#admittedly i may reuse this in the baby fic itself later on but who knows!

[thychesters]

Eight months in, Barbara doesn’t get mean, but she does get … testy. To her credit, he can’t exactly blame her, given that she spent her entire summer growing a tiny human in the already oppressive Gotham heat.

Barbara is annoyed, Dick can tell that much. It’s in the way she holds her arms—crossed, but loose enough for her to try to appear casual. It’s in the way her jaw clenches, leaning to the side.

As long as Dick has known her, which, at this point, is more years than he hasn’t, Barbara has always been the kind of person to do everything herself. At most she’s maybe allowed someone to pick up her dry cleaning, but that’s because of rare moments where it slipped her mind. She’s always been about her autonomy, and beside a few hiccups up along the way, he’s always respected that.

Barbara shifts and a pained look crosses her face. The tea he made for her remains untouched for the most part, and her fingers curl a little with her gasp.

It’s difficult to see her in pain. The other night she’d relented and murmured about discomfort, about heartburn and limited mobility. The transfers into and out of her chair had already been taking their toll for the last trimester, and she’d ground her teeth before asking for his assistance. He’d caught her crying later that night too when he came to bed an hour after her, when the baby wouldn’t settle and kept digging into her side, and the sight had hurt, but then she also cried at an insurance commercial, so he hadn’t taken it to heart. She’d been able to laugh at it after, swiping her hands across her face and blaming hormones, and rolling her eyes when he said it was a pretty sad commercial.

Now she sits with her arms folded over the rounded swell of her belly, and Dick is sure he can hear her gnashing her teeth from across the room.

“You doing okay over here?” he asks as he rounds the armchair, and she shoots him a glance out of the corner of her eye from where it threatens to swallow her up. Her hum sounds more like a grunt.

“Fine,” she grumbles, leaning her head back into the cushion some more. Barbara is quiet for a minute, closing her eyes, though the lines don’t fade from her features at all. Dick glances at the tea and considers asking if she’ll take a sip, if it’ll make her feel better, but elects against it as she sighs.

Instead, he makes his way back down the hall, pausing to check first for the bag beneath the bathroom sink before parsing through the linen closet for the array of nail polishes. The bottles clink against one another as he stands, and Dick can’t hold back his own grimace as something in his knee clicks. Damian would call him old, Jason would ask if he needed some help crossing the street, grandma. Dick rubs at the reddened, indented skin from where he was wearing his brace earlier and decides he’ll put it back on later, right in front of Barbara so she can’t give him grief for not wearing it.

He pokes through the bag for the colors he's looking for, nudging the closet door closed with his elbow. On his way back to the living room he stops in front of the nursery, the one that’s mostly decorated with only the changing table left to be put together. Barbara isn’t in much of a condition to be sitting on the floor to help him, and Wally’s “good luck” text hadn’t exactly been too promising. When he’d thanked him in person for the crib, Jason had fidgeted and told him not to worry about it, but congrats, again, like he hadn’t already been congratulating them bimonthly at that point. It hadn’t taken much for Barbara to get a hug out of him, and Dick thought he would have put Peter Pan to shame with the way he crowed at the baby kicking.

Lingering in the doorway, Dick lets his gaze wander. The nursery is adorned in different greens, the bookshelf already full of a small collection with different signatures from their loved ones in lieu of cards from the shower Steph and Dinah had put together. Dick hadn’t been there (a point he contested since it was his baby too), but from what Barbara had told him, it had been quite a day for Steph too, quiet moments of joy and like a weight was lifted from her shoulders.

Dick hadn’t had the same experience, having spent his own day catching a Rogues game with Jim, Duke, and Tim instead. Jim had bought the dad to-be an overpriced beer he’d only taken slow sips of, and Duke and Tim had debated the merits of mustard in a hot dog, a conversation he only half-listened to while Barbara texted him updates.

They were good on diapers for a while, hopefully, and their baby had a whole circus menagerie of toys to choose from, too. From where he stands Dick can see the rest of the clothes they have to fold, the outfits Linda promised they might not need until a few months in, and the little shoes that barely fit in the palm of his hand and had his throat tightening.

In the crib, he can also see the stuffed lion from Alfred, his gift along with the unspoken promises of stopping barely fairly often, a point they didn’t attempt to dissuade him from. Beside the lion sits Zitka, standing guard at the head of the crib. There’s a weight to that too, a stuffed elephant who’s followed him his entire life, one of his first gifts from his parents that he can now pass onto his own child.

The nail polish bottles clink again as he pushes away from the wall and clears his throat.

Barbara is right where he left her when he circles back, though she doesn’t crack an eye open until he’s settled himself on the floor in front of the armchair, crossing his legs.

“Blue or green?” he asks as she sits up a little, unfolding her arms to dig her elbows into those of the chair and push herself forward. Loose strands of her long bob dance over her collarbone and he wants to reach up to brush his fingers through them.

Her hand smooths over the side of her belly, corner of her mouth twitching as the baby shifts. He can see the spasm beneath the material of her sweater and he traces the fingers of one hand up from her hip until they can interlace with hers.

“Blue,” Barbara says as his other hand nudges her chair out of the way after a nod. “Like your eyes.”

Dick glances up at her while her nails trace a callous on his palm. He cracks a small smile before reaching into the bag of nail polish. The bottle rattles in his hand as he shakes it and Dick pulls his hand away, shimming forward a little to set her feet in his lap. Though she can’t feel it, he presses the pads of his thumb into the sole of one foot anyway, gently kneading the skin from her arch to her heel. She’d once remarked her feet weren’t as swollen as she would have expected, as had her physical therapist, who’d also been elated when Barbara told him she was expecting.

“Blue it is,” he murmurs as his fingers skim the smooth skin of her calf before setting her foot on his knee.

Her eyes remain on his as he paints her nails, his work careful and methodical. The first time he’d ever done them had been after a nastier night of patrol when they were still kids, when an angry bruise had blossomed across her cheek and his ankle couldn’t hold his weight properly. She’d told him he didn’t have to, but then the nails of one hand were a glossy purple before she silently passed him the other one while they waited for the first to dry. He’d done her make up a few other times too, and they used to practice their blending techniques for bruises on one another too, but by the time he left for California their time spent together had dwindled and then she was seeing Jason.

Sunlight catches on the wet polish as Dick carefully reaches for her other foot, stilling as a spring in the chair creaks and she leans forward a little further, as much as her stomach will allow. The due date is boldly circled on the calendar hanging on the side of the fridge, and Dick smiles to himself since they can count the number of weeks on one hand now. In two weeks they’ll be in the baby’s (supposed) birth month, and Barbara’s own excitement had been in the curl of her lip as she traced October fifteenth with her finger.

“What are you thinking about down there?” she asks, breaking his concentration for just a moment before finishing her last toe with a final swipe.

“How close we are,” he comes back with, “and the fact that in less than a month from now I’ll be painting your nails again but this time you’ll be holding our baby.”

Barbara’s fingers interlock over the roundness of her stomach, just below her belly button. Part of him wants to tell her careful, he’s doing those nails next, but she’ll just laugh and say no, his are next.

“The fact that we’ve definitely had our ups and downs; despite how challenging those may have been, I wouldn’t trade those for anything.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Not even having to console me in the bathtub because I was crying and said I wanted nothing to do with your family?”

“Kind of glossing over ninety percent of the key details there,” he says. He finishes the next nail. There had been more to it than that, a few weeks of build up before it had all come to a head. Having zero privacy hadn’t helped matters any, either. “Plus, Bruce was a little overbearing then, and you weren’t the only one who wanted some breathing room.”

Barbara hums, and he pauses to press a kiss to her palm when she brushes hair out of his eyes.

“At least it was a nice tub.”

“Dunno, I think the garage was better,” he says around a leer, looking up at her through his lashes. To her credit, she doesn’t look the least bit bashful.

“A little more fun, too,” she murmurs.

“Hold still and let me finish your nails and I’ll show you how fun I can be.”

“Might have to wait a few minutes so you don’t smear the polish.”

“For me to make dinner? I don’t think I need your nails for that.”

Barbara laughs a little, a gentle huff that evolves and then has her shoulders shaking. Her eyes crinkle in the corners and then her nose wrinkles in that adorable way that would make her blush to hear herself called adorable. The late afternoon sun highlights her freckles, and the sight is a far cry from the one not too long ago, when she looked miserable and not herself, unable to get comfortable as the baby refused to settle.

“This is a good look on you,” he says after her laughter has died down some. Tension ebbs out of her shoulders.

“Swollen knuckles and moodiness aside?”

“Including that.” Dick finishes her nails and sets her feet on his lap. “All around good look for you. The sunlight might help but you are quite literally glowing.”

Barbara blinks back at him, eyes glossy, and he closes his, leaning forward as her hands cup his face and pull him into a kiss.