DC fanfic, Babs/Booster/Ted
Erm, righto, shananagin has proposed a " Write the Pairing You Never Got Around to Writing!" challenge, and I immediately thought of this bunch of miscreants. 'Cause I think they'd be AWESOME together and I've only ever seen it done once, and that was by implication rather than main-character-ness. SO.
Title: A Day at the Races
Fandom: DC comics
Pairing/Characters: Barbara Gordon/Booster Gold/Ted Kord
Rating: PG
Summary: There are only so many places in the Clocktower her spare wheelchair could be.
Disclaimer: DC owns them, I try to make sure they have some fun.
Author's Notes: Er. Takes place . . . handwavey 90s?
Word Count: 1,400
It all started one day when Babs wanted to do maintenance on her primary chair and couldn’t find the secondary one. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, it was just a slight misalignment of the left wheel that made it squeak after one too many run-ins with the balcony doorframe. The sound was driving her mad, and Dinah had yelled at her about being on edge, so Babs had seen her agent through safely back to the hotel and then sought out screwdriver, wrench, and WD-40. The other chair, though, was no where to be found.
She checked in with Ted first, because literally everything was subject to his random moments of inventive genius, though she’d barred him from her systems and her personal workroom, which he did not begrudge her. Anything else in the Clocktower, however, was fair game.
Ted’s workroom in the Clocktower was two floors down, an unavoidable annoyance when most of your real estate is vertical. He had other workrooms, of course, including the R&D department of Kord Industries, but very few of them were secure enough to work on Blue
Beetle tech, with enough clearance to work with alien tech, and less than a thousand feet from his lovers in any direction. He also claimed that every delivery place nearby knew the Clocktower and made the fastest deliveries possible for the hot but bitchy-if-crossed woman who lived there.
Buried hip-deep in the Bug, with Skeets shining a light on the interior, Ted’s answer that he had no idea where her wheelchair was ended up muffled by layers of electronics. Babs stifled her growing irritation.
Having searched every inch of the Clocktower where it would logically be, and knowing that human nature being what it was she’d either forgotten an obvious place, or would facepalm when she found it, having put it somewhere obscure for what must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Finally, she resorted to what she was good at: computers. Every inch of the Clocktower had visual surveillance, yes including the bathrooms. It was a matter of sifting through the feeds, and if it didn’t become evident then, figuring out which places--like the insides of closets with closed doors--would need to be investigated by hand.
At this point, finding the wheelchair was irrelevant. This was a war of attrition, and Babs intended to win.
She started from the top and worked her way down. Fifteen minutes into the search, Babs switched to main camera in the simulation room, expecting it to be empty and deactivated. Instead, the screen filled with color and light--someone was using the room. Who--Booster. Babs laughed and flipped through the cameras in the room until she found her lover. She should have known not to leave the man alone that long. With Skeets and Ted distracted in his workroom and her being Oracle, at least until the Great Wheelchair Hunt, Booster was bound to get bored. And though Booster might not be the brains in this relationship--that would be hard when both the other people involved are geniuses--he was in no way dumb. Also, from the future. The tech that Babs and Ted were so good with couldn’t be terribly challenging for him, especially not when he already knew the room’s intended use. Given an endpoint, it couldn’t have taken Booster long to program in the hard light park, grass, trees and a winding path--
--down which Booster was propelling her second chair at great speed, a wide-eyed look of manic glee on his face.
Babs watched, a little stunned, as Booster took a turn much too fast and ended sprawled on the grass, laughing. He got up and righted the chair, which didn’t seem to have taken any damage, and set off again.
Her first thought was one of righteous indignation. How dare he!
Her second thought was that his arms looked awesome, and he had even more upper body strength than she’d thought if he could get the chair up to those speeds.
Randomly racing whenever they happened to have a long, clear area ahead of them had become something of a bonding exercise with them. Babs and Booster won most of the time. Ted only won when he cheated or caught them off guard, and they never begrudged him either, though he paid for cheating in bed later.
Babs shook her head at herself. Booster was unique. People who knew her history rarely touched her chairs, or made any mention of them. That she’d paid in her father’s and Batman’s stead was a known and little-spoken-of fact. Strangers, doctors, the deliverymen who flirted with her, they all reacted to her as if her wheelchair defined her.
Booster never acted that way, ever. She was a woman in a wheelchair, yes, but to him it was like saying she was a redhead. That it might matter beyond the inevitable practical considerations never occurred to him, and he never begrudged the practical considerations, either. Sometimes Ted would look at her ramps, or the bars she needed for leverage, and she saw his inventor’s brain ticking away, suggesting mechanical and technical applications. She couldn’t begrudge him that, either, because he never so much as hinted at it and it wasn’t like he could turn his brain off.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t stared at Victor Stone’s phone number for hours, sometimes, fighting with herself over her identity and whether being disabled was worse than being a cyborg. Neither word had positive connotations in her society.
In the end, she was who she was.
Booster always saw that, and only that.
Suddenly, Babs cackled like a madwoman, and her fingers flew across the keyboard, shifting the simulation. Booster cried out and stopped the chair on her monitor, but at that point she was already headed for the simulation room. When she came in, Booster had stood and was staring at the slightly changed park simulation. The sidewalks he’d been using to slalom around on had doubled in width.
Then he turned, and caught sight of Babs taking off her sweater, revealing a t-shirt underneath. He grinned and grabbed his chair. By the time he reached her, she was ready. He came up next to her and they didn’t speak, they just made quick motions of hand and eye and understood. Once around. Babs’s alterations had changed the course a little, so Booster wouldn’t have much of an advantage there. He nodded.
The speakers emitted a timed beep! and they were off. Babs rounded the first corner slightly ahead, fresh, with adrenaline pumping through her. Booster followed close behind and managed to take the second turn on a tight corner. Trees and the fuzzy outlines of people and dogs blurred past.
Babs whooped as she came over the last hill and let gravity work, speeding over the finish line three entire sidewalk squares ahead of Booster. She panted, laughing so hard she felt tears.
Booster bounced out of the chair and scooped her up, spinning her around, and then they tumbled down onto the grass. Babs lay back and looked up at the solid blue wall that was probably supposed to be the sky. Booster lay along her side, a solid wall of radiating warmth, and Babs pushed herself up onto her elbows and dragged him up for a kiss.
Skeets found them making out on the grass and wailed about his virgin eyes until Babs threatened to hook him into the Clocktower’s surveillance system permanently. They got up and found Ted, and had dinner, and Babs went back to reason with Dinah while Ted and Booster headed off for a JLI meeting.
Babs decided to store the secondary chair on the equipment rack outside the simulation room.
Title: A Day at the Races
Fandom: DC comics
Pairing/Characters: Barbara Gordon/Booster Gold/Ted Kord
Rating: PG
Summary: There are only so many places in the Clocktower her spare wheelchair could be.
Disclaimer: DC owns them, I try to make sure they have some fun.
Author's Notes: Er. Takes place . . . handwavey 90s?
Word Count: 1,400
It all started one day when Babs wanted to do maintenance on her primary chair and couldn’t find the secondary one. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, it was just a slight misalignment of the left wheel that made it squeak after one too many run-ins with the balcony doorframe. The sound was driving her mad, and Dinah had yelled at her about being on edge, so Babs had seen her agent through safely back to the hotel and then sought out screwdriver, wrench, and WD-40. The other chair, though, was no where to be found.
She checked in with Ted first, because literally everything was subject to his random moments of inventive genius, though she’d barred him from her systems and her personal workroom, which he did not begrudge her. Anything else in the Clocktower, however, was fair game.
Ted’s workroom in the Clocktower was two floors down, an unavoidable annoyance when most of your real estate is vertical. He had other workrooms, of course, including the R&D department of Kord Industries, but very few of them were secure enough to work on Blue
Beetle tech, with enough clearance to work with alien tech, and less than a thousand feet from his lovers in any direction. He also claimed that every delivery place nearby knew the Clocktower and made the fastest deliveries possible for the hot but bitchy-if-crossed woman who lived there.
Buried hip-deep in the Bug, with Skeets shining a light on the interior, Ted’s answer that he had no idea where her wheelchair was ended up muffled by layers of electronics. Babs stifled her growing irritation.
Having searched every inch of the Clocktower where it would logically be, and knowing that human nature being what it was she’d either forgotten an obvious place, or would facepalm when she found it, having put it somewhere obscure for what must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Finally, she resorted to what she was good at: computers. Every inch of the Clocktower had visual surveillance, yes including the bathrooms. It was a matter of sifting through the feeds, and if it didn’t become evident then, figuring out which places--like the insides of closets with closed doors--would need to be investigated by hand.
At this point, finding the wheelchair was irrelevant. This was a war of attrition, and Babs intended to win.
She started from the top and worked her way down. Fifteen minutes into the search, Babs switched to main camera in the simulation room, expecting it to be empty and deactivated. Instead, the screen filled with color and light--someone was using the room. Who--Booster. Babs laughed and flipped through the cameras in the room until she found her lover. She should have known not to leave the man alone that long. With Skeets and Ted distracted in his workroom and her being Oracle, at least until the Great Wheelchair Hunt, Booster was bound to get bored. And though Booster might not be the brains in this relationship--that would be hard when both the other people involved are geniuses--he was in no way dumb. Also, from the future. The tech that Babs and Ted were so good with couldn’t be terribly challenging for him, especially not when he already knew the room’s intended use. Given an endpoint, it couldn’t have taken Booster long to program in the hard light park, grass, trees and a winding path--
--down which Booster was propelling her second chair at great speed, a wide-eyed look of manic glee on his face.
Babs watched, a little stunned, as Booster took a turn much too fast and ended sprawled on the grass, laughing. He got up and righted the chair, which didn’t seem to have taken any damage, and set off again.
Her first thought was one of righteous indignation. How dare he!
Her second thought was that his arms looked awesome, and he had even more upper body strength than she’d thought if he could get the chair up to those speeds.
Randomly racing whenever they happened to have a long, clear area ahead of them had become something of a bonding exercise with them. Babs and Booster won most of the time. Ted only won when he cheated or caught them off guard, and they never begrudged him either, though he paid for cheating in bed later.
Babs shook her head at herself. Booster was unique. People who knew her history rarely touched her chairs, or made any mention of them. That she’d paid in her father’s and Batman’s stead was a known and little-spoken-of fact. Strangers, doctors, the deliverymen who flirted with her, they all reacted to her as if her wheelchair defined her.
Booster never acted that way, ever. She was a woman in a wheelchair, yes, but to him it was like saying she was a redhead. That it might matter beyond the inevitable practical considerations never occurred to him, and he never begrudged the practical considerations, either. Sometimes Ted would look at her ramps, or the bars she needed for leverage, and she saw his inventor’s brain ticking away, suggesting mechanical and technical applications. She couldn’t begrudge him that, either, because he never so much as hinted at it and it wasn’t like he could turn his brain off.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t stared at Victor Stone’s phone number for hours, sometimes, fighting with herself over her identity and whether being disabled was worse than being a cyborg. Neither word had positive connotations in her society.
In the end, she was who she was.
Booster always saw that, and only that.
Suddenly, Babs cackled like a madwoman, and her fingers flew across the keyboard, shifting the simulation. Booster cried out and stopped the chair on her monitor, but at that point she was already headed for the simulation room. When she came in, Booster had stood and was staring at the slightly changed park simulation. The sidewalks he’d been using to slalom around on had doubled in width.
Then he turned, and caught sight of Babs taking off her sweater, revealing a t-shirt underneath. He grinned and grabbed his chair. By the time he reached her, she was ready. He came up next to her and they didn’t speak, they just made quick motions of hand and eye and understood. Once around. Babs’s alterations had changed the course a little, so Booster wouldn’t have much of an advantage there. He nodded.
The speakers emitted a timed beep! and they were off. Babs rounded the first corner slightly ahead, fresh, with adrenaline pumping through her. Booster followed close behind and managed to take the second turn on a tight corner. Trees and the fuzzy outlines of people and dogs blurred past.
Babs whooped as she came over the last hill and let gravity work, speeding over the finish line three entire sidewalk squares ahead of Booster. She panted, laughing so hard she felt tears.
Booster bounced out of the chair and scooped her up, spinning her around, and then they tumbled down onto the grass. Babs lay back and looked up at the solid blue wall that was probably supposed to be the sky. Booster lay along her side, a solid wall of radiating warmth, and Babs pushed herself up onto her elbows and dragged him up for a kiss.
Skeets found them making out on the grass and wailed about his virgin eyes until Babs threatened to hook him into the Clocktower’s surveillance system permanently. They got up and found Ted, and had dinner, and Babs went back to reason with Dinah while Ted and Booster headed off for a JLI meeting.
Babs decided to store the secondary chair on the equipment rack outside the simulation room.