’s probably snatchin’ them from there.”

Montoya nods, a flash of pity crossing her face as she looks back down at the kid.

Jason wonders if people had looked at him like that at his autopsy. That 'you’re too young to be dead, what a waste of life' look. He wonders if this kid will look the same as he did on that silver table with a y-incision carved in his skin.